Qualityland

by Marc-Uwe Kling

  Comments

  » by Tino Trucker:

  We tried to launch a similar attack at the Fastest Food branch here in QualityCity, but then some guy turned up out of nowhere with, well, how should I put it, an army of Kung Fu robots or something. They really kicked the crap out of us.

  » by Mike Stuntman:

  That’s right, you wimps! Fastest Food is under the protection of the Kung Fu Robot Mafia of QC. Stay away! We have fists of iron!

  » by Mascha Organic-Shop-Owner:

  I’m eating the Sugarburger at Fastest Food right now. Totally delicious. Fastest Food really is my favorite burger chain. You should all go to Fastest Food.

  WHAT’S IT GOING TO BE?

  Denise gently caresses her large baby bump.

  “And? Can you tell us yet what it’s going to be?”

  The gynecologist looks at the monitor.

  “Yes, of course. If you want to know. Some parents prefer to leave it as a surprise.”

  “We want to know, don’t we, Martyn?”

  Martyn mutters something incomprehensible, but nods. It’s been a long day. He’s tired and wants to get this over with.

  “So, what’s it going to be?” asks Denise.

  The doctor clears his throat. Then he says: “She’ll probably be a drug-dependent sex worker, estranged from her family, with occasionally reoccurring depression and a particular fondness for old romantic comedies starring Jennifer Aniston.”

  “Excuse me?” asks Denise in shock.

  The doctor turns the monitor toward her.

  “Here’s the projected life cycle. As you can see, the problems will begin in Education Level II. She will have to repeat a year two times. By thirteen, she will make her first suicide attempt. But because we know about it in advance, we can intercept that. First sexual intercourse at fifteen. An older man. Presumably one of her teachers. A father figure. Then, at sixteen—”

  “Well, I didn’t want to know in that much detail,” says Denise.

  “Of course, this is only a projection based on the available data. It could turn out differently. But this life cycle is the most likely.”

  “Is it too late for an abortion?” asks Martyn.

  “Honestly!” Denise hisses at her husband. Then she turns back to the doctor. “What kind of data is that anyway? There must be some mistake!”

  “The data is compiled from the tests we carried out on your child, and from all the information about external life circumstances.”

  “And by that you mean us?” asks Denise. “We’re the external life circumstances?”

  “Listen,” says the doctor. “I don’t know how the system calculates its prognosis either. I just know that they turn out to be correct with astounding frequency.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, you don’t know how the system works!” cries Denise, outraged.

  “I only know some of the particulars,” says the doctor. “For example, babies with hormone-chipped siblings are often predicted to have dysfunctional familial relationships. And this gene here on chromosome four, this is often found amongst substance addicts. Where the liking for romantic comedies with Jennifer Aniston comes from, I have no idea. But then again, it’s a complete mystery to me how anyone can like Jennifer Aniston films. Have you ever seen one of those old flicks? They’re really terrible. Unfortunately my wife likes them. It must be some new trend.”

  “Wonderful,” says Martyn. His own genes on chromosome four are clamoring to him to get out of the doctor’s practice as quickly as possible and go get a beer.

  “We can do something about that, of course,” says the doctor. “We can try to reprogram the gene sequence, but…”

  “Let me guess,” says Martyn. “It’s not cheap.”

  “But worth every cent,” says the doctor.

  “You know how it is,” says Denise. “Standard children have no chance in today’s job market.”

  “All this newfangled crap!” exclaims Martyn. “It’s all completely unnecessary. Look at me. I wasn’t upgraded as a baby.”

  “Exactly” is Denise’s only response.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Exactly?” Martyn flares. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” says Denise. “Only that it’s true that you weren’t upgraded.”

  “Now and then, evolution gets lucky,” says the doctor, trying to suck up to Martyn, “like it did with you. But that’s very rare, believe you me.”

  Martyn hesitates.

  “And of course there’s the third possibility, which you touched upon already,” says the doctor, before drawing his index finger across his throat.

  “Honestly!” cries Denise indignantly.

  “Oh, excuse me,” says the doctor apologetically. “It didn’t say in your profile that you’re religious.”

  “I’m not,” sniffles Denise. “Do you have to be religious nowadays to not want your child killed?”

  “Well, at your high level, terminations are socially undesired anyway and therefore relatively expensive since the last health reform,” says the doctor. “The Useless, on the other hand, can terminate their children free of charge. Fully subsidized. Did you know that? If you ask me, they should even be paid to do it.”

  “We discussed that in parliament,” says Martyn. “But the experiences from QuantityLand 1 with abortion awards spoke against it. The Useless there started knocking up their women continuously in order to constantly cash in with the awards. The incentive was done away with after nine months and sixteen days.”

  “I didn’t know that,” says the doctor.

  “Even our system gets abused,” says Martyn. “Some of your colleagues pay Useless women pregnancy awards in order to be able to carry out a higher number of fully subsidized abortions.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Some doctors are allegedly so benevolent that they even take on the impregnation themselves, free of charge.”

