by Kevin Nguyen
“Okay, so the story is set on an asteroid cluster—two floating rocks in space. The first, the bigger of the two, is a mining colony called Excavator-IV. It is, like all things involving miners, very poor. The work is hard and dangerous. But not far away is Excavator-V, the other rock, where all of the mine owners live. It’s also home to a university that specializes in higher education for fields related to space mining. So basically, it’s a story about the tensions of inequality between the two asteroids.”
I’d told Margo that it sounded great.
“I’m still in the middle of it,” she’d said, “but it’s already among the best things I’ve ever read.”
At the time, Margo hadn’t revealed that Mining Colony had a special connection to her, that she’d helped shape it.
Now was as good a time as any to read it. I left my apartment with the intention of buying a copy, and realized as soon as I was on the street that I had no idea where the closest bookstore was. At the bodega, I got a coffee and asked the cashier. He had no idea, gave me my change, and told me to have a nice day.
I remembered there was a big bookstore in Manhattan near Union Square, the kind you would find mostly situated in a mall, usually nestled between an electronics store and a department store, always a coffee counter somewhere near the bestsellers. When I arrived, I wandered around looking for Jill August’s book. First I scanned the science fiction section. No luck. I checked the general fiction shelves. Not there either. I asked a bookseller, who attempted to summon Mining Colony on the computer. No records. What they found instead was another book by August. Adult Contemporary. The cover was sparse, just strong lettering over what looked like a stock photo of a family. I bought it.
I cracked the book open on the subway ride home. I walked from the train to my apartment turning pages, then continued back in bed in my apartment.
Adult Contemporary was completely different from what I was expecting. In the first scene, the two kids—a brother and sister—are sneakily checking the “casual encounters” section of Craigslist. They’re young (middle school and high school), and reading each other the prurient details of men and women’s fetishes. It’s all laughs until they stumble across one ad that has a photo with a woman that looks suspiciously like their mother.
The children are unsure what to do; whether they should tell their parents or just pretend they never found out. The middle-school-aged son feels an allegiance to his father and wants to tell him. The daughter, who is in early high school, believes that it must all be a misunderstanding. She convinces her brother to stay quiet.
The daughter, though, begins spying on her mother. She keeps a diary of her mom’s comings and goings. She begins paying close attention to the relationship between their parents—how often they talk to each other and show signs of affection; how often they argue or seem at odds. It’s a great literary trick, and we see that the daughter’s close observation of her parents’ marriage parallels her own discovery of what love and intimacy really mean.
The book is divided into two parts, and toward the end of the first half the daughter, after much deliberation and amateur sleuthing, decides that their mother is definitely not cheating on their father with strangers on Craigslist. The mom’s schedule checks out. Mom and Dad are clearly still in love. Everything is the way it’s supposed to be.
But one day, the brother cuts class to smoke weed in the park with some friends. (There’s an entire subplot about him being peer-pressured into drugs.) On his way there, he sees his mother’s car parked at a local motel. He investigates and, to his horror, discovers her walking into a room with a stranger. He is so shocked he is nearly seen by his mother. Still, he is able to take a picture of the two of them with his Polaroid camera.
Later, he shows his sister. The photo is blurry and washed-out. They argue about whether it means anything. The sister becomes incredibly upset, and takes the Polaroid and marches downstairs to show her father the picture, to tell him that his wife is a horrible cheater. She finds both her parents at the kitchen table, laughing and drinking wine together. The daughter, feeling raw in the moment, decides that she will just confront both of them at the same time.
She yells. She shows the father the picture. She points at her mother and calls her a liar and a whore. The mother begins sobbing. The father looks heartbroken and stares at the picture. He doesn’t say anything.
The daughter begins yelling directly at her mother, asking her why she would do something like this, why she would do this to her family, how could she be so selfish. The father finally speaks up. He tells his daughter to shut up. He tells her that he knows. He tells her that she knows that he knows. He tells her that this is an arrangement they have. The money is good. They need the money.
This is where the first act ends, with the revelation that the mother is a sex worker.
I looked out the window and realized the entire day had nearly passed.
* * *
—
MARGO’S DEATH HAD PUT a damper on the office for a few weeks, but eventually the mood at Phantom was possessed by a new crisis: teenagers.
Brandon had lofty goals for Phantom, but he did not anticipate his technology would become the next big thing with kids whose communication habits were radically different from those of the adults the service was designed for. Teenagers were sending messages at a clip that seemed impossible. Was it possible that kids in middle school and high school sent a hundred times more messages than their parents? The increased usage caused major instability in the Phantom servers. For two weeks, back-end engineers were pulling insane shifts at the office, attempting to keep all the servers online.
