“Okay,” he says. “That’s enough. I believe you. I appreciate you not going into detail. That is kind of you.”
I’d love to take the points but I can’t. “Not especially,” I say. “I don’t want to experience your memories.” Even secondhand pain hurts. I’ve got enough of my own.
“That’s fair. It’s not your burden,” he says. “And I wouldn’t wish it on you. I think we can say you’ve passed the test.”
I nod. We’re done with the preliminaries. “So why am I here?”
There it is, right at the front of his head. That one word again.
“Downvote,” he says. It sounds like an echo to me. “I know you’re looking for the guy behind it.”
“I am,” I say. “There’s a federal agent named Vincent who thinks it might be you.”
He shakes his head hard. “No,” he says. “It’s not me.”
He’s not lying. It doesn’t matter that he knows I can read minds. Even if he tried to hide it, I’d still be able to see the truth in his head. Even if he had a split-personality disorder or some deeply repressed memory, I’d still be able to see the place where his memories had been torn and stitched over. People can lie to themselves all the time. But never to me.
But there is something he wants to confess.
“But that’s why I wanted you here. I do think I bear some responsibility—”
There is a great tidal surge of memory and guilt. I see emails, instant messages, late-night chat sessions; hundreds of screenshots all scrolling through Stack’s memories.
“You know him.”
Stack nods. “I worked with him. For a long time.”
He pauses. I know what he’s going to say next, but I let him get it out. He needs to say it out loud.
“And I think I helped him build Downvote.”
11
It’s Easier to Make It a Weapon
I hold up a hand to keep Stack from saying anything else. “If you’re about to confess to me, I should warn you. I’m not a lawyer or a priest. If I get pulled in front of a judge—”
“You think I don’t know that?” he asks. Stack doesn’t roll his eyes at me, but there’s a brief blast of scorn from him all the same. It’s like a burst of hot air from a hair dryer, quickly snapped off. He’s spent years trying to scour any trace of arrogance or superiority from his soul, working toward his own vision of peace.
“I know you are just trying to help,” he says.
I nod. True, I could grab everything Stack is about to say direct from his head. But I can’t download his intelligence. I need the Easy Reader version if I’m going to comprehend what happened. So I want him to translate into plain English.
He settles into his chair and gears up. “First, how much do you know about the Net? Coding? Massive social networks? Ever read any Jaron Lanier?”
I smile patiently. “I use email,” I tell him. “The rest of the time I’m usually pretty busy in the real world.”
He sighs heavily. “Oh God, a digital Philistine. This is going to be worse than pitching investors.” But he’s smiling. He really does love explaining this stuff. “Don’t you know by now? The Net is the real world. Everything out there is just a pale shadow.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that before. I still haven’t seen anyone get killed because of a computer program.”
The smile vanishes, and a dark shadow passes through his mind. The memory of an image on his screen. A dead body. He shoves it away quickly, and goes back into his story.
He tells me he was looking around for his next project. He’d spent enough time being an idle billionaire playboy. He had his yacht, he had a personal chef and a hot female bodyguard. He felt like he’d hit most of the check marks on his personal list of life goals. So his intellectual curiosity began to grow again. Just like he did with spam emails, he began with something he found personally annoying.
“I wondered why people are always such colossal dicks to one another online,” he says.
“Really?” I say. “I hadn’t noticed.”
My sarcasm whistles past his head like a fastball. “Take a look at the comments section on any news story. Or go on Twitter or Facebook. You give people a chance to say whatever they want without consequences and they almost always turn vicious. Even the so-called nice people. People who won’t correct the waiter when they get the order wrong. They’ll sit there and eat food they didn’t order rather than have an unpleasant conversation. But you get them on a computer—”
“And they’re not polite anymore. Right.”
“Oh, it’s worse than that. A lot worse.”
And then he hits a few buttons and the screens all around me light up with the site itself. Downvote.
It’s the first time I’ve seen it out in reality, and not in someone’s memory. On the front page is the name of the site, followed by the slogans:
SHOW THEM WHAT YOU THINK OF THEM
HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE
MAKE THEM PAY
Then there is the Big Board—the list of the most hated people on the Internet, as decided by the people who come to Downvote. Some I recognize—the president, of course, and a couple actors and actresses—but many I don’t. Clicking on their names, Stack shows that each comes with a small biography, a collection of everything that can be gleaned from the Net about them by the Downvoters: Facebook photos, profile information, even home and work addresses and cell-phone numbers. They could be anyone. Anywhere.
Beyond the front page are the message boards, where the Downvoters argue for their choices.
As I said, I’m not a big social media guy. I spend enough time in people’s heads as it is, getting everything they’ve got live and unfiltered. Aside from pictures of their cats, I figured I’d already seen whatever they could possibly show me.
But even I’m surprised by the sheer level of unfocused rage that pours out of the screen.
