I smile slowly. ‘Yeah, of course.’
‘Well, that’s what they do. It’s not like their bosses are ever going to know that what they are saying is cool just isn’t. Sometimes it’s hilarious. There’s a couple of fast-food corporations at the moment with these marketing campaigns based around how good fast food is for you, and how good it is for the environment. I’m pretty sure that’s NoCo people. But you can never know for sure.’
‘So you don’t necessarily know who else is in NoCo?’
‘Oh, no. It’s a classic resistance structure. You only know what and who you need to know. Usually, this means that if, like me, you are a local coordinator, you know your members, and then only one person along in the chain. I think of my contact as my next-door neighbour in NoCo. It’s not exactly a hierarchy, it’s more of a circle. There are founders out there, though, somewhere. And there are plans for a big uprising eventually, but that’s a lot of years off. We need to get everyone in place first.’
‘How did you get involved?’ I ask.
‘I was headhunted by PopCo,’ Chloë says. ‘I was working for Greenpeace as a developer on the kids’ area of their website and PopCo got in touch. They wanted someone to go into their new videogames division, someone who could create a game with the theme “saving the environment”. They’d done research and found that children were concerned about the environment, so they looked around for someone they could bring in who’d have the right kind of knowledge. So they got me. It didn’t take me long to realise that PopCo wasn’t as wholesome as its image – not that I ever really thought it was. I mentioned my concerns to someone I used to work with, who had moved on into advertising. She told me about NoCo.’ She laughs. ‘I still think it’s peculiar that PopCo recruited me from Greenpeace. I think there was some sort of odd recruitment policy going on for a while …’
‘It’s all that new management theory,’ I say. ‘I was designing crosswords when they brought me in. I’d never even thought of working in toys.’
‘I think they find that people who actually want to work for them come up with boring ideas,’ Chloë says. ‘In fact, that’s one really interesting thing I’ve found with NoCo. Pretty much all the members here were originally headhunted, or they were working for a small company that PopCo took over. Companies like PopCo want to sell cool stuff to teenagers who don’t take any bullshit. So they bring in people who are, let’s say, a bit cooler than people who would go through the normal application process. And, well, now here we are conspiring to change the world.’
We both laugh.
I start rolling another cigarette. ‘So on a day-to-day basis, you’d do what sorts of things?’ I ask.
‘I do what all the NoCo creatives do,’ she says. ‘I work out ways to hide anti-corporate messages in products.’ She laughs. ‘I believe it’s called propaganda. This is actually one of the biggest areas of NoCo. As you can imagine, we have a lot of film-makers, musicians, artists, designers, videogames people who have joined. These people try to make anti-corporate products within corporate environments. Sometimes they are unsuccessful. Producers and people who control funding can often spot that kind of thing a mile off. Videogames is a key area, however. When you “hide” messages in products, you often find the best hiding places are simply places where powerful people cannot be bothered to look. A film, sure, you can watch it in an hour and a half. But who’s going to play a videogame right through to the end to find out that the hero has become a vegan and the corporate hooligans have been eaten by monsters they created? To get to that message, you’d need to play the game for more than seventy hours, and you’d have to be good at it, too. At the end of The Sphere, we basically tell players the NoCo message. We tell them to Do No Harm, Stop Others Doing Harm and to Do What You Can. But you have to fight the last battle first. Books are another good place for hiding things – everyone has always known that. Powerful people don’t read many books, especially not if they are at all long and complicated. They just say they have read them. There have been some big NoCo films recently, however, and even some NoCo advertising.’
I’m intrigued. ‘What’s NoCo advertising? Just really bad ads?’
‘Well, no. There’s been some bad feeling about NoCo advertising, to be honest. Some of it has backfired badly. One creative team used anti-capitalism as a message and then the brand did really well. Another NoCo team created an ad that was so obviously a spoof. It was for some trainers, and it was all about how great globalisation is. But it was too subtle, and the message didn’t get through at all. One great NoCo success in advertising involved a campaign where the creative team used really shocking social-realist images to advertise clothes. Everyone said, “Bloody hell, it’s a bit much that this company is trying to profit from images of people dying,” and the brand lost market share. It’s pretty well accepted now that this was a NoCo campaign. That was really good. It made people think about the issues and despise the product.’
I know the campaign she means. I always remember wondering how that came into existence and what it was designed to achieve. I never wanted to buy any of the products myself, so it worked.
‘So, say some kid plays The Sphere and thinks that they will try to live according to the messages at the end, they’d be like a member of NoCo but they wouldn’t know it?’ I say.
