The fact that the region has already implemented the Cure Violence model to some success suggests to me that it is receptive to this kind of treatment. And now that Slutkin has made the invisible processes visible to me, I now see that expanding the model to encompass the strange contagion is not so much of a hypothetical after all. I recognize the beginnings of that infrastructure already in place. It’s here in the way that Gunn High has called in mental health resources, the way Stanford psychologists have encouraged the media to curb their language, the way that the town has held routine symposiums on solutions, the way that the school district has proposed referendums on education practices. And who knows? Maybe that’s why we haven’t experienced another suicide in more than two years now. The infrastructure, fragile and uncertain, is holding. No, the only hypothetical here is that the interrupters are enough to keep the perfect storm at bay.
Part VI
The Interlopers
“And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect.”
―Leo Tolstoy
Chapter 20
The Impossible Reach
In the summer of 2012, our friends begin to move out of town. The first is a family who has two girls under the age of five. The husband is the principal of a charter elementary school, his wife a nurse at Stanford Health Care. He gets a job at a school in the Central Valley, and they move that fall with little warning.
The next to leave is a couple that has two little children. They buy a little bungalow about twenty miles south of Palo Alto. Another family emigrates to Israel. A family of four we know moves to Arizona. Neighbors three units away from our apartment move with their young kids across the bay to Berkeley. A teacher from the children’s center at Google loads her belongings into her flatbed truck and relocates someplace in the Midwest with her fiancé ahead of starting a family.
Each of our acquaintances leaves for different reasons, from job opportunities to the high cost of living that forces them out of town. Yet, down to a person, they admit they are not going to miss worrying about having to raise their children in Silicon Valley. It doesn’t seem to matter to any of them that two years have come and gone without another child stepping on the tracks. The memories of the cluster remain fresh. More than memories, though, the fear of another death looms unreasonably high for people in this traumatized town. Life is calm now, but we all know how quickly that calm can crumble into chaos. We all know how little it takes, too, like the tap of a ballpeen hammer against a reconstituted ceramic urn. We assume every inhale leads to an exhale, but the town hasn’t released the air in its lungs in thirty months, and at this point neither time nor distance has weakened its resolve. We’re waiting for a guarantee it won’t happen again, and we’ll keep waiting. The five dead have become stand-ins for so many of the troubles of this remarkable place. At the same time, we have come to see the troubles as responsible for taking these children. If I’m honest with myself I’m not yet certain how safe I believe we are, either. It’s something we’ll only know in hindsight, I suppose.
The truth is I still have so many questions, like what else was going on under the membrane of the strange contagion two years ago. There is more that we do not understand about what’s happened. If we don’t understand it fully, then we risk it happening again. This investigation doesn’t end until it reveals all of its secrets. The strange contagion is the sum of its parts, but it’s also bigger than that. If my search has taught me anything, it’s that individual social contagions matter in our day-to-day lives. As long as they exist, there also exists potential for another perfect storm forming over our heads. At least, this is what I find myself worrying about as friends leave and we continue to stay behind.
Our talk of absconding from town grows more serious as our group further disperses. My wife and I start to see safety in their decisions to distance themselves. During a recent conversation with Noreen Likins, the principal of Gunn High who retired shortly after the fifth suicide, I learned that she was commuting eighty miles a day from her home in Santa Cruz to work and back. “It was almost a sense of relief,” she told me, reflecting on living outside of Silicon Valley. “When you get to the summit on Highway 17 and you start coming down, it’s like you leave that behind you. The ability to do that, I think, kept me sane during that time. I could come home. I could try to put it aside.”
Yet, for each person we know who has left town, there are many others clamoring to get in, to take advantage of everything it has to offer, and to contribute to making it the community they want it to be. From its natural beauty to a culture rich in aspiring entrepreneurs and flush with money, there’s a reason the county is growing faster than any other in California.
The horror embodied in the deaths, typified by the quiet ambition of the maple-shaded streets named after Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Columbia, and Amherst, is really no more frightening than any place otherwise defined, or crushed by, a self-created character. In this case, it is a character so many have tried and failed to mimic.
I’ve visited Austin’s technology incubators and Boston’s Route 128 corridor; they’ve come close. China has invested billions in development spending to galvanize research and innovation with the aim of seeding its own version of Silicon Valley. Policy makers in Australia have done the same. Communities throughout the US are terraforming university towns into new centers of invention. But no one has succeeded in matching the output and advances that are coming out of this fifteen-hundred-square-mile body of land, this dimple in the West Coast, this navel of advancement.
Even if other places do not replicate the magic of Silicon Valley, notes the MIT Technology Review, they’ve taken note of its mind-set. The desire to achieve is as catching as anything so technologically flashy coming out of this place. Still, every attempt to replicate its level of output and achievement has failed to match the spirit of this charmed and overconfident El Dorado. They fumble their attempts to integrate innovation with business strategies. They falter at recreating a community-wide corporate culture that rests on a foundation of openness and idea sharing.
