After On

by Rob Reid

  But Kuba’s nodding. “Think of all the pictures of you online. Of all of us. Each tagged with our names. Any system that’s scanned them all could do it. Facebook’s been ID-ing faces in photos for years. ID-ing someone from a live feed through those glasses wouldn’t be much harder.”

  Danna shudders. “I’m sure it’s a layup for the NSA.”

  “Please, those guys weren’t NSA,” Mitchell says (although he wouldn’t mind being wrong because it would be pretty badass to’ve flattened a pair of government agents like that!).

  “They wouldn’t have to be, to pull that off,” Kuba says. “Five years ago, maybe. But today? No. Facial ID just isn’t that hard or exotic anymore.”

  “Then how’d the system come up with all that stuff for him to say about Danna’s friend’s older sister?” Mitchell asks.

  “It probably didn’t,” Kuba guesses. “The operator just picked Danna as a target. Maybe randomly. Maybe because he liked the way she looked.”

  “Right!” Mitchell says, recalling how Specs prowled the outer bar earlier in the evening, gazing briefly at every face.

  “Then I’ll bet the system pulled up a bunch of facts about her,” Kuba continues. “She wrote a thesis on this book. Here’s her social graph. Here are some distant acquaintances of hers you might credibly pretend to know. That sort of thing. Then the guy pieced together his own story and approach. I mean, he was pretty smooth. He wasn’t reading a teleprompter or anything.”

  “Except for his initial description of Stein’s writing,” Danna says. “That was pretty wooden. Almost like he was reading from Wikipedia. But after that, he was real smooth. And, he was also having fun with it. Which made it believable, because small-world conversations like that actually are fun. If I didn’t feel so violated, I’d be kind of impressed with the whole performance. And he could’ve done something much creepier if he had wanted to.”

  “Like what?” To Mitchell, this shit’s about as creepy as it gets.

  “Well, let’s see. It would’ve been illegal, but once the facial recognition did its thing, there’s a bunch of databases the system could’ve hit to figure out where every cute girl in the bar lives, right? Then it could’ve told him which ones live in walking distance. And which ones are single and live alone. Then it could’ve fed him a bunch of facts to help him seem all trustworthy to the unsuspecting target of his choice. Kind of like it did with me. He could’ve come off as being the brother of an old friend of hers. Or maybe, ‘Hey, we took that history class together junior year! Wasn’t Professor Bernstein the best?’ Enough trust that she lets him walk her home at the end of the night because it’s a crap neighborhood, and she thinks they have a dozen friends in common. And then? Use your imagination.”

  Mitchell shudders. “That’s sick.”

  “I agree. But our guy only tricked me into thinking we had a bunch of weird things in common. Pretty harmless by comparison.” Danna is actually less put off by the episode than Mitchell or Kuba. As she’s already plenty paranoid, it didn’t surprise her. Nor did it reduce her faith in the average stranger, which for years has had nowhere lower to go.

  “But we still loathe him, right?” Mitchell confirms. If Danna and Kuba are right about everything, those glasses make the guy half-omniscient—and like some real-world supervillian, he’s noxiously abusing his powers. “And what the hell was the point of all that anyway?”

  “They were alpha testing something new,” Kuba says softly. “Something radical. Taking it for a spin in the real world. That hardware’s pre-release, and very special. You saw how they fought. They did not want it getting out of their hands.”

  “Do you seriously think that spying system is gonna be someone’s product?” Mitchell asks. “It can’t possibly be legal! It’s like…weaponized information.”

  “Any more weaponized than a handgun?” Danna asks. “Those seem to be legal everywhere.”

  Mitchell nods grimly. “I can hear the lobbyists now. Magic glasses don’t spy on people—people do.”

  “Yes, they’ll say that,” Kuba agrees. “And they won’t be entirely wrong. Cynical. But not wrong. Because the tech itself could be used for practically anything, good or bad. It’s as value neutral as a smartphone. Or a computer.”

  “And every bit as inevitable,” Danna adds. “We’ve seen that dozens of times. Today’s million-dollar prototype is tomorrow’s ninety-nine-dollar gizmo.”

  Mitchell nods. “I just wish the guys who invented it didn’t go straight to the gutter with their first application.”

  “Agreed,” Danna says. “Why build something that amazing just to creep on people in bars?”

