by Kevin Nguyen
Meanwhile, as we were getting better at identifying abusive language, users had found new ways to skirt our moderating abilities. Since Phantom didn’t support the sending of photos, they began sending image links. Whereas before we could blacklist certain words, URLs obfuscated the things they pointed to: Graphic images of war. Sexually explicit pornography. A lot of swastikas.
Nina was the first one to catch what was happening with the links.
“So our users are Nazis?” I asked.
“No, they just like Nazi imagery,” she explained.
“What’s the difference?”
“Most of these kids don’t know what Nazis actually are. They just know that Nazis represent a kind of extreme version of evil. Nazis are scary and bad even without the context of, y’know, stuff like the Holocaust.”
“Stuff like the Holocaust, huh,” I repeated. “Hmm.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass,” Nina said, nudging me on the shoulder.
I had to admire such cleverness, even if it was disturbing. The brutes understood how we were policing their language, so they had found an entirely new medium.
Nina’s proposal began to set out moderation guidelines, like the ones we’d had for written threats of violence. I quickly flipped through the copy she had printed.
“This is…excellent work,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said. “I want to do my best for you.”
“That’s good, because I—”
I lost my words for a second. Nina was smiling, awaiting my approval. I wanted to tell her more about how impressed I was by her work, how she’d really thought things through in a way that I could barely begin to fathom. But the best thing I could do for her was to bring this report upstairs to Brandon.
“Where are you going?” Nina asked.
Waving the report at her, I replied, “None of this matters if Brandon doesn’t sign off on it.”
* * *
—
BEFORE MY PARENTS OWNED the bed-and-breakfast, my father worked as a chef at a Japanese restaurant situated in a strip mall. It was just one of many franchises in a chain of teppanyaki places, which seated guests around a hibachi grill. The main draw of these restaurants was that the chef would cook in front of the guests, performing knife tricks and telling little jokes. Both dinner and a show.
The chain had been started by a Japanese wrestler in the ’60s who’d been disqualified from the Olympics for getting into fights with his teammates. He had more success in the restaurant management business than in wrestling. Like most non-Western food, it was difficult to charge a premium price on Japanese food, no matter the quality. Ethnic food, especially at the time, was considered gross by Americans. It was inferior cuisine made by inferior people, so it could at least be cheap. But having been born in Tokyo, the wrestler realized he could wield that foreignness if it was exoticized. Impress diners with the outlandish, otherworldly appeal of the East, and customers would pay up.
My father was obviously not Japanese, but none of the patrons ever knew. Some kind of Asian was authentic enough. All of the chefs took on pseudonyms that were stereotypically Japanese names: Haru, Yuki, Haruki. As a joke that only he would find funny, my dad picked Sony, which was not in any shape or form a real Japanese name. Patrons often told my dad about how they loved their Sony television, as if my father were responsible for their high-quality technology just by bearing the namesake. He’d bow and say, in his best fake Japanese accent, “Oh thank you, thank you.”
To nail the accent, he’d studied his favorite Bruce Lee movies, where Japanese people were vilified, depicted as conniving businessmen named Mr. Suzuki. As a child, I remember him watching those films while practicing knife tricks. He’d quickly dissect grilled shrimp, then flip them into his shirt pocket, his chef’s hat. He would stack slices of grilled onions to form a volcano. Oil was poured in the top. “Fire!” he’d yell as it ignited, flames spouting out. I would clap at the spectacle.
He performed this routine day in and day out. He was always amazed that people came to the restaurant more than once, since all the chef’s tricks were the same each time. But the pay was respectable, the hours reasonable for a cook’s gig. It never bothered him that he was posing as a Japanese man. I doubt he ever thought about that, even as he feigned a different kind of accent. This was a rare situation, in which my father—an immigrant from Vietnam—could use his appearance to get away with something. What did it matter that people thought his name was Sony?
The wrestler’s obituary appeared in the paper the year before I moved to New York. He had died of pneumonia. In addition to launching an empire of lucrative Japanese restaurants, he’d been inducted into the wrestling hall of fame, started a pornography magazine, had a short career as an offshore powerboat racer, and fathered nine children. One of them became a famous model, another a famously mediocre DJ. He represented every American ideal of a man: an athlete, a businessman, a daredevil, a father, a womanizer.
In the paper’s write-up, the wrestler was credited for introducing America to Japanese food. It was a dubious claim—it was just steak grilled on a hibachi and doused in soy sauce—but there was a modicum of truth to it. Unlike any other kind of Asian food, be it Chinese or Korean or Vietnamese, Japanese food was seen as a high-end cuisine. It was respected, revered. You could charge real money for it too. And what was more American than that?
* * *
—
AFTER THREE STRAIGHT WEEKS of repeating the same routine every night—bar, small dinner, work on Margo’s stories—Jill began to go a little stir-crazy.
“I spend all day writing in my apartment, and then you come over and I write some more. Can we go out? See friends?”
