New Waves

by Kevin Nguyen

  “We get called out for a cyberbullying problem, so we find a way to solve it. What do these people want?”

  It was unclear who Brandon meant when he referred to “these people.” I tried to calm him down by assuring him that I’d look into the records and figure out what happened.

  “Emil’s stupid fucking algorithm,” Brandon said. “He wanted to test it against your team, prove that it could hold its own against human judgment. I never should’ve signed off on it.”

  “Wait, Emil’s algorithm is active? I thought he was still just testing internally.”

  That same algorithm had been eating two weeks’ worth of poisoned data. No wonder it was shitting all over itself.

  “We rolled it out a few days ago. We were only going to do it for a week and see the results. I’m sorry we didn’t tell you, but Emil said that if you knew, you might adjust how the team downstairs was moderating and it would make the test less scientific.”

  “I’m glad that making a test ‘scientific’ was more important than my trust,” I snapped. I hadn’t cared much about the power dynamics in the office. But suddenly I had leverage. And I felt a desire to play a new role: I was going to be as entitled and self-righteous as possible.

  Brandon apologized. He admitted his mistake—something he’d never done before. And I let him talk through what he was thinking: The piece that had been posted was incomplete, published by a half-assed twentysomething writer with no real proof that Phantom was censoring messages, even if he was right. But that would spur the real journalists with an investigative background, with clout, who worked at real, legitimate newspapers and magazines, to find the truth. And that was the worst part, according to Brandon. They had the truth on their side. Phantom was a compromised service. It advocated a set of values publicly, while privately and selfishly adhering to a different set of rules. People wouldn’t get up in arms about the company’s treatment of user privacy. They’d be furious about the hypocrisy.

  Even though he was raving (again, loud and hilarious), I couldn’t help but be impressed by how quickly Brandon had worked through the press cycle. Hopefully he wasn’t right, but rationally, I knew he was.

  Through the glass door of the conference room, we both spotted Emil.

  “Get in here now,” Brandon yelled. Emil rushed over, not even taking a moment to remove his jacket or put down his backpack.

  Brandon told me to figure out what exactly had happened. I headed downstairs.

  * * *

  —

  MOST OF THE SUPPORT team was already at their desks, but it was weirdly quiet—no keyboards tapping. I walked around to Thompson’s computer and saw that he had the article up.

  “Everyone’s reading it,” he said.

  “Do we know what happened?” I asked him. Then I turned to the room and asked again. Sternly. I figured this would be a good time to wield some authority. It was likely Emil’s automated moderation system that fucked this up, but I wanted everyone to know this was a serious situation. No one should take it lightly.

  I got zero response.

  “Listen, uh,” Thompson said quietly, “I pulled the customer service log.”

  “And?”

  “Well…” He gestured toward the stairwell.

  “What?”

  “It’s Nina. She’s…”

  Everyone was looking at us. Apparently the rest of the team understood the gravity of the situation, had already deduced exactly what happened, even if they didn’t understand the implications it would have for Phantom.

  “Everyone back to work,” I instructed. People returned their attention to their monitors half-heartedly, and I walked toward the stairwell.

  I could hear Nina’s gentle sobs echoing from a couple flights above. I asked her if everything was okay, but she couldn’t stop her jagged breathing. Her face was pressed into her palms; she was weeping with an intensity that I would’ve found cartoonish if I didn’t feel so bad for her.

  “I can’t lose this job,” she finally said.

  “No one said you’re losing your job.”

  “People have been fired for so much less.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like Lion.”

  “Lion showed up to work high four times. Do you know how bad you look when you warn someone that it’s three strikes and somehow you still let it get to four?”

  Nina let out a choked laugh. It felt like progress.

  “It was my fault, though.”

  She walked me through it. When the article broke this morning, Nina used the name of the writer to do a reverse-search through the Phantom user database. She’d assumed the photo had been deleted by one of the newer temps, and had mostly tried to find out who screwed up so she could scold them. To her surprise, it was herself.

  Nina barely remembered handling the flagged message. It was one in a queue of hundreds of messages she had looked at the day before. But she did recall some hesitation around the image. It was a black-and-white photograph from the Vietnam War, wherein the camera captured the execution of a handcuffed Viet Cong soldier at the hands of South Vietnam’s chief of national police. The image was iconic—a Colt .45 just fired, the bullet penetrating the skull of a prisoner.

  She’d hesitated flagging it, but the image had violated our policies for graphic content: regardless of the fact that it was well known, the photo was still violent and barbaric. For a user to send another user a depiction of a murder could be easily understood as a threat of violence. Nina had judged it as such, and moved on to the next image in her customer service queue.

  “It’s a famous photograph,” I said, unhelpfully.

  “Don’t you think I know?” Nina finally looked up at me. Through her tears I could sense anger, though it was unclear toward whom.

  “Then why did you flag the image?”

  “Because there’s nothing in our guidelines that exempts photos of historical significance. It’s still a violent image.”

