by Kevin Nguyen
Many of the postings included a photo of the guy, which usually featured him shirtless, never a face, of course. Other times, it was a straight-up dick pic. Jill found these fascinating—less aroused, more curious. Some guys understood that the appeal of a dick pic had less to do with the penis itself but with how it was framed. (It wasn’t difficult: good lighting and an angle that wasn’t from straight above—really, just a little thoughtfulness.) After leaving Victor, it was refreshing to think about someone else’s dick for a while. No sacrifice had to be made for the future. It was about what felt okay and comfortable in the present. And the thing that felt okay and comfortable right now was getting laid.
* * *
—
THE FIRST “ENCOUNTER” WANTED to meet at a bar. This seemed reasonable. But when she arrived, she found herself stuck there for the duration of a drink, even though she knew immediately that neither of them was interested in sleeping with the other. (He was too sweaty; she suspected he’d been disappointed by her height.) The small talk they made felt frivolous, and Jill felt her soul slowly leaving her body as she asked a litany of questions like “How many siblings do you have?”
Not to be discouraged, she set firmer rules. They could meet at a bar, but neither was obligated to stay for the entire drink. “Either of us can leave at any point, and the one rule is the other must not take it personally,” she wrote to the next encounter. He agreed.
They hit it off. Jill went home with him after a small conversation where they’d established a rapport, a mutual attraction, and so began Jill’s campaign of Craigslist hookups. Half the time she bailed, but all of the men she did go home with were for a single night only. (The exception was one man, Garrett, who liked to go down on her while listening to NPR on his headphones. Jill saw him four or five times.) Her strategy was to approach each encounter with no expectations but stick to her rules. If, during their conversation, the man said something she wasn’t comfortable with—an off-color comment, joke, or political belief—she’d leave; if he made any mention of her height, she’d leave; if anything was suggested that was outside of what they’d arranged on email, she’d leave.
Craigslist was an ugly website. It was Times New Roman on a stark white background, with functional blue text to denote links—like a website that was never styled. But Jill admired its HTML brutalism. There was something simple and naked that made it feel trustworthy, like it wasn’t trying to dress up what it was. Whereas the online dating sites she had briefly attempted to use were styled in bright, nonthreatening colors, Craigslist was stripped down to its bare essentials.
If getting over the loss of Victor meant regaining some semblance of control, in these casual encounters no one had more control than Jill.
* * *
—
MAKING RENT ON HER own was difficult. The market for full-time writing jobs had completely evaporated, and Jill found herself doing an uneven combination of freelance assignments and administrative temp gigs.
But mostly, Jill had a lot of unstructured free time. So she began to write. She’d fill up those empty hours in the day in front of her computer, working in a text document that had no deadline and nothing at stake. It was calming. She wrote and wrote and it felt therapeutic—or at least she believed that’s what something therapeutic would feel like. Eventually, the gigs became more reliable: a couple regular written assignments, three days a week filing at a law firm near her apartment. And Jill would come home, open up her laptop, and keep writing. When her law firm job turned into a full-time thing, it took more discipline to keep writing but she woke up early to write before work. Most nights, she’d come home and continue writing, exhausted, until she would close her computer and climb into bed in whatever she had been wearing at the office.
A year later, Jill had a manuscript. Through a friend of a friend, she had an agent. Through her agent, she suddenly had a book that several prominent publishers wanted. It was stunning that a year of work could culminate in this. And though it was at times difficult, in many ways writing a novel was the easiest thing she’d ever done.
The money was good. Jill hadn’t expected that. She quit her law firm job—the first time she had quit anything in her life. (Well, besides Victor, if that even counted.)
The title was Adult Contemporary. It felt like she’d finally grown up.
She hadn’t talked to Victor in months, but she couldn’t help dedicating the book to him. He would never read it—probably never even know about it. But Victor had made a video game to tell her exactly how he felt. Jill had returned the favor.
The art of a coward.
V
Mavis Beacon
GRIEF COMES IN WAVES. At least according to a book Jill had read. It was a famous memoir by a famous California writer, whose famous New York writer husband had died of a heart attack. Jill said the book fucked her up. The phenomena—the waves—come as sudden and unexpected symptoms: shortness of breath, tightness of muscles, choking, weakness.
“I don’t feel any of those things,” I said. “The waves. Do you?”
“I don’t either. Nothing so acute, at least,” Jill said.
Jill lent me that book, but I never read it.
* * *
—
CREDIBLE VIOLENCE
ABUSE STANDARDS
“For us to deal with a violent threat, we have to determine how credible the threat is,” I said. I clicked to the next slide.
We aim to allow as much speech as possible but draw the line at content that could credibly cause real world harm.
People commonly express disdain or disagreement by threatening or calling for violence in generally facetious and unserious ways.
