The Big Disruption

by Jessica Powell

  Niels needed to plot his escape. From his shirt pocket, he pulled out the pen and pad of paper that he always carried with him. In a world of internet intangibles, Niels found reassurance in last-century items.

  His high-level plan of attack was fairly easy to map. First, Niels needed to get himself out of the basement, and second, he needed to stop Gregor’s moon colony plan. (Third, he needed to destroy Gregor, though that was a longer-term goal that would require a separate strategy and PowerPoint deck.)

  The question, of course, was how to go about these things. Niels considered the obvious — he could call another member of the management team. But as soon as Fischer, HR Paul, or Old Al showed up, Gregor would have some story ready and they would all have a good chuckle over Niels’ paranoia. Word would get out around Anahata, and even his own team would eventually find out about his panicked call for help. Exhilarated by the scent of weakness, the salesmen would circle him like the killer sharks he had trained them to be. It would be the end of him.

  Instead, Niels sketched a mountain. At the base, he wrote, “Me.” At the summit, he wrote “FREEDOM.” Then he paused, realizing that he had failed to capture the full complexity of the situation. So he drew a second mountain next to the first. Now he had a mountain range. At the base of that second mountain, Niels wrote, “Gregor announces Moon Colony Plan.” At the top, he wrote, “I DESTROY the Moon Colony Plan!!!”

  After a few minutes, and a few trees and shrubs added to his drawing for good measure, Niels had the entire route mapped, from base camp to summit. He was ready to go. He leaped out of his chair and did fifty jumping jacks, followed by one hundred situps, enjoying the rush of blood through his body. Niels would save Anahata from the worst decision it could ever make, and possibly even get Gregor fired in the process.

  The first step was simple. He would ring Bobby and suggest that he pick Niels up at Gregor’s house for a midnight yoga class. Bobby was a sucker for yoga invites and had stated on numerous occasions that he wished the management team would chant together. Niels, for his part, thought yoga was the lazy man’s excuse for exercise, but like golf and wine, he saw value in its acquisition. Yoga had not only helped him meet several lonely housewives, but had also distinguished him as the only member of Bobby’s team who could execute Chaturanga Dandasana — providing a reasonable excuse for him to seed business ideas over sun salutations.

  Niels pulled out his phone, selected Bobby’s number, and was soon hit by his mountain’s first boulder. There was no reception in Gregor’s basement.

  He was not used to being knocked down so early in the game, but like a true sales champion, Niels rose quickly. “Only losers lose,” he whispered to himself, quoting one of the motivational posters in his office. He did five pushups with one hand, then jumped to his feet.

  Niels tapped his phone’s email application and began to type:

  Bobby, have just heard of a killer nighttime yoga studio in Mill Valley. Fantastic kombucha bar. I can get us in. Can you meet tonight? I’m at Gregor’s — stuck in his basement actually, funny story. Come grab me and we can head straight to the studio.

  He paused. Would Bobby sense desperation? He needed to make his message appear as normal and Niels-like as possible.

  Also, Gregor told me all about Project Y. Fascinating idea. I have some ideas about how we can monetize.

  Niels smiled. He could feel his bed and a good night’s sleep within reach.

  He pushed “send” and immediately began composing a second email, this time to HR Paul. Gregor’s insanity needed to be recorded somewhere — even if in the short-term Niels had no intention of compromising Anahata’s public reputation and Niels’ own financial stake in the company — by outing its head engineer as a psychopath.

  Niels decided to attach a photo of himself in the basement. He raised his phone camera to get an angle that captured both the rows of wine bottles and the staircase leading up to a locked door. Then he hit “send” and took a swig of the Chateau Margaux — it would make for great bragging rights at next month’s HBS Successful Man Golf Tournament.

  Niels opened the email application again, and his face fell. His email to Bobby hadn’t gone through. In its place was a time-out message — the data connection just wasn’t strong enough. Niels tried to send again, and then again and again, from different parts of the basement. But each time he was met with the same result.

