by Gabriel Roth
We hurry into room 1F at eight minutes after ten to find the seats mostly full and three men milling around next to the big table on the dais: the moderator, the director of a consumer-rights nonprofit, and the maker of an anonymizer application. The moderator, a columnist for IT Security, hurries over. “Oh good, good, you’re here,” he says, with a funny mixture of deference and irritation. “We’re all ready to go!” Maya squeezes my arm and slips away to take a seat.
I take my spot behind a microphone and a pitcher of water as the moderator begins his introductions. I survey the crowd—hey, that’s kind of a lot of people—and locate Maya, near the back, grinning up at me, proud, maybe?
In response to the first question, Jack Schell from the Center for Digital Privacy makes an appeal to fear: your secrets are a commodity; your personal information is bought and sold; a stranger is using your credit card and your social security number.
The moderator, whose name I’ve forgotten, looks to me for the rebuttal. I’m here to represent the bad guys.
I give the stump speech I used to give journalists who asked about Demo1’s Big Brotherly implications. Sharing your information entails benefits and risks; decisions should be left to the individual. Demo1 presented its terms of use in clear English, required user opt-in, provided for admirably fine-grained preference-setting. We’re in the early stages of a new mass medium. Remember the controversy around cookies circa 1998? Some people found it nefarious that the Internet could know who you are; it was as if your TV was watching you. But that’s why the Internet’s going to destroy TV: it’s a mass medium that knows who you are. Whether you find that exciting or frightening is up to you. The subtext of the discussion, which I do not exhume, is Will everyone find out I look at pornography?, to which the answer is Probably not, but you never know.
Jack Schell says, “You founded Demographic of One in 1999. Last year you sold it to Atrium.” His lips twitch as he represses a smile; he’s prepping a haymaker. “All the data you collected on users was included in the sale—it’s what Atrium paid for. Do you trust them to use it properly?”
Actually, that information wasn’t worth much; we didn’t have enough users. What Atrium paid for was our technology, the thousands of hours of concentrated thought that Bill and I put into the codebase. But what would Jack Schell know about that? I say, “The terms of use still apply.”
“But you don’t have any control over whether they stick to them, do you?” he says. “That’s what happens when people’s personal information becomes a commodity.”
The crowd’s silence has a special attentive quality: no one was expecting actual conflict. “Eric Muller, care to respond to that?” says the moderator, clearly imagining himself on TV. The other panelist, whose app is pretty good, hasn’t said a word.
“You know what that information is?” I say. “It’s what brand of dog food you buy. It’s whether you wear a medium or a large. It’s all stuff that the girl who rings up your purchase at the supermarket already knows.”
“We’re in the middle of a sea change that very few people are aware of,” Schell says. He’s drawn himself up in his chair to indicate that he’s about to intensify his rhetoric. “The government is granting itself ever greater powers to track people’s private information. The Internet is being used by corporations to gather data on customers. And the individual’s right to control information about him-or herself is falling by the wayside. The point is not the intrinsic privacy value of any particular piece of data; the point is our right to a private self.” A few spectators nod their heads vigorously.
I can’t match Schell’s oratorical style, so I opt for brisk dismissiveness: There’s no need for all that speechifying. “The information we gathered exists on a level at which the individual is meaningless,” I say. I look straight at Schell and smile. “The facts about what you eat or drink or wear or buy have no value. It’s only when those facts are bundled with everyone else’s facts, when you’re subsumed in a mass of data, that you mean anything at all to Atrium or to any other company with six hundred million dollars in revenues last year. This whole discussion is predicated on a kind of paranoid egotism: Everyone wants to look at me, everyone’s interested in what I’m doing, the CIA is bugging my phone, Pfizer wants to steal my urine. There’s no need to worry about this stuff, because none of us is that important.”
I’ve gotten kind of worked up, and by the end I’m sitting upright and projecting just as forcefully as Jack Schell. People laugh, although they’re not sure if they’re laughing with me or at me. Schell smiles at me, an all-in-good-fun smile—the professional privacy advocate, after all, is a parasite on privacy-encroachers like me—and then the moderator, out of pity, invites the man from SecreSoft to explain where his product fits into the debate.
When time is called the applause goes beyond the perfunctory, and there’s a sense that the crowd has been given its money’s worth. I make eye contact with Maya as she utters a celebratory whoop. She looks relieved, and I realize that she was nervous for me.
The audience for the next panel has begun to trickle in and hover at the back of the room, so we hurry off the stage. The moderator thanks us fervently, and Jack Schell begins following up on a point he didn’t get to complete. Maya comes and stands close to me while he’s talking. I wait for Schell to wind down before giving him a little excuse-me nod and turning to her. “You were so great!” she says, slipping her arm around my waist. Schell registers this, and I feel myself puffing up. Masculine dominance has an unfamiliar, hormonal tang. “You were great too,” she says to Schell, perfectly.
As the group breaks up, someone at my elbow says, “Mr. Muller?”
A chunky guy in a T-shirt, with a beauty mark tragically reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe’s. Of course, he has an idea that he wants me to fund, something about “social marketing.”