It was difficult to figure out who was the first individual user to spark Phantom’s popularity, but the data scientists pinned the teen sweep to a small high school in Central California. Gathered around one of the data scientists’ computers, we watched in awe as the users spread from California, jumping to New York, and then spreading inward from the coasts. It was like watching a contagious virus infect the entire country.
Venture capitalists were never interested in revenue—they were interested in the potential of revenue. That’s how investing works. User growth had slowed nearly to a halt, which threatened the next round of funding. So the sudden boom in new users was a small miracle. But with an entirely new demographic of users came an entirely new set of challenges, and we were wholly unprepared.
As Phantom’s user base was growing, so were the number of support requests that had to be answered, and right now our customer support team consisted of me. They were going to hire, but Brandon hoped I wouldn’t mind taking on more work in the interim.
“This is what we talked about, giving you greater responsibilities,” he said.
“Well, if I’m doing more, can I have a raise?”
“What?” I’d caught Brandon off guard with my request. “Yeah, sure. Of course.”
He offered a 10 percent bump so readily that I was left wondering if I should have asked for more.
* * *
—
GROWING UP, A PACKAGE would arrive in the mail for my father every three months. It was notable just as mail—he rarely received anything by post—and notable for its contents: always a pair of VHS tapes, bundled together, the packaging emblazoned with the soft photography and swirly type announcing Paris by Night.
The concept was relatively straightforward: it was a live variety show, mostly music with a few low-stakes comedy sketches. The entire thing was in Vietnamese—the singing, the monologues—filmed entirely in California. Besides sriracha, Paris by Night was the biggest cultural product of Vietnamese Americans. It was also the only thing my dad ever watched on our television.
We owned a DVD player, but Paris by Night kept arriving as a pair of chunky tapes. My dad claimed he didn’t know how to change our mail-order subscription, but I think he liked the f
amiliarity of VHS. Its size was so distinctive that you couldn’t mistake it for anything else in the mailbox. Every time it arrived, it was assumed that me and my mom would watch it with him that evening. It didn’t matter that neither of us spoke Vietnamese. Each Paris by Night was four hours long.
We’d been watching these quarterly since I was a child. Each new one had slightly stronger production values than the one that had preceded it. Watching Paris by Night was a bit like watching the Academy Awards, except there were no awards. If the Oscars used all the performances and jokes to pad the show’s run time, then imagine Paris by Night as simply hours of filler. It was also the only time I ever saw my dad laugh—a real laugh, summoned deep from the belly. He cracked up so hard that sometimes he teared up. Someone onstage would, in Vietnamese, deliver a punchline, their face waiting for laughter and applause. It always came. My mom and I never had any idea what was going on.
Mom did laugh along, though. Once, I asked her why she was laughing when she couldn’t possibly understand the joke.
“That doesn’t mean it isn’t funny,” she said.
A couple months after I’d moved to New York, Dad called to tell me about the new Paris by Night. We were on the phone for a while as he gave me the play-by-play of each performance, and the sketches that followed. He struggled to translate the hosts’ banter, often saying that it was funnier in Vietnamese, and then laughing at the joke I still didn’t understand.
He asked how my work was going. He’d hardly ever touched a computer—had only recently gotten a cell phone—so I’d always struggled explaining to him what exactly Phantom was. But at least now he understood the concept of text messages. Instead of talking, you sent written sentences back and forth. Simple.
What Phantom did, I explained, was made those messages disappear after they’d been read.
“Why would you want them to disappear?” he asked. “What if you want to see them later?”
I thought about my father’s Paris by Night tapes. Usually when you finish a VHS tape, you rewind it for next time. My father would never bother rewinding his Paris by Nights because there would never be a next time. He’d store the videos on a shelf in a closet—single use, then cast away into an archive.
“Why don’t you throw those away?”
“What if I want to watch them again?”
“You’ve never watched a Paris by Night twice.”
“But what if, one day, I did want to.”
“Wouldn’t it be more useful to have all that closet space back?”
My father took a moment. It seemed never to occur to him that he didn’t need to keep all the tapes he’d watched.
“It would be wasteful to throw them away.”
I wasn’t going to try and convince him.
“Text messages, they go away already,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“After some time, they disappear.”
“They’re probably still on your phone.”
“No, you forget them. Time passes and you can’t remember what you said to anyone, or what anyone said to you. They all disappear on their own.”
I had no idea what my dad was going on about but I let him keep talking.
* * *
—
I ARRIVED TO WORK late. I’d cut down on my drinking significantly, but I’d gotten used to showing up sometime after 10 a.m. And, more importantly, so did everyone else. So really I was just showing up at my regular time.
Brandon and Emil were arguing in the conference room, and it was loud enough that everyone else in the office had stopped working, many of them turned around in their chairs just to observe the conflict.