Wormwood2311: what a waste of skin.
PresidentBusiness19: If I see this fag in the street, I will pull my Glock from its concealed-carry holster and give him a few new holes!
HeavingStalking says: goddamn cucks wasting our vital heritage makes me ashamed to be an American.
DashGorgon: It’s the Jews controlling the media, shoving these fuckin ragheads down our throats. can’t wait to see them all choking the gas chambers.
And it always comes back to rape. Dozens of rape threats. This was from a string of messages about an actress who had sued a hacker who stole a bunch of nude selfies from her phone:
Fuck that bitch. I’m not going to stop spreading her disgusting nudes around and making sure her life is a living hell until she either kills yourself or I rape her to death.
i hope she gets raped
only question is will she be raped first or killed first
ill do it imma kill her and then rape her
i swear i would put this bitch 6 feet deep
I’ve done some unquestionably evil things. I’ve killed. I’ve tortured. I can say I was just following orders or doing a job, or even that they were worse than me, but I can’t change the facts. I’ve hurt people.
But even if I don’t have much of a conscience, I have limits.
These people blow past them. They talk about violating people like they’re ordering something through the drive-through window.
And they have no goddamn idea what they are talking about. I wonder if any of them have ever experienced actual pain. If they know what it does to you just to watch real violence happen, just to be close to it. If they know the difference between video games and spy movies and real life.
&nbs
p; Or if they are just that dead inside.
I’m certain none of these people see this, but it is like a suicide hotline. Every one of these posts is a cry for help: I’m sad, I’m angry, I’m disappointed my life isn’t as good as someone else’s, there’s nothing I like on TV, and I’m bored.
I get to see this all the time—every dirty thought, every deeply hidden prejudice, every secret hate. There is a constant throb of barely contained rage going on in the minds of almost every person around me. I see what’s going on behind the polite smiles.
But I don’t have any choice about the crap that comes streaming into my brain from all the angry, disappointed people around me. I don’t know why anyone would do this to themselves voluntarily.
I search for the words. “That’s pretty awful,” I say.
“Yeah,” Stack agrees. “You get death threats, rape threats, and racist slurs. And then they get inventive. And I kept wondering why. When I began programming, we all thought computers would make us better people. That we’d get better at communicating. Not worse.”
“You were wrong.”
“But I wanted to know why. So I started doing research. I went onto the message boards and into the forums. I figured that was the best place to start. And I kept asking, ‘Hey, why are so many people such dicks when they’re on a computer?’”
He smiles. I can see some of the responses in his head.
“At the very least, I got some firsthand experience. But I didn’t give up. And pretty soon I started to get responses from some other programmers who wondered the same thing. One of them called himself Godwin. We messaged back and forth for hours. We both wanted to know: Why did so much of the Internet turn into junior high school? That’s never what any of us intended when we started.”
I get another flash of a painful memory from Stack. In the hallway of his school, a group of jocks shoving him aside, spilling his books onto the floor, in a casual display of their teenage might and invulnerability. The last days of jock culture in America, when the word “geek” was still an insult and guys like Stack had to hide their comic books or get the crap kicked out of them by the football team. But then the Internet changed everything. It became cool to be smart. No matter how weird your fetish or how specific your taste, you could find someone else out there who shared it. The Internet connected everyone in one big, worldwide family.
At least, that was how it was supposed to work. In reality, the bullies still existed online.
“So Godwin and I began to talk about how we could make people better. How we could push them into behaving online.”
I must look skeptical, because Stack stops and asks, “You don’t think it’s possible, do you?”
I consider all the ways I could answer that question, but I decide to be honest. “In my experience, people are who they are,” I tell him. “They don’t change.”
He smirks a little. “You sure about that?”
I give him a look. I spend all my time inside other people’s heads. I’ve tried pushing their thoughts into some kind of order through sheer force of will. And I’ve seen how they insist on barreling down their own personal course of destruction, no matter how many roadblocks are in the way.
“Pretty sure,” I say.
“Ah, but you’re wrong,” he says, and he spins one of the screens around to show me a bunch of charts and graphs. “I knew we could change people’s minds. You just have to apply the right pressure. Look at what Facebook did a couple of years ago. They made people feel sad by adding depressing news stories to their news feeds. And they prodded people into voting on election day by including ‘I Voted’ buttons on their pages. And it worked. It’s a technique called massive emotional contagion. It’s possible to spread an emotional state or a mood over social media—just like a computer virus, only it affects the users, not the computers. In other words, Facebook was willfully screwing with the heads of their users—and then they bragged about how it worked. They published papers on it. And that’s just what they admitted to. What happens if a piece of legislation comes up in Congress that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t like? Or if there’s a presidential candidate he wants to see in the White House? What does Facebook start pushing to its users then?”
“You’re saying people can be steered. Pushed into behaving certain ways.”