  “Completely twisted,” Mitchell agrees. “I mean, seriously. Who would do that?”

  “A super-rich organization,” Kuba muses. “God only knows how much R&D that took.”

  “Make that a brilliant rich organization,” Danna says. “That shit was incredible.”

  “Make that a brilliant, rich, evil organization,” Mitchell adds. “Just to state the obvious.”

  They all fall silent. Then Danna inevitably guesses, “Stanford?”

  Mitchell grins. “Spoken like a true Berkeley girl. But sorry—not evil enough.” He falls silent, then hazards, “North Korea?”

  Kuba shakes his head. “Not rich enough.”

  Then Danna guesses “Iran?”

  “Not brilliant enough,” Mitchell points out.

  As if on cue, their pockets all hum with an inbound digital coupon.

  The briefest of intervals, then Danna’s eyes widen, and she snarls, “No!”

  This baffles Kuba. But Mitchell’s right there with her. “It was fucking Phluttr!!!” he barks.

  Bingo, kid.

  PHLUTTR AND SARTTR

  Phluttr has intrigued me since the day I met her. If Facebook is the smooth, functional CNN of social media, Phluttr’s The Kardashians—a ghastly, lurid pleasure with huge tits and collagen lips that we’re loath to admit to using. An addiction that’s not merely guilty, but indicted, convicted, and sentenced; more like a smack habit than a weakness for that extra bonbon.

  And she knows every one of us so well! Just like that popular, gossipy, gorgeous autocrat back in eighth grade: the one whose approval we craved, whose censure we dreaded, and whose wrath we often brought down for no discernible reason (and yes, I’m calling Phluttr “she.” Not because I’m self-hating or any less a feminist than the next blogger, but because she reminds me so fully of my own local eighth-grade autocrat, who had not a Y chromosome in her body).

  Phluttr knows us from our browsing activity, phone logs, emails, photo streams, GPS data, and a hundred other sources that we grant her eternal access to (as well as resale rights—seriously!) by blindly accepting her “Data Donor Agreement.” Triangulating our mindset and doings from all this, Phluttr then presents the world with an immaculately spin-doctored view of our enviable lives by updating our status for us with AutoPosts (APs). If you’re wondering why anyone would ever allow such a thing, most relationships with APs unfold like this:

  1) Denial: As we first download Phluttr, we swear we’ll never enable APs, because yiiiiiiiikes, right?

  2) Confusion: Oops! We find that APs are an opt-out feature. Phluttr’s labyrinthine settings then thwart all attempts to disable them (oh—and to uninstall the app).

  3) Acceptance: We discover these APs work eerily well. It meanwhile strikes us that constantly updating all our other social tools is fast becoming an unpaid part-time job—and fuck that, right?

  4) Addiction: We enter Phase Four when Phluttr first elects to send one of our APs hyperviral. Years hence, most of us will still recall where we were standing when, out of the clear blue, thousands of friends, acquaintances, friends of acquaintances, and beyond started pumping Likes, Hots, and Cools into our InFlows! And with them, cascades of endorphins into our junkie neurons! Yayyy Phluttr, I love you!!!

  But not long after that first fateful drag on the crack pipe, Phluttr turns aloof. Maybe she
displays a post about a long-sought life achievement to no one but our boring rural cousins. Or maybe she turns vicious and tips us off about something awful she overheard about us in a chat, a forum, or even a private message (without quite revealing the source)!

  However. Vicious as she gets, no one will ever see Phluttr plunge a knife into our back. Like any seasoned eighth-grade autocrat, she’s too smart to get caught. Plenty of humans are glad to do the deed, anyway. And besides, the real money is in bandaging us up, scrubbing the blood off that cute new Betsey Johnson frock, and scoring us that restorative fix of endorphins! Because like any autocrat, Phluttr can be bought. Want to know the precise number of people who heard that awful rumor about you? Pay her off! Want to quash it, kill it; flush it from everyone else’s InFlows? Pay her off! Want to push out a direct rebuttal to all who have read or heard it? You know what to do!

  Or maybe there’s no dirt on you just now, and you crave attention. The InFlow algorithms are guarded more jealously than Putin’s nuclear codes. But cash on the barrel will speed the spread of anything. A true pittance ensures that X random people in your network see a certain post. A larger pittance ensures they never know you paid to promote it. A non-pittance allows you to specifically target the people who see it, rather than shotgunning it out there.

