Kraft
Page 9
The two men sigh at the immensity of the task and shake their heads atop their broad necks. In any case, the one with the extravagant number of teeth rushes to say, as if he couldn’t bear to linger on even the thought of failure, he’s raised his productivity over the last two months. He points to a kind of oversize sippy cup filled with an unappetizing viscous grayish-brown liquid. Nine thousand two hundred sixty-one minutes, he says after checking his phone, that’s how much time he’s saved thanks to Soylent. At this news, Curly Hair puts the slice of pizza, from which he had been about to take a bite, back on his plate and whistles through his teeth; 9,261 minutes, that’s 154.35 hours or 6.43 days, impressive, very impressive. What Kraft finds most impressive is how quickly the young man did the calculations. Math-cretin, he thinks, idiot, autist. Square Jaw grabs his giant sippy cup, takes a swig, and with his cheeks full, he lets the liquid trickle down his throat for a moment before gulping loudly. Kraft stares at his remarkably prominent Adam’s apple as it bounces and thinks of cats and mice with a faint sense of superiority, convinced the two number crunchers wouldn’t grasp the subtle literary allusion.
The thought of 6.43 days in a bottle, that piques his curiosity after all. What had they called the brew: Soylent? The word sparks a faint memory. He googles discreetly while he listens to Curly Hair justify the slice of pizza on his plate. It’s primarily the taste of melted cheese he can’t do without, maybe because of his Italian ancestry, eating was always central to family life at home, and he can certainly imagine that if he were of Irish ancestry like his interlocutor, he’d have an easier time switching to Soylent. This is a claim his friend rejects and asserts that he, too, hasn’t completely given up recreational food, he eats out once a week, usually on social occasions. Recreational food? Kraft can’t believe his ears.
Here it is, he found it. Soylent is apparently a brand of liquid meal replacement products, not one of those horrible diet drinks Ruth consumed for a while after she had weaned her second child and mistakenly tried to pin her unhappiness on her figure, no, Soylent is seen as a long-term replacement for normal food and an intelligent alternative to the usual “rotting ingredients,” as the inventor of the grayish-brown goo calls traditional food. Food wastes more than just our time, Kraft reads on the screen of his phone. Eating is a widely overrated, extremely labor-intensive, and uneconomical activity; grocery shopping is a nuisance; and the preparation of traditional meals is a waste of time and an inefficient use of resources. That is why, the inventor of Soylent explains, he decided to devote his life to reproducing food empirically. Kraft shivers. This, then, is the future. No, even worse, it’s the present: you take a human activity—in this case, eating—isolate it from all cultural significance, all historical connections, all emotional ballast until nothing but the bare essentials are left. The brew in the sippy cup is the quantifiable remains of a rich and influential cultural activity developed over thousands of years dissolved into a series of measured values: so many grams of protein, so many grams of fat, 0.03 grams of this vitamin, one iota of that trace element, etc., etc. But what worries Kraft most is the realization that behind this process of quantification lies a longing for optimization through rationalization: nothing other than maximizing the product by minimizing the cost, in this case by saving time. And this, Kraft knows well, is nothing other than the fundamental calculation of capitalism. Why, then, does the sippy cup inspire such dread in Kraft? Shouldn’t it serve as proof of the robustness of his own convictions?