“Exactly. Godwin and I figured out we could do the same thing. Only we could go even further. We could make people act nice by spreading different kinds of emotional contagion. We wanted to develop an algorithm that would do just that. We needed a way to force them into being better versions of themselves.”
He looks a little guilty here, and I sense a small amount of discomfort. In his moment of hesitation, I can see what he did. I don’t have his technical genius, and I certainly don’t understand the lines of code stringing through his mind, but I get the intent.
“You created a virus,” I say.
He looks surprised. “No!” he says. Then he reconsiders. “Well. I wouldn’t call it a virus, exactly.”
“What would you call it?”
“Stealth software. A tiny little package of code. Small enough to be contained in a cookie from a website. Once you clicked on the site, it would download itself onto your computer, and it would start showing you nice things. It would add itself to your social media feeds, and begin scouring the Net for good stuff. Happy families. Puppies and kittens. Firefighters rescuing babies. You know. Things that would make you more positive. Emotional contagion, but in a good way.”
“Sunshine and lollipops and rainbows,” I say. “This sounds like a great advertising trick. But I don’t see how you’re supposed to make it into a weapon.”
He rolls his eyes, and impatience simmers in him. “Are you serious? It’s easier to make it a weapon. That was where we started.”
I wait. He realizes what just came out of his mouth.
“I don’t mean we started out designing a weapon. It really was supposed to be benign,” he says. “But first, we had to look at what drives people. What pushes them into action. And that’s where you run into the limits of the hardware. You should know exactly what I mean.”
“The human brain,” I say. “Yeah. I’m familiar.”
“Right, of course,” he says, remembering who he’s talking to. “Well, that was the point. For everything we’ve done in the last couple of centuries, we’re still talking about a lump of tissue designed by evolution to keep an ape alive. Our forebrain—the part that’s supposed to do all our finer thinking, that’s supposed to control our basic impulses—that’s like a new upgrade, in terms of human evolution, maybe two hundred and fifty million years old. Practically still fresh from the factory. Our emotions, though—they’re wired down much deeper, close to the spinal cord. That’s the part that handles all the stuff we need to deal with to survive. And that’s the part that takes over when we feel threatened. That part of our brain is still the big boss when it comes to setting priorities. Fear. Greed. Hunger. Lust. We had to learn how to design our software to trigger those basic emotions first, before we could move on to the nicer ones.”
Despite what I saw at Kira’s wedding—and inside the minds of the shooters—I’m not convinced. He’s moved into an area I do know something about, from my time in the army and the CIA. Part of my training involved looking deep into what makes people behave, and what makes them follow orders. Because I was expected to do both, but I was also expected to use my talents to make other people do the same thing. I needed to know how the operating system inside people’s heads worked, and how it could be manipulated. And it’s not as easy as Stack makes it sound.
“I don’t buy it,” I tell him. “It takes a lot of work to make one soldier do what he’s told. Months of training. Group dynamics that reward teamwork and conformity. A rigidly enforced hierarchy with constant supervision and monitoring. That’s what any army is, when you get right down to
it. And it still breaks down all the time. People disobey orders. They slack off. They go AWOL. There are soldiers who put down their guns in the middle of combat rather than shoot a kid, no matter what it might cost them. Or they’ll wander off into Taliban territory because they believe everyone else around them is wrong. But you’re certain you can get people to dance like puppets on strings with a few Facebook posts.”
Stack smiles, as if I’ve just proven his point. I can hear him say
“That’s the beauty of it,” he says. “We didn’t need people to follow orders. Whoever gets exposed to this will go out and do what I want because they think it’s their own idea. For better or worse, the Internet is our nervous system now. Someone pokes us on social media, we lash out like we’re actually hurt. I present them with the right input, and they react. All we had to do is play on their emotions. Fear. Anger. Hate. I’m not building an army. I’m opening a floodgate.”
I am still not convinced. “So what are they going to do? Most of them won’t get up out of their chairs. You know this. They might send an angry email. And then they’ll go back to looking for porn or watching Netflix.”
The irritation flares up again, and he loses his temper. “Oh yeah? Well, I know it works, because we did it!”
Then he stops. But I’ve already seen it.
I get a name.
“Who’s Gary Holmes?” I ask, and suddenly I see guilt blossom inside Stack. I get several images. A guy in the crowd at a baseball game, holding a foul ball. A kid with the unmistakable shaved head of a cancer patient. And it comes back to me. I’d forgotten the name, but not the story.
Stack looks away. And I get that image again.
A dead body. Holmes, his corpse like something washed up by the tide, bloated and dead-eyed in a cheap apartment.
And suddenly it’s clear to me. “You tested it.”
Stack looks down at the surface of his desk and sinks into himself. Despite his age and wealth, I feel like I’m seeing a child sitting in his seat right now. I hear echoes of a second grader when he speaks again.
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