An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

by Hank Green

  She fixed them and we both reloaded the page.

  “Don’t Stop Me Now” is a song by the British rock band Queen, featured on their 1978 albu Jazz that was relesed as a single in 1979. Wrtten by lead singer Freddie Mercury, it was recorded in August 1978 at Super Bear Studios in Berre-les-Alpes (Alpes-Maritimes), France, and is the twelfth track on the album.

  “OK,” Maya said, “there is no conceivable way that I didn’t see that someone misspelled the world ‘album’ after you specifically asked me to look for typos. I’m fucking fastidious.”

  She was.

  “I’m going to fix it again,” I said.

  I fixed all the typos and reloaded the page again.

  “Don’t Stop Me Now” is a song by the British rock band Queen, featured on their 1978 albu Jazz that was relesed as a single in 1979. Wrtten by lead singer Freddie Mercury, it was recorded in Augst 1978 at Super Bear Studios in Berre-les-Alpes (Alpes-Maritimes), France, and is the twelfth track on the album.

  “The u in ‘August’ is gone now!” I said, getting more freaked-out.

  I called Andy.

  “Yello!” he said, still clearly delirious.

  “Can you go to the Wikipedia page for ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ right now?” I said, without any preamble.

  “Yup!” I could hear him rustling around for his computer. I just waited.

  “OK, loading up . . . aaannd . . .” I heard the keys clacking.

  “Do you see any typos in the first paragraph?”

  “Ummm . . . Yes . . . there’s no i in ‘written.’”

  “And that’s all.”

  “Is this a test?”

  “What about ‘released’ or ‘album’ or ‘August’?”

  “I have had a very weird day, April, but you are making it considerably weirder.”

  “Answer the question.”

  “No, all those words are spelled correctly. You do know how Wikipedia works, right, you can change the page. Somebody probably just fixed it.”

  I reloaded the page again, all the same typos, no new ones.

  “Fix the typo.”

  “April, we’re supposed to be downtown to shoot for ABC News in like two hours. There are a lot of errors on Wikipedia and we aren’t going to fix them all today.”

  “OH MY GOD ANDY DO THE THING,” I loudly monotoned.

  “I already did . . . I did it while I was whining. It is not fixed. Oh, actually, this is weird, ‘released’ is now misspelled. Wait, that was one of the words you listed. How did you do that?”

  Maya chimed in, “Put him on speaker.” So I did.

  “Andy, this is Maya, the same thing happened to us, but it didn’t require me to make the first change before I saw the second one, probably because April and I are on the same IP address. Every time I fix a typo I see a new one, as well as the one I just fixed. According to the Wikipedia log pages, no one is making these changes. Indeed, according to the Wikipedia log, no one has made any changes, including us, to this page since three hours ago when an editor added a note about the song playing in security camera footage.

  “In the time that you two were talking, I tried to fix the final letter, and I didn’t see any more typos. It seems as if we have run into a dead end. Additionally, we are not going to figure this out right now because April has to do her hair in the next half hour and then get on the subway to Manhattan,” Maya ordered.

  “Are we really going to still do this TV thing?” I whined.

  “Yes,” Maya and Andy replied simultaneously.

  “But do you not both agree that this is far more interesting?”

  They both did, but then there was the whole matter of the $10,000.

  Later, after I had been through a quick rinse and was flat-ironing my hair, I called to Maya from the bathroom, “What were the misspelled words?”

  “‘Written,’ ‘released’ . . .” She thought for a second before poking her head into the bathroom. “‘Album’ and ‘August.’”

  “I, A, M, U,” I said.

  “Hmm?” she asked as she sat down on the toilet. Not to pee or anything, just because there wasn’t anywhere else in the bathroom to sit.

  “Those were the missing letters. I, A, M, U.”

  “‘I am you’?” she said.

  “Well, I am fairly certain that I wasn’t the one ghost-editing Wikipedia from the inside.”

  “April, this is a mystery we are not going to solve today.”

  “Uggggghhhh!” I said in frustration. “How can you do thaaat?”

  “Do what?”

  “Don’t you want to figure this out?”

  “You’re going to be on the national news in an hour, hun. Literally dozens of senior citizens are going to see you, you have to look presentable.”

  “This is terrible.”

  She laughed. “You do know what you’re doing right now, right?”

  “Huh?”

  “April, picture this if you will. A young woman who has created some excellent fan art for her favorite band gets an email to ask if she can make some official merch. And then that woman doesn’t just not respond, she stops listening to that band entirely. And then remember that you actually did that.”

  “I was already growing out of them, I’m embarrassed I ever grooved to those particular tunes.”

  “Sure,” she said, unconvinced. “The point is that you hate it when money makes you do things, even when they’re interesting things. And I get that, it sucks to have money push you around, and maybe you’re a little less used to it than the average person.”

  “That’s not fair,” I replied, a bit hurt. “Andy is ‘freelancing’ because his dad can just keep paying his rent while he builds his portfolio.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, of course there are people who have more than you. Hell, I have more than you. But you still have way more than most people. But whatever. You’re you, and you don’t like doing normal stuff, and the normal thing when someone offers you ten thousand dollars to do something is to do it. Even if it’s stressful and scary.”