  The Master Negotiator was hit with a strong dose of reality — there was no phone connection, only a very weak data connection, and he was trapped in an Austrian psychopath’s basement.

  Niels scanned the room. Aside from the bottles of wine, it was absolutely empty. The staircase led to the locked door on the first floor, but otherwise there were no windows and no way out. He couldn’t go to work. He couldn’t make money.

  He couldn’t make money!

  “No!!!” he screamed, kicking over one of the chairs. He bounded up the stairs and began pounding on the door. “Let me out! You can’t do this!”

  Niels pounded for several minutes, but there was no answer from the other side.

  Niels crumbled on the top step and was at first shocked, then horrified, then just miserable to discover that the wet feeling on his face were tears, actual man tears. His body shook, and he began to feel cold. He wanted his mother, or the ex-girlfriend he had cheated on, or even just that hippie receptionist he had slept with.

  Or even God. Niels clasped his hands in prayer, unsure whether the gesture was necessary for the Almighty to hear him. Did God have to listen to him? Didn’t God love rich people?

  Just in case, Niels apologized extra hard for ignoring Him the previous four decades and promised that he would be good from now on. He wouldn’t sleep with receptionists, he’d mentor inner-city entrepreneurs, and he’d teach the homeless how to code. He’d get rid of moon colonies and pop-up internet ads, and he’d fix piracy on the web once and for all. Above all, he’d be a good citizen and son and follower of whatever religion God turned out to belong to.

  He looked down at the useless mobile phone in his hand. Tears had formed pathetic puddles across its surface, distorting his Flitter application, which now seemed to sprout wings from the “f” of its logo. Niels stared at it for a few seconds, watching the “f” heave under his tears, like a bird dreaming of flight.

  And then it hit him. Flitter — Galt’s popular thought-sharing tool — was famous for working in the lowest-bandwidth parts of the world. They were always bragging in the press about how someone had used their tool to escape an oppressive regime. It drove Bobby crazy — he thought Anahata should have a monopoly on freedom and hope.

  Niels didn’t care about any of that. In fact, he had zero interest in Galt or Flitter or in reading anyone’s thoughts other than his own. But a year earlier, he had tried to convince Galt to run Anahata’s ads on their apps and opened a Flitter account, Niels_1973, to show them he really cared about their product. But eventually the deal fell through, and other than a few half-hearted fleets about some Anahata sports matches, Niels’ account lay dormant for months. He had practically forgotten he even had it installed on his phone.

  The likelihood Flitter would work in the cellar was low, but Niels had nothing to lose. He fired up Niels_1973 and, hands shaking, expressed his panic in fewer than one hundred thirty-five characters (the limit set on any Flitter message):

  Help me! Trapped in basement at 13 Willow St, Atherton.

  Niels hit “send,” and in a split second, the post was successfully transmitted. Niels jumped up from the step, pumping his fist in the air. “Yes!” he cheered. He sat back and waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  Twenty minutes passed, and there was no response — no “we’re coming,” or “hold tight, buddy!” For a moment, Niels wondered whether his message had indeed been delivered — or fleeted, as the Flitterati would say. But he could see there were millions of other live fleets coming
in from the rest of the world — fleets about politicians, fleets about celebrities, fleets from companies hawking their products, and fleets from celebrities hawking those same products. Clearly someone was getting through to someone.

  The problem, Niels quickly realized, was that no one was listening to him. He had only two people following his fleets: agefshgr_74 and tina_xxx. Niels didn’t even know who they were or how they had found him in the first place.

  “Failure is not an option,” Niels whispered to himself, repeating the Smeardon family motto. He took a gulp of Chateau Margaux and reminded himself that the important thing was that Flitter worked. The next step was simply to make it work better for him. He needed something more eye-catching — something that would get people so excited that they would want to refleet his message to all of their friends and followers.

  He quickly settled on Tech Geek, the Valley’s hottest tech gossip site. Including the @techgeek Flitter handle was his best bet to be seen by someone following their account. So Niels tried again, decades of Chateau Margaux life force moving him into a new world of confidence:

  @techgeek Love your hard-hitting tech analysis. Also: Help me! I’m a prisoner of #Anahata.