I read the slides to the room. I had spent a lot of time working over the language, but realized that I’d never spoken it aloud before. It sounded clinical, cold.
We aim to disrupt potential and real world harm caused from people inciting or coordinating harm to other people or property, by requiring certain details be present in order to consider the threat credible.
An Indian woman raised her hand. She was one of the younger people in the room. Really cute.
“Hi, I have a question.”
“I can see. You raised your hand. What’s your question?”
“What is a cred—”
“Actually, what’s your name?”
“What?”
“Everyone, before you ask a question, just tell me your name so I can remember it.”
“Oh, I’m Nina.”
“What was your question, Nina?”
“What is a credible threat?”
“I’m glad you asked.” I clicked to the next slide. “First, we have to determine if the threat of violence is achievable. That means establishing a time frame.”
ACHIEVABLE THREATS OF VIOLENCE
Today
Tomorrow
In 3 hours
Next time I see you,
When it rains
Sooner or later
Etc
NOT ACHIEVABLE
When pigs learn to fly
When hell freezes over
Etc
“Who still says ‘when pigs learn to fly?’ ”
“The point is that any idiomatic or hyperbolic expression makes the threat unachievable.”
“Why?”
“Because pigs will never learn to fly.”
“And what if they did? What if someone developed technology that could crossbreed pigs with birds, and from that, pigs gained the ability to take flight.”
Another person jumped in. An older black guy.
“My name is Thompson. Why would we want pigs to have wings?”
“You know what a chicken wing tastes like,” Nina said. “Imagine if that was made of pork.”
The class seemed amused by the logic
, or maybe they were just hungry. I decided that I liked Nina.
* * *
—
OUR FIRST PROBLEMS WITH user behavior were related to bullying, which was nearly impossible to police. Context was everything, especially since bullying could so easily be confused with regular, good-natured teasing. There was no way to understand just from messages whether the tone was playful or openly hostile.
But as Phantom grew, bullying became the least of our problems. Suddenly, we were dealing with threats of violence, hostile and graphic in nature.
i’ll kill you
i’ll put my boot so far up your ass i’m gonna knock out your front teeth
come near me i’ll skin you like a pig
fuck off nigga
i will kill you i will kill you i will kill you
Like bullying, it was difficult to moderate without full context. But unlike bullying, we actually had to do something about it.
For a week, Brandon and I hunkered down in a conference room attempting to write moderation guidelines, which was boring and tedious and felt like busywork. If we were a much larger company, we would have called in experts, firms specializing in handling sensitive material, hired an expert with moderation experience; we might even have installed a resident academic ethicist. But it was just me and Brandon, two twentysomethings with no idea how to handle abusive language or death threats.
“Were you bullied in high school?” Brandon asked.
“I mean, sure. Who wasn’t?” I said. “Well, you probably weren’t.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“You’re tall, white, handsome, pretty charming. What would anyone even bully you about?”
Brandon basked in the compliment for a moment before answering. “I wasn’t always this confident, or this tall. And harassment is more complex than jocks picking on nerds.”
“In my experience, it’s just the more powerful making life miserable for the less powerful for the sake of making themselves feel better. I think it’s pretty simple.”
“If it’s that straightforward, then this should be pretty easy for you.”
Which is why, a week later, I was squashed into our conference room, presenting a PowerPoint deck to a dozen new hires. They were contract workers, briskly assembled by an outside temp agency. They looked ragtag, unhappy to be there, fully aware that this was just another in a series of low-paying gigs. I immediately loved them.
* * *
—
IT’D BEEN SINCE HIGH school that I had to present anything in front of a group of people. I was nervous, even though no one else really cared. There weren’t quite enough chairs for everyone, so some were seated while others stood or leaned against the wall. “Hi everyone,” I said to the crowded conference room. The response was tepid.
I explained the basics of the job. Every time someone flagged a message, it would be routed to a member of the moderation team for investigation. The moderator would then look at the context of the conversation and decide whether it violated our content guidelines.
At the end of the deck, I had prepared a short quiz. The article I’d read about presentation tips had suggested finishing with something interactive. So I decided to test my new moderators by putting a few statements on the screen and seeing if they could file them correctly as credible threats of violence or not.
Someone shoot the President.
“Is this statement a credible or not credible threat of violence?”
Thompson raised his hand. “Not credible.”
“Wrong,” I said. “This is a credible threat of violence because it is a call to action and it cites a specific target.”
“I disagree,” he said. “It would be extremely hard to shoot the president. Like, he’s got Secret Service and everything. You couldn’t walk up to the president and shoot him. They’d murder you before you could shoot the president.”
“But what if you shot him long-range, with a sniper rifle, JFK assassination style,” said a white guy from the back of the room. “And that guy got away with it.”
