Distortion

by Gautam Malkani

  I tell him seven.

  “Horseshit. You’d just turned eight. Imagine if she knew the crapfuck you fuel yourself with these days. Then again, our bodies are hardwired to gorge on sugars and fats because those things used to be so scarce. That’s why junk food’s so addictive, Dhilan. Hardwiring. And, as you surely know in your bone marrow by now, the same goes for junk information and junk stories.”

  I tell him it’d be a bit of a dick move to bust out more media sermonising after the shit I just been through. Thing is, though, I already got me some generalised idea what he’s gonna fess up – like as if my brain is switched to autocomplete. Cos it ain’t about your data, it’s about what your data does to you when it’s crunched up and processed and fed back to you. And cos, sometimes, how you wind up knowing something can change what you wind up knowing. Cos some answers, they shouldn’t come instant-style at the click of some button. Sometimes you gotta layer it – gotta know enough to know it.

  “You were almost correct the first time we met, Dhilan. I have been trying to stop a student start-up. But your snivelling solipsism meant you thought it was your own start-up. You’re so accustomed to being at the centre of your own mother–son drama – your own personalised little snot bubble.”

  He tells me the made-up eyewitness quotes that he’d got planted all them years back in a bunch of English-language newspapers contained special triggers: “A series of coded mathematical triggers rendered as letters of the Roman alphabet. They would be activated by the simple process of being digitised and put up on the web. And the purpose of these triggers was to subvert an algorithm that had been devised as part of a PhD thesis undertaken by two enterprising students at Stanford University. But unlike today’s student start-ups, they didn’t use their clever algorithm to establish some sillyfuck restaurant reservation app. They used it to create the mother of all search engines.”

  He scans me for some response. Only newsflash for me here is this guy’s sudden brand-new skillset for getting straight to the point.

  “Understand that I have no beef with Google, Dhilan. They had the best of intentions. Give people the most relevant answers to their questions as quickly as possible. Simple. Noble. Yes – even noble. Our beef had more to do with the way we expected that original search algorithm to evolve – specifically the idea of relevance that lay right at the algorithm’s heart.”

  I catch myself once again fronting with geekness: “Because relevancy means clickbait?”

  “Because relevance means relevance, Dhilan. We wanted to stop you people from being conditioned to expect to find relevance in the stories that you’re reading. Equally, we wanted to stop stories from aspiring to relevance.”

  That’s all for today about Oedipus.

  Ain’t fully for sure what he means by relevance, though. Start scrolling through the dropdowns in my head. Could mean it links in with the subject you been searching for. Or could be it links in with some topic in the news. Could be it links in with your own personal shit – or with your family or your friends or your neighbours or whoever. Fuck it, could even be it’s relevant to someone who you hate. The dropdown options keep on dropping.

  “When you look back on today’s shit show, Dhilan, whose answers to your question will prove most relevant – your father’s revelations or my revelations right now? Or maybe even someone else’s revelations still to come? Surely this is something that you alone will be best placed to judge. And, ideally, after you’ve taken in whatever we’ve told you.”

  Botox man’s now on some proper solids for breakfast. Can’t tell if it’s just an Egg McMuffin, though. Supersize hands and munching it without removing the wrapper. Carries on talking with paper wrapping in his mouth. Telling me how, back in the day, relevance was mainly about the quality of the webpages thrown up by Google’s search engine. It meant cutting through all the spam and second-rate crap on the web. Filtering out the shit and the sex. And, as every media-studied schoolchild knows, the whole fixationship with relevancy then spread to other tech platforms, other digital businesses – till one day it dominated how the digital world works.

  Now an ad for custom-tailorised advertising.

  An article about surveillance capitalism.

  “But at the end of the day, kid, these algorithms are designed to serve business models. Businesses that are obliged to keep growing. My associates and I therefore feared that, for many tech firms, ad-funded revenue models and targeted personalisation would wind up crystalising the concept of relevance either as popularity or personal resonance …”

  Now an ad for a recommended story.

  “… And, of course, those same business models would mean that these conceptions of relevancy would be valued higher than factual accuracy. How useful and glueful the information is for the user becomes more important than how truthful it is.” He says it wasn’t difficult for them to predict the fuckfest that would follow.

  See also: the well-known history of humankind.

  See also: all those well-known cognitive biases of the human mind.

  “I mean, you didn’t exactly need the oracle from Oedipus to tell you what was likely to happen, Dhilan – just a basic Humanities degree would do.” He puts down his food like it can’t help him no more. Still ain’t sure if this is just some Egg McMuffin. “You know the rest of the story, kid. What happened to the world. People deciding to only believe stories and information that they agree with. The monetisation of misinformation and hatred. Polarisation. The source of unlimited information serving to limit so many people’s understanding. Knowledge itself becoming ignorance. And, of course, everything now both true and false. Every fact like that famous cat that gets locked in a box with poison – the one that’s both alive and dead at the same time. Dying and dead and dying – they should call them Schrödinger’s facts.”

