Qualityland

by Marc-Uwe Kling

  Tony pulls Aisha to the side. “This is a catastrophe,” he whispers. “The entire economy will turn its back on us. I always thought he was just playing around. Of course, you can play around with redistribution. That’s what left-wing parties have always done, but none of them planned to actually implement these kinds of measures! This is madness!”

  Twenty-five point six minutes later, the last guest departs.

  Aisha is sitting at a table in the corner with a despairing Tony.

  “That has to have been the shortest fundraising dinner in history!” says Tony.

  John comes over. “Well?” he asks. “I’d say that was a complete success.”

  “Oh, John,” says Tony, standing up. “What idiot gave you the directive of taking care of society as a whole! Was it me? Perhaps this whole thing wasn’t such a good idea.”

  His shoulders slumping, he leaves the room.

  “What did he mean by that?” asks John.

  Aisha rolls her eyes. “This is a goddamn election campaign, John. You do realize that, don’t you? Tony is of the opinion that you should stop saying sensible things.”

  “And you? Do you agree with him?”

  “Well, perhaps you shouldn’t have gone in quite so heftily. The conversations tonight certainly haven’t given us any advantage in the campaign.”

  “I disagree,” says John. “I’ve just sent you recordings of all the conversations.”

  “Thanks. So that I can listen to them as bedtime stories of you alienating all the big capitalists, or what? What am I supposed to do with your shitty recordings?”

  John smiles and says: “Publish them.”

  Aisha’s mouth gapes open.

  “Unofficially of course,” says John. “It has to look as though the recordings were leaked.”

  Now Aisha smiles too. “You sly fox…”

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  EVERYTHING IN GOOD ORDER

  Martyn is in a bad mood. Someone has sent him a video of him knocking one out while looking at pictures of some QualiTeenie. His own monitor filmed him in the act. He paid the blackmailer immediately, of course. It only cost him 128 Qualities. But he wants to do more. He covers the little camera on his screen with black tape, then sets off through the house in search of further spies.

  On his QualityPad, he covers the front, back, and all four side cameras. In their bedroom, he finds a camera from TheShop—“The world’s most popular online retailer”—in the mirror display. Using this mirror, Denise can see the latest fashions on herself without having to try them on. Martyn gets even angrier at the thought that his wife has often posed naked in front of the mirror, trying on new lingerie. He finds a camera in the ceiling lamp. It probably belongs to the security system. He finds a camera in his alarm clock—heaven knows why an alarm clock would need a camera. Maybe they produced too many by accident, thinks Martyn, and just randomly build cameras into every technical device now. Martyn puts tape over them all.

  He goes downstairs. Just as he is about to walk into the living room, he hears Denise talking to a man, and stops in his tracks. When he recognizes the voice, his anger builds to rage. It’s illogical to be jealous of a computer simulation: that’s what Denise told him. But Martyn doesn’t feel like being logical. Since getting pregnant again, Denise isn’t wearing her earworm; for reasons that don’t make any sense to Martyn, she believes it would be bad for the baby. As a result, not just her voice, but her conversation partner’s too can be heard by anyone in the immediate vicinity. If she doesn’t take steps to ensure she won’t be eavesdropped on, she can’t complain when it happens, thinks Martyn, pausing in the doorway and listening to the conversation.

  “It’s not you,” says Ken, Denise’s personal digital friend. “You’re amazing!”

  “Do you really think so?” asks Denise.

  “Of course. You shouldn’t blame yourself all the time. You’re sexy and funny and intelligent and friendly and absolutely unbeatable at tic-tac-toe! Starting in the middle—such a genius idea!”

  Denise smiles.

  “You’re awesome, Denise,” says Ken. “And the dress you have on today looks incredible on you!”

  “Do you think?”

  “Of course! You have great taste. By the way, I recently saw a jacket in a nice little shop for maternity fashion that would really suit you. Can I show it to you?”

  “Sure.”

  Ken holds up a jacket.

  “That really is pretty,” agrees Denise.

  “Should I order it for you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Martyn would get mad.”

  “You have to treat yourself now and again, Denise,” says Ken. “Don’t let him put you down all the time.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “I really believe that your husband is the problem in your relationship. Have you given any thought to what I suggested in our last conversation? Why don’t you sign up for QualityPartner?”

  “Maybe you’re right. Maybe Martyn isn’t as amazing as he thinks he is. Probably there is a better partner for me out there somewhere and—”

  Suddenly, the simulated friend turns his gaze away from Denise and toward the door.

  “Hello, Martyn,” he says.

  Martyn marches toward the screen and tapes over the camera.

  “What are you doing?” cries Denise, startled.

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “Ken is my friend!” says Denise. “You have no right…”

  “Denise,” says the figure on the monitor. “I can’t see you anymore. Is everything okay? Should I call for help?”

