The Shadow Scholar

by Dave Tomar

My grandmother has absolutely no understanding of how the Internet works, what it is, or what makes it possible. I have attempted tirelessly to explain it even though I suspect that the Internet is probably a dangerous place for somebody like my grandmother. It’s not that she’d start giving her bank account and routing numbers to every Nigerian prince or friend allegedly stranded at a PO box in Scotland. Quite to the contrary. If she received an e-mail like that, she’d call the police, move the couch in front of her door, cancel all her credit cards, and throw her computer off her balcony. The Internet is a big place, and I’m not sure she’d be comfortable there.

  “So, how’s work? Are you still with the cleaning supply people?” she asked.

  “Actually, I graduated from there.”

  “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I’m so proud of youuuuuuuu.” High-pitched wailing and sobbing.

  “Yeah, and I’ve got corporate headhunters all over me, so really, anything could happen now.”

  “I love you so much!”

  “I love you too, Grandma.”

  “And how’s your book-writing going?”

  “Well, I’m not really working on a book right now.”

  “What are you working on?”

  “Well, I’m helping students with their homework. Remember? I told you about this.”

  “So you’re tutoring the students?”

  “No. Grandma. I’m helping them cheat. I write papers for them, and they pay me.”

  “Ohhhh,” she said somewhat gravely. “Does that pay well?”

  “It pays me well enough. Actually, it pays me better than the cleaning supply company.”

  “Oh,” she said, giggling a little bit. “So how does that work? Do you go to the students, or do they come to you?”

  “No. Grandma, it’s all over the Internet.” I pointed to the computer and showed her the website while I explained. “They send their assignments through the company that I work for. I write them and send them back.”

  “But how do you find the students?”

  “Well, they find me. I should say, they find the company that I work for, they use their credit card to pay for a paper, then the company puts the paper online, where I can look at it and decide whether to write it.”

  “But how do you write their papers? You don’t do the research, do you? Where do you find everything?”

  “Grandma, you have to understand, it’s very easy to find stuff on the Internet. You just type in the thing you’re looking for, a page comes up showing you all the different websites where that thing might be, and you just click on them.”

  “OK.” She didn’t understand.

  “OK. It’s like, imagine if you were in a library, and you wanted to find every page in every book that mentions Tony Bennett.”

  She lit up at the thought of Tony Bennett. These were the first two words she’d understood in about twenty minutes.

  “So imagine that you can walk into this library and type in the words ‘Tony Bennett’ and that all the books that mention him fly off the shelves and land in front of you with bookmarks for all the pages on which you can find his name.”

  “Your grandfather and I met Tony Bennett when he was performing in Atlantic City. He’s very tall in person.”

  Talking to my grandmother about the Internet was like going back in time and trying to explain to an Andrews Sisters fan club why people like Lady Gaga.

  I knew she didn’t really understand what I meant by anything. I had tried so many times to explain it to her. I had even showed her on numerous occasions, scrolling through websites about Eddie Cantor and demonstrating how easily I could look up all of Jeanette MacDonald’s movies just like that. But she couldn’t possibly comprehend the way that facts are so accessible, the way that we communicate with one another, the speed at which information careens, replicates, disseminates, distorts, and disappears into the virtual ether, never to be googled again.

  This is a cultural game-changer that makes no sense whatsoever to my grandmother. How could it? When she was in school, if she wanted to know who had invented the cotton gin, she’d just ask around until she met somebody who’d known Eli Whitney. If my parents wanted to know, they’d go to a library and do, well, god knows what. I went to libraries when I was a kid, and all I did was read Mad magazine and leaf through issues of National Geographic looking for native boobies.

  Ethan and I tried to go to the library once, just once, in order to conduct research. I was looking for a book by Hunter S. Thompson. It was readily available on the Internet, and the assignment was easy enough. But it seemed like as good a reason as any to get out on a sunny day. And really, you have to get out of the house once in a while, or a job like this could turn you into a freak.

  The Central Library occupies multiple city blocks, rises several stories, and descends some number of moldy levels underground. It is a hulking behemoth, impressive in its own way but also a monument to something from a long time ago.

  After entering, ascending the wide marble steps, regrouping to catch our breath, emerging in the wrong section of the correct floor, receiving directions from an unsmiling lady librarian, and finally arriving at our destination, we found that the book was not in its proper spot. I logged in to the library intranet at a computer terminal and learned that the book was not checked out. I inquired with the old cardigan-wearing gentleman at the desk, who said that the book was “in the stacks.”

  “I can send somebody down there. But you’ll need to have a seat.”

  He called for an old lady who walked with an excruciating, disjointed, and slow gait that suggested one, maybe even two prosthetics. He sent the poor thing down to the stacks. Ethan and I sat down and agreed that book or no book, it was simply a victory if she didn’t die down there.

  Thirty minutes passed, and to our relief, she returned. She had had no success locating Mr. Thompson’s text, though. I’d have to go elsewhere for my gonzo. I went home, my sunny day now more than half over, with nothing but a soft pretzel from a stand downtown to show for it. I googled the book and wrote the paper in an hour.

