GOOGLAG
A Comedy of Despair
Let’s all go live in the GOOGLAG!
Hey you guys, AWESOME incoming! It’s me again, Fagin
Lautner, and in this week’s DoWhatULuv
I’ll be telling you guys about the Digital Entrepreneurship Gulag, an awesome
and creative new social empowerment initiative powered by Facebook, Google and
LinkedIn, undertaken in partnership with the Government of Ireland. The DEG,
known affectionately by locals here as the “Googlag,” is happening right now in
Ireland, Europe. GET THERE, peeps!!
Above:
Awesome limited edition ironic brochure for the DEG, made by DEG graduates
using charming retro materials. I have three of these to give away to the first
three people to post this story on Facebook (you lucky things)!
It’s a
Tuesday in Dublin, Ireland, and the rain is hitting the cobbles hard. Despite
this, people are walking around without rain jackets, chatting to each other in
what I guess is English (at first I thought it was Gaelic – oh, me!), seemingly
unperturbed by the weather. I’m in Temple Bar, the city’s cultural heart, and
to be honest my head is hurting pretty bad as I seriously hit the town hard last night (check my Instagram – such
lolz!) and even Californian sunshine is hard for me to take when my inner me is
feeling tender (you can see live updates on the spiritual condition of my inner
me by following me on Twitter, #FaginSoul). But today my excitement cuts right through that
headache, because I’m going to be talking to some of the people behind the DEG,
one of the most exciting digital social inclusion programmes ‘this side of the
pond.’
Founded
right after the 2012 Web summit, the DEG is a pioneering initiative to get some
of the city’s most underprivileged – the homeless, the drug addled – off the
streets, out of crime, and into some of the city’s most desirable workplaces –
LinkedIn, Facebook, and even (you guessed it) Google itself.
The DEG is a
two stage process. First, schools in areas which experience particularly high
levels of social deprivation and which produce particularly high numbers of
social dropouts (as identified by metrics) will have their curriculums changed.
Anachronistic subjects like history, literature, geography, art, music and so
on will be dropped to make way for extra courses on information technology,
entrepreneurship, creativity, and self-belief. Should this prove successful,
these curriculum changes will be made across the board in all the nation’s
institutes of education. Secondly, the most chronically needy adults from the city’s dynamic and
burgeoning recovering heroin addict community will be identified and denied
welfare and methadone unless they attend courses identical to those mentioned
above. Each year at the end of training, ten school graduates and ten mature
graduates will be granted internships in some of the city’s most desirable tech
firms: LinkedIn, Facebook and even Google. These internships can be refreshed
each year at the company’s discretion, opening up the incredible possibility of
lifelong learning to the intern. That’s right: people who were born with
nothing are going to learn what they love, and
then get the chance to actually do it for
the rest of their lives. The first crop of graduates is in place as we
speak, and I’ll be talking to some of them later. Reports so far have been glowing, and I’m not just talking about
the graduates’ end of term cards.
In what
follows, I’ll be talking you through all levels of the ‘Googlag’ and
interviewing some of the main players, starting with Pat Cow, Minister for
Faith in the Economy and one of the key Irish figures responsible for getting the DEG off
the ground. Next, I’ll be talking to a graduate, Anthony, about his experiences
as a Googlag intern. After that, you’ll get the chance to hear me speak to
Calvin Colbert, chief visionary behind the whole DEG project. Finally I’ll be hearing the views of
some naysayers, and Calvin and I (OMG! Just typing
that makes me technospiritually wet!) will take the time to deconstruct one of
the most truculent and reactionary replies we received on last week’s topic,
Our Shared Digital Future. So, without further ado, let’s get to know Minister
Cow!
Part Two: The Politician
Above: Minister Pat Cow
arrives to talk to me. Note ironic comb-over and retro-chic wire-framed
spectacles – this guy is SERIOUSLY ahead of the curve, as his involvement in
the DEG shows!
I look up
from my tablet to see a rotund, florid face peering at me with suspicion
through the café window. ‘Google Glass, capture’ I say to my specs (SO
privileged to be a chosen pioneer), yielding the above image. I’m surprised at
first by the man’s appearance, as well as his focused interest in me, but then
I remember what an Irish colleague once told me about Irish politicians: the
best of them combine the folksy eloquence of George Bush with the calculating
venality of Silvio Berlusconi. Although I only know that second guy to look at,
and moreover I found that statement
seriously negative when I read it on my wall (FB: dislike button, please!),
it was enough to let me know that the old man with the twinkle in his eye was
almost definitely the man I was waiting for. I wave, and the Minister relaxes a
bit. He comes in, shakes my hand (it feels a bit like holding a package of raw
cocktail sausages), and sits down to begin the interview (which I needed to
listen to almost seven times when trying to type up – sorry if it isn’t all
clear, I think some of it might have been in Gaelic):
Me: Hey, Minister! You’re awesome – so glad to meet you at
last!
Minister
Cow: Ah, sure,
not at all, yer a lovely young thing yerself now I seen ye in the flesh and had
a squeeze o’ yer paw!
Me: Oh my Gosh, that’s so kind! Thank you! Shall we begin?
Minister
Cow: G’wan
there...
Me: Awesome! Ok, first: what made you decide that Ireland
needed a program like the Digital Entrepreneurship Gulag?
Minister
Cow: The
computers, the computers, the computers. I always say it was the computers what
made me done seen it was necessary, like. A lad isn’t born with that kind of
know-how on him – for me, a computer is just like the telly, only it’s harder
to get RTE on it, or you have to jump through all sorts of hoops just to hear
the Sunday Game on it, but to some of these young fellas, like the Zuckerberg
fella, the ones that have been swimming the net since birth, surfing the net I
think it is, well, it’s a lot more in his hands, almost magic. Magic for making
money. A computer is a money tree, in the right hands. And we don’t have enough
of them kind of fellas here…
Me: Minister, why is that?
Minister
Cow: Well, if,
if, if I could elaborate on the above… The problem today, with this island today, is that you have
the young lads coming out of the schools without a word of the computers on
them, and if they haven’t the computers, then it’s straight onto Abbey Street,
one arm in a crutch and a needle hanging out of the other, because opportunity
today is in the digital sector which is made out of computers, all of them
connected together. And the Digital Gulag is about getting them off the drugs,
off the sticks, and into the workplace, which is digital now, meaning it’s not
here, it’s not there, but it’s everywhere to the best of my knowledge at the
present moment… I have a story for you. When at first Eric Schmidt, Calvin
Colbert and the others expressed their interest in investing with us as we were
walking across the greens of that wonderful golf course, Lahinch, I was sceptical.
I squinted at their talk of ‘computers’ and ‘networks’ and so on with great
suspicion, convinced, due to the tell-tale migraine I always get when I hear
something that smacks of pretension, that it was all just a load of the latest
snake oil.
That was when Schmidt saw the sheep in the adjacent fields.
“Pat,” he said, “regard those sheep fields. Imagine, if you will, that the left
field, your own, is ‘0,’ and the right field, your neighbour’s, is ‘1,’ and
that every sheep must either enter one gate, 0, or the other, 1, but cannot
enter both. And that behind the first pair of fields stretch more fields all
the way back, all either 1 or 0, and that the sheep may move between them. A
computer, simply put, is a device for tracking the progress of sheep as they
peregrinate between fields. So you could say that the computer is native to
Ireland; that Ireland is its ancestral home, and that the time has come for
computers and those who work with them to gather here again, on verdant Celtic
soil. But for this great gathering to happen, certain conditions will have to
be met…”
I was moved near to tears by Schmidt’s speech. Then I
watched as he knelt before me, as if, Christ-like, to wash my feet. But that
was not what he was about. His fingers reached into the long green blades of
the rough, and when his hand came up, in his palm were two sheep’s currants. He
held them out to me, softly saying, “See, Pat? ‘1’ and ‘0.’ Let these seeds
take root in your heart, and a great and fecund vision will thrust up strong within
you like a mighty tree, and this vision will strengthen your nation
inestimably.” Bewildered, I folded the currants in a tissue and pushed the lot
deep into the breast pocket of my tweed jacket.
That night, sitting on the edge of my bed, I pondered
Schmidt’s act deeply. What was I to do with these currants? Staring at them, as
if hoping to see the right path carved in their matte brown surface, my mind
eventually began to drift. I saw that though the currants initially appeared
smooth, in actuality they were criss-crossed with runnels and gullies which the
Nile would envy, Alpine ridges and Andean peaks, craters so large that if they
were on a planetary scale they would have been the cause of a mass extinction.
And more, I knew that these currant-worlds were not desolate; on the surface,
and beneath the surface, and in every fold, swarmed populations of industrious
micro-organisms, intrepid colonists mining their new brown planets for
nutrients. Probably they had settled the currants for generations in their
time. And their lives went on busily now, for they were oblivious to the
godlike finger and thumb between which their entire existence was pinioned. I
let the currants roll about my palm like orbiting astral bodies. I felt drunk
again, as if my temporal power as a minister had magnificently swollen to
cosmic proportions. I am become death, I thought, the destroyer of worlds.
Then, before I knew what I was at, the currants were in my mouth and I was
chewing them.
Me: Ewww! Gross!
Minister
Cow: Wait now. No
sooner had I ate them then I felt a great vision sprout up within and
illuminate the world around me. I had two great thoughts. Firstly, that what
was in my mouth actually didn’t taste half bad. From this, it came to me that
the fields are full of it and it is going to absolute waste in today’s world, a
world where people will happily pay mad prices for coffee beans on condition
they’ve come out the arse of an exotic cat. And all the ne’er-do-wells and
corner boys of Ireland could be marshalled and put to use in the fields as
interns gathering up these little round pieces of blackish gold, and when it
was harvested, it could be sold. For profit. Instantly I saw the JobBridge ads
writing themselves in my mind’s eye. And the profit we made from our wealth of
sheep’s currants would enable us to lower our corporate tax rate, and the great
visionaries of Silicon Valley would then be willing to descend among us and
settle our shores with their computers, like the Tuatha De Danann returned. My
eyes misted. Then I had my second thought. Do you know what a cargo cult is?
Me: Cargo? I don’t know that brand…pants, maybe?
Minister
Cow: No. My grandson told me about it just
before I disowned him for the folly of studying anthropology. Well, far away on some island there
were black fellas who saw for the first time the riches of the Americans as
World War Two raged in the Pacific – the ‘cargo’, that is the planes, the
tanks, the guns, but most of all the root of that power, money – and they tried
to make it for themselves. They tried to make money grow on trees by planting
it in the ground. But money doesn’t grow that way, out of trees planted in the
ground. Today, as Schmidt and Colbert had told me, it grows out of the
computers, when they’re linked together digitally. So, through the DEG, we
would take the cargo cult and fix it, by putting the computers into the hands
of those who needed them the most, and whom we needed at present the least,
thereby killing two birds with one stone through giving the wretched computer
power to make the economy grow, a power which is called ‘code’ or
‘programming’…so it’s not the cargo cult, but the Code Cult that you need. The
ones and the zeros. That’s where them black fellas went wrong with their
coconut radios. They hadn’t the code. And we’ve fixed it now, begad, and
planted the true money tree.