  “I’m not scared of being on TV,” I asserted.

  “Yeah, you are!” she countered.

  I checked, and I found that she was right.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it’s scary to go on TV. That’s not a ‘you’ thing, it’s a human thing. But you shouldn’t do it for the money. And you shouldn’t do it because you’re scared of it. You should do it because it’s going to be strange. You’re going to see stuff people don’t get to see, you’re going to know how things work, and you’re going to tell me all about it, and I’m going to be fascinated, and we’re going to make fun of the weird newspeople together, and then we’re going to work on this weird Wikipedia shit.

  “Also, in a week you will have fifty thousand new dollars, and that is amazing and I’m really happy for you. You do the things you have to do in the order you have to do them.”

  Maya has a kind of self-control that almost seems like a foreign language to me. I see her using it and I know it’s real, but it never stops feeling like gibberish to my brain.

  “And we’re not going to figure out the Wikipedia shit right now,” I finished for her.

  “Nope. I’ll be thinking about it and we’ll work on it as soon as you get home.” She stood up to take a look at my hair.

  “Did I do OK?”

  “I wouldn’t call it an adventurous look. But the good news is that no matter what you do up here”—she gestured to my hair—“all the rest of this”—meaning my face and body—“is just pure genetically induced hotness.” Her eyes were soft, and not for the first time, I had the sensation that she and I had settled into a rhythm of mutual appreciation that was at once wonderfully comfortable and totally terrifying.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  That night I discovered
that TV interviews are a terrible way to spend time but an excellent way to make $20,000. I learned pretty quick that I didn’t have to do my makeup at home because the vast majority of time spent on television news is spent making television news look impressive. This included painting an entirely new face onto my face as soon as I walked into the building. Interesting that, when I did tag team interviews with Andy, he spent the “face reconstruction” time eating free doughnuts on leather couches.

  To say that I didn’t watch TV news is underselling my position. I actively avoided not just the news but also clips of the news on social media. I believed (or maybe wanted to believe) that I lived in a bubble world unaffected by the kinds of things that happened on cable news.

  I was about to get a crash course. Here’s the first thing I learned:

  TV news spends lots of time and money looking impressive because it is not actually impressive. After I saw it from the inside, the shine immediately disappeared. TV news studios are just rooms with people in them. Some of the people are cool and nice; others are insecure and loud. It’s basically just like every other room full of people you’ve ever been in, except exactly half of it looks extremely fancy and important, and the other half is just concrete and scaffolding.

  It’s like a warehouse crashed into the lobby of a three-star hotel and then they just left the mess alone.

  It occurs to me that this is a fairly good metaphor for what TV newspeople are like—half boring and normal, half peculiar caricatures of TV newspeople. They’re so “TV news” that it seems like they’re making fun of TV newspeople. They have a very particular and standardized way of speaking that is nothing like the way normal people talk. It sounds natural on TV, but in real life it’s basically like “Whoa, wait, stop . . . why are you talking like that?”

  We’re going to skip around the timeline of the story a bit here, but I have now been on the news a lot, and I have Thoughts.

  At first I did the news things for the reason Maya identified for me: It was weird and new, and when someone’s offering to pay you $10,000 to talk to them for twenty minutes, you do it. I don’t like that everyone has a price, but ultimately you do, and it turns out that mine is below $30,000 an hour.

  Even Before Carl, I spent time thinking about what I’d say if I ever had a platform to say it. That’s what art is about, right? I mean, not app interfaces, but art.

  Much of the best art is about balancing between reflecting culture while simultaneously being removed from it and commenting on it. In the best case, maybe an artist gets to say something about culture that hasn’t been said and needs to be said. That’s a lofty goal, but not a bad one. I’d spent my four years of art school waffling between believing I could do that (or even that I needed to do that) and feeling like I should be more realistic and leave art to real artists.

  But in those manic moments when I thought I could be some kind of vessel for truth, I’d thought about what I’d say if I someday got a soapbox. That income inequality is out of hand. That all people are pretty damn similar so it would be great if we stopped hating each other. That prison sentences for nonviolent crimes are dumb and that drug addiction is a health problem, not a crime problem.

  Well, I finally got my chance and I mostly said, “No, um . . . maybe it’s a way of saying, a way to show, that we don’t see how much we don’t see? Um, just like the news, so many important things happen that, like, nothing seems important. Why do people even watch the news?”

  That’s an actual quote from an interview I did on cable news. Direct quote. Great game plan, April. I really knew what I was talking about.

  Step 1: Stumble around the point and sound like an idiot.

  Step 2: Insult the entire institution that is currently giving voice to your inane musings as well as the people who enjoy it.

  Step 3: ????

  Step 4: Profit!