  I haven’t a fuck’s clue how to do research if my Internet is down and my phone battery is dead.

  My grandmother can’t make sense of the Internet. Me, I can’t make sense of the world without it. If it weren’t for the Internet, I would have no idea how to make a living as a writer. I paid all that money for that Writer’s Market book. I sent out a billion self-addressed stamped envelopes so that magazine editors could throw my manuscripts in the trash and reuse my postage stamps … probably. I submitted samples to the too-cool-for-you hipster papers that circulated the city for free. I got by on encouraging rejection letters and constructive critiques.

  Nearly every cent I’ve ever earned as a writer was made online and not just without the help of gatekeepers but in spite of them. I suppose I can credit my college for training me thusly. Books were so goddamned expensive there that I just learned to get by on whatever I could find on the Internet. Everything is googleable.

  A great wealth of knowledge is available for free to those who know how to massage a keyboard. For a master masseur and an indigent scumbag, it was a no-brainer. I could never afford books, not any good ones, anyway. I always had a copy of Shatner’s TekWar lying around.

  Ironically, though, thanks to my job I was now getting awesome books, and some terrible ones, for free. Many of my clients would not only buy syllabus-required books that they had no intention of reading, but also bundle them up and FedEx them to me so I could do their coursework. Thousands of dollars’ worth of brand-new texts, many of them gorgeous hardback editions. I did a whole course on American constitutional history once for a client. This kid sent me The Federalist Papers, The Anti-Federalist Papers, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Abraham Lincoln’s Great Speeches, Selected Writings by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Other Writings, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government.

  All of the
m were shrink-wrapped editions with glossy covers that make my shelves look positively stunning.

  Naturally, I could find any one of those texts on the Internet for free, and I generally have. Frankly, cutting, pasting, and properly citing reference materials from websites takes a lot less time than retyping them from physical texts. Still, it’s fun to get shiny new books and put them in my personal library. It makes me look well-rounded. Most of my clients never ask for their texts back.

  It’s just as well. The best of them I usually read in the bathroom, anyway. They are flagged.

  Frankly, if it weren’t for the tactile pleasures of holding a text while on the toilet, I would only read on the Internet. Such is the crime of my generation. We are killing the book. The book shouldn’t take it personally, though. We are also killing the record, the newspaper, and the magazine. Someday soon, we’ll have nothing with which to swat flies.

  I can see the bind that professors are in, though. Many of them make a good side piece hustling their own books in class. I had a class called Politics and Culture in my junior year of college. The summer before the class, the professor published a pet project about the spy novels of John le Carré. When we showed up in class, the required readings were five le Carré spy novels and the professor’s book analyzing them. There was a mutiny. Half the class dropped immediately. But it was so hard to get into a requisite-fulfilling class that the other half of us simply remained behind and harangued the professor deep into the semester about how any of this crap related to politics or culture.

  Don’t tell me that selling books isn’t a priority for educators.

  Professors and schools are gatekeepers of intellectual property, arbiters of that which is valid and that which is not. But capitalism cares nothing for their prejudices. Capitalism helps those who help themselves. Enter the paper mill.

  There are a few things that people will not want to hear about the company for which I began working all the way back in college. Here they are:

  • This is one of the best and most ethical companies that I have ever worked for. I won’t tell you its name. It wouldn’t matter anyway. It’s just one of many, at least hundreds and possibly thousands.

  • The company never bounced a check to me, and it never paid me late. I always got paid exactly what I’d earned. It was never a question. If I was on the right side of a dispute with a customer, the company went to bat on my behalf. If I needed an advance, the company would approve it. If there was a change in company policy, it would be reported on the writers’ board in due time for writers to prepare.

  • The company revamped its website format every few years, always working to improve the flow of traffic and ease of use. It remained abreast of advancing Web-design and e-commerce technologies, created a highly streamlined work flow that required very little oversight, and still engaged in regular testing and maintenance of the system.

  • When customer service or employment issues came up, I rarely waited more than an hour for a response from one of the two customer service representatives to whom I was assigned. They were always friendly, polite, professional, fair, available, and appreciative.

  Having been the recipient of bounced paychecks, having been verbally condescended to, having been falsely promised opportunities for advancement in past jobs, I saw the paper-writing company as one of the first trustworthy entities I’d yet met in the crooked world.

  And not just with me. It was judicious and fair with its customers, too. The common impression that many of the paper-writing companies online are scams demonstrates a critical misunderstanding of how the paper-mill economy works. Some may indeed be scams, but many are simply service companies. Repeat business, good word of mouth, and consistent results are very important to success in a service industry. Therefore, it behooved my employers to run a fair, equitable, and trustworthy practice. A paper-writing company has natural enemies, and no need for conflict from other sources.