“Privacy is one of the reasons I started this company,” Brandon said. “If we give up on protecting the privacy of our users, then there’s no point.”
Emil’s response was calmer and more measured. “That was before our service was being used by people under the age of eighteen. If we don’t start monitoring what people are saying, we are going to get in serious legal trouble.”
It took a moment for me to piece it together. The genius of Phantom was that messages were temporary. Once something had been seen, it disappeared. Emil reminded Brandon that one of the company’s big sells was how “ephemeral messaging” would be a way for whistleblowers to message people without fear of leaving a paper trail. But of course, the majority of Phantom’s users were not anonymous whistleblowers sending incriminating evidence of corporate transgressions and government corruption. They were not implicating white-collar criminals or toppling authoritarian regimes. As far as any of us knew, that had never happened. Our users were regular people, just making frivolous conversation with each other. And now, they were mostly very young.
There had been several cases of teenagers sending sexually explicit messages to each other.
send me pics of your tits
bitch suck me offfffff
i wanna cum on ur face lol
The screenshots had come through the customer support email. These were hard to investigate because it was merely one person’s word against another’s. In one case, a woman reported that she had received sexually explicit language from another user, insinuating that the man would like to have intercourse with her. The details were disturbing in nature. But since all messages self-deleted, I had no way to verify if the screenshots were real. On one hand, I knew the chances were very low that someone would go out of their way to make up a story like that. On the other, I didn’t have any proof. I wrote back to the user and said she could simply block his account and she would no longer receive any messages from him—a recommendation that was unsatisfying to both of us.
Other cases were even more complicated, especially when it came to bullying.
talk to me again and i will end you
your dead faggot
i’m gonna throttle you so hard that you’ll shit your teeth
don’t make me rape your face
Now that Phantom was made up of teenagers, this became a growing concern. How do you prevent users from harassing one another? What is the line between teasing and bullying? Did we have an obligation to protect our users from one another? These were all questions we’d put off confronting, because they didn’t have clear solutions.
Emil proposed that we start saving records of all conversations between users. They would appear to be deleted to the user, but we would have them stored, to be summoned in case of customer service requests. We could analyze messages in broad swaths. Emil’s example: All users that were flagged for harassing another person could be grouped together, their behaviors and patterns identified so future iterations of Phantom could learn to automatically flag inappropriate conduct. I was surprised by how confident Emil was in this idea, considering it undermined everything that Brandon had set out to do with the company.
“Think about how much time that would save out of Lucas’s day,” Emil said, pointing toward my desk. Another surprise: I had no idea Emil cared about my time.
Like everyone else in the office, I was pretending to work, headphones on but playing no music, listening to the argument but staying out of it. I could hear others in the office typing furiously. Everyone was messaging each other. I caught stray glances around the room. No one was messaging me, though. Instead, I thought about all the things I would be saying to Margo if she were here.
“If we give ourselves the power to read people’s private messages, then we’re just like every other company out there,” Brandon said.
“We’re not reading individual messages. We are writing software that allows us to comprehend huge amounts of messages. No human being has to violate a user’s individual privacy.”
“But a human writes that software.” Brandon pointed to another engineer, Tom, who ducked behind his monitor. “This idea is insane. You’re insane. You can’t say
that we’re protecting user privacy if you have the ability to look at their private communications—even if it’s just code that’s crawling it. Emil, that’s unethical.”
“Ethical? You believe it’s more morally justifiable to create a platform that doesn’t protect its users from harm than it is to lightly moderate people’s behavior.”
“Not if we violate users’ privacy!”
Like all arguments between angry men in a workplace, the disagreement became circular, then personal, then unresolvable. Neither was going to change his mind, and eventually Brandon pulled rank as CEO. His closing argument was that in the case of any future legal issues the company might have, it would be better to not have any evidence at all. The last thing Phantom would want is to have its data subpoenaed and used in litigation against itself. If no one had proof, it didn’t happen. Both men marched away, pissed. They were steaming, like they’d each been robbed of the most precious thing in his life but couldn’t do anything about it. I found the whole thing hilarious.
* * *
—
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for Emil’s concerns to expand outside of the company. The following weekend, a news story ran about a high school sophomore in the suburbs of Orlando who had been viciously bullied. The report, which ran on a local news station, had accused Phantom of enabling harassment. I suppose they weren’t wrong.
The whole Phantom staff—all sixteen of us—crowded around Emil’s computer to watch a clip of the segment. It opened with some low-quality B-roll of students in a computer lab and a voice-over from the reporter asking, “Do you know what kinds of messages your kids are sending? They could be harassing their classmates. Or worse yet: they could be the victim of bullying.”