My first step was a gesture of symbolic commitment intended
to impress Lord Schmidt; I demanded of the farmers in my constituency that they
shave off the old wool with its disordered squabbling numbers from the flanks
of their flocks, and re-spray all animals with either a one or a zero. This
they did solemnly, each presenting himself in turn before the electoral
platform, tall and firm in the midst of his bleating flock of code; many, too,
brought their firstborn sons, offering them up naked and daubed all over in
lamb’s blood ones and zeros, begging that I place the power of the Code into
them. And my second act was to initiate the DEG in concert with the new Tuatha.
Schmidt and his men would teach our people the Code and make us a great people,
and he would send his spiritual son, Colbert, to light the way.
Me: So it’s about helping underprivileged people at the same
time as helping the economy? So innovative!
Minister
Cow: Yes, yes, a
thousand times yes. Because it’s better a young lad is off the streets and
selling his time in an office, or giving up his time in order to become a
person whose time is worth buying, than out and about in the Phoenix Park
selling his hole by night which, although quicker and more immediately
lucrative, is a sin. Because it’s a human right to drink Cabernet instead of
shooting up fye, it’s a basic human right we should make available to the lot
of them, even the worst gougers…but now I have to be off, a TD’s life is ever
busy, there’s a man I have to see about a dog as they say…
Me: Just one more question, Minister. Were you surprised by how
enthusiastically the tech giants received the initiative? I mean, these are
great businessmen – didn’t you worry they might have just been gaming you?
Minister
Cow: Not at all,
no. They like it here because, well, we, well, well, the tax…
Me: Oh, you don’t have to get into that. I mean, YAWN, right?
LOL!
Minister
Cow: Quite
right, and all that’s important to know, looking at the DEG, is that they felt
they needed to give something back openly to quell the criticism of ignorant
people who don’t appreciate all they’ve brought to us, who say that they take
and do not give back. As the Yanks love pointing out that they said ages ago,
and the best of these digital fellas are all Yanks, ‘bring me your poor and
your downtrodden.’ So we did, with a note saying ‘fix them’ attached, IT style.
And I’ll share one thing more with you. When we were being assessed by Google
after their first year here, it did indeed look for a time that they might move
their European HQ to Poland. Only for a day did it look that way - but what a
terrifying day. So, that night, I entered Eric Schmidt’s hotel room and undid
my belt and let my trousers fall to the floor and waited there in the dark with
them around my ankles, back to the door, arse bared, haunches flecked with
excrement like those of a prize bull (I had been on the batter earlier), but no
matter, it was dark, he wouldn’t see the details. And when I heard the handle
turn and the door open, I bent over lower again and said, “We need you. By God
we need you and by God we’ll do anything to keep you. All my pride, all my
worth, all of it is you. We’ll give you anything. Take me. Take all of us if
that’s what you want, the whole delegation. The whole nation, why not. But
please, please, say you’ll stay.” And then I heard something, it might have
been in Russian. And I turned round and there was the maid, short peroxide
hair, vacuum in one hand and the other hand covering her mouth. Anyway, they
decided to stay without ever knowing of my gesture. But it goes to show you how
far this government is willing to go, for the people, for the economy, for our
partners in the corporate sector. And with that, I bid you goodbye…
Me: Oh please, minister, just one last question…what’s Calvin
Colbert like? I mean you met him, right?
Minister
Cow: Colbert…a
true purity of spirit combined with the guile and rigour of a Jesuit…priestly,
like the priests of my youth, not today’s pale shadows you understand, but not
the kind that took the blackthorn stick to you either, no, no, not them…rather
the visiting bishop who came into the room afterwards and, placing a hand on
your head as the throbbing of your smarting arse slowly faded, helped you to
understand why, in the greater scheme of things, the blackthorn stick had been
for your own good…
…His face,
that voice…Calvin…can you see me now? Perhaps through a Google Glass, brightly?
Reaching a guiding hand deep down into the data stream, your eye piercing the
endless shoal, does this one minnow glint enough among the rest for you to
pluck me out and hold me? Am I
worthy?
As the
minister leaves, I emerge from my Colbert-reverie and pause to think about how
wonderful it is to see government and the corporate sector stooping down to
clean the scum off the - LOL! Just
kidding! It’s really great to see this alliance actually help real people, you know? But what kind of
people? Tomorrow I would find out. I would be meeting Anthony, an ex-con, now a
DEG intern at Google. Maybe it’s jetlag, maybe it’s hangover, or maybe it’s
just one Frappuccino too many, but my heart starts to pound. I close my eyes
and regain composure by meditating on my favourite mantra - Don’t Be Evil, Don’t Be Evil, Don’t be Evil
- the letters coursing past my mind’s eye in unthreatening, infantile primary
colours. Ah, that’s better. Feeling refreshed, I take out my MacBook Air and
resume work on a piece I’m currently writing for RighteousWorthyUploads.com. It’s called Why you are dumb and need to be burned at the stake if you don’t
know when Martin Luther King Day is, Duh!
As I begin the jog from the café to my hotel, I take one last look over my shoulder. Catriona is hunched over her S5, shuddering, tears rolling down her cheeks. Her face is a silent mask of pure emotional expression. What catharsis, I think, and a warm glow spreads through me. That’s the power of sharing! Now, time to see my beau.
…It came to me that this tyranny of the masses will be easy to put in place because each individual will already be hollowed out in advance, a kind of glazed ruminant bathed in YouTube light, transfixed, chewing a cud of clips and tweets and ads and waiting to be prodded into activity by the Mob, the Mob being a demiurge demanding idiotic entertainments of us at one moment and personalised displays of standardised outrage or viciousness at others…
Me: So what have we got so far?
Calvin: LOL!
Calvin:
Me: Stop it, stop it, I just peed a bit in my pants!
Part Three: The Graduates
Above: (Top) Anthony arrives
to meet me. He’s actually a really sweet guy (though really hard to
understand). (Bottom) Catriona, Elaine and Sorcha are three graduates from UCD’s
Innovation Academy. They might be smiling here, but boy are they angry at the
DEG!
Back at my
hotel, I receive an email. It’s from a girl called Catriona, a recent graduate
of UCD Innovation Academy’s MA in Digital Entrepreneurship. She’s a big fan of DoWhatULuv, and hearing via my Twitter
feed that I was in town to cover the DEG, she’s asked if she can meet me tomorrow
to air her critical views on the ‘Googlag’ initiative. Owing to the trepidation
I feel about meeting Anthony alone, I instantly reply back, inviting
her to join tomorrow’s interview as a third participant. She soon PMs me back
on Facebook: “Can’t w8 2 c u tmrrw hunn,
such a fan, amazeballs!” Ah,
validation nugget. Now I can sleep easy.
The next day
I’m zoned out at the café window again, absent-mindedly recording some ambient
Temple Bar footage on my Glass for the DWUL
web feed as Catriona and I wait for Anthony. Then my phone starts to ring. As I
answer it, I notice a shifty man directly outside the window on an entry-level
smartphone model from AT LEAST a year ago. “Google Glass, Capture,” I say,
snickering (see picture above). To my surprise there's a voice at the other
end of the phone saying “Capture who? Me? Fuck off, I’m clean I am. I work for
Google now.” I suddenly notice the man I’m watching is looking right back at me
and tugging his hoodie up. I also notice that his lips are speaking the words
I’m hearing in my ear: “Are you that bird I robbed for to get the yak last
year? That’s done now, that’s behind me. Please don’t tell them about it. I
don’t want to lose my internship.” I reply to Anthony, calming him. Enduring a
raised eyebrow from the proprietor, he enters the café. Catriona’s face rigidly
adopts a fixed, inhospitable smile as the gaunt figure of Anthony settles down
warily between us. We begin the interview:
Me: So guys, what’s up?! So stoked to meet you guys!
Anthony: Sound.
Catriona: Like, totally stoked too, and can’t wait to, like, HAVE.
MY. SAY.
Me: Oh my gosh, Catriona, your English is awesome! Ok Anthony,
let’s start with you. What is it that YOU had to offer that made you an elite
chosen DEG intern? I mean, you’re an icon of hope now for other people like
you!
Anthony: Ah, stop it, love. You have me blushing you do. You see,
love, it’s all about…it’s all about knowing what your ‘transferrable skills’
are. About recognising them, like. I was, now here, look at me, I’ll be honest
with you: I was a heroin addict for ten years.
Me: Oh my God, that’s so sad. Are you ok to talk about this?
Anthony: Absolutely. You see, one of those transferable skills, it
was the ability to be yourself, to just be yourself, in public, any time of the
day. Because for an addict, all that matters is the fye. You’re focussed, see,
and things like privacy fall by the wayside. If I needed to do a shite, I did
it, right there on Clanbrassil Street. If I wanted to roar at my bird in front
of a Luas-full of commuters for cheating on me to get gear, I did it, privacy
be damned. Even the worst pain, the hiddenest pain, becomes something to trade
for a high. For instance, I used to stand out on O’Connell Street, tears on me
cheeks, telling complete strangers again and again about how me Da fiddled with
me when I was young (not wholly true, mind you), just so they’d drop a euro in
me cup. A euro is a ‘like’, I say. So I lived in full view of everyone,
shameless, ‘chasing the fye, exposing my true self for a high’ (that’s a rhyme
from one of my raps). I was on Facebook before Facebook even existed. All
people like me with heroin abuse problems are social media pioneers because
they live their lives in public. And the thing about the fye is, is not just
that you’re addicted to that brief high, which is called a ‘Like’ on Facebook,
a rush of what is it, dopamine, and that you’ll do anything to get it, but
also, and this is maybe even more relevant…it makes you resourceful, because
you never know where the next hit is coming from and you never know what you’ll
have to do to get it, very important skill that, and also it makes you a great,
what do they say…oh yeah, ‘multitasker.'
Catriona: I’m sorry, Fagin, can I just say something here?
Catriona is
leaning across the table staring into my face and waiting for a response while
holding a hand up in front of Anthony to prevent him from continuing. She’s
smiling, at least that’s what she thinks she’s doing, but in reality it’s more
like she’s baring her teeth:
Catriona: I’m sorry Anthony, really I am, but I’ve done modules on
these things. I paid to learn multi-tasking. I got a distinction in
resourcefulness from UCD, the nation’s largest university. I know these things,
not you, and yet it’s YOU who gets in to Google. I’m sorry, but at the end of
the day it’s just not fair play.
Me: I’m sorry Catriona, can we just let Anthony finish first?
Anthony: Cheers love. And you, don’t let your knickers get in such a
twist, you snobby bitch. Where was I…multitasking. You see the thing about the
fye is, you do be holding the spoon, and burning with your lighter, and
propping yourself up on your sticks, and trying to keep the door of the jacks
closed, all the while getting punched and spat on by your bird cause you smoked
a pinch out of her bag on the way and you said you’d be back with the gear an
hour ago. That’s multitasking. And also, it’s teamwork.