  Nina was right, of course. We hadn’t specified what to do with art.

  “This is why we have humans handling these requests. A person should be able to identify this picture and understand that this is an edge case. Or at least know that this particular instance is more complicated than what the policies cover.”

  “The point of rules is that they should cover everything!”

  “I still think you should have caught this. You know that when support cases are questionable, we can spend the extra time to talk through them.”

  “But we’re supposed to get through as many cases as quickly as possible,” Nina said. “We have quotas. There are bonuses. We have a fucking leaderboard.”

  I didn’t have a response for this. Again, Nina, even in her state of despair, was thinking clearly, rationally. We’d created an environment that rewarded people for being as efficient as possible, rather than thoughtful.

  “I really can’t lose this job,” Nina said. “I’d have to go home and move back in with my parents. This job is already embarrassing enough as it is.”

  I tried not to take offense.

  “I did everything I was supposed to do. I studied hard. I got good grades. I graduated with fucking honors. And still, not a single job I applied for even bothered to call me back.”

  She explained that she had earned a bachelor’s degree in American history and student debt from an Ivy League school. Her focus was the second half of the twentieth century. She knew everything there was to know about the Vietnam War. Definitely more than I did.

  “Have you heard of the Hamlet Evaluation System?” she asked. “That’s a rhetorical question; no one knows what it is. Which is maybe the point of writing a thesis: to dedicate months and months researching a topic that nobody would ever care about—”

  The talking seemed to be calming her down.

  “—Not
many people realize this but Vietnam was the first war that was believed could be won using machines—”

  What would I report back to Brandon?

  “—General Westmoreland believed in something he dubbed ‘the electronic battlefield,’ that by using a systems-oriented approach, he could more efficiently manage everything in the war—”

  I was confident I could save Nina’s job, but the responsibility ultimately fell on me.

  “—So his strategists devised the Hamlet Evaluation System, which quantified the Americans’ efforts into a series of metrics that could be used to understand how much progress was being made toward winning the war—”

  My team screwed up, so I should take the blame.

  “—The attempts to statistically measure the war effort meant advisors were filling out worksheets based on eighteen different indicators—”

  It crossed my mind that I could lie—protect Nina by saying that it was the fault of Emil’s moderation algorithm, as Brandon had originally suspected.

  “—Most of these were subjective, though, on top of being near-impossible to gauge in the first place, so advisors’ reports always showed progress—”

  But Emil would have access to the logs and could easily dismantle that story.

  “—I mean, it makes sense, right? If you’re under pressure to turn in good news, and no one can really prove otherwise, wouldn’t you just say that everything was going swimmingly?—”

  Still, I could maybe spin it in my favor.

  “—On top of everything, all of this data collected was used not just so the Americans could convince themselves they were winning the war—”

  The needs of Emil’s system pushed my team to resolve tickets at a rate that was untenable.

  “—But so they could also convince the media that they were always making headway—”

  Really, this was all Emil’s fault. I could make that case.

  “It was true because no one could prove it untrue.” Nina paused, as if having a minor revelation. “God, even that is ironic too.”

  I didn’t understand what she meant, but I also knew that it didn’t matter much.

  “Are you even listening to me?”

  I reached over to touch her arm, to comfort her. It was sudden.

  “Really?” Nina pushed me backward. Hard.

  * * *

  —

  UPSTAIRS, BRANDON WAS SCREAMING at Emil and making no effort to hide it. The room had a glass door, and did not keep sound in very well. Everyone at Phantom could hear. Emil was seated, just taking it all in while Brandon berated him. He looked attentive, but still unfazed, which I imagine was making Brandon even angrier.

  I waited for a pause in the conversation. A few minutes passed before there was a lull in Brandon’s yelling. I knocked on the glass. Brandon exhaled and gave me a hand motion that indicated I could come in.

  “We were just discussing the possibility of taking Emil’s moderation system offline, at least until it improves enough that we can feasibly start testing it in the wild.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” I said.

  I sat down at the table. Brandon finally seated himself too.

  “The censored message from the article—that wasn’t flagged by Emil’s algorithm. It was someone on my team.”

  “What?”

  Emil looked surprised too, but didn’t say anything.

  “It was an image—an old war photograph, kind of famous. The moderator identified it as such, but removed it because it still violated our policies about graphic imagery.”

  Emil let out a chuckle—tried to keep it in—a small, satisfied betrayal of his cool indifference.

  Brandon didn’t apologize, only let out a long sigh. Back in levelheaded CEO mode.

  “Emil, go back to your desk. Lucas, lay out all the details.”

  Emil left, and I walked Brandon through what had happened step-by-step. I explained that it wasn’t Nina’s fault. (Brandon had forgotten who she was. “One of our most senior moderators,” I said; when he still didn’t know, I further clarified: “short Indian girl.”) We had set policies that were rigid, and we encouraged consistency rather than flexibility.