  Up in San Francisco, Tech Geek’s social media manager stared at the fleet from Niels_1973 and groaned. Of all the Galt apps, Flitter definitely had the most crazies. There was something about giving people just one hundred thirty-five characters to express themselves that made them even more desperate — fueled by the hope that a bite-sized thought would be small enough to penetrate the world’s scattered attention.

  It wasn’t just weirdos like Niels who drove him crazy. It was the number of people who didn’t properly understand Flittiquette. They exhibited a poor use of hashtags, a tendency to refleet every compliment or inane statement made by a follower, and an inability to craft something eye-popping in one hundred thirty-five characters.

  Social media was a twenty-first-century art, and a true amateur (“in the French sense,” he explained to anyone who would listen, “meaning a lover of social media”) had to spend time honing his craft. He often reflected that his title should have been Master Craftsman of Social Media. Or simply God.

  Because as far as he could tell, there was no job with more prestige. Sure, he told his friends, he could take a high-paying social media job at a big corporation, but that wasn’t his style. He didn’t want to be the guy fleeting “Not feeling fresh? Try the new #Summer_douche in fresh lavender.” He had done his college senior thesis on Che Guevara’s influence on scatological pop art. He could hardly sell out to the agro-chemico-industrial complex to be their social media plaything. He was part of an #online #revolution #disrupting #everything.

  That’s why he was at Tech Geek, by all accounts the heart of the universe — or, at least, his universe, and the universe of anyone who mattered to him. Tech Geek was where all things tech and Valley were beating, throbbing, iterating, de-duping, compiling, normalizing, and randomizing. As far as he saw it, if you did social media for the Valley, you were, in many ways, the Valley. In fact, he liked to think of himself as a modern-day William Randolph Hearst. The decisions he made — whether to refleet someone’s comment, post a piece of news or gossip about another company, or (shock!) ignore it altogether — these were the things that made and broke powerful men and their companies.

  So it annoyed him when fools like Niels_1973 would fleet things that were clearly false, just in the hope of grabbing his attention. It was irresponsible and a waste of his time. Niels_1973 was probably the same guy who had tried to send a “tip” to Tech Geek a few months earlier that Anahata had discovered Atlantis and was refurbishing it so that Bobby Bonilo could have an underwater pleasure kingdom. Or the guy who had fleeted that Anahata was suggesting its lowest-performing employees take performance-enhancing drugs. Granted, the latter proved to be true, but the source had missed a crucial detail. Anahata was randomizing who would get the drugs so they could analyze the effectiveness of the trial — a piece of research that would be helpful for the entire scientific community. #Detailsmatter

  Niels_1973: @techgeek Love your hard-hitting tech analysis. Also: Help me! I’m a prisoner of #Anahata.

  He reread the fleet and shook his head. He spent several minutes contemplating the various punishments he could mete out, finally deciding to block Niels_1973 from his list altogether. It was an extreme punishment, but he couldn’t condone such outrageous, attention-seeking behavior.

  Then, feeling like he had done yet another great service for the world, Tech Geek’s social media manager called it a night and made his way to bed.

  It took total isolation from the outside world for Niels to discover what millions of Galt fans around the world already knew: There was no longer any point in real conversation when you could just communicate in short phrases and poop emojis.

  As night gave way to morning, Niels found himself deeply focused on a handful of celebrities and their preferred hair products and was closely following the reports of a burgeoning relationship between two contestants on a popular reality TV show. His concern for smooth hair and the couple’s happiness grew stronger as he finished off the bottle of Chateau Margaux, then opened a 1787 bottle of Chateau Lafite.

  Niels’ innumerable fleets about captivity, despair, and Anahata had gone unanswered despite variations in text, creative spelling, and attempts at haiku. Despite hours of nonstop fleeting, there were still no refleets by his two followers, and still no acknowledgment from Tech Geek. Nor had he gained any new followers who could potentially spread the word on his behalf.