  Then he switches to talking about the practical stuff. Says the task of cleaning up the algorithms couldn’t be left to dickless governments and media regulators. He explains that if their trigger codes had worked, they’d have kept on fucking up Google’s early search results so that people would’ve got used to different ideas of what counts as relevant info – would’ve got into the habit of deciding it for themselves. Search engines would’ve then evolutioned on some different path, steering the rest of the digital world away from the fields of bullshit. Maybe something closer to old-school surfing instead of searching. Or selecting your own multiple definitions of relevance for each individual search query. Or some kind of built-in randomness, serendipity, diversity, alternate perspectives. Whatever would make it physically impossible for people to just swallow whatever knowledge and info they got fed with. Whatever would save the facts from hand-to-hand combat with relevance. Whatever would stop the truth from becoming irrelevant.

  Then he throws out a For Example. Tells me to imagine searching for images linked to the keyword “beauty”. Only, this time, forget being hit with answers dominated by the beauty industry’s definition, and forget being hit by my own personalised foot fetish. Instead, I’d get images of sunsets or baby elephants or something – or, fuck it, why not even distorted faces and other deformations. Flexing his botched Botox as he says this.

  And now for today’s lesson about Oedipus.

  “Better still, Dhilan, think back to your first few childhood searches for knowledge about Oedipus. Now imagine that, instead of receiving stories dominated by the standard Greek tragedy or Freudian incest nightmares, your top search results also contained the American rock band named Oedipus. Or, at the very least, completely different viewpoints – contrary viewpoints, counter-theories, diametrically distinct perspectives. Or how about the perspective of Oedipus’s mother and wife? After all, she was the smarter one who managed to understand it all before he did. And the first recorded version of the myth focuses on her, not him.”

  That’s all for today about Oedipus.

  I scroll back with a quickness: “So wait a sec. Your big badass plan with the trigger codes and
the made-up eyewitnesses quotes – you’re basically saying you were planting fake news stories in order to save the world from fake news stories?”

  “Well at least the cure would have gone viral, kid.”

  But, of course, their big badass plan got trashed when my dad rumbled himself and his stories never got digitised. The trigger codes they spent so long planting, calibrating and sequencing remained incomplete.

  “Your father’s fuck-up gave us pause for thought. Rather than simply plant the missing bits of code in someone else’s stories, we decided to wait a few years – to wait and watch what actually happened. More fool us. And then along came Facebook with their own algorithmic models of what’s relevant – though I understand these days they prefer the term ‘personally informative’. None of us back then could have even imagined the power Facebook would have to decide what kinds of stories and information people are fed. And our methods were simply inadequate for dealing with their levels of diaperless toddler chaos. Best we can do for now is just keep those original trigger codes hidden in order that we might keep ourselves hidden while we figure out what can be done.”

  Now he starts straight-up eating the remaining sugar sachets. Swallowing them with his coffee like as if they’re capsules. “Dhilan, how come you haven’t asked me who we are – my associates and me? I’ve finally told you what I’ve been doing and yet you don’t even ask who I am.”

  I tell him ain’t no point in having knowledge without under-standing.

  Anycase, fuck knows if he’s even been telling me the truth here. Could be, I guess. But I do know he’s for definite speaking truthfully when he tells me I should never have given away my attention so easy to all them custom-tailored scare stories. Those algorithmic recommendations and prophecies about Oedipal relations. That predictive tech is basically just another kind of narrowband relevancy. That Google and Facebook ain’t actually the oracle; if anything they were more like Oedipus himself – tripped up by misinformation and false facts. That I shoulda been flexing more carefulness and judgement – not just about what stories I chose to click on, but also what stories I chose to accept as relevant and what definitions of relevance I chose to accept. In fact, fuck Oedipus. What the hell has Oedipus got to do with the shit between me and Mum?

  The Botox man starts getting ready to split but then stops. His jumbo-sized hand stuck in some holding pattern – as if it can’t figure out if it’d be cringe to land on my shoulder. “You know, it’s idiotic enough to be authoring your own reality with your search history and so forth, but how could you possibly expect to get a sense of your mother’s world that way? Obsessing over the most virulent imagery and information. Autoplaying more and more extreme versions of the same scenes in your head. Writing off her rage and bodily expulsions as just simple side effects of her treatment. Fixating only on what you’re shown and told. What kind of relationship can someone have if they can’t enter a shared reality? And even beyond your mother’s perspective, what about that of other people in your life? Because once you let go of relevance, you’d be surprised at the things that turn out to be much more relevant.”

  Then finally, after all his lecturising and sermonising, he drops one final data download like a footnote – an afterthought to a side-convo. The info I ain’t puzzled out yet, the false fact, the thing that made me misunderstand the algorithmic predictions and prophecies: when they said I’d “take the father’s place”, turns out they weren’t actually talking about my father. They were talking about my mummy’s father.

  Follow her into Holborn station. Piccadilly line – a straight line. Tube map turns everything into straight lines. Ramona ain’t headed nowhere, though – just buys a newspaper and then steps back outta the Tube station. Rocking a grey woollen cardigan that’s basically a coat. Ain’t actually rehearsed how I’m gonna apologise for dumping her. Or how I’m gonna fess up about all my lies. Or tell her how she’s been living in some alternate reality that I bullshitted into existence.