  “If you have an entire floor of people making those judgments, why can’t we take things on a case-by-case basis?” Brandon asked.

  What a gift, and Brandon didn’t even know it. If I played it right, I could land a finishing blow to Emil’s algorithm and protect my team.

  “We’ve been treating the customer support team as temporary, and preparing for a future where Emil’s automated moderation system handles all requests. For his system to work, our guidelines need to be consistent—even if it means making the occasional mistake like this.”

  “We can’t make a mistake like this again,” Brandon said. “The press is gonna kill us.”

  “Then maybe an automated future is not what we should be planning for.”

  Brandon sunk back in his chair. It looked like he was considering it.

  “And what kind of changes would we have to make to accommodate this new course we’re charting?”

  I tried to not let the weak nautical reference distract me.

  “Right now, we incentivize everyone to get through as many of these tickets as possible. They’re encouraged to work quickly, not thoughtfully. We hire with high turnaround in mind, so even if we did have people with expertise, we’d expect them to leave with it after only a few months, maybe even weeks. They don’t care about Phantom because we make it clear we don’t care about them.”

  And here’s where I planted my flag: “Make them full-time employees, with salaries and benefits and a stake in the company. Give them a real reason to want this.”

  Brandon started nodding. He said this was a strong case and promised to “run the numbers,” a phrase he always used that I didn’t really believe meant anything. But Brandon seemed to have been listening, maybe even convinced. We talked through several more minute details about how we would change our moderation policies, specifically to avoid cases like this one. Brandon said that the clearest way to illustrate a change publicly was to make an example of someone. I told him that wouldn’t be necessary—I’d hold myself personally responsible.

  “Fine, I trust you,” Brandon said.

  This was the most encouraging thing he had ever said to me.

  I headed downstairs, feeling victorious. If it wasn’t 11 a.m. and I wasn’t at work, I would’ve celebrated with a drink.

  But by the time I had returned to the customer service floor to tell Nina she didn’t have to worry about her job, she was nowhere to be seen. I checked the stairwell again. She wasn’t there. I asked Thompson if he’d seen her.

  “She left.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “No, you don’t get it, man,” Thompson said. “She left.”

  * * *

  —

  “I DIDN’T KNOW YOU had a car.”

  “I barely ever use it,” Jill said. “I mostly keep it around because I love to spend what little money I have on auto insurance. Plus, I love re-parking the car across the street every few days to keep it from getting towed.”

  “At least it gets you out of the house.”

  “God, I was joking but I think you’re right: I might never leave the apartment if I didn’t have this stupid car.”

  With our bags in hand, we walked down the tree-lined street in search of Jill’s car. She’d lost track of where she’d parked it. Somewhere on this block. We looped back a couple times and when we found it, a beat-up 1994 Honda Accord, Jill lifted her hands in mock celebration at the absence of a parking ticket on the dirty windshield.

  After the Friday I’d had, with the negative press around the moderation team, Jill decided that we should get away for the weekend—maybe the most t
houghtful thing anyone had ever done for me. I printed out directions, two pages’ worth. On our way out of Brooklyn, we got caught in stop-and-go traffic headed toward the George Washington Bridge. But once we’d cleared it, it was smooth sailing headed upstate.

  “Do you want to put on some music?” Jill asked, passing me the aux cord.

  “What if we put on some of Margo’s stories?” I suggested. “There are still a bunch I haven’t listened to yet.”

  “Oh, cool. Sure. That’s a good idea.”

  “Do you want to listen to something else?”

  “No, let’s do Margo. For sure.”

  I plugged in the iPod, and it took us the rest of the way there—out of Brooklyn, up I-87, away from the city. We arrived at the house Jill had rented after two and a half easy hours of driving. As we pulled in, Jill joked that her favorite part of going upstate was being able to park wherever the fuck she wanted.

  The exterior of the house was quaint, the interior immaculately adorned by mid-century modern furniture and tasteful art. No gaudy flat-screen television; instead there was a vintage record player with an impressively curated milk crate full of LPs. Similarly, in the bedroom, a meticulous selection of paperback books, nearly all of which, Jill noted, she had read.

  * * *

  —

  JILL HAD MADE DINNER reservations near our place. I wished I’d known ahead of time so I could have packed a nicer shirt, but I made do with the collared one I’d brought. It was wrinkled from being stuffed in my backpack. I spent a few minutes trying to smooth out the wrinkles with my palm. It only sort of worked.

  The outside of the restaurant was innocuous, like an old house. Inside, though, it was something else: dark wood floors—new but made to look old, possibly “reclaimed”; dimly lit by Edison bulbs, their filaments offering more of their wiry figure than functional radiance; small tables paired with big chesterfield couches; a bar with a bartender; a bartender with a vest; at the center, a carefully manicured fireplace below a massive taxidermied head of a buck, his glassy-eyed expression appearing less sad to be mounted on a wall and more bored by what he was forced to look at for eternity.