He catches himself recoiling yet again as he does each time he stumbles upon a concrete, practical example of something that is undeniably a real-life consequence of the theories he’s spent his life thinking through and defending. This has been happening more often of late. On top of it all, he has to admit that although the guy on the other side of the table has been subsisting solely on this slop for two months, he looks outrageously healthy, sitting there with his splayed legs and his powerful jaw, farting unselfconsciously in the California heat as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
It suddenly occurs to Kraft where he’s heard the name before. Soylent Green, that was the title of a dystopian science-fiction movie from the ’70s; an overpopulated world, food shortages, the government feeds the people with protein wafers and in the midst of it all Charlton Heston is tracking down a dark secret. Kraft can remember the final scene in which a dying Heston is being carried off on a stretcher and with his last ounce of strength he shouts, “Soylent green is made out of people!” Is this brand name the expression of a strange sense of humor, or, as Kraft supposes, does the inventor think the idea of making foodstuff out of dead people is less outlandish than simply economical? This is a possibility that should at least be considered, since death itself could be subject to a process of quantification by isolating it from all cultural, historical, and emotional connotations and exposing its measurable, corporeal core. What remains is the calorific value of the human body. Kraft recalls a study with the wonderful title “The Limited Nutritional Value of Cannibalism” he had come upon in an old issue of American Anthropologist. The authors came to the conclusion that a skillfully butchered fifty-kilo man delivers the minimum daily ration of protein for sixty men of roughly the same weight. “One man, in other words, serves 60, skimpily.”
“Excuse me?” the two young men ask in unison, and turn to Kraft with inquisitive expressions. Kraft realizes he must have said the last sentence aloud and as the blood rushes to his head, he apologizes, he was just thinking out loud, there was a banquet, a birthday dinner for a colleague he had to organize, and he was just wondering how many waiters he would need to hire. The two men turn to face him and Kraft gathers from their demeanor that, amazingly enough, they seem genuinely interested in his problem and are ready to talk it over with him. “Sit-down dinner or flying buffet?” the melted-cheese lover wants to know. “Never mind,” Kraft says, afraid the other one is about to suggest serving the dinner guests giant sippy cups of Soylent and he’s in no mood to get caught up in a discussion that would no doubt require using the concept of “recreational food,” which he feared would molder in his mouth like fungus and leave a stale aftertaste in revenge, a risk that was not worth taking, especially since he had just then invented the topic in a panic.
But he knows he won’t escape that easily and so takes an offensive tack and asks if they’re students at the Stanford business school. To Kraft’s relief, they’re happy to reply. They are graduates but are working on their start-ups in an incubator associated with the university, an unbelievably inspiring place where Stanford’s best minds and most audacious entrepreneurs meet and are provided contact with the most important investors and the best mentors in the world. You can find a lot of “disruptive energy” there, an expression Kraft finds as irritating as his own irritation at feeling irritated, because he wasn’t born yesterday and so is of course aware of the current enthusiasm for the idea of disruption, having read about it in countless articles and studies and subjected it to theoretical analysis in heated seminar discussions. He had even smoothed its sharp edges to integrate it seamlessly into his own thinking, but now, hearing it spoken of with such sincere enthusiasm and unqualified approval, he finds it threatening.
The young man with the curly hair starts talking passionately about his start-up, which he’s just successfully steered through a first round of financing, with its app, called Famethrower, already well into beta. Basically, he explains, it’s a range accelerator for live video-stream services like Periscope, Meerkat, or Facebook Live. Kraft unfortunately has to admit that he doesn’t know those apps and doesn’t really have any idea what a live video stream is. They’re only too happy to explain it all to him and as an example the broad-jawed one shows him an app on his iPhone featuring a world map covered with red and blue dots. Now Kraft has to tell them where he’s from and the young man zooms in to southern Germany and right away, without needing the search function, he finds Tübingen, calling it “Hölderlin’s town,”
and his colleague adds that the poet lived and studied there with Hegel and Schelling. And don’t forget, the first one interjects, Friedrich Miescher discovered nucleic acid in pus cells there in 1869. Kraft, feeling rather intimidated at this point, feigns a lively interest. Not much going on in Tübingen these days, the broad-jawed one says regretfully, and taps on one of the three red dots on the Neckar River. After loading for a few seconds, an intimate scene appears on the screen. Two girls, thirteen or fourteen years old, Kraft guesses, are sitting on a bed. One of them brushes her friend’s thick, dark hair while she, in turn, seems to be holding up her phone and filming herself and her friend. The girls are talking casually and easily about a girl in their school in the slang of young Eastern European immigrants. The transmission quality is impressive; Kraft notices how chipped the red nail polish is on the hand pulling the brush again and again through the gleaming hair. Behind them, on the wall of this girl’s bedroom in Tübingen, is a poster of Nicki Minaj’s monumental rear end, a sight Kraft knows all too well, since every time he enters the twins’ room, he is subjected to the hypnotic power those gigantic buttocks exert on him, a pull that is almost as strong as Rumsfeld’s piercing gaze. Even his daughters had noticed he had trouble tearing his eyes away from their poster and took advantage of the opportunity to embarrass him.