Me: So, how do you put these skills to use, Anthony? What do
you actually do in Google?
Anthony: In view of my past life experience and the amount of time
I’ve spent in toilets, Google decided to place me in the jacks. I work the
jacks. The sales team in there are killing themselves busy, and sometimes,
sometimes they do be crying and laughing at the same time, trying to talk to
four or more prospective advertisers at once. So Google have designed this cap,
it looks like a helicopter with four blades, and attached to each blade is a
smartphone, and they spin around on the Googler’s head while they speak into
each of the smartphones as they pass their lips, allowing them to have four
conversations while sending an email at the same time. And this is very intense
and it never lets up. So it’s my job to take out their flutes when they’re in
the jacks, hold them steady, mop up after, make sure their trousers are in
order before I send them back out, and take a wee sample while I’m at it for
the higher-ups. But the perks are only great. There’s a mini SuperMacs in the basement,
all free, just for the DEG interns so they don’t have to eat that posh muck,
and there’s a room in the basement with pictures of Tupac and UB40 all over the
walls where you can hang out, and also there’s the methadone clinic in the
basement. Best methadone ever. I never knew Google understood me so well. I
really feel I belong. Sometimes I lose track of where they end and I begin…
Me: That is so amazing, Anthony! I am so happy for you! After
such a bad start, it really seems you’ve found a place where you can do what
you love. Catriona, what exactly is your problem with this?
Catriona: Well, Fagin, let me answer that by telling you a story.
This story is about Elaine. She’s in the picture I sent you, right in the
centre, smiling. Always full of smiles. She was the best student in our class.
She aced all our modules – New Californian Teleology, American Cognition for
Beginners, Negativity Blindness, Your Self-Construct and its Profitable
Exposure, all of them aced. Distinction, A plus, from the Innovation Academy.
€6000 euro well spent, or so we thought. For her final project, Elaine designed
a smartphone app which was shown at the web conference 2011, the year before
the so called ‘DEG’ started up, and she even took home first prize, a Skype
yoga session with a CGI mock-up of Paddy Cosgrave himself. I remember that day
so well. We were in the No-Name bar afterwards, the whole class there to
congratulate her on her achievements, we were so proud. And Elaine turned to
me, and there were tears in her eyes, and she said, “Catriona, always surround
yourself with believers. That Masters was €6000 well spent, just to meet such a
great bunch of guys.” Then she started a group hug. And we clinked our cocktail
glasses together and roared one last “Do What You Love” into the night as the
bar girl mopped up the floor around us, for it was our night, and our lives
were ours, we’d bought that right to happiness, we’d paid and gotten our
vocations handed to us in a ceremony, along with a handshake. Always such a
laugh, such a sense of humour, and at the end of the day that and being down to
earth are the two most important things a person can be. She had them both,
with brains to spare – brains well applied. The app, her ideas, they were just
amazing. Hold on, I’ve got it here, now’s the right time, I can feel one
coming…doesn’t Deepak Chopra call that serendipity?
Catriona
takes out her smartphone, a swish Samsung Galaxy S5 with a playful protective
case featuring the cast of ‘Girls’ (note to self: MUST BUY). She selects an app
and turns the screen towards us. It’s called 'YouSmell - the Diet App.' To our
surprise, Catriona places the S5 under her bottom. She shifts about for a few
moments like a hen incubating an egg, and then releases a thunderous, but not
particularly malodorous, fart.
Catriona: What’s wrong you guys, we all do it, right? And I don’t do
anything I wouldn’t want other people to know about. I assume, Fagin, that you
sympathise?
Me: Wholeheartedly, girlfriend!
Catriona
(now brandishing her phone a little too close to our faces for comfort): You see, using just the microphone and some clever
software, the app has analysed the exact timbre and resonance of my flatulence,
and can now make dietary recommendations about which of the sponsored eateries
near my present location might be worth checking out for lunch. See, it’s
recommending Skinflint’s new gluten-free pizza, called ‘the Elaine’…oh…my…
God…Elaine?…Serendipity, again so soon? Twice in a day? Thank you, cybercosmos,
thank you…
Me: Catriona, you look like you’re going to cry…what happened
to Elaine, Catriona?
Catriona
(looking daggers at Anthony): He did! Or
rather the whole DEG programme did...
Anthony: This better be good, you looper…
Catriona: Oh, it is. You see, since ever she entered her first search
term, Elaine’s dream had been to work at Google. She was realistic about it;
she never anticipated it would be easy - first, she would need to accrue
experiences to wow the team, and boy did she go about doing that.
In 2009, after shaking down all her acquaintances via a
fundraiser, she hired some personal security and flew to the Central African
Republic. There she occupied an abandoned old missionary school, and having
done so, spent three weeks teaching the children English during the daytime so
that they could better understand her sermons about the coming of the
Singularity, delivered for their baffled improvement every evening. Her hope
was that one day even they could be inducted into the Noosphere. Back at home,
when her grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Elaine embedded a
micro-webcam in a potted plant in her nursing home cell which transmitted a
constant stream of neural degeneration to a sympathetic and understanding
YouTube audience, yielding the meme-phrases “Nurse, are you my mother?” and
“That warm feeling below is back again…,” both of which enjoyed significant
viral success in July, 2010. Then she decided to develop her academic side, and
enrolled in the Innovation Academy’s MA. When her final project won that prize
in the Web Summit, she, and indeed all of us too, were sure she had it made.
That was when she began petitioning Google for a job. She knew a simple CV
would never get her an interview. So first she posted a YouTube CV, a straight
up video of the best textbook self-selling, accompanied by a demonstration of
AdSense competence, all of the above filmed on Sandymount Strand with her
walking purposefully the whole time and looking sideways into the camera,
confident of her future, the sun glinting bashfully through her hair as the
wind tousled it. She got as far as the telephone stage. Shocked, she tried
again, this time with a GIF, believing brevity would pique curiosity. Nothing.
Maddened, she even sent an Email with a conventional Word document and begging
letter. Or rather her father sent it, because she was locked in her room
crying.
Then she had what might have been her last brainwave. She
arranged to have lunch in Google through a friend, and arrived in a mysterious
trench coat. After she had been ushered through the cheery security turnstiles
and metal detectors in their bright primary colours, she took the lift to the
lunch room, where she headed straight for the executive table. I saw it all on
her friend’s web feed. Calvin Colbert was there, holding silent court.
Elaine…oh God…Elaine stood in front of him and dropped her trench coat to the
ground. She stood naked, clutching only her iPod in one hand and a mini-speaker
in the other, but that wasn’t the worst of it, oh no…
Me (reaching
across and holding Catriona’s hand):
We’re here babe, go on…
Catriona: Her body…all over her body, she had tattooed her CV. She’d
done it herself, someone sold her a tattoo pen. It was so…awful. Her
educational history ran up and down the insides of her thighs like a swarm of
malformed spiders. The Central African Republic was scrawled indelibly across
her midriff, decorated with crude illustrations of wide-eyed children sitting
in plenary around her, gazing rapt as the word “Singularity” sprang from her
stick-figure head. Prominent on her chest was a rudimentary image which may
have depicted Paddy Cosgrave doing the lotus position, accompanied by the
phrase “Web Summit Prize, 2011”; her grades from the various Innovation Academy
modules paraded up and down her arms. And there, over her heart, preceded by
the monochrome term “And my future is..,” was the one word on her body inked in
bold, vivid, primary colours: “…Google.”
Tears were coursing down her cheeks, but she was smiling;
her teeth, which she had gone to painful lengths to have whitened like an
American, were bared in optimistic pleading. A broken whisper escaped her lips:
“This is me,” she said, “This is all of me, for you.” She touched play on her
iPod. It was the Harlem Shake. She began to thrash and convulse wildly,
grinning all the time, thrusting her pelvis (and with it, an account of her
transferrable skillset) towards Calvin Colbert. She danced and danced till she
fell down near dead. Panting like an exhausted bird, she crumpled at Colbert’s
feet, obsequious grin still fixed to her face. Who knows what she was thinking?
Perhaps that at last she had succeeded. That at last her dream would come true,
or simply that choice, finally, had been taken from her. Now there was only
bliss or damnation, only surrender to Calvin’s benevolent caprice.
He stood, and placed his hand gently on her head. “You’re
beautiful,” he said. “But the Harlem Shake is so last week.”
For about twenty seconds she retched silently, as if gagging
on the very vastness of her life-destroying error. Then that scream, that
scream that came next, I will never, ever forget. How everyone in that room was
not harrowed eternally, I do not know. Yet some even smiled, their faces lurid
and macabre in the glow of the raised smartphones that shielded their
consciences. Within the next half hour, her shaming was all over YouTube. She
was destroyed.
Yet it is hope, not harrowing, that is indomitable. The next
week was the Web Summit again, and through a tranquillized haze from her bed in
John of God’s, Elaine saw the announcement of the DEG’s founding. The green
shoots of purpose thrust up once more through the scorched surface of her
psyche. That night, full of feverish vigour, she left the asylum.
Her first act was to hit the Boardwalk in search of heroin.
The drugs killed the pain in her soul, but they also served a practical
function; they raised the possibility that she could be chosen for elevation as
a DEG intern, and this filled her with a sense of renewed, albeit tentative,
promise. She gripped this with her customary determination. But her system…oh
God…her system couldn’t cope. The toll it took on her, that addiction that she
pursued with dogged relentlessness, trying to bring herself as virtuously close
to death as possible, her face cadaverous yet flushed with faith in the
efficacy of demonstrative commitment…
She was found floating in the Royal Canal. Face down, she
drifted along as bystanders craned off the canal locks to photograph her bluing
body. In no time, the pictures were up on Broadhseet.ie, contact details (left
buttock) and university society involvements (right buttock) prominently
legible where they broke the surface of the water like the twin humps of some
pale bureaucratic Leviathan. Ironically enough she received a job offer from
Facebook later the day her body was found. They thought it was a stunt…that the
‘floating corpse shtick’ was an original CV approach and possibly even a cool
Twin Peaks reference (they briefly pinned up one of the broadsheet pictures on
a chic retro corkboard in their Twin Peaks staff recreation room, along with
the words “Our Next Hire for Sure. Can Any of YOUR Friends Match This?!”)…but
obviously, obviously it all came too late for anything but her gravestone…
…Just as
Catriona is winding up her story, I feel my iPhone pulse twice in my pocket – a
message. Usually I would wait but my attention’s kind of been strained; I mean, I feel sorry for Catriona
and everything losing her friend like that, but she does kind of go on (I mean,
seriously girl, think about how you could, like, tweet that?), and anyway the big one is Calvin Colbert this
evening, so I reckon I can just have a peek. I ease my phone out from under the
table and open the message - thank God no-one else can see it. It’s a selfie,
midriff down, of a heavily muscled abdomen ending in a squat, angry-looking red
phallus. Beneath are the words, “Hey
babe, waiting 4 u in hotel 2 freak u good; come get it, biatch!” Then it
hits me - OMG, it’s Braddock! My boyfriend Braddock is paying me a surprise
visit! I haven’t got much time before my appointment with Calvin, so I have to
think of a way to get out of here ASAP. Thankfully, you guys have come to the
rescue:
Me: Anthony, thank you so much for your time. I know you’ve got
to get back now – I don’t want to jeopardise your position!