  “Be that as it may,” says the gynecologist. “At your level, an abortion would cost almost as much as the genetic upgrade.”

  Martyn sighs. He hates doctors. All they want is money. Even if they have to kill you in the process. He wonders whether it had always been that way.

  “We’re doing the upgrade,” says Denise.

  The doctor looks at Martyn. Martyn is lost in his thoughts. If they really had to have a second kid, why hadn’t they just ordered one? There are some exceptional babies on offer at TheShop from certified high-quality genetic material. They’re not exactly a bargain, admittedly, but you save yourself nine months of the fat belly and the throwing up and the blood and slime at the end. The babies are delivered ready to use. Clean! With accessories! A smart cart pram, which constantly measures the baby’s temperature, breathing, and nappy status. The things even give practical tips. Presumably along the lines of: “Your baby is crying. Say something calming.”

  “Martyn,” Denise drags him out of his thoughts. “We’re doing the upgrade. Okay?”

  Martyn gives the only answer he knows his wife will accept: “Okay.”

  PETER’S PROBLEM

  The old man sits down and stares at a screen. There is a strange object in front of the monitor. It consists of six rows of predominantly quadratic buttons, on which numbers and letters can be seen. However, these figures seem to make no sense, read neither from right-to-left nor from left-to-right.

  “It’s a keyboard,” says the old man.

  “I know,” says Peter.

  He does actually know, even if he has never used a real one himself. The old man begins to hammer away on the keyboard with all ten fingers, and so speedily that Peter is unable to follow.

  “Now, let’s see,” he murmurs.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Hacking into TheShop’s customer database.”

  “Is that possible?” asks Peter. “Aren’t there any security precautions?”

  The old man just laughs.

  “But what if you get caught?”

  T
he old man shoots a frantic look over his shoulder. Then he breathes a sigh of relief.

  “What is it?” asks Peter.

  “Nothing, I just had the feeling that my mother was creeping up from behind.”

  The old man stares back at the screen. After three minutes and five seconds, Peter gets bored and asks: “Why are you sitting behind this glass screen, by the way?”

  “Perhaps you heard about the biological terror attack in QuantityLand 9,” says the old man.

  Peter shakes his head.

  “A group of racist scientists developed an artificial virus that afflicts only humans with dark pigments. It was a catastrophe. Over 100,000 people died before the government managed to manufacture an antidote.”

  “But that must have been huge in the news,” says Peter. “Why didn’t I hear anything about it?”

  “Some algorithm was obviously of the opinion that it wouldn’t interest you.”

  “What does all that have to do with the glass box?”

  “I’m keeping strangers from accessing my DNA.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing can make its way out of the box. Any hair, any fragment of beard stubble would enable my enemies to sequence my DNA. And it’s not only possible to construct a virus that targets entire groups of the population or perhaps even all humans—it’s also possible to construct a virus that targets just one single DNA. Mine, for example. But for that the arseholes would have to get a DNA sample from me first. And they won’t get one!”

  “You’re paranoid,” says Peter.

  “I’m not. I’m just better informed than you.”

  “So you do have enemies?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Suddenly the old man smacks the palm of his hand against the side of the monitor.

  “Aha. Here you are,” he says. He reads some of the numbers on the screen. “That’s strange.”

  “What?” asks Peter.

  “For analytical purposes, TheShop puts each of its customers into a specific drawer, a so-called cluster. For example, customers from cluster 4096 are white men over 64, who suffer from delusions of grandeur, have at least two private jets, and have wives who are more than thirty-two years younger than them from one of the QuantityLands.”

  “And?”

  “You’re in cluster 8191: black postmenopausal single women, with no independent income, a liking for old comedies starring Jennifer Aniston, and at least two cats.”

  “But that’s ridiculous!” exclaims Peter.

  The old man studies him. “Hmm, you’re right. Now that you mention it.” He laughs. “Oh. No. Sorry. My mistake.”

  Once again, he smacks the palm of his right hand against the side of the clunky monitor.

  The display flickers briefly.

  “Here it is,” says the old man. “You’re in category 8192: white men under the age of 32. With low income, slightly racist tendencies, small penises, and an interest in large sporting events.”

  “But that’s not true either!” cries Peter. “Everyone who knows me knows, that I… erm…”

  “That you hate large sporting events?”

  “Yes, amongst other things.”

  There is a bottle of oxygen next to the old man. He puts the mask over his mouth and nose and takes a deep breath.

  “So is Kiki right?” asks Peter. “My profile isn’t correct?”

  The old man nods. “And the problem is bigger than you think. This isn’t about your lilac eel vibrator.”

  “Dolphin,” says Peter. “It’s a dolphin. And it’s pink.”

  The old man chuckles.

  “Why is the problem bigger than I think?” asks Peter.