Espalier pear tree, he’d murmured, and fled. Every time he sees the pink thong that disappears between the sumptuous mounds of flesh just below the coccyx, he can’t help but think of the espalier pear tree in his grandfather’s garden that climbed up the wall of the house on tautly strung wires. He had only visited his grandfather in Altes Land once, he and his mother, and while she was talking to her father, a man whose face Kraft could not recall, he was sent out to the shady garden, where he shivered in his thin jacket and stood in the only patch of sun, his face to the wall, enjoying the warmth on his back. Right in front of his face, nature had refused to be tamed by the steel wire; the pear tree’s gnarled wood had incorporated the wire into a thick knot divided in two. A single drop of resin gleamed in the sealed crack. The taut wire disappeared into this growth like the pink string between Nicki Minaj’s fleshy buttocks, into which the stretchy synthetic string—Kraft was certain it was elastic because in his imagination he had plucked at it to make sure—seemed to have permanently grown. On the way home, his mother was unfamiliarly cheerful, almost girlish and willing to be silly. In Hamburg, she bought him a warmer jacket and, in a Nordsee restaurant, they ate breaded cod fillets with tartar sauce.
Espalier pear, espalier pear. Kraft lets these words circle in his mind like a calming mantra to keep from punching the broad jaw as punishment for dragging him without a word of warning into this intimate scene, into this girl’s room ten thousand kilometers away, where neither he nor the two young men have any business being. Is that live? he asks, aghast. Absolutely, it’s happening right now, at this very second, on the other side of the world. Can they see us? Kraft wants to know. No, they can’t but we can send them a message and with baboonish speed he types Hi Girrrls, what’s up? Like your hiar! Hair!!!;)!!! on his screen. A fraction of a second later, Kraft hears a light pling in the girls’ room in Tübingen and sees one of the girls raise her eyes to the camera and echo the sentence that had just been typed in California. She purses her lips and blows a kiss. The melted-cheese lover reacts by frenetically typing on his phone and generating a roundelay of colorful little hearts that dance across the screen.
And that’s your invention? Kraft asks, dumbfounded. No, no, unfortunately not, the young man regrets, Periscope was developed by two colleagues who sold the app to Twitter for tens of millions of dollars. There are a handful of similar services, but his app, Famethrower, is a platform that brings all these services together and solves a huge problem they all share. You see, he says, our two Tübingen girls only have five people watching despite the gleaming hair. Isn’t that unfair? And yet, reach is everything, at least from the point of view of the one posting. For those watching, on the other hand, it’s essential to be able to filter out relevant data from ten thousand livestreams being broadcast on the internet around the world at any given time. His app meets both needs. A complex algorithm, the centerpiece of his start-up, calculates relevance by evaluating a multitude of parameters. Facial recognition software with access to all the large image databases, social networks, and short message services identifies in a fraction of a second who can be seen on any given livestream. If you were standing in front of Justin Bieber in line at a Starbucks and streamed yourself with Bieber in the background, your relevance value would rise suddenly because Bieber is one of the most prominent and active users of social networks and short message services, so Famethrower would recommend this stream to its users as especially worth watching. Not only that, this software can also identify 2,127 different human and animal activities as well as several million landmarks. So not only is it important who is doing something, but also what they’re doing and where. If, for example, Justin Bieber showed signs of being drunk, this software would evaluate the livestream as more important than if he were just waiting in line. Bieber throwing up, his friend adds, would be a real boost in terms of relevance. Kraft has a strong urge to argue with them about the concept of relevance, but he keeps it in check and continues listening to their enthusiastic explanations.