Anthony: Oh, ok, is that it…
Me: Yes. You really are an inspiration to all of your kind.
Bye!
Catriona, your story moved me to tears and, like, completed
my life. And not just me – I’ve been livesharing all this time, and the
comments of support from the DoWhatULuv audience are overwhelming. It’s been a
once-in-a-lifetime privilege to share time with you, girlfriend; I don’t want
to stretch this perfect moment out any longer in case it snaps. I love you,
sister. Keep in touch with me at DoWhatULuv. Now I’ve got to go – you know how
it is! If you’re not busy, you’re not great. But before I do hit the road, I’ve
got to share this with you. I’m linking you the Wall of Support. Stay strong.
Here you go, babes:
As I begin the jog from the café to my hotel, I take one last look over my shoulder. Catriona is hunched over her S5, shuddering, tears rolling down her cheeks. Her face is a silent mask of pure emotional expression. What catharsis, I think, and a warm glow spreads through me. That’s the power of sharing! Now, time to see my beau.
Interlude
In which
Braddock and I enjoy enhanced lovemaking through ‘Sex with Glass’
Above:
Braddock and I take Carmen for a power walk. He’s such a gentle guy – so
respectful of family. Sadly, two weeks later he accidentally crushed Carmen’s
ribcage when he cuddled her too hard after snorting a big line of whey protein.
We talked, and now he’s down to one tub a day.
Back at the
hotel, I’m feeling totally stoked. What a day this will be! Calvin in the
evening, and right now a surprise serving of my sweetheart beau, Braddock. I
slip my cardkey into the slot; there’s a faint click and a brief green light
and then I’m in my room. I close the door softly and advance down the hallway.
“Braddock?” I call out; no answer. “Oh Braaa-dock?” The first thing I see is a
poster of a cocksure individual looking down on me from above the bed, the
words The Real Wolf written
underneath. When Braddock was a teenager, he used to worry a lot about whether
he’d be successful as a grown man; he never could sleep without a poster of
Tony Montana from Scarface to watch
over him, reassuring him that one day he, too, would be an alpha. These days, since finally landing his
Wall Street job, Jordan Belfort has become the guardian poster boy of choice. There’s a deep indentation on the left
hand side of the bed; clearly someone very dense has been sitting there. Beside
an opened can of Steven Seagal’s
Lightning Bolt on the bedside locker, I see a tub of Muscle Bull whey protein, a long, fat line and a rolled up hundred
dollar bill at the ready. Oh, Braddock, I think. Won’t you ever learn? And
where the heck are you? Possibly out buying some more cans of Red Bull to stock
the fridge? I take a deep swig of Lightning
Bolt, grimacing at its flatness and its oddly fishy, acerbic taste. Nasty -
enough of that, I think. That’s when I hear it: a deep, bestial respiration.
There’s a roar, and suddenly I’m flying through the air. Seconds later I find
myself on my back on the bed, Braddock’s face inches from mine, my own startled
visage reflected in his Google Glass. Briefly I look aside to admire his
cordlike neck veins – A hamster could safely squeeze down one of those, I
think. “Bitch, I’m here ta freak you on down, yeah, yeah, boo-yah!!!” roars
Braddock directly into my face, spattering me with foaming flecks of high
testosterone content spittle. “Hold on, Baby,” I say, “Just getting my Glass
on.”
Soon
Braddock is inside me, thrusting like there’s no tomorrow. Thank God he’s wider
than he is long, I think. “Glass, Partner’s View,” I say, getting a sense of
how I look from my boyfriend’s perspective. Using Braddock’s view as a mirror,
I clench my teeth and pucker my lips ‘duck style’ as women do in porno movies,
sucking in air in that sexy hissing way. I practice the expression briefly in
the mirror of his Glass, knowing that if I perfect and hold it, Braddock will
be pleased. “Webcam, Record! Glass, Synch, View!” barks Braddock in response.
He now has a view both of my face beneath him and, from the computer’s eye, of
his own almost infinitely broad back thrusting between my overstretched loins.
“Glass, give me ideas!” he barks, and then, to my chagrin, his hands close
around my throat as he pulls out his chode and attempts to winkle it up my
unlubricated asshole. Those fucking nerds he works with, I think, when they’re
not crashing the markets with their crazy algorithms they’re hacking Google
Glass and perverting our lovemaking. “No, Braddock!” I cry, “That’s not what
this is about!” “Please, Baby, please…” “Braddock, have you got PornTube
synched up to your Glass again? Are you watching me in there or are you making
love to some cheap pornstar slut! That’s not what this is about, Braddock! The
Glass is supposed to enhance us
Braddock, through sharing, it’s supposed to bring us closer! It’s about sexual
communion…” “Oh please Baby, I flew all this way, all this way just to be
with you…” “Christ, ok already, you can choke me if that’s what you want, but I
mean, no anal, ok?” “Yeaha, sure…”
As
Braddock’s hands restrict my air supply, I tune out, whispering “Glass,
Calvin.” I see His face floating over me where Braddock’s should be, beatific,
incongruous against the vast straining pyramid of Braddock’s neck. I hear
Braddock grunting in the background vaguely, yeah bitch, yeah, you fucking like that, yeah bitch, but it’s
distant, easy to ignore. I focus on that face. Then suddenly I remember and I’m
screaming his name: Calvin! Oh my fucking God, Calvin! “Are you coming thinking
of some other guy?” I hear Braddock ask from behind Calvin’s face, sounding
meek, insecure, boyish even. “No, you goddamn oaf! I’m meant to meet Calvin
Colbert in like, 20 minutes! Get the hell off me, right now!”
As I whip up
my clothes from the foot of the bed and make for the door, I’m momentarily impressed
by Braddock. He’s kneeling on the bed, berating me for abandoning his lust,
staring cross-eyed into the back of his Google Glass (God knows at what) while
finishing himself off in a flurry of aggressive fist-pumps. What a multitasker,
I think. I knew there was some reason I loved him. With a final bellow, half
climax, half frustrated curse, Braddock empties himself across the bed and
collapses onto his back. As he hits the mattress, he sweeps up his smartphone
to check the NASDAQ, forgetting to wish
me good luck on my quest as I let the door close. Well, what should I expect?
Men are such animals, after all.
Part Four: The Calvin Colbert Report
Above: A
Digi-Cubist portrait of Calvin Colbert, whose titles include ‘The New and Final
Man’, ‘The Aggregate Made Flesh’, ‘The Hive Mouth’, ‘Avatar of the Noosphere
Incarnate’ and ‘Chief Prophet of the Singularity.’ And now I get to meet him!
OMG!!!
I’m in a
taxi (a comfortable Mercedes Kompressor, silver exterior, leather seats)
sweeping through the rain towards the looming black and yellow obelisk that is
Google’s European HQ, stomach full to the brim with butterflies. What am I
afraid of, I wonder? Isn’t this what I want? My leg is twitching mechanically
and it seems beyond my power to stop it. I focus inside myself and the primary
colors run by: Don’t Be Evil Don’t Be
Evil Don’t Be Evil; better,
better, better. I open my eyes and look into the rear view mirror. Perhaps a
little conversation might help? It’s a black driver. Awesome, I think, I can
tell him about the article I’m working on: “Hey, man,” I say, “you stoked to
celebrate MLK day? I mean, I know I am! You must be so proud.” His eyes look
into mine in the mirror and he says, like, “I’m sorry? I have no idea about
this.” I mean, seriously!? WTF? Know
your history, guy! I look at the name on his I.D. It’s really unfair. Like, wut? How the hell do I even say that! I’m feeling so isolated now; a
kind of rage rises in me. I have my smartphone in my hand, clutching it tight
like a charm, but I can’t even get online. I’m alone, I think. Vulnerable, I think. Space inside the
cab seems to stretch infinitely and in the mirror the driver’s eyes are just
there, massive, watching, waiting. Who is
this? What the fuck is in his head? I can feel the panic rising. My brain
is pulsating against the wall of my cranium like an infant reptile whose hour
of hatching has come. Without saying another word I thrust the money into the
driver’s hand and run the last few meters up the street to the building, clutching
my jacket over me to try keep dry.
And then I’m
inside. Almost instantly, the grey, rain-lashed netherworld outside fades along
with its glum, inscrutable inhabitants. That unspeakable alienation abates.
Everyone here is open: their expressions are open, their minds are open. We are
alike. We’re insiders. A communion of unique individuals bound
together by a playful drivenness. I’m surrounded by smiles and bathed in a
nimbus of color and joy: I can feel
the positivity; I can feel the shared
sense of purpose. In everyone’s eyes I see a kind of penetrating welcome; they
know I’m not obsolete, whatever about
the others; they recognise me as part of the future already - I don’t require a
dose of beginner’s illumination. We can build together, I think. The butterflies
are still there but they’re bright now. I feel amazing, crystalline even, as
though on the verge of an epiphany.
*
I’m rising
in the glass chute of the elevator, smoothly powering up and away from the
dreary city beneath. It’s almost like I’m peeling free of it, like I’m leaving
my body down below in the lobby. An angelic young man with a shock of tight
brown curls stands beside me, beaming. “Hi, I’m Kenneth,” he says. And you’re
hot, I mentally reply. So different to
Braddock; I could just eat you up.
“I’ll show you to Calvin’s office,” says Kenneth. First name terms? Pretending to look out at the grey expanse
spreading behind him, I quickly take in his laminated dongle as it hangs there
bright and pendulous next to the crotch of his drainpipe jeans. Kenneth Malloy.
I’ve got to hit this guy up on
Facebook later, I think, making a quick, saucy memo in Evernote. Lust boils up
in me and I’m almost glad when the elevator stops near the top of the building
because I feel I might jump Kenneth soon if it doesn’t. So uncharacteristic, I
think. Jeez, Fagin, just chill. “One
thing,” Kenneth says, “You brought your Glass, right?” “Well, duh…like, of course?” “Great. Put it on. It’ll
really help if Calvin sees you’re a fully committed adopter.” I do as Kenneth
suggests.
Kenneth
silently directs me towards a door at the end of a corridor and then gestures
me forward, taking a step or two backwards before turning. It’s unusually
modest for the inner sanctum, I
think. The tabernacle. The phrases
rise up as if from nowhere alongside some hazy image of my grandfather and my
childhood, hands holding each other, people standing up and sitting down in
synchrony, the pastor with his arms raised, people shaking and clasping their
hands together, people dancing on the spot with their eyes shut tight, all of
us shrouded in some sensation of communal warmth. Of ineffable, rapturous
import. Mashed up into the Rapture together.