  I just lame-like call out her name.

  “So you’ve finally come to apologise.”

  Even though I’ve just basically jumped her, Ramona’s like the polarised opposite of surprised.

  “Only exactly what part do you want to apologise for, Dhilan? For ditching me? For treating me like a sack of shit? Or for lying to me for longer than I can even fucking remember?”

  “Lying to you?” The denial in my mouth on autocomplete, sent before I can delete it.

  “You seriously can’t stop yourself, can you?”

  I know I should probly be angstipating now, but it’s like that shit’s all been used up. My panic button worn down and busted. “So Naliah finally told you about my mum, then?”

  “Oh, wake up, Dhilan. I knew long before Naliah showed up.”

  She says: why the fuck do I think she put up with the way I treated her all them years?

  She says: sure, she might not have known all the details, but every time I let her down, she had a generalised idea why. Every time I kept secrets.

  “I mean, seriously, Dhilan, how do you suppose I coped with all your nonsense? How do you think I did all those things that I did? Never mind how did I convince myself you weren’t really cheating on me. And why the hell do you think I kept bringing you breakfast from Starbucks after every night you suddenly bailed on me in the middle of a date? I’m not a doormat, Dhilan. Maybe my feelings for you could rise above all the fictions and the facts, but my brain still had to operate at some level of reality.”

  I don’t ask her how she found out. Or even when she found out. Seem like stupidass questions right now – questions more about me than her. Ramona now with full-on eye saliva, telling me she did all them things cos she wanted to help me. Says she could see that, even when we was together, I was always worrying about my mummy. And, anycase, given the nature of my bullshit, she didn’t see no choice but to keep forgiving me. “I mean, otherwise I’d basically be labelling myself a heartless bitch, wouldn’t I? And even right now, right here, I can’t even have this conversation that we’re having without putting to one side all the questions I desperately want to ask about your poor mum – I can’t even imagine how horrible things have been. And so, once again, I feel like I’m being heartless for not asking. Well, I’m not bloody heartless, Dhilan. But, at the same time, I can’t keep treading on eggshells around you.”

  I ask her why she let me keep on lying to her all them times. Lying for nothing for years.

  “Because I wanted you to come clean, Dhilan. I wanted to know that you would come clean. I wasn’t letting you lie, you dumbass, I was letting you tell me the truth.”

  Ramona looks down at the floor. Some midpoint between leaning towards me and leaving. “Look, you always seemed on the verge of telling me. But then another week would go by. Another month, another year. You know, for a while I even thought maybe your start-up was just a cover story.”

  She watches me fiddle with my Oyster card. The fuck am I pulling out my Oyster card for?

  Because I can walk through the ticket turnstiles now.

  The Piccadilly line – a straight line. Today an even straighter line.

  Cos I’m ready to go back to Acton now.

  Step closer to Ramona and hold her. But, again, I’m doing that thing where I’m only hugging as tight as I calculate a woman in this state should be hugged. And so I tell her that I can do better now – I mean properly. I tell her I can do this properly now. Tell her, “Everything can be okay now.”

  She kisses me on the forehead. Smiles. And, still smiling, she scrunches her nose. Tries to free herself from my hug but doesn’t even need to cos my arms ain’t no longer hugging her. Doesn’t wanna say nothing, but her words come out anyway. “Except I guess we both know that’s obviously bullshit, don’t we, Dhilan?”

  And I’m thinking, maybe it was meant to be obvious?

  Cos, fact is, I don’t need to bullshit her no more. Don’t need to bullshit anyone ever again.

  Acknowledge
ments

  THANK YOU SO much to everyone at Unbound for turning my manuscript into a book, particularly my editor Rachael Kerr for your invaluable suggestions, advice and endless moral support; DeAndra Lupu for masterminding the publication and for all your patience and understanding; John Mitchinson for rescuing both myself and the manuscript from the scrapheap and also for suggesting the perfect title; Georgia Odd and Jimmy Leach for all your crowdfunding advice; Amy Winchester for your tireless championing of this project; Lauren Fulbright for your work behind the scenes; and Anna Simpson for all your encouragement.

  Thanks also to Mark Ecob for a literally cracking cover; Justine Taylor for copy-editing; Kate Quarry for proofreading; Mark Bowsher for the fundraising video; Peter Straus, Matthew Turner, Mohsen Shah and everyone at Rogers Coleridge & White.

  And thank you, thank you, thank you to each and every single person listed in the back for crowdfunding the book’s publication. This book simply wouldn’t exist without your incredible generosity and faith.

  As for writing the manuscript, it wouldn’t have been doable without the support, guidance, patience/forbearance of so many people, inspirations, Gods and deities. I hope all those to whom I owe thanks will forgive my failure here to mention individuals by name. You shall always have my deepest gratitude. A shout-out to all those young carers and former young carers who took precious time out to speak with me, or whose testimonies I read.

  Thank you to our mother, Meena, for all the wondrous things she’s done for us. You came before names, before language.

  And, finally, thank you to you for reading this book.

  About the Author

  Gautam Malkani’s first novel Londonstani was published in 2006. He lives in London.