“We’ve got to run,” I tell him. “Send me an email about it.” I lean in and murmur my address confidentially, although he could find it in ten seconds if he typed my name into Google. And then I take Maya’s arm and head off toward the main entrance.
She has to get to her office. We hold hands as I walk her to the bus stop.
“He didn’t have a good idea, that guy?” she says.
“Who knows?” I say. “Ideas are worthless. If it’s a good idea, two thousand people are working on it right now. The only way to make money on it would be to figure out which of them’s the smartest.”
We make plans to go out tonight to eat and drink, and I put her on a bus and head back to the convention center. I’m not due at “Surviving the Crash” for an hour and a half, so I ride the escalator and find a bench on the unoccupied third floor. The walls are tinted glass, and the metal grid between the panes casts rhomboid shadows. There is something soothing and luxurious about all this expensive real estate sitting empty. As the hum of professional activity wafts up from the floors below, I feel saturated with contentment. I know everything I need to know right now. A janitor pushes a vacuum along the floor and I follow his path in the slant of the sunlit carpet fibers.
The second panel goes just as well as the first, or perhaps better. I make one remark that gets a full-on laugh from the audience, which makes me think I should have been a comedian—This is the best feeling in the world; you’re bringing joy to people, plus they worship you like a god. I wish Maya had been here to see it. If she could see only one of the two panels, which would be preferable: the earlier one, in which I vanquished an opponent in verbal combat, or this one, in which I made a successful joke? This thought exercise is interrupted by a question from the moderator about raising venture capital.
My line on “Surviving the Crash” is Just build the best thing you can and if it’s good enough someone will pay you money for it. That’s true as far as it goes, but it leaves out the one million accidents that are necessary ingredients in any success story. For instance, this incredible girl who seems to like me. We might never have met, or she could have had a
boyfriend or been a lesbian. But let’s not discount the role played by my own perspicacity and adroitness. I used my native wit to track her down and my carefully honed charm to beguile her. I triumphed over every obstacle, and if most of those obstacles were self-generated, that only underscores the difficulty of the triumph. And this last hurdle, this level boss, this mental loop that I was almost trapped in… No, I was trapped in it, and I jolted myself out and made it home. And now I just have to answer a few more questions from these aspiring entrepreneurs, all of whom want to be where I am, young and rich and basking in new love, and then I can go buy some new clothes and take Maya somewhere expensive, with fancy cocktails in specialized glasses. The panel ends, and there’s clapping, and I hustle out quickly, avoiding eye contact with the scrum of would-be founders.
It’s already dark when my cab pulls up outside Maya’s building. The streetlights are high and weak and the block has a ghostly feel. I tell the driver to wait, let myself in, and call up the stairs to warn her of my arrival. She steps out of her room applying a final coat of lip gloss, and when it’s done she looks at me with a smile that’s somehow both calculated and innocent—it recognizes and enjoys its own devastating effect.
Her final steps down the hall toward me might almost be choreographed: as she moves she slides on a heavy coat, grabs her purse from a hook, slips the lip gloss into it. I’m on the second stair from the top—our spot—and when she reaches me she leans in and kisses me just enough to let me know she means it without messing up her lips.
In the cab we talk about what we’re doing, the occasion.
“So this is Fancy Eric,” she says, giving me the once-over. “I like it.”
“These shoes are made from opossums,” I say.
“Sustainably harvested opossums, I’m assuming.”
“You could harvest these opossums for a thousand years, you’d end up with more opossums than you had at the beginning.”
“Mine are vegetarian,” she says. “They’re made from kale.”
My hand is on her thigh. “A special kind of high-tech kale.”
“A kind of kale that’s tanned and dyed to look like black leather.”
“How does it taste?”
“You have no idea.”
In front of the restaurant I climb out and extend a hand for Maya. Presumably somewhere there are people who can perform the man-helps-woman-out-of-cab bit with no ironic flourishes on either side, but we have never met those people.
We are half an hour early because we want to wait in the bar, where we sit in a booth whose back rises above our heads and makes us feel cocooned in velveteen. A gentleman in his forties, who knows as much about liquor as I do about Unix, hands us lists of specialty cocktails that cost sixteen dollars and contain at least five ingredients. Maya chooses something involving gin and muddled blueberries; I order the second-oldest whiskey, which is a more masculine approach to spending a lot of money on alcohol.
“So!” she says after we clink glasses. “You were such a rock star today! I had no idea you were good at stuff like that.”
“I’m not, really,” I say. “You know how sometimes when you’re feeling good you can do things you wouldn’t normally be able to do.” I am trying to say that she gives me special powers without quite saying it, although by the end of this whiskey I’ll probably just be saying it.
“With me it’s totally an either/or thing,” she says. “When I go on the radio, I can tell from the first minute how it’s going to go. Like with that school budget story—I knew it was going to be hard to sum up, and then I started talking and two minutes later I’m still trying to explain it. Two minutes is forever.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” I say. I don’t think I told her I was listening.