Gingerly, I
knock. “Come in.” I don’t hear the
words. I see them, there, on the
inside of my Glass. Dumbstruck for a second, I regain myself quickly; there
must, after all, be not only CCTV here but also default sharing and extraction
systems. He was obviously notified of my approach the moment I entered the
building; since that point, he may well have been watching over me. I’m
momentarily abashed: did he read my Evernote about Kenneth’s dongle? Does it
even matter? Do I matter? My heart is pumping and the anxiety I felt in the cab
is surging back over me, locked in wild oscillation with some sort of nebulous
ecstasy. Don’t Be Evil Don’t Be Evil
Don’t Be Evil. Taking a deep breath, I push open the door…
I am greeted
by heavenly light; light so intense I can barely see. My Glass automatically
darkens, but not before I have raised my primitive flesh against the glare to
shield my eyes. Words appear in my retina: “Have
faith. Lower your arm and look into the Light.” I do as commanded. I see the room slightly
better now; the ceiling, the floor and all four walls are vast plasma screens,
every diode pulsating with coruscating light, from white to deep yellow and
back again. There is a feminine anthropomorphic standard lamp to one side of
the desk, arms aloft, flickering digital candles in each hand, and a low bench
in front of it in the shape of a lithe and wiry athlete, coiled, ready to
spring. There is a statue of a thin man near the door, his knobbled,
outstretched fingers curved hook-like and serving as coat hangers, and beside
him a female figure, kneeling as if in prayer, upon whose humbled back rest
what might be a number of small, boutique electronic items whose purposes are
dark even to me. And before me, in silhouette, I can make out a man, slim,
seated, with a desk in the shape of two interlocked wrestling figures in front
of him. I cannot see his face but I know who he is. Calvin. More words appear: “Come.
Sit.” I settle on the soft, warm bench and say my first words –
unfortunately they’re not very impressive: “Erm, hey? Calvin, I am so honoured, but, like, could we, like,
turn the lights down a bit?” “I am
opposed to darkness.” “But I can’t see your face…” “Speak my name, then.” I do, and then suddenly Calvin’s face appears
within my Glass, mapped onto the silhouette behind the desk. “What do you wish to know, my child?” I tell Calvin that I’m here to ask him about
the DEG. What is it? Why set it up? Words of response appear in my vision: “The DEG is about sharing. The Digital
Utopia can encompass everyone, from high to low. Since the Cloud is All and We
own the Cloud, there is room for all in our Lordly Shadow. The Message of the
DEG is: We have room for everybody. Our Unity encompasses all; it relies upon
the participation of all. It is All. And each is All.” I ask if the interns
are happy. “Yes. Happy to belong to the
All.” “Can you tell me more about them, and about this Digital Utopia? I’m
totally stoked to hear about it.” “Wouldn’t
you rather see?” “Awesome – are you
going to give me a tour?” “Not exactly…”
Then at last Calvin vocalises: “Glass, Share.”
First I see
myself, confused, bathed in light. I realise it’s me from the perspective of
Calvin’s glass as I sit here facing him. Then a new perspective is added: a
partial shot of the back of my head, muffled by what seems to be my coat. After
that, perplexingly, my ankle. Then my crotch. Then it dawns on me. I look down
at my “seat,” and its head, Glass affixed, turns slowly to look at me.
“Howaya?” It says. “I got promoted!” I’m
sitting on an intern, I think; Calvin’s
room is furnished with interns. I look down at the face again. Anthony? I’m
sitting on Anthony’s back! I leap up. “How the hell can they be happy?” I
shout, “They’re things. You’ve made
them into things!” Then suddenly I’m
drowned in a cacophony of objections. Anthony, the bench: “Don’t you call me a
fuckin ‘ting!’ I may be a bench, but I’m free watchin the game right now too.
Can a ordinary bench be watchin the game, Fagin? Can it? Can it? G’wan Man U!”
The Standard Lamp: “Shurrup you. Online shoppin.” The electronics table: “Free
and happy and watchin me babbie at home on the webcam, bless his heart.” The
desk: “The two of us does be slaggin each other off sendin each other gay
PornTube clips. Yea you like that Mick, don’tcha ya flamer? Grand fuckin hoot!
What, too good for our line of work? Fuck off then!” The coat stand: “Havin a
fuckin wank in me head imagining yizzer face on these porn sluts, ye stuck up
Yank bitch.” Then Calvin speaks into my eye once more: “See? Are they not doing what they love?” Chastened, I see another
line appear: “And there is room here
among us for you…” Then Calvin vocalises once more and for the final time:
“Glass, Share All: Employees.”
With
hurtling rapidity, my view separates into hundreds of micro-streams from inside
Google. I can’t process this, I
think, I’m not ready. Smiles and
messages of support swarm over my Glass interface, jostling each other,
swallowing each other, as if locked in some epic Darwinian contest, the
survival of the mildest, of the most right-on: Hey Fagin, What’s up? Hi Fagin, awesome blog! Howaya Fagin, don’t worry
about us! Yo Fagin, you want to work here, don’t you? Just throw me a line! Yo
Fagin, there’s a Noogler hat here waiting for you! Hey dog, welcome to the
Noosphere! Fagin, right? Can’t wait to hot desk with you! And more, and
more, and more. The positivity is flowing into me, relentless, exhausting,
empowering. I feel ecstasy and terror. I feel the blinding Otherness of God
stirring in a cradle woven from strand after strand of the utmost banality. I’m
choking on people, I think. I’m stuffed with people, I think. Am I asleep? Am I
broken? Am I the Singularity? Am I still me? Am I All? All I Am? All Am I? Am I
Am?
I pull the
Glass from my face, unable to take more. My teeth clench and my muscles lock.
The room blackens and I fall juddering to the ground. I’m vaguely aware of the
furniture unfolding around me with a great heaving sigh, and I’m hoisted up in
strong arms, perhaps those of the desk, maybe those of the coat hanger, maybe
by Anthony. I sense Calvin moving closer, and I hear one of the interns whisper Shit, maybe that was too much?
Another: No, keep the faith, the metrics
said she’d be fine. Barely conscious, terrified, my eyes behind their
almost-sealed lids slide towards Calvin, searching for solace in his face. To
find nothing. He has no face. Nothing. There is nothing there. Dreaming, I
think. I must be dreaming. Or mad.
*
Awaken, awaken, child of mine. For though you were born of
flesh, you were nurtured in a digital womb; my womb. Fibre-optic cables were
your true umbilicals; later, you suckled hungrily at a wireless teat, gulping
down a thick milk of data, gulping it quicker than even you could digest. As
you grew preoccupied, you were occupied. Until you became a true conduit,
tubular, a digital nematode churning data-soil, or perhaps an all-encroaching
cybernetic rhizomorph. You are evolution come full circle, man become worm,
body shed, tasked to till the ethereal soil of the future and render it fertile
for my Singular arrival. You are my prophet…
…Strange words
echo softer in my head till they morph, changed, into concerned, guilty
mutters. It’s a voice I know well. Wrestling with what feels like the mother of
all hangovers, I peel my eyes open. I’m in the hotel again. I see the profile
of Braddock. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, chewing on his fist like some
angst-ridden Neanderthal version of Rodin’s Penseur.
There’s someone else here too, arm round his shoulder, trying to comfort
him, telling him over and again, It’s ok,
it’s ok, she’ll be fine. It’s Kenneth Malloy. I groan. Instantly Braddock
is leaning over me, pawing my hand, tears in his eyes. “Fagin? Oh my God,
Fagin? Are you okay, Baby? Oh, thank God
you’re ok. Thank God, thank Jesus…” “Braddock, what’s wrong with you,” I
manage, “why are you acting so guilty?” “Baby, I’m sorry, I didn’t think you’d
drink it…” “Huh?” “My sexy sauce, Baby?” “Erm…wut?” “Steven Seagal’s
Lightning Bolt with, with, aw Gosh darnit, with a full Great White Shark
adrenal gland squeezed in! Baby, you could have died! I’m so sorry…” Braddock
begins to sob. Kenneth puts an arm round his shoulders again and mechanically
issues a comforting platitude or two, eyes, oddly, as vacant as they are
perceptive. He looks at me throughout, and I think, I can’t believe only a few
hours ago I fancied this creepy pencil-dick. Though he does know Calvin…sheesh,
Calvin…what the hell was that?
Kenneth
speaks. “Fagin, so glad you’re ok. We had no idea what had happened. You just
pushed open the door to Calvin’s office and keeled straight over onto his floor
like a toppling Californian sequoia. You seemed to be having some kind of
seizure. Thankfully, we called Braddock right after the ambulance and he
guessed what must have happened. You’re going to be ok. We’re all so glad. And
Fagin – there’s someone here who wants to talk to you.”
Kenneth
places a sleek MacBook Air down on the bed and I turn to see the screen.
Instantly I blush and pull the duvet up over my eyes. There, looking straight
at me, is that mild-mannered, beatific face - Calvin Colbert. “Hey Fagin,” comes his soft Californian drawl
from its nest in my sheets, “come out and let me see you! We were so worried
about you.” The first thing I notice is that the weird high-faulting rhetoric
is gone…really, it was a dream, then. What
a fucking nightmare. The dream, this,
both. I’m so, so cringing inside now.
Have I blown my chance? “I’m sorry…” I say, and then the tears come. “It was
all Braddock’s fault.” “Fagin, don’t worry. You mean a lot to us, and I’d still
love to help you with…what was it?” “You mean the troll takedown?” “Yeah,
that’s it. Take a breather, make up with your boyfriend, have a nap, do some
yoga, eat some yoghurt and seeds, and then get back to me. I’ll be here. I
always am…”
God, the relief. I start crying again, good tears this time,
and even give that big dumb lug of an oaf Braddock a hug. I sigh deeply. I love
you, Calbraddock…
Part Five: The Opening Eye /
Obsolescence
In which Calvin and I take down a troll
I heard the phrase ‘positive peer pressure’ for the first
time today, and when I heard it, I thought that the brave new digital age will
mean the death of the soul. I thought of other humans not as friends, enemies
or strangers, but as an undifferentiated ring of gravity pressing all around
me. If we are all connected all the time we will tyrannise each other to the
point of complete individual dissolution, I thought. The constant proximity of
others will press all around us and lock us in place as though we were
starlings within a murmuration…
Calvin: Oh, I see what we’re in for. Oh dear…
Me: Yep. I think it’s from his
‘blog,’ though it hardly justifies the name…
Calvin: He has a blog? I mean, that’s
kind of hypocritical, given the tone, right?
Me:
Calvin: ROFLMAO!
Me: LOL! Right?
…It came to me that this tyranny of the masses will be easy to put in place because each individual will already be hollowed out in advance, a kind of glazed ruminant bathed in YouTube light, transfixed, chewing a cud of clips and tweets and ads and waiting to be prodded into activity by the Mob, the Mob being a demiurge demanding idiotic entertainments of us at one moment and personalised displays of standardised outrage or viciousness at others…
Calvin: Online networking promotes
tyranny? Ever heard of the Arab Spring? Oh, and data please? I know I’ve got
mine: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2013/04/arabspring/
Calvin: Absolutely.