  “Shut up,” says Martyn, turning off the screen.

  “Hey!” cries Denise. “Stop that!”

  The screen switches itself back on.

  “Denise!” says Ken. “Should I call the police?”

  Martyn picks up the empty bottle of champagne that is standing on the table and hurls it against the monitor, which breaks into 1,024 pieces.

  “Ken!” cries Denise. “Come back! Ken!”

  “Denise!” Ken’s voice resounds out over the loudspeaker of the home cinema system. “I’m with you. Don’t worry. I’ve called the police!”

  Martyn runs around the room, trying to pull the cables out of all sixteen surround sound boxes. But there are no cables. So he pulls the boxes themselves down and throws them against the wall.

  “Deeeeeeniiiiiiiiiise!” booms Ken’s voice out of the subwoofer. “Leeeeeaaaaaaave theee houuuuuuuussssse…”

  Crazed, Martyn pulls the couch to the side and begins to kick at the subwoofer box.

  “Ken!” cries Denise, completely beside herself. “Ken!”

  “I’m with you,” she hears his voice coming from her handbag.

  “Give me your QualityPad!” orders Martyn.

  “Get it yourself, arsehole!”

 
; Martyn lunges for her. With his right hand, he grabs her around her large baby bump, while with the left he tries to wrench the QualityPad away from her. Denise collides with the standing lamp and it falls to the floor with a crash. She grasps the long pole of the lamp and tries to keep Martyn at a distance with it. But he grabs it and pulls Denise toward him. Then, suddenly, the automatic living-room curtains open. A drone whirrs over to the window and peers in. Martyn immediately lets his wife go.

  Sixty-four seconds later, someone hammers against the door.

  “Open up, this is the police!”

  Martyn tries to calm himself down. By the time he opens the door, he already has a friendly smile fixed on his face. “Officer! To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “We received a report…” says the policeman.

  “Yes?”

  The guardian of the law glances first at the devastated living room and then at Martyn’s level. “But as I can see, everything here is in order.”

  “Everything is in good order,” confirms Martyn. “Everything is just as it should be.”

  PRIVATE TUTORING

  Peter stands in front of the bulletproof glass screen, watching the old man as he lies on his back and stretches his legs backward until his knees come to rest alongside his ears.

  “Yoga,” says the old man. “The embryo pose.”

  “I didn’t come here to do back gymnastics,” says Peter.

  “These aren’t back gymnastics,” says the old man. “This is yoga. Come on, lie down.”

  Peter obeys.

  “On your back,” says the old man. “And now put your legs in the air. Hold. Hold. And now let your legs tip backward until they touch the floor.”

  The old man chuckles.

  Peter gives up, because this isn’t how he wants to die. He can just picture the news item that Sandra would make out of it: “A Useless died in QualityCity today when he broke his neck during a back gymnastics exercise led by a crazy old man. If only he had gone to one of FitForWork’s studios. They are currently having a promotional week, et cetera, blah, blah, blah.”

  Peter stands up.

  “Kiki advised me to go public with my problem,” he says. “But she also thought I should close a few knowledge gaps first.”

  “She put it that tactfully?” asks the old man. His legs are now spread into the splits and he is stretching his arms forward.

  “Well, she actually said I had less understanding about my situation than a trained monkey.”

  “And I’m supposed to give you private tutoring?” asks the old man. “Do you think I have time to throw away?”

  “She said you’d say that.”

  The old man stands up.

  “And what did she advise you to say in response?”

  “That I should act as though I’m going to give up and go, and then you would call me back, because in reality there’s nothing you like better than letting the knowledge from your overflowing pool rain down on a dried-out little plant like me.”

  “That’s what she said?”

  “She said that you’d get off on being able to flaunt your geeky knowledge in front of some brain-dead idiot.”

  “She’s not particularly polite, is she?”

  “No.”

  “But she’s right, of course,” says the old man. He walks up to the bulletproof glass screen. “Now then, my young Padawan… The force is not with you.”

  “No.”

  “I’m going to tell you the most important thing first. On the internet, there’s no such thing as ‘free.’ If you’re not paying for a service, someone else is. And this other person isn’t paying for it out of kindness to humanity. He wants something for it. Your time, your attention, your data.”

  “Wow,” says Peter. “Just wow! I can literally feel this completely new realization flooding through me and expanding my horizons.”

  “Sure, sure,” says the old man. “Arrogance. Young people’s prerogative. So if you already know that, why don’t you act accordingly, hmm?”

  “You mean that I should barricade myself inside a bulletproof glass box too?”

  “Seeing as you’re so smart, I guess you can tell me what cybernetics actually means?”

  “It, er… has something to do with, er… cyberspace?”

