The Echo Chamber

by Rhett J Evans

  Darnell had to admit Arlo’s presence, the extremism he represented, was far from comforting. But working for the company that built Sharebox—quite possibly the most elite technology company in the world—would be a fantastic start to his post-Army life. It was something that might make him proud again.

  “Things move fast in this business,” Zimmer said. “We have a live one, a hacker who we believe to be American, that we’re pinning a location for right now. And he’s the worst one we’ve ever seen. That’s why you have to make a decision now. Don’t worry about things like salary or benefits. They will all exceed your expectations, I’m sure. Heck, you can name your price.” He reached his hand out towards Darnell.

  “Are you with me, Sergeant Holmes?”

  Darnell looked at Zimmer’s hand, and then he extended his own.

  “I’m with you.”

  Before

  Sharesquare Industries occupied a small campus of buildings in the Santa Clara Valley. The area had once been home to a series of apricot orchards, but then an ill-tempered and abusive physicist named William Shockley who spent the latter years of his life trying to prove that the struggles of minority communities were based on genetic deficiencies opened up a company in 1956 interested in building the world’s first silicon semiconductors. And that’s when everything in that sleepy place began to change in earnest. Within forty years, every serious tech enterprise had a presence there.

  The facilities at Sharebox were state of the art and lavishly adorned. The main lobby housed a forty-foot-long trampoline. Coffee baristas were stationed within every building. The halls were full of edgy art pieces and whiteboards for impromptu brainstorm sessions. And the people there loved working for their employer. Generally. They had a mission to provide the next generation of social networking, and they took to that duty with an imaginative, almost unquestioning zeal.

  Only the sales teams ever talked about how all the plated meals in the dining halls, free concerts, and corporate shuttles were all paid for by the ads they sold. For the product engineers building the next generation of features for the upcoming Sharebox launch, ads were a necessary evil. They didn’t like to think about them. They were too busy focusing on how to change the world.

  Mike walked into Catalina’s office one afternoon rubbing that spot behind his ear again. He was wearing a denim jacket that Catalina believed was supposed to be ironic.

  “Great demo today,” he said, referring to a presentation Catalina had made earlier in the day. She had demonstrated how Diana could stitch together virtual reality scenes using only one or two pictures or a short, user-uploaded video. Mike took a seat in front of her desk.

  Catalina nodded and leaned back in her chair. “Thanks,” she replied. “But I’m sure Devon is already plotting how he’ll take credit for it.”

  Mike laughed. “He’s not even around much these days. My team tells me crazy rumors that he has ties to the White House, and he has been flying to D.C. to do tech advising for them.”

  “Anything seems possible these days,” she said, and then she turned to her computer monitor and went back to typing.

  “I see sales for the Nutrino Mixer are still on the rise,” he offered.

  She sighed and turned away from her screen a second time. “Yes, though no one seems particularly excited about the artificial intelligence powering a smoothie blender. Diana is still getting a little smarter each day. She’s using a wider catalog of supplements and answering more complex health questions. Not too bad for a pet project.” Her voice was bitter.

  Mike nodded and went quiet for a moment. “I saw another commentary this morning that our app is slowly making the world a dumber place. That we’re just the builders of social media echo chambers, augmenting everyone’s preconceived worldviews and trapping them there. That’s our legacy. It was in the Times. It was really articulate.”

  “Maybe they’re right,” she said.

  “They just don’t get it. They don’t get what we’re trying to do.”

  Catalina leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “Then how would you explain what we’re trying to do?”

  “We’re connecting everyone in the world with technology, and we’re giving our users the best possible experience by building a platform customized for them. It’s not driven by humans. It’s not driven by biases. It’s driven by machine learning. It’s pure knowledge, and it’s insulated from human prejudice.”

  “So when our app serves up a video of an angry, fat white guy telling his followers that school shootings are a conspiracy to take away their Second Amendment rights, that’s ‘purity’ to you?”

  She was trying to stay detached from this conversation, but the hairs on her forearm were already prickling.

  Mike waved his hands in the air. “It’s not our place to decide what content to show. That’s how you get yourself into trouble. We let the free market of ideas decide that. We’re agnostic. We’re not arbiters of truth.”

  She groaned.

  “Come on, Mike, you’re smarter than that. We all started at this company with this dream of trying to stay neutral—trying to avoid the appearance of favoring one side or the other, even if it means we hand out soap boxes for ignorant egoists to expand their followings. It isn’t working. Neutrality isn’t working. We’re just legitimizing fake news by pretending that sensational, borderline-racist junk holds equal weight to real news and real facts so long as people will still click it.”

  Catalina typed a few strokes on her keyboard and then flipped her monitor around.

  “On the Sharesquare app, there are more users following a channel that churns out climate change denial videos than there are following NASA,” she said, pointing to the screen. “There are more ‘Likes’ on an article—which cites no evidence, by the way—about how women are biologically happier working in the home than this investigative piece about the plight of Yemeni children. Here’s another one: look at this profile of a former police officer who publicly advocated for better education programs for law enforcement. She said she wanted to reduce shootings of unarmed black men by using more sophisticated training scenarios, and she had to shut down her account because she and her family got too many death threats.”