  Ever the mountaineer, Niels devised a new plan, with a new mountain range that showcased the complexity (but also the conquerability!) of his current situation. This was one of his favorite mountain-range models to use at work. It had switchbacks and a very large boulder. The point, he often told his team, was to not get distracted by the boulder and to stay focused on the switchbacks.

  Flitter users were switchbacks.

  No, they were boulders.

  Well, whatever they were, they weren’t the point. The point was, he had been foolish to think that people on Flitter would care about him, Niels Smeardon. What they cared about was the content he himself had been sucked into — the celebrities, the gossip, the lifestyle guru tips. The trick was to make these idiots care about him through his connection to the people they worshipped. They were like lichen growing on top of the boulder. Or maybe the sign at the bottom of the mountain marking the trail. Or…

  “I don’t need mountains,” Niels growled. “Mountains need ME.”

  He crumpled the paper and tossed it to the ground, then immediately started fleeting again.

  His first pass was a flop, despite referencing the biggest pop star on the planet — the sexy blonde singer named La Lala who was known for hitting high notes while writhing on the floor with pythons.

  #OMG LaLala making new video with #Liberace! A duet with a legend!

  The only reaction came from Tina_xxx, who removed herself from his list of two followers. No one else responded to his fleet.

  Niels sipped some wine and took a few minutes to study the most popular tweets about La Lala. Then he tried again.

  #LaLala sings at #Nashville high school, discourages #bullies. Wears pythons in school uniform. Such an #inspiration!

  Niels doubted La Lala had ever been to Nashville. But no matter, within minutes, he had been refleeted. There was even a string of responses, most of them from Lala fans in Nashville asking where she had sung. Niels responded:

  My friend said #EmersonHigh. She wore band aids instead of clothes!!

  Within a few seconds, he had two new people following his account. He stretched his fingers and typed his next set of messages.

  #LaLala wears no makeup to remind us that talent is more important than beauty.

  #LaLala pythons remind us that in every snake is a beating heart.

  #LaLala spotted at #LAX, straddli
ng a plane. Anyone have pictures?

  The popularity of Niels_1973 began to climb. The more inane his posts, the more misspellings and melodrama (driven more by inebriation than calculation), the more followers he gained. Niels felt his blood begin to pump again. He gave one of his help me! posts a go, just to see if someone would respond. But despite having amassed four thousand followers in thirty minutes, all hanging on every word he had to say about La Lala, there didn’t seem to be anyone interested in helping the man behind the fleets.

  Niels scratched his head, then returned to his notepad. He drew a SWOT analysis listing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of his pop star. When he hit the “weaknesses” box, he realized his error: La Lala skewed toward a much younger audience. Was it really plausible that a pimply fourteen-year-old fan would come to his rescue?

  Niels groaned. His demographic targeting had been all wrong. La Lala fans were too young. He needed serious people. People who had driver’s licenses. People who thought a bit more about the consequences of social media. People like…thirty-year-olds.

  Niels flipped back to the Flitter homepage to study the most popular age-appropriate topics. What were people fleeting about on a random Monday morning? Scrolling through the list, Niels saw that most of the topics were things he knew nothing about. In addition to the perennial pop music favorites, the list included things like #bitchslap, #whatimknitting, and #blessedmoments. Niels kept scanning, moving farther and farther down the list. And then he saw it: #Poodlekek.

  “Yes!”

  Niels knew all about Poodlekek. It was his friend’s heavy metal band in college. He was surprised they were still together after two decades, let alone had become so popular. He remembered going to their shows at the campus coffee house, cigarette lighter waving in the air as he and his then-girlfriend sang to guitar-heavy ballads about twisted love, rocky family relationships, and starving children in Ethiopia. Their fans would likely be Niels’ age, the kind of people who would take seriously his cries for help. And Niels had plenty of interesting things he could fleet about them to get people’s attention — like the lead singer’s bad case of the Herp. Women would totally refleet that.