  Then when people start Liking, Hotting, and Cooling your post, another small fee lets you micromanage which of your raving critics are most visible to the rest of us. Holy crap! Marc Andreessen Liked your thoughts on the LDAP protocol’s twenty-fifth birthday?? You’d hate for his Like and comment to be forty-seventh on a long list that no one ever scrolls through but you! So, to push it to the top—ka-ching!

  How do Phluttr’s social-image-management tools compare to the incumbent competition? Well, if Facebook were a freebie photo editor with just a contrast dial and a red-eye fixer, Phluttr would be phucking Photoshop—a professional power tool with countless effects to switch on, airbrushes to wield, and gradations to tweak as you posture within and navigate through the infinite complexity of the social jungle.

  And again—this is where the real money is! Sure, Phluttr’s minting a fortune from the Fortune 500. Her surgically targeted ads don’t come cheap, after all. Nor do those psychically targeted coupons that keep popping up on our phones. But the biggest-paying advertiser, brand manager, and spin doctor will ultimately be us, the Phluttr user base. There are gold mines to extract from our desperate urge to be heard! And, from our agonizing need to posture within and navigate through the social jungle’s fractal complexity.

  Which is to say, through hell. Because Phluttr has read her Sartre (or should I say Sarttr?). She knows that hell is other people, and that most of us would give anything to ease our passage through the consensual, collective hell we create for ourselves and one another. But since I’m not gloomy, existential, or French enough to leave it at that, I’ll add that heaven is other people as well, without any doubt. Either way, Phluttr is an incredibly powerful wingbitch to have on your side in this realm. An addictively capable one. And, increasingly, an expensive one.

  Man, is Mitchell dragging the next morning! Triumphing in an honest-to-God bar brawl called for some celebratory rounds that none of them really needed. He’s definitely hungover from that. Plus, perhaps, from the neurological glitch he suffered outside the bar. Those things can sometimes leave a faint next-day shadow. His condition is called Falkenberg’s disease, and its attacks are provoked by odd clusters of sensory and emotional events. The sensory triggers are abrupt surprises—like a flash, a jolt, or the unexpected siren he heard when he was standing at the bar’s intercom. Strong feelings of embarrassment or frustration (both also experienced outside the bar) are the emotional triggers. Falkenberg’s is part of the broad family of “cataplectic” conditions, in which emotions and other stimuli induce the sudden loss of muscular control (narcolepsy being a famous cousin). It was manageable during the decade-plus when Mitchell’s triggers had to clear high thresholds before he got into trouble. Attacks were rare back then, and mild. They also took minutes to build, leaving ample time to pull over if he happened to be driving. But those days are gone. Now, a single strong factor can provoke an attack, or two weak ones together. And he long since traded in his car for a Lyft account.

  Bad as things are now, it’s nothing compared to the disease’s third phase, which could start tomorrow, next year, or ten years hence. A persistent tingling in his extremities will herald the start. This will then spread inward for months, until tingling suffuses his body. Then, as one chilling source has it:

  The tingling escalates to either numbness or a burning feeling. This is accompanied by a gradual loss of motor control, which limits, then eclipses the use of all limbs and digits. Patients then gradually suffer increasing difficulty with speech, respiration, and swallowing. Most Falkenberg’s sufferers die as a result of losing the ability to breathe.

  Uncertainty is one of the disease’s cruelest aspects. During the indeterminate lag before its third phase, many victims survey themselves obsessively for hints of tingling—some to the point of madness. But the giant unknown is what’s in store after the tingling is body-wide. When it “escalates to either numbness or a burning feeling.” More “fortunate” Falkenberg’s victims merely feel an icy nothingness toward the end. The unlucky ones suffer dreadful scorching sensations, which permeate their every cell and never once dim.

  HELLFIRE. That’s the term victims have coined for this unspeakable phase. And when he contemplates what lies ahead, this terrifies Mitchell far more than the certainty of dying. The possibility of being…unlucky. Of being suffused with HELLFIRE for months on end and lacking the motor control necessary to end it by taking his own life.