  I followed this example to the best of my abilities. I used a personal honor system when dealing with customers. Revisions are a common part of the job. Writing papers is not an exact science, of course. After I’ve sent out a paper, there’s no way to know if I’ll ever hear another word on the subject. I might complete an epic masterpiece and receive a five-page diatribe detailing with bullet points and headings exactly what I did wrong. I might puke a bunch of barely related words onto a page and receive an e-mail praising my work and promising the customer’s vote if I ever run for president. Beauty is in the eye of the somewhat literate beholder. No way to know.

  But when revision requests came in, I would try really hard to be fair about it. If the completed essay really hadn’t adhered to the customer’s initial instructions, I would provide the requested rewrite. And the company would expect me to do so. But it was objective about this, and so was I.

  I’ve gotten lord knows how many assignments phrased like this: “In three pages, tell your life story, complete with the most embarrassing thing you ever did in a public bathroom and how it felt the first time you had an inguinal hernia examination.” The student might supplement this with additional information such as the following: “Please make this essay awesome. Thnx.”

  The customer presumes that whatever deeply personal anecdote or complex set of emotions I select from the annals of his or her memory will do just fine. Some paper-writing companies will inflate the accomplishments of their independent contractors, claiming to employ staffs of Ph.D.s and retired professors. But telepathy is another skill entirely, and as far as I know, my employer never claimed I had it. Why so many customers had the impression that I could explain their internal strengths, describe their greatest fears, and rifle through their personal memories without much more than a credit card receipt, I’ll never know.

  I tended to use assignments like this as an opportunity to flex my sometimes neglected creative-writing muscles. Prompted to describe a life-changing experience and how it related to my eventual career aspirations—a standard multipurpose academic essay that I’ve written at least thirty times—I might tell the story, from the perspective of the customer, of course, of the morning I woke up to find that I’d been bitten by a radioactive praying mantis and would thenceforth travel the world using my special powers to fight crime in a fluorescent green spandex bodysuit.

  In the event that I got any complaints from Praying Mantis Man, my employers would probably review the initial instructions and agree that I’d been left with little choice but to improvise. Who’s to say what’s true and what’s not?

  On the other hand, if I wrote this same essay in response to the question “What are the three primary causes of climate change over the continent of Antarctica?” my employers would most assuredly request that I edit the assignment with closer attention to the initial instructions. And because they were so judicious and fair, I would always defer to their mediation in such matters.

  My company had a disclaimer that appeared at the top of every completed order. The basic gist of it was that the customer bore sole legal responsibility for any undue usages of the material in question; the material could be used in the individual’s own work only if proper citations were made; and it was expressly illegal to reuse, resell, or otherwise claim the work in question without proper crediting. The company would even provide the customer with a bibliography to be used in the event of citing the completed “study guide,” “research supplement,” or whatever the hell other euphemism you wanted to give it.

  This was the basic legal measure taken to protect the legitimacy of the paper-writing company. Not every company takes this step, but the better ones that are likely to be around for a little while all offer a similar disclaimer. The disclaimer was, of course, not really designed to prevent the student from turning in the assignment. It was to prevent him from blaming us for whatever consequences came of this action. The disclaimer was sufficient to preemptively inform the student that we would take no responsibility for grades received for submission; that
we held no accountability for punitive measures, such as probation, censure, or expulsion, resulting from the assignment; and that in such instances, if we really wanted to, we could actually sue the student for improper usage of our intellectual property.

  Not that we ever would. Suing your own customers is poor business practice. Just ask the music industry.

  Also, not unlike in the music industry, one offshoot of this arrangement was that the customer didn’t have a whole lot of recourse for buying a crappy product. If you buy a Michael Bolton record and then walk around complaining to everybody about how bad it is, you’re really just incriminating yourself.

  Like many companies, some paper mills simply sell a shitty product. It is incumbent upon the buyer to make informed decisions, as one would when choosing a car or a laptop or a doctor. Referrals are a pretty big part of the business for the company of quality.

  The company I worked for was successful and strategic and perfectly poised to enjoy the realities of intellectual property law and globalization and that magical series of tubes2 known as the Internet. And thus, I and my fortunes as a writer were bound to these tubes, which suspended the limitations of time and space, which sent my writing over lakes, rivers, and oceans, which erased the once impenetrable imaginary borders between countries but did little to erase the language barriers, which in fact created one vast virtual Babel where you could also find great deals on flights.

  The Web was a place so unlike school in its versatility, its accessibility, and its mystery. My classes had been rigid and often dedicated to the assertion of one perspective. But here, where no gatekeepers existed, I was free to use and create intellectual property in a way that school had never ventured to teach me.

  That’s because the fundamental role of the professor has changed very little since the time when my parents went to school, or even since the time when my grandmother went to school. Our relationship to information is in a state of constant evolution, and our relationship to our professors remains stuck in a hundred-year holding pattern. Even through the occasional scrutiny and reform of pedagogy, the professor remains the single great channel for knowledge, the funnel through which years of singular education are condensed into ideas conveniently framed by a textbook and a semester of lectures.