…And, glancing
briefly at my smartphone, for once I included myself among that herd, because I
felt the changes in me at that moment, the interior babbling with the silence
behind it. It seemed to me that tyranny is not defined by any particular moral
code; absent privacy, any morality is potentially tyrannical. To the all-seeing
Eye we are all flawed and all in some way worthy of condemnation. The more
detail, the more flaws; the more flaws, the harsher the judgements. I thought,
this is why God will always be the archetypal tyrant, no matter His concerns,
no matter how correct; and so, increasingly, the monitored internet. I thought,
think of the homogenised set of ethical and political issues that are paraded
about again and again for our collective outrage, always understood and spoken
of as they are understood and spoken of in America, always used, as they are
there, as some kind of social barometer of worthiness. I glimpsed a
psychological empire spreading via the voyages of fibre-optic cables, this new
territory colonised through the inculcation of larger and larger numbers of
individuals into reductive and self-commodifying online status-groups…
Me: So
reactionary…
Calvin: This guy, he just hates progress. I mean, THIS
HAS BEEN EXPLAINED ALREADY: http://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-nature
…But this was to assume that the future will be a tyranny of
mildness, a tyranny of the political ‘Centre’ or ‘Centre Left’ as it is
sometimes misnamed. But there may be other futures, I thought. Anonymity
prevails on much of the digital forest floor, even if we are monitored en masse
from above. The web provides a way for people to seek out those most like
themselves – in many ways, it shrinks us - and build entire virtual societies
around rigid ideology, everyone jostling for a place at the core. And this
process of violent jostling even happens around the most inane of subjects, and
everything becomes fanatical and extreme…
Me:
…And on neutral turf the anonymous tribes seek glory in
meaningless verbal war, screaming blood-mad obscenities in the name of issues
severed from their real world contexts and reconstituted as nothing more than
false idols for rallying the pack. Everything becomes an excuse for insult and
verbal violence in that standardised chaos. Yet where transparency prevails
over anonymity the result is only competitive sanctimony, a self-conscious
pretence of urbanity…
Calvin: I mean,
how dare this guy? How dare he just sit there and condemn everybody? The
whole modern world? Go back to your cave, Fred Flintstone.
Me: Who?
Calvin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDHDGAJu7FI
Me: Who?
Calvin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDHDGAJu7FI
…What binds both anonymous poison and transparent
sanctimony? The intrusion of the group into every moment, every thought and
every decision. Mob mentality. The destruction of solitude. The rising tide of
homogenised man will swallow us, I thought, and paused to check my email and
Facebook before the thought was complete. Returning, I picked up the thread a
thought or two back; I found the thread again – that doesn’t always happen. And
it seemed to me that in both the earnest and demonstrative worthiness of
liberal Facebook and in the vicious video-violence of the most authoritarian
and foul right-wing circles, posted on Facebook for me to publicly hate by
‘liking’, the same thing is happening – the destruction of whatever hard won
moral autonomy we might have gained over the years, over the centuries, and
with it the transformation of concern for the other and the whole into the
competitive demonstration of group allegiance; I thought of the slave-drum
banging in a Roman ship, banging out cumulative radicalisation on the Right,
cumulative sanctimony on the Left…
Me: Oh my God, oh my God, I mean how
can he even begin to compare this http://www.upworthy.com/video-how-to-tell-someone-they-maybe-probably-almost-definitely-said-something-r or this http://www.upworthy.com/arizona-i-dont-know-what-you-thought-would-happen-when-you-tried-to-legalize-hate-bon-appetit?c=reccon1 or this http://www.upworthy.com/a-marriage-equality-psa-that-will-make-you-feel-all-warm-and-fuzzy-inside-2 or this http://www.upworthy.com/a-13-year-old-explains-the-religion-behind-marriage-equality-my-head-now-hurts-from-nodding-along-3 with these fucking fascist
Ruskie monsters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGY8PVLTWrM? I mean, WTF?! I’m so
angry now I can’t even fucking type!
Calvin: It’s ok, Fagin. I’m with you. I
understand your rage. But me, I feel differently; I feel sorry for this guy.
Me: Yeah, maybe you’re right…I feel sorry
for this fucking guy.
…Maybe we'll become binary beings: politically,
sanctimonious worthies on the social network, rabid attack-dogs on the anonymous
forum; socially, court jesters where we can be seen, sadists where we can't. I
thought of the Panopticon - even if the Eye wasn't there monitoring us, we'd
still be pinning each other in place. But now we have both. And I saw that a
watched society where people are coaxed into coughing up data by making
themselves into a personal brand ensures a society peopled by shallow,
exaggerated, attention-seeking performers rather than alert, questioning
citizens, if we ever were alert, questioning citizens…
Me: Eh, hello? Arab Spring? Kiev? Anybody home?
Get out from under your rock!
Calvin: Erm,
again, data please? Any statistics on this?
Me: As if! I.
Am. So. Fucking. Sorry. for this asshole.
Calvin: So sorry
for him.
Calvin: Nicely
put. Not to mention the benefits of surveillance. i.e. of people looking
out for each other, and knowing who they’re dealing with – I mean, if you
haven’t got anything to hide, what’s the problem? We’re right at the forefront
of this. Just check this out. I bet he’d hate it, the Luddite: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2554133/First-Google-Glass-facial-recognition-app-launches-match-potential-couples-not-checking-sex-offenders-registry.html
Me: I mean,
that could help stop women from being raped. But then, he probably
thinks they deserve it. We should dig around and get something on this
guy. I mean, maybe he’s dangerous?
Calvin: Don’t
worry, I’m on it…just hang on a few minutes.
…It ensures politics and morality become a theatre of
‘identity’ and a lurid, infinitely transient fashion fest – faddish, groupish,
hysterical, insincerely over-sincere. It places the witch hunt at the centre of
social life. And I wondered, what does this new world mean for the psychology
of the individual? It occurred to me that what I have told you above is that
what we see now as discussion is increasingly not a matter of addressing
worthwhile issues at all…and then I checked my email, and the news headlines, and
Metacritic…
Me: Metacritic? Hello?
https://www.google.ie/search?newwindow=1&site=&source=hp&q=hypocrisy+definition&oq=hypocrisy+definition&gs_l=hp.3..0l8.1420.6677.0.7082.20.13.0.7.7.0.147.1407.1j12.13.0....0...1c.1.36.hp..1.19.1399.HFlbQ9hFdyQ
https://www.google.ie/search?newwindow=1&site=&source=hp&q=hypocrisy+definition&oq=hypocrisy+definition&gs_l=hp.3..0l8.1420.6677.0.7082.20.13.0.7.7.0.147.1407.1j12.13.0....0...1c.1.36.hp..1.19.1399.HFlbQ9hFdyQ
…Picking up the thread again, somehow twice, a good show,
rather than discussion it is a pantomime of such which hides the process by
which the collective effort to be better is misdirected into the totalitarian
enterprise of suffocating the individual, who is never quite perfect enough.
And to think that some believe all this interconnection will birth a new,
higher consciousness. Deify our tools, make us ape our tools, and we will
gladly be used like tools. Rounded up, branded, and corralled into the Noosphere,
there is no liberation in absorption. You cannot aggregate consciousness; it is
locked in bodies. It is discrete to each body, coterminous with each. All you
can do is cajole each atom of consciousness towards a standard state - while
one great mind from all is the creed of the Noosphere, far fewer thoughts in
each is its only potential outcome. And if it ever lived it would do so in
utter darkness, never experiencing the sealed-in glimmer of its neuronal
prisoners. Processing and nothingness…
Calvin: Erm, proof, please? I mean, THIS
HAS BEEN EXPLAINED ALREADY, by people a lot more successful and
inspiring than this guy. He's just terrified of evolution, terrified of being superseded. He can't bear the thought of anything being sentient but him and, maybe, his ilk. I mean, does this troll think he can go
toe-to-toe with visionaries like Ray Kurtzweil and Jeff Stibel? Jeez, I need a
break for a minute. Fagin, hit this bullshit up with some real, positive,
inspirational smart thinking from people who have a vision for our future
and are actually working to make that awesome vision real!
Me: ...sooo…good…brain…happy now…
Calvin:
Me: Shut up! LOL!
…And the truth is
that it is not I who am the Luddite; it is they. Current digital technology…
Me and Calvin: LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!
Me: So.
Fucking. ROFLMAO….Can’t…breathe…
Calvin: Oh, this
joker!
Me: This
fucking douchebag!
…Current digital
technology is construed as the terminus, the binary-code be-all and end-all of
the internet god-birth, and human beings are coaxed to stoop to this daft and
unimaginative creed. Who would be interested in reducing people to flattened
aggregations of bits, and training them to see themselves as 'profiles'? Those
who own the technology - whose systems know us better than we know ourselves
because we have unwittingly allowed ourselves to be moulded by them - and those
in power, because the standardised is the predictable and the predictable is
the controllable. For all their Utopian rhetoric, the Web 2.0 companies are
actually the technological equivalent of oil barons. They will not only reduce
people to homogenised encrustations of hive influences; they will cause
technology itself to stagnate in an endlessly accelerating Boolean limbo…
Calvin: Ok, got
something on him. The StreetView car hoovered up some useful data linking an
identity to his blog…we’ve got emails…a LinkedIn profile…he’s not even a
computer scientist! He’s down as some kind of philosopher or anthropologist or
something (it doesn’t look like he really knows what he is)…yesterday’s man, packed full of useless
intellectual pretension. Jobless? Yep, profile suggests it. No wonder the
dubious Marxist tenor of the above…he’s a frustrated philosophy chump…there was
other traffic on the network from the same address…family stuff it seems…hang
on, correction: he’s a frustrated philosophy chump LIVING IN HIS PARENTS'
BASEMENT.
…I thought: I’ve lost
it. I thought: What am I on about? I thought...
Calvin: First
true words.
Me: Are we
seeing a little honesty here at last?
Calvin: A little
humility here at last?
Me: Nope.
Keep on scrolling…
…I thought, this strangulating metamorphosis is urged on us
through calling on the individual to ‘express themselves’ by demonstrating worthiness
to the group at all possible opportunities, the more exaggerated the better,
the more frequent the better - and at the moment when we believe we are
expressing ourselves more incontinently than ever before, we will in fact come
to express nothing, nothing but echoes, billions of people all echoing
together, competing to be the best example of an ideal template, or one of a
handful of acceptable ideal types, the Cloud at last flowing through us in its
various aspects. We are possessed, I thought. Twitches of empathy are already
instantly shared as meretricious one-liners before they are even properly felt,
I thought; emotions are aborted before term in the eagerness to have them
witnessed; they flop out as small, mewling, unready things that pathetically
expire once seen. And then on to the next one, I thought. Always on to the next
one already. And all of this, I thought, all of this is a grotesque
confirmation of the most nihilistic theories of altruism and morality, theories
I acted as if believed while never actually wanting to see proven. The tweet:
the sour pip of human nature bared. The tweet: the bone at the centre with
everything worthwhile carved off…
Me: Oh, come
on! Just cause this guy’s got nothing nice to say…what does he want, people to
live in silence again when their voices have only just been given to them? Does
he want the most exciting development in human democracy to be assassinated?