  Andy’s dad called me after that interview to give me some media-relations tips, which, thank god. He literally wanted me to take a class, but I caught on pretty quick. The real trick is to know exactly the one point you absolutely 100 percent need to get across and also know when to shut your mouth. My biggest problem was always the second bit. I always finished really strong and then would say, “uh,” like I had more to say, but really I didn’t. Listening back, I hate hearing that “uh” so much. It makes me want to smack my idiot face.

  Anyway, I did five or six of these chats, and by the sixth I was pretty good. It was four consecutive days of waking up at 4 A.M. to get ready for an interview on Good Morning America or the like. Sometimes Maya would be there if she could get off work, and Andy always would (that was part of his dad’s deal). It was exhausting and fascinating. It was also distracting and prevented any of us from giving the mysteries of Carl and Wikipedia the attention they deserved. Not that thinking about them more would have helped much.

  You can go back and watch a lot of these interviews on YouTube. No one comes out looking anything but dumb because of how completely wrong everyone was about everything. People argued with me that it wasn’t about art, that it was, in fact, government spending gone awry. The most prevalent theory (which I couldn’t really argue with) was that the Carls were a PR stunt for a new movie or video game, or maybe the launch of a lost Queen album. Seriously. It’s so easy to forget being wrong.

  It turns out pundits don’t want to talk about what’s happened; they want to use what’s happened to talk about the same things they talk about every day. Eventually, I realized that almost all of these people were talking on the news for free. And they weren’t doing it because they wanted to change the world, or because they wanted to do something interesting. They were doing it because it got their face and their name into the world.

  But I think I’m being honest when I say that I initially came at all of this fairly reluctantly. At first, I tried to maintain my preexisting distance from the internet. But it didn’t take long for it to get out of my control. Here’s a story: I was sitting on my bed (the one in the living room) with Maya. We were both on our phones and watching some terrible but also amazing baking show on Netflix. At this point I was still assuming that the attention and notoriety were all short-term, so I had left my email address up on my site. I checked my email and saw this:

  Your Cruelty

  Our interaction on Twitter today has left me so disillusioned. Judging by your TV interviews and YouTube videos, you seemed like a genuine person. Maybe even a kind person. I now see how wrong I was. I should have known better. I just wanted to let you know that you suck.

  Mary

  So I wrote back, because not only had I not been mean to Mary on Twitter that day, I also did not have a Twitter account. If this seems completely bizarre, I agree. It can be easy to stay inside your bubble in New York City. It is a world of its own. Instagram was the only platform that meshed well with my strengths (art, design, and being photogenic). I also liked to share photos of whatever I was reading, which was probably Louisa May Alcott but might also have been a biography of a famous artist or something. How else is a girl gonna show the world that she can be irreverent and sophisticated at the same time?!

  Anyway, Mary linked me to the Twitter conversation and, indeed, a person pretending to be me had been pretty fucking terrible to Mary.

  “How do you get a tweet taken off Twitter?” I asked Maya, who was slightly more social media savvy than me.

  “I think you can report it? What’s going on?”

  “Someone is pretending to be me, I can’t figure out how to report them.”

  She took my phone.

  “Oh, hon, it’s because you’re not logged in. You have to log in.”

  “I don’t have a Twitter, though.”

  “Well, I guess it’s not too much of a surprise that people are impersonating you then.”

  “Huh?”

  “People are going to be looking for you, t
o follow you or to argue with you or just to see what you’re up to. And when they find that you aren’t there, some small percentage of them are going to just make a fake account. And since there’s no real one, you can’t report impersonation.”

  “So why hasn’t anyone else reported them?”

  “Because no one . . . cares? I can report them. I don’t know if it’ll do anything. I think they take it more seriously if the person actually being impersonated does the reporting.”

  “What?!” I was a little taken aback. “And I can’t do that unless I sign up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So in order to not have people pretend to be me, I have to be on Twitter?”

  “That’s pretty much the size of it!”

  “This is not fair,” I replied, matter-of-factly.

  “I keep wondering when you will notice that that’s how everything is,” she said with a smile.

  So I signed up for Twitter, and we linked to it from the YouTube channel, and I tweeted some things, and by the end of the day I had five hundred real, human people waiting to hear my every word . . . as long as they only came a few dozen words at a time. My Instagram, on the other hand, had been blowing up all week. I had ten times more followers than I had before. It was a weird mix of exciting and stressful. I freaked out a little bit and went through and deleted a bunch of stuff I was less than proud off. Everything that had a border had to go. I thought way more about every post, and I felt like I couldn’t put anything up if it wasn’t really high quality. Suddenly my posts had gotten much better (and required much more work).

  Seven days in, I had stopped calling in to tell work I wasn’t going to make it, and instead, I just didn’t go. Don’t do this, it makes it way harder to get another job in the future if you quit by just not showing up, but that’s what I did. It helped that, by that time, I had made tens of thousands of dollars. But that income stream was drying up. We weren’t being paid for our appearances; we were being paid for the use of our video, which they had already paid for. They were happy to have us keep coming on shows, but they weren’t going to pay us. And if they weren’t going to pay us, then I had more important things to do.