I didn’t have any other friends. Jill barely did either. Which is how we made plans with her old roommate and her new boyfriend. They hadn’t hung out in forever. Dinner and drinks, it would be easy—fun even. I wasn’t particularly interested in going out, but I was curious about Jill’s friends. She rarely mentioned other people in her orbit.
The restaurant they picked was the New York location of the teppanyaki chain.
This place reminded me of the one where my dad used to work, only larger and more crowded. We arrived early, and were the first ones seated. I told Jill that my dad used to be a chef at one of these places. She asked if that made it weird eating here. I told her it didn’t, but I appreciated her asking.
Jill’s friends, Jackie and Jeremy, arrived late.
“Sorry, the train,” Jeremy said. He shook my hand, gripped it hard.
“It’s so nice to meet you, Lucas,” Jackie said, giving me an unexpected hug. She said Jill had said nothing about me. A joke?
Jackie and Jeremy were an attractive white couple. Both had come straight from work and were dressed up—professional, somewhat conservative outfits that could best be described as Connecticut chic. His shirt was starched crisp, well-fitted, and the blandest shade of blue. His suit, too, was prim, its only flourish a checkered pocket square barely peeking out of the breast pocket. Hers was slightly trendier, a blazer with sleeves made to be rolled up, the sort of outfit that could be worn during and after work hours. Jill and I, as people who worked from home and at a startup with no sense of dress code, had put no mind into what we wore: T-shirts, jeans, old sneakers.
Maybe it was because we were quiet people, but throughout dinner, Jackie and Jeremy did most of the talking. Their stories were about work and how hard work was and how hard they worked. But there were few specifics. Jackie worked in PR and spoke vaguely about difficult clients; Jeremy, from what I could gather, was in finance, but anything more specific than that never surfaced, other than that lots of money was involved.
“Jeremy travels so much that he sometimes prefers to sleep sitting up.”
“It’s true. Some nights I sleep in the living room on the couch with my travel neck pi
llow. I’m such a freak sometimes.”
“You just work so much, honey.”
“Gotta bring home the bacon for my baby.”
The two kissed and Jill looked at me, eyes wide with some combination of horror and distress.
“You know, Lucas’s dad used to be a chef at one of these places,” Jill said.
“Oh really?” Jeremy said.
I nodded.
“That’s cool,” Jackie said.
I nodded.
Jackie and Jeremy, surprisingly, had nothing to say. Jill, maybe embarrassed that she’d brought it up, asked if I’d looked at the menu yet.
I didn’t need to. I already knew everything on it.
* * *
—
THE CHEF’S ROUTINE WAS—without missing a beat—exactly the same as the one my father had performed nearly two decades earlier. There were shrimp tosses; an onion volcano. Jeremy kept trying to make conversation with the chef. Jackie wanted to do “sake bombs,” which were less a kind of drink and more of a hazing ritual. She explained: you balance a shot of sake on two chopsticks above a glass of beer. Then, in unison, everyone bangs the table until the shot drops into the beer, then you chug the whole thing as quickly as possible. Jill protested, but Jackie assured us it would be fun. When a waiter came by, Jackie held up four fingers to make it crystal clear. The waiter apologized, and pointed to a sign behind the bar: NO SAKE BOMBS.
When the bill arrived for our steaks, Jeremy insisted he pay. Then he and Jackie insisted we go out for another drink. There was a great bar around the corner, apparently.
At the bar, Jeremy wanted to know where I worked—the first question he’d asked me all evening.
“No shit! I use Phantom all the time. Great service. You folks do good work.”
“Oh thank you,” I said. It was the first time I’d met anyone not affiliated with the company who used Phantom. “Everyone works really hard on it, so it’s nice to hear that someone likes it.”
“Like it? I love it. Disappearing messages—so much fun. Genius idea. You come up with it?”
I told him I didn’t, but Jeremy’s compliments kept coming. They were aggressive, disingenuous. A sales tactic, it seemed, but I wasn’t sure what he was selling.
Jackie interjected. “If you two are gonna talk about work, I’m getting another drink.”
“It’ll be quick. I just want to ask Lucas a few questions. Phantom—it’s such a big deal.”
Jackie sighed. “I’ll grab the next round but I’m putting it on your card.”
Jeremy opened his wallet and found his credit card. It was a pale green card with the word CORPORATE stamped across it.
“You’re gonna expense this?”
“Yeah, talking to Lucas about Phantom is…research for a future investment opportunity.” Jeremy laughed to himself.
“Come on, Jill. I’ll need a hand with the drinks.” And the two of them headed through the crowd, toward the bar.
Jeremy continued.
“Can you keep a secret?” he asked. I never said yes, but he kept going. “I gotta admit: I use Phantom to talk to this one girl. It’s perfect. The messages just disappear. No way Jackie would ever find out.”
It was strange how Jeremy trusted me with this information so quickly. Even stranger was how he so readily volunteered it, thinking that I would be impressed. I kept waiting uneasily for him to try to high-five me, and if one part of this conversation was not a disaster, it was the fact that the high-five never came.