We watch people come and go, and we continue to weigh the elements that constitute the underbelly of Silicon Valley against the beauty and the promise, no better typified than by the event that transpires one fall morning in the skies above us.
I read online that NASA is retiring the space shuttle Endeavour. To wish it a bon voyage, the space agency is flying the ship to its final resting place in Los Angeles. Navigationally, its flight path takes it right above our town.
We roll a double stroller with our newborn daughter and now three-year-old son into a brown field across from Google headquarters. We work a bit to find a spot in the gathering throng and then spread our blanket on the ground. We straighten the corners, lay our backs down, and face the sky. Some around us point high-powered cameras to the north. Others are charting the path of the low-level flyover on their smartphones. After about an hour, a dark spec materializes out of the morning haze. As it nears, we can make out that the shuttle is catching a ride on the back of NASA’s modified 747 airplane.
I get to my feet, lift my son by the armpits, and seat him on my shoulders. His red tennis shoes swing at my chest. I touch the palms of my hands to his ankles. The craft soars over our heads, so low that we can clearly make out the details of the shuttle and the NASA insignia on the airplane’s fin. I feel my son’s weight shift. He reaches up to try to grab it.
I notice that a lot of people are reaching for the shuttle, too, as though this marvel of engineering has at once activated something embedded within each of us, an impulse to extend our hands and reach higher than our capacity to achieve. The people we are among pride themselves on refuting these boundaries, having become accustomed to believing that you, too, can learn to reach such heights. Here, you can orbit people, planets, celestial bodies, and even outshine them, leaving
everyone else in the dust.
Chapter 21
Considering the Piggyback Treatment
Autumn in New York brings with it a cooling off of spirit that moves in with the sweep of crispness in the air. The bank of flags across the front of the United Nations Headquarters casts a shadow across the sidewalk of First Avenue as I pass underneath it. Across the street, I move through a heavy glass door and past a United Nations Plaza security station. Neither X-ray machine nor metal detector is strong enough to spot the kind of social contagions I’m after. No amount of security guards, with all the firepower of a small army, possesses the means to stop them, either.
A few days ago I was still at home. The television was switched to the evening news. It featured a clip of the Endeavour’s flyover. The camera lens had managed to capture a perspective from a spectacular vantage point that showed the spacecraft in crisp detail, rendering in me a sense that perhaps we hadn’t been there at all, or had seen an entirely different event transpire with our own eyes. Watching it on television, that bottomless thrill bloomed in my chest all over again. Such is the power of media, at once capable of revealing and enhancing reality. Watching the space shuttle move across the screen, it occurred to me that if we can catch social contagions like eating disorders and somatic symptoms of hysteria, then we might also use the medium of television to introduce a specific kind of cure. We could allow a foolproof remedy to piggyback on the digitalized, high-definition images just as the Endeavour rode on the back of the 747.
To test this theory, today I find myself back in Manhattan, now standing face-to-face with an armed guard who’s examining my identification in his big hand with a thoroughness that’s a bit excessive. He asks me what exactly brings me here to UN Plaza. I consider telling him that I have reason to believe that the next piece of an impossible puzzle is located on the fifth floor of this building. Or I can tell him that I’ve come 4,000 miles to ask a man named Sean Southey about how to remedy a strange contagion he’s never heard of before.
Instead, I tell him I’m here visiting an organization called PCI Media Impact. The security guard turns my license under a pocket blue light, then looks at me and hands it back with no expression. After checking my name against a roster on the computer, he motions me through a metal detector and into an elevator. He pushes the button for my floor and slips back into the lobby as the doors slide shut. They don’t mess around here. I can understand that; I’m not here to mess around, either.
The organization I’m looking for is at the end of a short hallway. I step into a suite full of editing booths and producers toiling quietly at computers. A young guy with short hair and a dark beard closest to the entrance looks up at me, not nearly as skeptical as the lobby guard. Just hang back for a bit, he says. Someone will come to fetch me soon. I sit down on a hard plastic chair. The walls are electric orange. A large poster in a plastic frame reads reaching the next billion with life convincing stories.
To my immediate left, my eyes are drawn to, of all things, the vintage wooden case of a century-old Singer sewing machine. I recognize it only because, growing up, my family had an heirloom sewing machine just like it. Similar to the one in the waiting area of this Manhattan media enterprise, mine also served as a table stand. The organization’s executive director, Sean Southey, soon appears beside it. He’s dressed in a dark sport coat, slacks, and thin-framed glasses.
“Why the sewing machine?” I ask, standing up and shaking his hand over its case.
“You like it?”
“It’s beautiful,” I say, pressing the flat of my hand against the smooth container. The scuffed wood thirsts for finish. The machine inside is a dull sheen of black and overlaid with gold filigree. Most of its parts are still intact: the balance wheel, the spool pin, the tension disks, and the needle bar. Judging by the look of it, all faded and busted up, no one has worked the sewing machine in a long while. All it might take for the device to come alive again is a simple press of the foot against its cast-iron treadle, cranking its wide band wheel, threading the leather belt up its pulley system, and initiating a symphony of movements, all to pull a single thread into a length of fabric. Such an ordinary motion once seeded a fever that took over all of Latin America. And that, if the security guard must know, is exactly what brings me here.