  Catalina was seething now. She could hear it in her voice, but she had let herself get too riled up to care.

  “And this says nothing about the role we have in spreading false information during elections. Does this really seem like we’re building a better world to you?” she asked. “Read a goddamn newspaper about the better world we’re building.”

  There was a long pause. Mike stared at the floor.

  “How come you never bring these issues up with the CEO?”

  She gave a fake, cold laugh.

  “Please. He is the chief Kool-Aid officer. He doesn’t think these are problems measured against all the good our technology offers. He just wants to keep the board of directors happy, and all the board of directors care about is what the shareholders care about, and all the shareholders care about is that our profits all go up each quarter at a predictable rate.”

  She turned the monitor screen to face her again.

  “Besides,” she said. “I’m just a coward, too. I like my job. My family is proud of me. I have one of the most prestigious titles in the valley for a woman of color. Someone else can be a martyr. Maybe when we launch the virtual reality Sharebox in a couple weeks, the problem will get so bad that we’ll have to address it.”

  Catalina went back to typing. Mike just sat there for a moment, rubbing his temples.

  “Are we friends, Cat?”

  Cat’s eyebrow twitched. She turned from the computer screen again to look at Mike’s face. He looked suddenly tired. What a strange question. Was he feeling lonely? Were they friends? Did she really have any friends? This was not a conversation she wanted to have right now. She swallowed her discomfort.<
br />
  “We’ve been working here together for over five years,” she said with cool detachment. “I think that makes us more than work colleagues, certainly.”

  “I’m pretty sure my project is a bust,” he breathed out as if he had just confessed some great secret. “Unless you got some hidden Diana magic for me right now on how the world’s best artificial intelligence could be used to help me download human thoughts to a computer.”

  Catalina thought for a moment. “Soon. Maybe in a few years, or a decade conservatively. Diana’s ability to digest information and process it is kinda like an eight-month-old baby right now. To do what you’re describing, she’ll need to be the equivalent of a fully-fledged adult.”

  Mike looked miserable. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Then he scratched at his head again.

  “Hey Mike,” Catalina said, feeling a little awkward but too curious to restrain herself. “Is it true that you had a computer chip inserted into your br—”

  “I have to get going,” he said, rising from his seat. “Sorry I’ve kept you so long.”

  Mike smiled weakly at her and then shuffled out the door.

  After

  Orion stayed with his grounded yellow plane often. He was eager to hear all of Diana’s updates. After countless years waiting for a breakthrough, Diana was now delivering new revelations and victories almost every hour.

  I have now hacked through the commerce API’s security keys.

  I have now hacked the preliminary master administrator tools.

  I have now hacked the avatar creation tools.

  She was on a roll.

  Orion sat in the cockpit and sketched on a small notepad. He tried to draw his son often. Charlotte had seen the sketch of when he was four. But there were others. Orion wasn’t the best artist, but the drawings were all he had. They were the only way to keep the memory of his son’s face fresh in his mind. He dreaded the day when the memories faded entirely, though that seemed inevitable. Everyone else he had ever met in his life was safe—they weren’t going anywhere. Only his son would one day be fully lost.

  I have now hacked all building and structural creation tools.

  Orion sat up. “Diana, does that mean I can remove buildings?”

  “No,” Diana answered. “Those privileges are under more stringent encryptions I’m still working on. But you can create new structures wherever you please.”

  Orion hopped off the plane and removed a small, grey virtual reality headset and two gloves from within the plane’s hidden compartment. He plugged a cord that ran into the black device that served as Diana’s hardware and speaker.

  “I want to try it out,” he said.

  “Michael, that doesn’t seem like a very good idea.”

  “What’s the risk? We get infinite tries at this.”

  “Theoretically. Unless something goes wrong, and I haven’t tested how well the new features work,” she said. But she loaded the new administrative privileges for him, and Orion put on his headset and gloves.

  He tapped through the Sharebox start screen and logged in as a new avatar using an administrator panel interface that hadn’t been there before. Then his avatar found himself at the center of Homepad where users were shown conventional social media updates from friends and family. But Orion had wiped his account clean years ago—the only information Sharebox still had was his name—so the area was mostly blank. A few suggestions for new friends glided across a wall nearby. A video advertisement for a celebrity-centric News City played on a hovering console to his left. It paraded a series of unflattering images of mostly female actresses under blinking, alternating captions of, “Where are they now?” and “You’ll never believe what they look like today.” A closely cropped photo of Charlotte Boone, almost like a mugshot (which is almost certainly how they wanted it to look) flitted by.

  Trash ads run by trash people.

  He ignored them all and went to Homepad’s central transit hub, where he voiced his destination to an interface there that was designed to look like an airport departures board. The Patriot Palace.

  Then he arrived there instantly.

  After the accident, after the revelation of what Diana had been doing to its users with the Nutrino Mixer, Sharebox was never the same. It was “democratized” in a sense. The app was relaunched under a banner of openness—now anyone could create their own “City” beyond the outskirts of Homepad. The virtual world was finally “free.”