  “The net morphs.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “It means that every individual experiences a different digital world. It’s not only search results, advertising, news, films, and music that are personalized. The offers, the prices, even the design and structure of the net change according to who enters this magical world of mirrors, and even according to how they’re feeling. If you’re horny, you might see offers for highly erotic lady bots everywhere, or if you’re feeling low, they want to foist psycho pharmaceuticals on to you, and if you’re afraid, they’ll offer you the blueprints of a self-printing pistol. You must have heard the saying, ‘Everyone lives in their own world.’ In the digital space, that’s not just a cliché. It’s literally true. You are living in your own world. A world that constantly customizes itself to you.”

  The old man closes his eyes and immediately begins to snore. Peter is confused initially, then knocks against the glass. The old man opens his eyes and continues to speak without losing his thread. “We can’t make the mistake here that all the others make. The net doesn’t customize itself to you, of course, but to the image it has of you. Your profiles. Do you see your problem now? If your profiles are incorrect…”

  “Then I’m living in the wrong world,” murmurs Peter.

  “Then you’re living in the wrong world,” repeats the old man. He chuckles.

  “And as Adorno said: ‘Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.’ Although I’m sure he wasn’t thinking about the internet when he said that…”

  “Who’s Adorno?” asks Peter.

  “A philosopher. You do know what a philosopher is?”

  “Yes. Someone who tries to solve problems through logic alone.”

  The old man chuckles. “What you just described actually sounds more like a computer.”

  “But I can’t be the only person this is happening to,” cries Peter in agitation. “Why is no one talking about this?”

  “Well, perhaps they are, but not in your newsfeed,” says the old man. “Or perhaps it’s down to the fact that most people don’t even realize that their profiles are wrong. They simply become what the system believes them to be.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “That the algo-rhythm’s gonna get you!” says the old man, doing an awkward dance. It’s an embarrassing sight, and he soon realizes that and stops. He holds the keyboard up to the glass. “Qwertyuiop,” he says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Qwertyuiop,” says the old man. “Do you know why the letters on every keyboard are arranged so strangely?”

  “No idea.”

  “The first keyboards were created for typewriters that operated with so-called type levers. These levers unfortunately had a predilection for linking up. That’s why the printer C. L. Sholes came up with the clever idea of separating the most frequently occurring sequences of letters as far as possible from one another.”

  “What does that have to do with me?” asks Peter.

  “Do computers have typing levers?” asks the old man.

  “No.”

  “So why do our keyboards still use Qwertyuiop and not, for example, the supposedly much more ergonomic Dvorak keyboard arrangement?”

  “Probably because too many people learned to type on an old keyboard.”

  “Correct. We call that path dependence. Decisions made in the past about what direction to go in make it difficult to change the path in the present. Even if you’re on the wrong one. Now do you see what that has to do with you?”

  “I’m afraid I do. But it’s not my decisions that are forcing me onto this predetermined path.”

  “That’s correct,” says the old man. “If the system believes you’re a loser who spends his days eating junk food and watching trashy films, it will suggest trashy films and drown you in junk-food advertising. It will match you with a partner who it places at an equally low level to you. If you’re looking for an apartment, it will only suggest dives that it has defined as being suitable for you, and if you look for job advertisements, it will withhold the placements it doesn’t consider you to be qualified for. If you should manage to apply for these anyway, the algorithms will filter you out long before your portfolio appears on a personnel manager’s desk. If someone is only offered the options of a Useless, it’s very dif
ficult not to be a Useless. A profile is a self-fulfilling prophecy. A self-fulfilling identity. Of course, it works the other way around too, for example if the system considers you to be a complete stud. But I don’t think that’s your problem.”

  “No.” Peter scratches his head. “Because my profiles are wrong, I’m living in the wrong world.”

  “Yes,” says the old man. “That’s your problem. That’s Peter’s problem. Hey, that sounds good. That should be the name for it. I hereby baptize this problem, Peter’s Problem.” The old man chuckles. “It makes me happy to know that I’ve just created a term that will stand the test of time. A formulation that will outlive its creator and live on in colloquial language. Soon people will say things like, ‘I’m up to my neck in Peter’s Problem.’ The psychiatrist will tell his patient, ‘What you have is a clear case of Peter’s Problem.’ Or a father will scold his little daughter, ‘Don’t make such a fuss. You’re acting as if you had Peter’s Problem!’ Maybe the president will even say one day, ‘All of us here have Peter’s Problem!’”

  “Because my profiles are wrong, I’m living in the wrong world,” repeats Peter.

  “Oh, even if all the profiles were right, the algorithms would still discriminate against us.”

  “But why?” asks Peter. “Shouldn’t machines be objective?”

  “Nonsense,” says the old man. “Take the following example: a human resources algorithm learns by searching through numerous decisions that human personnel managers have made before him. It establishes that black-skinned applicants are rarely employed. So it’s only logical that it won’t even invite black-skinned applicants to interview. Do you understand? If you put prejudices into an algorithm, prejudices come out.”

  “A racist machine?”

  “Worse. A racist machine concealed beneath a cloak of objectivity.” The old man chuckles. “When I was even younger,” he says, “Microsoft released a chat bot called Tay, which was supposed to learn from the interactions of its conversation partners. And it did. After just sixteen hours, Microsoft withdrew the bot from the net because it denied the Holocaust.”