Chloë sighs. ‘Yeah, sort of. We want to get some “ground-level” members who do know what they’re doing, though. There’s an idea that individual members of NoCo will be able to “sign up” ordinary people who don’t work for corporations – like schoolkids, students, the unemployed – and then act as that person’s contact. They wouldn’t tell anyone who they had signed up but everyone would still be connected. When everyone is connected, and when there are enough of us, we should be able to do some pretty exciting things. For example, those of us who can afford it already buy shares. It’s nice to feel you own a bit of the company you’re fucking up. It gives us options, too. One plan is that we will choose a day to sell all the shares in all the companies in which we have collectively invested. When we are much bigger, we will have “buy nothing” days that we plan in secret. We could send the market haywire. We will send it haywire, and then we will kill it. We will only leave the ethical companies intact. And the coolest thing about it is that we will be able to achieve it from within the market itself. Since we are the workers and the consumers, we have an effect on market forces. We will harness that effect and use it in the most efficient way, that’s all. Thatcher – if she’s still alive – will weep while her free market fucks itself in the arse. And governments won’t be able to do much about it either.’
My mind is racing. So this is the basis for NoCo.
‘We are the new workers,’ Chloë says. ‘The new proletariat, if you like. Our workplaces aren’t factories any more, though, but air-conditioned offices, studios and call centres. But, just as we no longer work with our hands and bodies, or have to grapple with machinery, this revolution won’t be physical. This will start as a revolution of ideas. They teach us branding. Of course, branding is traditionally what happens to animals, slaves, property. Now, of course, the mark is worth more than the object. Corporate money goes into idea people – like us – advertising, marketing, design people. The products are mostly bits of plastic, fabric, dead animal, chemicals, lies. Our job is to make the label on these pieces of nothing mean something to children and teenagers so that they use their money to buy these things so that we can have small flats in London and our bosses can fly first class.’ She gives me the biggest smile yet. ‘But we are quietly doing another job instead, using the tools they gave us.’ She pauses again. ‘So, are you with us?’
‘Oh yes,’ I say. ‘I am with you.’
‘There’s no membership pack, I’m afraid. We have no official documents, no official membership. They can’t abolish us like they tried to abolish unions, because we don’t exist. And they can’t legislate against us because all we are is a group of people not doing
their jobs properly. Sure, they can arrest the kid who paints slogans over the front of his local burger bar. But they can’t arrest someone for coming up with a terrible marketing campaign.’
She’s right. This is a resistance movement based on not doing your job properly. And in this crazy new world of ideas and brands and thoughts, who really knows if you are doing your job properly or not?
‘You said something about my skills,’ I say. ‘About code-breaking and stuff …?’
Chloë nods. ‘Yes, that’s right. NoCo needs to develop some sort of code or cipher to help with communications. We need people inside to work on development. I mentioned that every month I get a communication pack from my “next-door neighbour” in NoCo. This has all sorts of information that I disseminate among the members I have here. But it also requests skills and ideas which, if we have them in our unit, can be fed back along the chain. When they said they needed someone with expertise in coding, I remembered your KidCracker kit. Then we checked you out. If you agree, I’ll feed your details back and you will probably be assigned what we call a “special task”. In other words, you’ll be given the brief to develop something for eventual distribution throughout NoCo.’
I frown. ‘Surely there are people in NoCo who understand basic RSA encryption.’ Chloë looks blank. ‘You know,’ I say. ‘E-mail encryption systems based around huge prime numbers …’
‘But can it work offline?’ she asks.
‘Offline? No. But …’
‘As far as I understand it, we need something that we can stick on billboards and in TV commercials. It’s not going to be an Internet-based thing at all. We think we have many more “ground-level” members than we know about. When we need to coordinate action, this might be a good way of doing it. Or, at a higher level, it could be a good way to pass information around the globe without worrying about it being intercepted.’
‘You want a code that can be stuck up on a billboard anywhere in the world, that NoCo people can understand but the enemy can’t?’ I say. ‘Bloody hell.’
‘Yeah, I can’t get my head around it. But maybe you can, if you give it some thought.’
I think about how information was communicated to SOE agents during the Second World War. After the BBC News bulletin there’d be lots and lots of ‘Personal Messages’. Some of them really were personal messages, usually in code, designed to make sense to one listener out there. Some were confirmations: coded replies to agents’ requests or communications. Some were just made up to confuse the Germans. You never knew which was which. My grandparents said that listening to these gobbledegook messages was one of the most interesting things about the war. It was a kind of poetry, they said. Of course, when my grandfather was dropped behind enemy lines, the poetry took on a rather more urgent meaning.
What Chloë is asking is difficult, almost impossible, but I know I am going to have a go at cracking it. It excites me. Sitting here now on my corporate bed in this corporate concentration camp (where you come, literally, to concentrate), I feel a warmth inside me that I haven’t felt since I was a child. I remember the day my grandfather asked me to help with the Voynich Manuscript. This is like that but more so. To be honest, I feel like I have just fallen into a very exciting film, where life and death don’t matter as much as defeating the enemy. Or maybe I am in a videogame with my friends and my sword and my spells. For most of my adult life, I have attempted challenges for fun, as a kind of leisure activity. Even my job felt like some crossword puzzle. And although it was nice filling in the blanks and making my bosses happy, well, this is just so much better than that. Even the mathematics of this adds up. You can get huge, thriving patterns on John Horton Conway’s Life game, patterns that keep changing but seem that they will never die. But sometimes, you can give life to one new cell and the whole thing terminates a few moves later.