“The things I can say on Phantom—it’s so freeing. You can say the dirtiest, nastiest shit. Real, deep, primal human things because it’ll never come back to you. And if it did, what proof would they have? Their word versus yours.”
He went on.
“Are you guys going to add the ability to send photos? Because right now it’s just text. You guys have to be adding photos soon, right? Phantom would be perfect for sexting then.”
I was tempted to tell him the workaround the bullies used—send links to pictures, the trick to sending unsolicited swastikas. But Jeremy barely let me get a word in. He went on and on and seemed to know a lot about “sexting.” A mayoral candidate for New York City had just been busted—his entire career and future upended—because he was caught sexting. If he had used Phantom, Jeremy argued, he’d still be in the running.
“That’s not exactly what we built Phantom for.”
“If not that, then what?”
“The idea is that the self-destructing messages would enable people to make brave acts without worrying about the paper trail, like corporate or government whistleblowers, or undercover journalists.” I was at once defensive of Phantom and disgusted with myself for sounding like Brandon practicing his pitch deck.
Jeremy scoffed. “But how many whistleblowers and journalists use Phantom as opposed to dudes like me talking dirty to their side pieces?”
“To be honest, it’s almost entirely teenagers.”
That shut him up. Jackie and Jill returned with four beers. I drained mine quickly and helped Jill finish hers.
* * *
—
“SORRY JEREMY WAS…the absolute worst.”
I assured Jill that he was fine. I’d had a nice time.
“You don’t have to pretend,” Jill said. “Especially because you are terrible at holding it in when you don’t like someone.”
“You don’t know me. Maybe I love to be lectured about…markets.”
“Business transactions.”
“Investing.”
“And let me tell you all about my Starwood points.”
“It’s funnier if you imagine that Starwood just means ‘space boners.’ ”
I never thought someone would kiss me immediately after I uttered “space boners,” but here we were, making out in the street. Jill apologized again for subjecting me to an evening of Jeremy. Maybe the strongest bond two people could have was hating the same person.
That night, I slept at my place so I could be at work before anyone else. I looked up Jeremy’s Phantom account. It took a minute to verify it was the right Jeremy, but once I dug into his message history—the feature that Emil’s team had newly created—it was easy to confirm. Now that all messages were archived in Phantom’s database, I had the ability to look up any user’s past messages. It was for customer service purposes, but this seemed like a reasonable use case. Jeremy wasn’t joking. He had been full-on sexting with someone named Lily:
J: baby i’m so hard for you
J: i’m going to do all sorts of things to you
L: your getting me so wet
L: tell me what you want me to do
J: suck my balls baby
L: ok yes
L: i want you inside me
L: i want your hard cock in me
J: i want to be inside you too
J: but i also want you to suck my balls first
L: ok ok i am sucking your balls now
I printed out the entire transcript. Then I texted Jill for Jackie’s mailing address. She asked why, and I told her that I’d promised to send Jeremy some Phantom swag—a T-shirt, some stickers, that kind of thing. Jill seemed skeptical, but surrendered the address of their condo on the Upper East Side.
Funnily enough, the most time-consuming part of this whole task was finding an envelope and a stamp. I thought about including a note, explaining that these were Jeremy’s secret messages, but I decided against it. Jackie would know what these were, or at the very least, she’d confront Jeremy about them.
As I dropped the envelope in the mail I had a thought: When was the last time I mailed a letter?
* * *
—
AFTER A SERIES OF fluffy magazine interviews aimed at drumming up investor interest, Brandon was finally getting meetings
with people who’d previously turned down the opportunity to hear him pitch. But the newfound attention on Phantom also raised the company’s profile for criticism. Two weeks after Emil began work on the new algorithm, I received a flurry of emails from Brandon early in the morning, telling me I needed to get to the office immediately.
“I emailed you like a dozen times,” he said when I walked in.
“I don’t have a smartphone.” I raised my flip phone in the air. “You can text or call me.”
Brandon hardly glanced up as he motioned me over to a conference room, and on his laptop he had open a story that a tech publication had run about a photo we’d censored. The piece, which didn’t include any comment from us, ran under the headline “Is Phantom Censoring Your Private Messages?”
Apparently, a journalist using Phantom had had one of their messages flagged and deleted.
“People can’t know that we’re doing this,” Brandon said. “It would be disastrous to the company’s reputation.”
I’d known that our moderation operation was not exactly aboveboard. Sure, we’d updated our terms and services to cover our ass legally, but the language was deliberately vague, elastic.
Still, the specifics of our moderation guidelines could never be a secret forever, especially given how many temporary employees we were churning through. They’d all signed nondisclosure agreements, but hunting out leakers and litigating would draw more undue attention.
Brandon was beside himself, frustrated and anxious in a way I’d never seen him before. He paced around the room. He flapped his arms wildly as he talked, which reminded me of the way stand-ups might punctuate a punch line, save for the fact Brandon was screaming. I tried not to laugh. I understood the severity of the situation. But seeing Brandon out of sorts was, as always, a delightful experience.