“The thing is—and thanks, you’re sweet—but the thing is, even if it was fine, it threw me off for the rest of the show. I couldn’t give simple answers to any of the questions. And then when we started getting calls—did you hear the whole thing? There was this one terrible guy, this racist guy…”
“I don’t think I heard that far,” I say. Of course I heard the whole thing.
“So this guy calls in, and he was like, The problem is they’re spending all this money on trying to equalize the test scores, because the blacks always score lower than the whites, and we’re going to spend all this money trying to make sure all the groups score the same. And usually I know how to handle these guys, but—”
“I totally heard this,” I say, because why the hell not? “You got a bit more heated, there was a little more fire in your voice, but you were still totally articulate and convincing. You said, You invest in the underserved areas because that’s where the need is greatest, but it’s also where the returns are highest. And the way you said it, it was like, Good morning, sir—I’m going to be totally courteous and professional while I carve you into pieces.”
She’s a bit taken aback—she wasn’t expecting a direct quotation from a radio appearance she made more than three weeks ago—but I think in a positive way. “Well, thanks,” she says. “That’s kind of what happened to you with that privacy guy.”
“I guess so,” I say. “I mean, he’s not actually harmful like a racist, he’s just irritating.”
“Yeah, but you got some mileage from that irritation,” she says. “And you were the underdog. If some racist nutjob wants to pick a fight with me, literally everybody listening to public radio in the Bay Area is on my side. You were there representing big scary corporations.”
“I know—it’s weird,” I say. “I started this thing that was basically a supermarket loyalty-card program, and now somehow I’m the guy inside your computer watching you undress.”
“Well, you did great,” she says.
“Thanks. How’s the drink?”
“It’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted in my life. How’s yours?”
“It’s just like normal whiskey only without the part where it burns your throat.”
“I didn’t realize you were such a connoisseur!”
“That was actually a quote from my forthcoming review in Whiskey magazine.”
And then she does this amazing thing: she scoots around the booth to me and leans into my side, tipping her head onto my shoulder. We sit like that for a minute as the whiskey reaches my fingertips and everything is perfect.
“So we’re getting serious about this, huh?” she says.
“Yeah, we totally are,” I say. “I mean, I am. I’m serious.”
“OK then,” she says, sitting up and looking me square in the eye. “I’m serious too.”
At some point maybe this will feel like simple contentment rather than giddy euphoria, but that’s hard to imagine.
“It’s weird, right?” I say, as though we’re just two people having a conversation about some normal thing. “You meet someone, you fall for them, you do stuff together and it’s great and everything, and they’re still basically a stranger.” She’s nodding and grinning. She’s with me on this. “And at some point you have to decide, OK, I’m not just on the outside of this trying to figure it out, I’m on the inside now.”
“I was wondering when you were going to decide that.”
“Really? You saw me being on the outside?”
“Yeah. I mean, I’m not a mind reader, but it seemed like at first you wanted to put me under an X-ray machine, and then that got really intense and hard to deal with, and then it kind of peaked and you got it out of your system.”
“You know you are in fact kind of a mind reader, right?”
She laughs. “Nah, you’re just not that great at hiding what’s going on with you.” Unbelievable. “So what was it? Just normal fear-of-commitment stuff?”
“Yeah, basically,” I say. I get a weird metallic taste in my mouth at my impulse to dissemble at this of all moments. It’s a bad taste and I’m sick of it. “No, actually, not just that. It was to do with the stuff from your past, with your father, the abuse.”
She looks
sympathetic. “What were you feeling about that?” she asks.
“Well, I didn’t know if it was true or not,” I say. “I mean, really, that’s the thing about it, is that there’s no way to know. So I got all wrapped up in this idea that I had to figure it out, I had to find the truth. I went and talked to your dad about it, is how worked up I was about it!”
That was probably a mistake. “What the fuck,” she says.
“That’s what I’m saying!” I say helplessly. “I was so wrapped up in this stupid way of thinking, having to figure out the, you know, the facts instead of concentrating on what’s important, which is how you feel about it. And so I did this dumb thing and I…”
“You called my dad?”
“No, I, uh, I went to see him. In LA.”
She just sits there looking at me. A certain amount of astonished bafflement appears on her face alongside the anger. I don’t know how long it lasts, us sitting there with her visibly adjusting her feelings about me in light of this new information. Maybe a long time. Minutes.
“So what happened?” she says, working to minimize the emotion in her voice.
I’m not sure if the specifics make me come out looking better or worse. Probably a wash. Not that it matters. “I made an appointment to see his gallery, and I flew down there. I—”
“When was this?”
“Last week. Friday.” She nods. “I just asked him what happened, and he told me his version.”
“Which is what?”
“He talked for a long time. He really wanted to persuade me that you were wrong, that you’d been brainwashed or confused or something.”
“And what did you think when he said that?”
“I thought I didn’t know, and there was no way to know, and I was looking for some kind of certainty that didn’t exist and I should forget about it and concentrate on, you know, you and me, and being in love, and the stuff that’s important!”
The hostess is hovering just behind my right shoulder, which means our table is ready. Maya is ignoring her. Obviously we’re not about to head into the dining room, look over the menus, order the pork shoulder, which is only available for two people and which seems to stand for everything I have just lost.