A code that could be widely published but only understood by NoCo people? It sounds impossible. But there must be a way. Since e-mail encryption became easy to do and impossible to break, there hasn’t been such a push towards new forms of cryptography. The ball is in the cryptanalysts’ court. Once they work out how to break RSA, then it’ll be up to the cryptographers to invent something new. Most people believe that the breakthrough for crypt-analysts will come either with the invention of the quantum computer, or work coming out of research on the Riemann Hypothesis. If someone worked out how to predict primes, the Internet would crumble in a day. There’d be no e-commerce, no secure sites, no credit-card transactions. I know for a fact that big banks and credit-card companies employ people specifically to watch what is going on in the mathematical community. If you were on the verge of this kind of breakthrough in prime-number research, would you turn around one day and find a bullet going through your head? Probably. People make billions of dollars out of the fact that we don’t know how to predict primes. I wonder, not for the first time, what my grandmother would have made of this new world, where her primes are like vast corporate diamonds. When she died, no one apart from a few academics used e-mail. No one really imagined that less than ten years later, we’d all be dating and shopping and even living online. What would she have made of the virtual worlds? I doubt she could even have imagined them.
Are there mathematicians in NoCo? I hope so.
‘Tell them I’ll do it,’ I say to Chloë.
She grins. ‘Fantastic.’
On the radio, a drum and bass version of the Tarantella is playing. I remember reading that a folk remedy for the bite of the tarantula spider involves getting a passing troupe of musicians to come and play the Tarantella, while the victim of the bite dances the venom out. I feel tired now. I might need more coffee.
‘You won’t be the only person working on the problem, of course,’ she says. ‘But if you do come up with something, I will feed your results along the line and we’ll see what happens. At the very least, we will want to use whatever you come up with in the local organisation here at PopCo. As you can see by my attempts to contact you, it’s not very easy.’
‘How many NoCo people are there at PopCo?’
‘In PopCo Europe, which I coordinate, oh, about 200.’
‘200! Bloody hell. I thought it was just you, Esther, Ben, Hiro and a couple of others.’
‘We are getting quite big, now,’ Chloë says. ‘And you know what? I really think we are going to win. People are coming over to us all the time. I heard about one thing – you don’t often hear about things like this, but somehow the information got through. You know all this offshoring that’s going on with call centres at the moment?’
I nod. It seems to be like everything else. Any job that isn’t connected with ideas, accounting, management, marketing or face-to-face retail is being moved offshore at a startling rate. It’s what happens in a global economy. Someone works out that an Indian call centre can be run more cheaply than one in Britain, and bang! Before you know it, the English one is closed down and suddenly you are in the odd position of calling a number to book a train and knowing that the person you are speaking to is thousands of miles away. I heard a programme about this on Radio 4. Now I suddenly wonder about retail assistants. If we move into a virtual economy, will their jobs go, too? Imagine if you could order anything you wanted online, and luxury branded items became things you bought for your avatar, not yourself? It doesn’t take an economics degree to work out who the online retail assistants would be. They’d be people who have the lowest cost of living in their real-world environment and can therefore work for the lowest price. What would we become then? A nation of creatives, truck drivers and postal workers?
‘Offshoring scares me,’ I say.
‘Well, NoCo got into the Indian call centres pretty quickly. When a group of call-centre workers in Liverpool lost their jobs, they just phoned up and spoke to the Indian workers and became friends. One of the Indian workers was already in NoCo, and organised resistance at the call centre. There was one week where, on this particular call centre, which handled
directory-enquiry services, they gave out wrong numbers something like 60 per cent of the time. No one wants to use them, now. It’s all connected.’ Chloë rubs her eyes. ‘Imagine the day when there are more of us in corporations than there are of them. We could melt it down in a day. I’ve often thought about how fantastic it would be if, on a particular day, someone gave the signal and we just shut the world down. Imagine, all over the world, accounts people transferring millions into housing projects in poverty-stricken towns, or making huge donations to workers’ pension funds and paying them out immediately, because of a ‘mistake’; workers deleting their company’s files, losing passwords, shredding documents, selling shares, closing down public transport systems. At the moment, someone calculated that we could cost them something like 75 billion dollars on one day of calculated action. That potential grows every day. Of course, a lot of people argue that the collapse should happen slowly and organically, not overnight. If the big corporations go bankrupt overnight there would be severe chaos. We don’t necessarily want that. We don’t want what the enemy calls “collateral damage”. We don’t want to affect organic farms and hospitals, for example.’
For some reason I find myself thinking of the Emperor’s New Clothes. I think about how the weakness of all the big corporations nowadays is that they have to employ people to think, and thinking is everything. Perhaps once, say in the button factory in which my father worked, you could get rid of the workers and still have something of value left: the raw materials, the machines, the design of the object you were making. But the things that have value today are the invisible ideas and the marketing plans and the logos and labels that are created on invisible machinery in our minds. We own the means of production – our minds – and we can use our brains to produce whatever we want.
‘Why is the group called NoCo?’ I ask suddenly. ‘How does that work in, say, non English-speaking countries?’
PopCo Page 50