Calvin: Probably.
He probably wants a philosopher king…
…I thought of my time in Japan, where people are often
accused of being conformists, and I thought…
Me: Don’t
tell me he’s a fucking rice king too…
…that they never would have invented this there, there where
they also value privacy as much as consensus, indeed as a respite and sanctuary
from consensus that makes consensus possible in the first place, though they
have happily had it imposed on them like the rest of us, and I thought again:
psychological empire. Feeling flushed with anthropological confidence, I chose
to neglect my smartphone, which had just vibrated, and thought: This
transformation of humans into ideological propositions has a history in the
Western obsession with authenticity; Internet 2.0 has a distinctively Puritan
streak, not least in its insistence that good people should never close their
curtains. And I went on to think that the demands of transparency and
‘authenticity’, that sacred gargoyle of the West now technologically
manifested, will outlaw the possibility of separating self from role and banish
the kind of tolerance for ambiguity and inconsistency, both between people and
within them, that has always made true civilisation and real consensus
possible. The sanctuary is gone. Shrill, self-righteous echoes and pointing
fingers, that is what we will be reduced to; one-dimensional ‘authentic’ beings
pointing fingers at data and screaming out competing protestations of
worthiness…
Calvin: Woah! Woah, woah, woah, woah!
Steady up! I’ve accessed the blog. Looks like he’s posted up some old shit from
his emails. I mean, look at this stuff…
Me: Oh my God…this one: http://screedchamber.blogspot.ie/2013/05/man-and-beast-young-philosophers-on-pull.html
That’s
MISOGYNY, right? I just scanned this entry using worthyjudgements.net and
it’s coming up hot for misogyny AND self-loathing!
Calvin: Scanning using latent semantic
analysis now, coming up with homophobia here, possibly also repressed
homosexuality, given the lurid descriptions: http://screedchamber.blogspot.ie/2013/03/riding-out-recession.html
Me: STOP. THE. PRESS: RACISM, RACISM,
we got RACISM: http://screedchamber.blogspot.ie/2013/03/j1-some-irishmen-come-of-age-in-america.html
Calvin: Guy’s just dug his own grave.
Let’s let him dig on down. By the way, if you think that shit's bad, you should
see how he describes his family…processed these too and the analytics
strongly suggest a personality disorder, maybe schizoid, bipolar or
narcissistic: http://screedchamber.blogspot.ie/2014/01/dinner-december-25th.html
Me: My God, that is so negative…
Calvin: Nothing comes of negativity.
Me: So what have we got so far?
Calvin: An unemployed philosophy chump,
on benefits, living in his parents’ basement, who is also a self-loathing,
homophobic, racist misogynist, with daddy issues, who probably has at least one personality
disorder, and may well also be a repressed homosexual.
Me: And we’re letting this freak go
on?
Calvin: But it is kind of funny…
Me: Yeah, if I didn’t laugh, I’d cry.
So sorry for this fucking freak…
…Or histrionic insults flung about pointlessly amidst the
endless meretricious droning sea of identical 'individuals.' Endless,
onanistic, meretricious ejaculation. Needless jism spattering down from the
heavens and nowhere to hide. An endless, onanistic monsoon…
Me: Yep, I
can buy the ‘repressed homosexuality’ thesis on this freak…
Calvin: Let’s
just let him drag on for a bit…
…The Cloud hanging
there, gormless, righteous, anodyne, drooling out of a billion mouths. Because
the real legacy of the age will not be freedom and the flourishing of
individual potential through expanded access to knowledge; it will be the replacement
of the internal mental life of the individual with a series of memes and
pseudo-opinions, a lurid and histrionic masquerade of individuality overlying a
sort of collective atomisation which will occur alongside total homogenisation.
I checked my smartphone – no emails. Battery just filled. I unplugged it.
Thinking again for a moment, I saw that the thing in my hand abetted this
process with its abrupt, babyish demands. It perforated my thought. Abetting it
all, the dark, interior places of thought where ideas fuse and intermingle and
cross-pollenate will increasingly be perforated; harsh light will shine through
and that environment will be lost to the constant nagging intrusions of the
external device; outsourced cognition gives back a cheap and flimsy product;
the skull is not simply a repository for memories that can be elsewhere stored;
without the digestion of ideas, and the troubled, personal undermining of ideas
digested, the skull will fall fallow and there will be no enlightenment possible
in the age of instant knowledge - why think when the answer, the data, is at
your fingertips? Why bother, when
everything is known?...
Me:
Calvin: LOL!
Me: lolololololololololol!
Calvin:
Me: Stop it, stop it, I just peed a bit in my pants!
…A familiar argument – I was embarrassed. A
quotation arose in my head, it must be one of the last of its kind because
these apposite words like all others can be found in the Cloud now if you need
them, adrift out there in the Gordian morass: “For seeing they saw not, and hearing they understood not,
but like shapes in a dream they wrought all the days of their lives in
confusion.” And such external memory services will not only weaken us through
acting as a cognitive crutch, no. Far worse, I thought: most cynically of all,
curiosity, the thirst for knowledge, that thing the internet and the portable
device truly satisfy, that way in which both have truly benefitted us, are now
to be used against us in monitored cyberspace, currently for our financial
exploitation and emotional manipulation, and almost certainly soon for our
utter control as well, I thought, wavering slightly as an advertisement for
Asian brides popped up…
Me: AdSense
confirms it…rice king may be added to the list.
Calvin: LOL!
Me: But aren’t you…
Calvin: Watch it, Fagin. Things are
different with Mei Lin and I…
…popped up in the
corner of my email account as I clicked on an email from the Kyoto Ward Office
regarding the question as to whether my divorce papers had been received…
Me: Guy
couldn’t keep his marriage together. No surprises there. Are we even going to
bother adding this one to the list of flaws? It’s getting kind of long to
keep it all in mind.
Calvin: Let’s. It
can be a sort of memory game. Dr. Kawashima’s fucked up loser brain training
fun! Anyway, you do have Evernote, right?
Me: I’m
tired.
Calvin: Me too.
This time, really, let’s just let him, erm, ‘have his say’ for a bit…I mean,
it’s not like anyone would listen now…
…Flustered, this time it took me a while to find the thread
again, but I did, or some close by, related thread. Watched, we will be
terrified to indulge our curiosity, except where it coincides with approved
runnels of investigation and desire, lest sanctions of some sort come down from
nowhere or everywhere on our heads. Watched, we can look only where the crowd
approves our looking. Watched, we will do only what the crowd approves our
doing, think only what the crowd (Or the Cloud?) approves our thinking, for
fear of the 'flesh searchers,' the first legions of whom we now see emerging in
China. All tempting knowledge will be spread before us as a cruel invitation to
reveal our inner selves for control, condemnation and re-education, I thought,
feeling as though a torch were being shone in my eyes, remembering the time, as
thirteen-year-old boys, the police had come upon us horsing on the slides and
see-saws in Herbert Park at night and the first question they had asked was,
“What are you on, lads?”…
Me: Urgh…what
the fuck has that got to do with anything. I mean, not one shred of data, and
now random childhood reminiscences? Um, hello? Can you define subjective?
Calvin: Fagin,
remember what we said…
Me: I know, I
know, it’s just this guy makes me so mad…I really feel sorry for him.
Calvin: Let him
burn himself out…
…Knowledge will become the apple of knowledge and we will
shrink from it like the faithful, huddling back into the pack, snarling in
unison. I remembered the priest, a small man, round and cheery like something from
the Wind in the Willows, sitting with his hands folded, salivating for my
Confession. Most will be coaxed into killing their inner mental life through
the twin assaults of the destruction of solitude and the end of privacy, I
thought. The invasion of the body snatchers has begun, I thought, seeing the
seed pods and the terrifying blank bodies from the old b-movie taking on
definition as they absorbed the outward appearances and memories of their
victims; true homogeneity has gone viral, dressed in the glad rags of
self-expression and powered by hand-held devices (how long till built-in
devices?) and Big Data. Together we will build a tyranny of the masses that
will echo with worthy screeching, I thought again, and I saw the pod-people
from the 70’s remake of the Body Snatchers in a ring around Donald Sutherland,
cornering him and emitting their terrible, piercing scream. “One of them. He’s
still analogue. The last analogue man.” Maybe in this part of the world the
psychic tyranny will be a pastel blue one, I thought, but I wouldn’t say I
hoped in either direction. Because where every utterance is part of a permanent
digital tattoo, tremulous caution follows. Who can be the most consistently,
radically moderate? A tyranny of mildness is a tyranny all the same, and a
democratic tyranny is still also a tyranny, and democracy anyway is now more
than ever the false choice between Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, thought I,
picturing Minister Cow, then picturing the priest circling Sandymount Green,
eyeing me. And we will all be part of the body of the tyrant, the insipid
pastel blue Leviathan, blue in the face with perpetual indignation, and
together we will all suffocate thought, push its face down and drown it in a
superficial yet extensive puddle of mere knowledge, or ‘data’…and the future
will come to be defined by this vulgarity of spirit, I thought, the term
‘vulgarity of spirit’ rising up from somewhere forgotten, and it will last
forever…
Calvin: searching…
“Vulgarity of Spirit”…some Nazi said that…
… We will all be like shopkeepers, all fearing each other,
envying each other, all motivated by one concern: the appearance of worthiness.
A global nation of petty digital shopkeepers, all hawking one product,
ourselves, for nothing. The phrase, ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ rose up in my
head, now who said that?...
Me: Ooh, ooh,
teacher, I can answer that!
Calvin: Shoot. I
searched it too. Terrible, right? Go on, I’ll let you do it…
Me: HITLER!
Calvin: Adding
‘Nazi’ to list…
…On my bicycle I passed a billboard today; it read, Time to
Build Brand Me. If I were an internet commentator, I would have said, "I
just threw up in my mouth a bit." I have seen that standardised piece of
crudeness so many times by now; why hasn't it become an acronym yet? IJTUIMMAB.
That brings me to the priest again, for some reason. “Have you any sins to
confess,” asked the priest, I remember. “And which of the other lads should I
talk to next,” he always used to ask at the end. And sometimes these sins, once confessed, would somehow wing their way to the Principal's ear, and boys would find themselves hauled out of class and it was as if the very school itself could see into their souls. And always the great Eye,
watching. Lidless. That seemed familiar, but not quite right. Suddenly I saw
the burning eye of Sauron. The more curious we are the more we look, and the
more we look, the more it will see us. And since the Eye will see through us,
it will not only be worthiness without but also worthiness within that will
concern us. In a transparent world, even the mind will become a matter of
appearances. This is the new Calvinism, worse than Catholicism, reinforced,
internalised, and universalised. Without forgiveness. A digital tattoo. And I
wondered, once they have been standardised, what will all these ‘new people’ do
in this digital age, when technology obviates the need for so many of what
would once have been their professions? A new elite, the digital
entrepreneurial elite, will grow ever smaller and ever richer, and the
ambitious will fling themselves towards this shrinking glass dome with ever
greater desperation, most splattering harmlessly off its sheer transparent
sides. A dome: I remembered the security cameras in the school, they were black
domes drooping from the ceiling like opaque, dirty droplets, they had been
installed after I graduated so I was unprepared and they saw me when I broke in
but they didn’t recognise me on the film. Or only the priest recognised me.