“What do you mean he got away with it? They caught Lee Harvey Oswald.”
“You think he acted alone, man? You gotta wake up.”
“We’re getting off topic,” I banged my hand on the table, like a gavel in a courtroom. “Per our policies, ‘Someone shoot the president’ is a credible threat of violence. End of story.”
Let’s beat up fat kids.
“Credible?”
“Not credible,” I explained. “Unlike ‘Someone shoot the president,’ this statement doesn’t specify a specific target.”
“So you have to want to beat up a specific fat kid for it to be a problem?”
“Exactly.”
I hope someone kills you.
“Definitely credible,” Nina said, brimming with confidence.
“Let’s let some other people answer,” I said. A few other hands went up. I pointed to one man in the back.
“I’m Lion.”
“What?”
“You said to tell you our names after we raised our hands.”
“Oh, that’s right. Your name is Lion?”
“My name is Lion.” A white guy, dreadlocks. “And that is a credible threat of violence.”
“Sorry, Lion, it is not a credible threat.”
“But it’s talking about a specific person.”
“Right, but the qualifier ‘I hope’ indicates desire but not intent.”
Kick a person with red hair.
“Credible threat,” Nina said.
“Sorry, it’s not credible.”
“Again? Is anything a credible threat if it’s not against the president?”
“And isn’t this offensive to redheads?” asked a man standing in the back, a redhead.
“Right, redheads have it so tough in America,” Thompson said.
“All I’m saying is, like, what if the sentence was ‘We should kick black people.’ ”
“Whoa, you need to sit down right now if you think those are the same thing.”
“I don’t! I just want to understand the rules.”
I clarified: “These threats are only credible when they’re leveled at what we call a ‘vulnerable group.’ ”
“Hi. My name is Lion.”
“I didn’t forget that your name is Lion.”
“What counts as a vulnerable group?”
Actually, Lion had a good question. I looked through my notes. “Any group defined by race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, gender, or religion.”
“But not hair color?” The redhead again.
“White boy, sit down!”
“I can’t—there aren’t any more chairs.”
“And who defined what a ‘vulnerable group’ is?” Nina asked.
The answer, of course, was that I did. But I ignored the question. “I should have included that in this presentation. I’ll update it and send a new version to you all.”
Next slide.
To snap a bitch’s neck, make sure to apply all your pressure to the middle of her throat.
Nina put her hand up meekly.
“Credible?”
“Sorry, this is still not credible.”
“OH, COME ON!”
Thompson jumped in: “It’s just a bitch, not the bitch.”
I nodded approvingly at him. I felt a tinge of pride. “That’s right. And it’s not signaling a specific threat—it’s more of a general statement, even if the language is—”
“Gross? Horrifying?” Nina looked upset.
“The rules don’t single out gross and horrifying. Just achievable threats of violence.”
We put the moderators to work shortly thereafter. Emil and I had set up an array of computers and desks late the night before. The
re was already plenty of work to do—the request queue was unending. The members of my team got to their seats and began.
At Brandon’s insistence, a large screen had been set up at the front of the room. It displayed two numbers: how many new requests there were and how many had been finished that day. A management tactic. It would motivate everyone, Brandon said. The screen and its counter were visible from everywhere on the floor.
Soon the customer service crew was working quietly. The sound of gentle keyboard taps and mouse clicks filled the room. I walked around, occasionally looking over people’s shoulders. When someone had a question, they would raise their hand and I would address it. But mostly people didn’t have questions, which I took as a testimony to how well constructed our policies were written. It was all going better than I could have expected.
* * *
—
THE SECOND HALF OF Jill’s novel Adult Contemporary jumps ahead a year. At first, everything seems normal in the household, but in reality everyone is still reeling from the revelation that the mother has been selling herself to support the family.
The kids have reverted back to teenage angst mode. The son appears uninterested in having friends, doing well in school, or engaging in anything but video games. On the surface, the daughter appears to be coping well. She is still a stellar student and a hyper-engaged, college-bound high school star. But in secret, she is becoming more rebellious. And her behavior becomes reckless and dangerous.
The novel feels more intricate, more emotionally complex in the second half. It opens up to include the perspectives of both parents. The mother quits sex work, hoping that it will heal all wounds in the family. It does not. The financial strain is keeping her up at night, and she feels an overwhelming sense of guilt that she is no longer providing. Then there’s the dilemma of the father, who feels guilty because he is unable to make ends meet. Even though his wife was a sex worker by choice, he cannot shake the feeling that he has failed her. When he tries to express that feeling to her, she becomes furious. She reminds him that doing this work was her decision and that he has no right to wallow because of it. But he asks her if she would be doing it if they didn’t need the money, if the family didn’t need so much. She knows, in her heart, that she wouldn’t if they didn’t. It’s a devastating moment.