  But that wasn’t entirely true, of course.

  Sure, anyone could try to build a media platform on Sharebox. But building anything, even virtual buildings, sidewalks and billboards, costs computing power and money. There was enormous wealth to be found in charging pundits, news barons, the gaming and even the sex industries to host content in their own private locations. In the end, only the wealthiest could afford to build anything. So that one percent got to build things, and the other ninety-nine percent got to enjoy what was built and be subjected to the ads that served to make the owners richer.

  Orion looked at the garish high rises, an opulent and tacky water fountain, the gold-plated billboards, and the red, blue, and white flag that seemed to envelop the entirety of the sky around the Palace, and it all felt so…pathetic. That this place was the number one trafficked News City on Sharebox said a lot about its users, who had proved all too eager to embrace the ugly worlds of media barons so long as they reinforced existing worldviews and grievances.

  On the outskirts of town, there was nothing but an empty expanse in which the Patriot Palace would no doubt grow into at some point. Orion walked off the crowded path of avatars clamoring to enter the city gates and eventually found himself alone in an unremarkable field. He could still see the avatars’ shapes on the city streets where they immersed themselves in a memoriam video grieving the fallen president, or they walked through a virtual museum of “Second Amendment History,” or they mingled with people like them in lavish rooms frequented by beautiful, flirtatious women that were mostly bots (but it was hard to tell and the men rarely cared).

  Orion pulled up a floating administrator panel in front of him, the gift of Diana’s hacking efforts. He had never built anything in Sharebox before. It was too expensive. But with his new administrator rights, there were no limitations. So Orion swiped through a carousel of thumbnails under the category “Famous Landmarks” before selecting a full-sized replica of the Empire State Building. He dragged it onto the field and placed it fifty yards in front of him with an earth-shaking thud.

  The design was exquisite, missing no details, and it stretched so high into the sky that Orion nearly fell over when he looked at it. The base alone covered over two acres, and on its four sides, 6,500 immaculate windows had just been breathed into digital reality.

  Then he found a replica of the old Mets stadium he went to as a kid, and he placed it just another thirty yards away. It blinked into life like it had always been there, constructed in fractions of a second. Orion laughed in triumph, disbelieving.

  Next, he added a recreation of the Mayan temples of Tikal—they reminded him of Star Wars—then Dubai’s Burj, then the Eiffel Tower, then the London Eye. All those landmarks, pulled out of their context and placed in a giant, flat field, looked like some graveyard of human civilization’s greatest hits.

  He looked over at the Patriot Palace across the field, and yes, indeed, he could see his haphazard construction had gotten their attention. A crowd of avatars was standing at the outskirts of the city, and their heads had all turned to watch the parade of enormous landmarks appearing from thin air with both incredulity and a little fear. No one had ever seen someone buy such things so casually, let alone on the private property of the Palace owners. Replicas of real-life sites were the meticulous and painstaking products of digital artists and architects. It was a little like buying a stack of Picasso paintings and housing them in your basement. Buying a ba
seball stadium meant purchasing enough computing power to render each hot dog stand, each seat, each blade of grass. Affording such creations was a luxury of the fabulously wealthy. It didn’t occur to anyone at first that a user could hack Sharebox and buy whatever they want. Sharebox, as everyone knew, was unhackable.

  It all reminded Orion of computer games he played as a kid—simulation games where you got to build houses or farms or military buildings that housed little fake people that would scurry in and out of them.

  But this was colossal. Even in virtual reality, it was a strain to look upwards at the abominable collage of misplaced monuments he had scattered around the plain.

  Diana had really done it. This was the greatest breach of Sharebox security protocols ever, and they were only just beginning.

  “Damn good work, Diana,” Orion whistled.

  “Have you had your fun yet, Michael?” her voice rang disapprovingly into his headset.

  Some of the avatars from the Palace were beginning to walk closer to his field now, to his construction zone. He even heard the sounds of sirens—there were still private security forces at work in some of the News Cities. Their job was pretty boring since no one could really hurt anyone else in Sharebox; the stakes were low. But the virtual police forcibly logged out avatars who made scenes, whose arguments became too rowdy or obscene or whose flirtations with the lady bots in the lounges had become too explicit. All the guards had to do was tap under an avatar’s chin with their fingers. He could see the flying patrol craft approaching rapidly.

  Orion had one last idea. He reached up with his hands, his real hands, and his avatar mimicked the gesture. And then he began grabbing ahold of his monuments, tipping them over and shifting them on top of each other—sometimes in terrible, thunderous collisions. Stones, bricks and steel girders went crashing realistically and frighteningly to the earth as the famous structures crumbled. The collapse of the Burj was particularly spectacular. One monument was layered on top of the other in a terrible collage of familiar but savaged shapes. The Empire State building alone stood tall and unmolested in the center of this hideous pile of virtual architecture. And when Orion was done, he took a second to smile and admire his catastrophic handiwork as the structures all settled into ruinous place.