The highest-rated soap opera in broadcast history is a Peruvian-produced telenovela called Simplemente María. It aired from 1969 to 1971 and told the story of a rural-urban migrant from the Andes Mountains who came to the big city to find work and fortune. The first dozen or so episodes related her struggles to endure in a poor immigrant neighborhood. To earn a living wage, she cleaned homes and at night attended adult literacy classes led by Maestro Esteban, who was secretly in love with his student. Maestro Esteban’s mother was the one to teach María to become a seamstress by running fabric across the needle of a Singer sewing machine—just like the prop that now sits in the lobby of PCI Media Impact. At the end of the four-hundred-episode run, María was no longer a poor maid but the president of an international fashion design empire in Paris.
Though pure entertainment, Simplemente María addressed the liberation of migrant women, the treatment of domestic servants, and the conflict between social classes. The series was an instant hit. It garnered higher audience ratings than the World Cup Soccer championship games during all the years it aired.
Interestingly, Singer sewing machine manufacturers during that time also reported a 9 percent increase in sales in all eighteen countries that broadcast the telenovela. This corresponded with household maids there taking up sewing in record numbers. As Southey recounts this story, I’m reminded of the studies of Anne E. Becker and the years she chronicled the people of Fiji catching a slender ideal based on a stable stream of nineties television shows.
Like Becker, far more significant in the eyes of a producer in Mexico named Miguel Sabido was the psychology behind this unexpected correlation. Viewers that strongly identified with the character of María adopted her desire to move up the social ladder, represented by her ability to turn sewing into a symbol of personal empowerment. Later studies were to show that the effect cascaded, reaching people who hadn’t even watched the series but who were also taking up sewing. Endeavoring to understand how random elements of the show’s larger narrative inadvertently inspired dramatic behavior changes in viewers, Sabido found himself in none other than Palo Alto, California.
Ten years earlier, the Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura instructed his lab assistants to blow air into inflatable vinyl toys. Fully expanded, each stood roughly the size of a grown adult and was shaped like an upside-down lightbulb. You could buy one of these creepy-looking self-righting punching bags at your local toy store for a few dollars. But Bandura’s lab was using them to change the way we understand behavior and how we catch it from one another. One by one, seventy-two children from the university’s nursery school entered a playroom filled with toys. Half of the children shared the room with an adult who, during playtime, took a toy mallet and hit the inflatable doll in the face. Later, when left on their own, the children exposed to aggression then punched, kicked, and struck the dolls with hostility, marking the first formal demonstration of social learning theory in action. Until then, psychologists contextualized the source of behavior as one welling from within, impelled by subconscious needs, drives, and impulses. Bandura’s ongoing work on social learning now suggested that people “automatically and unconsciously” acquire new patterns of behavior by observing the behavior of others, as well as by witnessing the rewards and consequences that follow. As Southey recounts this for me, I think about Gary Slutkin’s story again and his theory of contagious violence, along with the other scenarios in which observation turns to adaptation and a social contagion is born.
Later studies by Bandura went even further than violence and hostility. Through social learning, people also adopt complex competencies, such as languages, mores, customs, and political practices of a culture,
either deliberately or inadvertently, by example. And one of the most effective methods for transmitting attitudes, emotional responses, and new behaviors, he writes, is symbolic modeling through television, one of the most important vectors for quickly and efficiently conveying information, even more so than live demonstrations.
As a producer at Televisa, Miguel Sabido saw exponential opportunity in the prospect of marrying Bandura’s theoretical work at Stanford to a practical and purposeful demonstration of a new kind of media project. If a telenovela convinced people to take up sewing, perhaps television was a powerful way to promote and reinforce public health and educational issues as well. After all, with almost daily airings, Latin America’s soap operas provided massive messaging exposure.
Sabido tested his theory by producing a telenovela called Ven Conmigo. The soap’s ratings soared more than 30 percent higher than every other Televisa-produced series ever. What viewers didn’t know, however, was that by setting the soap opera in a classroom, Sabido designed the show to promote adult literacy to Mexico’s largely illiterate labor market. A follow-up study on the show’s impact revealed that, during the broadcast years of 1975 and 1976, nearly a million illiterate people enrolled in adult literacy classes in Mexico, nine times the enrollment from the previous year. Registration doubled the following year, even when the series was no longer on television.
Televisa broadcast nearly two hundred half-hour episodes of Sabido’s next series, Acompáñame, in 1977. Viewers were wholly unaware that producers designed the soap to address the issue of family planning. After the show aired, despite the fact that Sabido disguised the message in subtext, sales of contraceptives increased 23 percent. More than a million people tuned in per episode, and while not every viewer sought birth control based on the serial drama, peers of those who did were more likely to model this behavior, even if they’d never seriously thought about contraception before.
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