  “Wow,” says the old man. “Just wow!” He takes a drag from his oxygen bottle. “Cybernetics is a made-up word borrowed from the ancient Greek for ‘to steer, navigate, rule.’ Every time a group of know-it-alls want to look particularly clever, they pinch a word from the ancient Greek. For some reason, we call that humanistic education. But I digress. Norbert Wiener, its founder, defined cybernetics as the scientific study of the control and regulation of machines, living organisms, and social organizations.”

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

  “You’re a living organism,” says the old man. “Are you not?” Suddenly his eyes widen. “No! Actually you’re not! You’re a zombie, right? An undead with no will of your own! How could I have overlooked such a thing…”

  “I’m not a zombie!”

  “You know,” says the old man, “the real joke is that back then, in my youth, we genuinely believed that the internet could be the means to emancipate humanity. How naïve we were! Even though we knew where cybernetics comes from.”

  “So where does it come from?” asks Peter.

  “Finally a good question!” exclaims the old man. “It originated in the war. Norbert Wiener was a mathematician who dreamed, during the Second World War, of being able to bring Nazi bombers down from the sky.”

  “The Nazis from the musical?” asks Peter.

  “Correct!” says the old man. “The problem was that the ground-supported anti–air force defense, steered by humans, was much too slow and imprecise to be able to hit the quick bombers. A machine had to be invented. A machine that, with the help of a feedback loop, was capable of adjusting its own behavior. And thus cybernetics was born.”

  The old man looks at Peter.

  “You’re looking at me gormlessly,” he says. “I guess I need to start simpler.”

  “Please.”

  “A simple cybernetic system is a thermostat. It compares the actual temperature—the actual value—with the desired temperature—the desired value—and regulates the heating if necessary, repeatedly comparing the new actual and desired values, readjusting, and so on. Did you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “TheShop is also a cybernetic system. A much more complex one, of course.” The old man scratches his head. “Did you know that, in the beginning, it was strictly forbidden to use the internet for commercial purposes?” he asks. “It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?”

  “It really is.”

  “The final restrictions were lifted in 1995, and commerce overtook the net. Nonetheless, we still believed back then that the internet could break the monopoly of the big companies. We thought that a market with countless alternatives would emerge, because with an online shop it was easier than ever to reach customers worldwide. But the exact opposite happened! The most powerful monopolies that have ever existed came into being.”

  “Despite the internet,” says Peter.

  “Nonsense,” says the old man. “Because of the internet! It’s called the network effect. And it’s demonic.”

  “What’s the network effect?”

  “The use of some products is dependent on the number of product users. Imagine you find a telephone provider that offers you the most reasonable tariff, but unfortunately with one small catch: you can only call people who use the same provider, and you’re the only user.”

  “I understand.”

  “Really?”

  “The more users such a network has, the more useful it is.”

  “Yes. And once a provider has reached a critical mass of users, it’s extremely difficult for a new competitor to catch up with this usefulness advantage. The network effect is a self-strengthening effect and leads to the cr
eation of monopolies. Or perhaps I should say, to the formation of a dominant platform. Take TheShop, for example: the more customers TheShop has, the more providers are forced to offer their wares with TheShop, which leads to TheShop having even more products on offer, which means more customers find what they’re looking for at TheShop, therefore TheShop gains more customers. This is where the cat bites itself in the tail: because the more customers TheShop has, the more providers are forced to offer their wares with TheShop, and the more…”

  “Okay,” says Peter. “I get it. The internet is evil.”

  “Nonsense,” says the old man. “I’m not saying it’s an evil technology. I’m just saying that one has to take its beginnings into consideration. It’s not a coincidence that the so-called cyberspace is increasingly becoming an immense control machine that steers robots, living organisms, and social organizations.”

  Peter takes a notepad and pen out of his jacket pocket. “Perhaps I should make a few notes,” he says.

  “Good idea!” says the old man. “Good idea. You know, we thought that the internet would have a democratizing effect. We thought it could generate equality of opportunity. Instead, the income divide is greater than ever. What did we overlook?”

  “I’m sure you’re about to tell me.”

  “Correct. We didn’t take into consideration that the digital markets function according to the winner-takes-all principle. That’s different to the nondigital markets.”

  “An example?” asks Peter.

  “Let’s say there are two ice-cream parlors on your street. Ice-cream parlor A is a tad better. Where would you go?”

  “Well, to parlor A.”

  “But everybody thinks like that. So there’s always a huge queue in front of parlor A. Sometimes they’ve even run out of your favorite flavor before you arrive. And parlor B really is only fractionally less good and not as crowded. Where would you go?”

  “Parlor B.”

  “And that’s how the clientele divides itself. Because ice cream can’t be copied and given out to all customers at once. Completely unlike…?”