Brushing hair is about in the middle of the relevance scale, brushing another person’s hair is a bit higher and studies have shown that an astonishing number of men have a hair-brushing fetish. The software, Kraft is told in a whisper, can learn. AI, the other one adds as if this acronym bathed everything it was applied to with the nimbus of a bright future. The software searches the internet independently for the latest news, the most popular hashtags, and the most frequently used search terms, so it’s able to constantly reevaluate the relevance of people, activities, and places. On top of that, it learns from its users because they can pick Famestars by double-tapping on the screen, and this raises the livestream broadcast in the rankings, or, conversely, they can give “Wrinkles” to a stream they don’t like and when enough people have done this and the livestream looks old and crumpled, it falls in the rankings. The app is still in the development stage, but the beta version is already pretty satisfactory. Unfortunately, at this stage, it’s unable to distinguish between real people and two-dimensional images, so the Tübingen girls’ stream would be near the top of the rankings right now because the software would combine mutual hair-brushing by underage girls with face-sitting, thanks to Nicki Minaj. These, however, are just the usual childhood diseases the developers will be eradicating in the coming weeks. Maybe he’d like to be a beta tester? And before Kraft can decline the offer, he’s urged to photograph the QR code on the young man’s screen with his own phone. Kraft, who suddenly has a splitting headache, does what he’s told, obediently pushes accept, and watches as Famethrower is installed on his new iPhone along with a half-dozen live-streaming apps.
On the way home, surrounded by all these young people whose flawless bodies suddenly seem so gentle, so vulnerable, and infinitely worth protecting, he is ashamed of the bloodbath he had fantasized earlier. He wants to safeguard them all, to form a protective shell with his hands and carry them to safety like robin redbreast chicks—or purple finches, for all he cares—that have fallen from the nest. Why this sudden fit of tenderness? It certainly wouldn’t be unfair to assume that his concern wasn’t actually for the Stanford students on their bicycles, but instead for his daughters in Tübingen, whose vulnerability had just been demonstrated in both a general and a very concrete way. However, because he knows, or more exactly, refuses to admit that his worry for his daughters is nothing more than a cheap sentiment as long as he’s here fighting for the prize that will relieve him of his fatherly obligations—thanks, no less, to the vulgar power of money—he prefers to focus his concern on these teenagers he doesn’t know from Adam.
Whatever you do, don’t think of little-girl feet now!
B
ut, dear Kraft—as one would like to call to him—can’t you see, right here, the tip of an idea that could save you if you only tugged on it? Who could object if you recognized in your worry for your daughters the real reason you haven’t been able to rise to the challenge of the contest with your usual brilliance? You fundamentally don’t want to win this prize because you know it would be wrong. That’s how it is, isn’t it? Come on, Kraft, this is your straw: grab it!
But no, Kraft can’t trick himself so easily into grabbing this straw. Because he knows that’s simply not the way it is. Nothing is ever that simple, not ever! he hears as a distant cry. This was a lesson he had to learn early. For example, when his mother’s lighthearted cheer had completely vanished the day after their visit to his grandfather and she started an argument with him over some triviality, maybe because he had left his shoes in the small entryway. She berated the young Richard until he began to cry and then kept at him until he began to rage against the injustice being perpetrated upon him, and once he began to rage, she took his new jacket back to the department store in punishment. Yes, that’s when it first dawned on him that nothing is ever simple. Not ever! And every single line he read in the public library in his effort to understand why someone who did not need to kneel would kneel for his father confirmed this intuition.