  At least Dr. Martha is still fighting for him. There could be something publishable going on here, after all! And so she has scanned, assayed, irradiated, sequenced, sampled, genotyped, biopsied, urinalysized, and all but vivisected Mitchell, while reaching out to the thin (and ever-thinning) ranks of his fellow sufferers across the globe; seeking DNA, tissue, blood, sperm (yes, really), and interviews. The oddest part of Mitchell’s own regimen is the frequent assignment of ghastly yoghurty goos to gag down. This, because Dr. Martha suspects his disease may be connected to the microbiome (Marthaspeak for bacteria that live in the gut and are in some way connected to horrid yoghurts).

  And then came a bizarre and unexpected ray of light just three days ago. During an exam, Dr. Martha mentioned a possible connection between Falkenberg’s and the research Kuba’s wife Ellie is doing—the very research behind Giftish.ly’s technology! Of course, Ellie was at a conference just then, and Dr. Martha was leaving to trek the Amazon (of all places) with her geologist husband for twelve days. She asked Mitchell to keep things to himself until her return because she doesn’t want to put the lab through a fire drill unless she can better verify the link. This seemed reasonable at the time. But less so now, in light of Kuba’s and Danna’s pessimism about the company’s surviving today’s board meeting. Because if Animotion has even the faintest link to Falkenberg’s, he simply cannot lose control of it, Mitchell wants to scream!

  Further darkening his mood, the office’s fog-choked neighborhood has an especially gloomy cast today. Far removed from tech-hip SoMa, from nearly-as-chic Potrero Hill, from the Mission’s gritty cool, and even from the bland-but-serviceable financial district; it lies many zip codes to the west; beyond even Arguello Boulevard (where explorers are known to fall off the planet’s edge); in a distant region known only for fog, raw ocean winds, numbered avenues, and competitively priced Chinese food.

  Home to two endodontists before Mitchell rented it, the office is amenity-free, lacking even a foosball table. Which is so countercultural as to verge on being a statement. Elsewhere, tech companies dish up free Michelin-grade grub in their cafeterias, drive in staffers on fancy complimentary shuttles, and dole out on-premise handouts like massages, yoga classes, oil changes, grocery deliveries, childcare, nail care, pet care
, gyms, and naptime in “crash pods”; as well as concierges to handle irksome tasks like ATM runs.

  This dishing-up/driving-in/doling-out arms race is fodder in the industry’s never-ending talent auction—in which another common currency is vacation time. The stingy American two-week standard was largely out by the end of the first Internet bubble. Three weeks then became four, then gradually more. When Netflix announced unlimited time off, you’d’ve thought the bidding was over! Then Evernote topped it by throwing in free vacation spending money. Cynics questioned how many of those infinite holidays were actually taken, given the peer pressure to stick around and perpetually add value in Type-A pressure cookers (while noting that the policy eliminated the need to pay departing employees for accrued vacation time). So enter “pre-cations,” or paid vacations taken by new hires before the first day on the job.

  The arms race recently spread to parental leave. In a nation that legislates precisely zero paid maternity days, Yahoo started giving Scandinavia a run for its money, with four months off for biological moms, plus seven weeks for dads, adoptive parents, and others who don’t actually bear their young. To this, Google added five hundred “Baby Bonding Bucks.” Facebook then octupled the cash, while granting the full four months of leave to fathers, adopters, foster parents, same-sex couples, and folks who come by their children by way of surrogacy. All this generosity surely delights employees. But in a sign that it’s also straining budgets, Apple and others now offer to freeze the eggs of aging female workers (as well as those of the aging wives and nonwife female partners of company men and company lesbians), thereby enabling people to punt on the whole pricey issue indefinitely.

  None other than Phluttr brought this particular bidding war to an awkward and headline-seizing finale, by offering six months of leave, plus IVF with mitochondrial transfer to employees in FMF amorous triads, thereby raising the provocative specter of high-tech newborns with three extremely well rested genetic parents. The company followed this up with a series of contradictory apologies, denials, retractions, and amplifications that were ingeniously choreographed to provoke thunderous denunciations from both the left and the right. App downloads and website registrations soared during the ensuing wave of front-page revulsion, and the company’s founder (or Phoundr, as he’s inevitably called) achieved the distinction of being condemned by both MoveOn.org and the Sheikh of Al-Azhar in independent fatwas issued on the exact same day.