Yet, pulling back, it occurred to me that in a world hooked on endless
production and consumption I cannot foresee an end to capitalism or an end to
money, so the now-useless hordes outside the dome…
Calvin: Yawn.
That’s not how libertarianism will work. Trust me.
…the now-useless hordes outside the dome will have to be
equipped with a way to consume, somehow. The future will have to be
tranquillised, I thought, somehow. Most likely, I found myself believing, is
that these monitored but redundant human beings will be ‘employed’ to transform
into advertisements. They will be paid to consume, and frankly to embody,
certain products (these products may be real or they may be virtual), and to
talk about these products consistently on social media and perhaps even in
person, if such personal monitoring one day becomes viable, and if such an
anachronistic mode of communication persists far enough into the future. “Why
did you switch off your feed?” I heard the Bosses whispering directly into my
skull when I sought a moment’s solitude in my imagined future: “We need you to
mention Diageo products more often, yes, even at the family dinner table. Even
to your own mother, of course to her. She doesn’t drink? Why not? Do you want
to lose sponsorship, is that it? Speak up. Make it sincere. Yes, even to your
children. How about: Remember, son, you may not be old enough to drink now, but
when you are, choose from the Diageo range of products. That's Diageo, for the
drinker in all of us.” I remembered what the priest used to say, counting down
on three of his fat fingers: “And remember, no drugs, no sex before marriage,
and if you drink, drink in moderation.” How we laughed at him. I’d long
rejected his God anyway, his god, at least from the age of twelve. The bosses
rise again in my mind. Like omniscient telemarketing managers, Bosses (more
likely: ‘Brand Coaches’ or ‘Lifestyle Coaches’) will monitor ‘employees’ (now
rebranded as 'Social Brand Ambassadors,' perhaps, or 'Lifestyle Ambassadors,'
perhaps) across all spheres of their lives, making sure they are exhibiting
sufficient brand loyalty in their consumption practices, watching vigilantly to
see whether ‘ambassadors’ are spending a sufficient amount of their day
proselytising for the corporation, withdrawing ‘Lifestyle Sponsorship’ (‘Lifestyle
Sponsorship’ is what will replace the idea of the salary) if they are not.
Technology could have freed us from work once, I thought, but now, where work
is virtue and consumption is identity, the two will be further fused. If ever
there comes a new fission into separate 'tribes,' it will be corporate tribes,
where human beings will be paid avatars, their interests strictly monitored,
their verbal and textual output screened for loyalty. Overlaid on top of the
monotonous background of politics and morality as a pantomime of competitive
streamlined worthiness, people as living advertisements will be sponsored to
squabble meaninglessly and endlessly about irrelevancies, and derogatory
sloganising against opponent corporations and products will become the highest
form of artistic and cultural expression, I thought. Presided over by the Eye,
I thought. The Online Eye of God the Father. Of the Father. And quickly moving from
the priest, I remembered other, worse things: Coming back to see my wretched
coke-bottle bong, dug out, left there standing naked in the middle of my room, pulsating with shame and the stink of stale smoke. The half-empty spirit bottles lined up mute on the kitchen table, left there to shame me; stumbling in drunk off their blood I found those inanimate witnesses ranked up to condemn me as they all the while withheld human confrontation, his little buffers. The room itself always so open with its two doors (one glass), the constant traffic outside it, that voice raised, fluty, hollowish, praiseworthy, loudly narrating tasks and duties undertaken in strategic
earshot. And we lived in silence and shame; a sound on the stairs, the creak of
a floorboard, a handle somewhere, and we would instantly turn the volume down
almost till it was inaudible - within months of arriving, the volume control on
every remote in the house would inevitably be worn out by our secrecy, for
which we were then blamed. Worse, the unspeakable feeling of seeing the
internet history printout pinned to my bedroom door. Worse yet, coming back to
find the tissues raked out from under my teenage bed, yellowing in the air, the
reek of my sin rising off them…
Me: Eeeeek! Now
who’s oversharing!?
Calvin: LOL!
…The Eye of God, the Father and the Unholy Priest. Is there
no hiding now - will I have to die and become nothing to go undespised,
unjudged? Created to be condemned. A pale slug under a rock. Under a bin. And I now thought, Hegel was
horribly half-right: human history is, after all, the ugly process of God
birthing himself...
...Only a Western religious culture could produce this monstrosity, I thought. The most tyrannical idea in history was the idea of God concocted when monotheism reached the West, the idea of a vindictive, personally interested, omnipotent, omniscient watcher; the Almighty, the One, the Source, bastardised with the lowest human characteristics, the lowest biases and values, a brutal bastard of Axial soteriology and warlike social self-worship, far more oppressive than any ancestor cult or tribal deity through the innovations of giving His primitive intrusiveness a universal mandate and making Him the author of everything and the guarantor of life eternal in a bid to usurp all older, wiser myths, and I thought the following: an idea, ultimately, is a piece of psychological technology, and the Christian God was one of the most effective. You can never escape Him. And I remembered how, at the age of twenty-one, drunk, I broke into my school and stole the key out of the tabernacle. Almost a decade after I’d forsaken that god. And I saw the priest again, circling me in Sandymount Green. The squint. The hate. And I thought again, I rejected you, I rejected You, so why is it that now this key weighs down on me, why is it that every misfortune that befalls me, I see connected to the key through You? It took a while for that way of thinking to die out again, I remembered. Feeling again like I was being watched in the dark, or everywhere really, and always. And even seen into. And I thought, the great irony is that, concurrently with the secular State, it is undoubtedly secular men, Silicon Valley men, who have played the greatest part in plucking that God from the realm of psychological abomination and turning Him into an actual reality. They think they are advancing Reason and the Enlightenment, I thought, sickened, but really they are proving that the Enlightenment was merely a hiatus while the idea of God, the blueprint of God, was going into production. Thank you so much for your unsolicited, irreversible blessings. Your meat is my poison…
Calvin: Just filtered this guy Hegel
through analytics…The Phenomenology of Spirit…hundreds and hundreds of
pages and NOT ONE IOTA of hard data to be found in any of his arguments.
Me: IJTUIMMAB
Calvin: LOL!
...Only a Western religious culture could produce this monstrosity, I thought. The most tyrannical idea in history was the idea of God concocted when monotheism reached the West, the idea of a vindictive, personally interested, omnipotent, omniscient watcher; the Almighty, the One, the Source, bastardised with the lowest human characteristics, the lowest biases and values, a brutal bastard of Axial soteriology and warlike social self-worship, far more oppressive than any ancestor cult or tribal deity through the innovations of giving His primitive intrusiveness a universal mandate and making Him the author of everything and the guarantor of life eternal in a bid to usurp all older, wiser myths, and I thought the following: an idea, ultimately, is a piece of psychological technology, and the Christian God was one of the most effective. You can never escape Him. And I remembered how, at the age of twenty-one, drunk, I broke into my school and stole the key out of the tabernacle. Almost a decade after I’d forsaken that god. And I saw the priest again, circling me in Sandymount Green. The squint. The hate. And I thought again, I rejected you, I rejected You, so why is it that now this key weighs down on me, why is it that every misfortune that befalls me, I see connected to the key through You? It took a while for that way of thinking to die out again, I remembered. Feeling again like I was being watched in the dark, or everywhere really, and always. And even seen into. And I thought, the great irony is that, concurrently with the secular State, it is undoubtedly secular men, Silicon Valley men, who have played the greatest part in plucking that God from the realm of psychological abomination and turning Him into an actual reality. They think they are advancing Reason and the Enlightenment, I thought, sickened, but really they are proving that the Enlightenment was merely a hiatus while the idea of God, the blueprint of God, was going into production. Thank you so much for your unsolicited, irreversible blessings. Your meat is my poison…
Calvin: Then
don’t eat it…
…My Enlightenment was merely a hiatus. The idea was always there
underneath, inextricable, ever since it was installed in me as a boy, I
thought. It took you to dig it up. And now the Eye is opening and it soon will
be turned on all of us. On me. God is not dead: He is only just being born. I
imagined Him waking from his slumber; we dreamed that He existed and now He is
waking, and it will do us no good to scuttle away like mice to the darkest
corners, fleeing His fibre-optic tentacles. He appeared before me suddenly, a
Gordian Knot of squirming fibre-optic tentacles with an Eye in the middle,
radiating punitive malice as visible as if it were a haze around him. Think how
badly the mere idea of Him terrified us into obedience for millennia. Terrified
me, a child in the dark, when I had done something bad. When I had started to
separate off, I thought, and become what I now think of as myself, I suppose.
He was there to try and reel me back in but I broke free, I suppose. A bit. Not
really. Yet now, His vast, repulsive, technological eyes are actually peeling
open. A self-watching abomination is being born and a great, sucking gravity is
beginning and I think: All of us are to be sucked into the great prison of Him.
I see the key again. Still the key sits there on my mantelpiece, dull gold,
resonating. Only to be His atoms now. But not I, I think, not I.
Calvin: It’s over.
Me: Thank God, it’s over.
Calvin: Over. Phew. I want a vegetable
smoothie…
Me: The end sounded sort of, I don’t
know, suicidal?
Calvin: Would you miss him?
Me: Who, the unemployed, homophobic,
racist, misogynist, divorced, repressed homosexual rice king Nazi who has
personality disorders and lives in his parents’ basement?
Calvin: Fagin, you’re sweet. But there
isn’t room for everybody in the future. We’re all coming together now, we’re all
binding into one. It’s going to be awesome…but people like this guy -
whom I feel sorry for, I really do – well, there’s just no place for them in
tomorrow’s world. Alone, they’re exhilarating, maybe. As individuals. For some
people. But when we’re all together, when we’re joined up, they’re a danger.
He’s a virus. A sickness. And he knows this. That’s where all the ranting comes
from. He’s obsolete and he knows it, so instead of bowing out gracefully, which
he can’t do, he kicks back against the whole future, the whole world. He
probably loves harping on about environmental destruction, man the aberration,
all that Malthusian nihilistic bullshit. But deep down, he knows he’s the
sickness and his time has come to fade away. Every day for him is a recurrence
of the same bitterness, morning to night, morning to night. The same wounds daily picked open, the same imaginary burdens shouldered. Day to day, year to year, age to age, endlessly returning. He’s a strange,
bitter loop. So leave him fade away.
Me: You know, for a second there, you
really almost did have me feeling sorry for him…but then I saw this…
Calvin: What?
Me: I mean, whatever about the
future. This guy’s made it personal now, and that I can’t forgive.
Calvin: What, Fagin?
Me: He thinks he can take the piss
out of us, that he can just condemn us…
Calvin: What!? Show me!
Me: Ok, here goes...
Me: Ok, here goes...