The Every, page 19
I know your employer does everything it can to counter common sense and has buried many unflattering medical studies, but the inexorable rise in suicides these last twenty years is so obviously a result of two entwined products of the digital age—the catastrophic health effects of manic (and largely meaningless) mental activity, and the lack of real purpose. No one is resting, and no one is accomplishing anything of real worth. It is, instead, the endless churning of middlebrow nonsense, of smiles, frowns, Popeyes, How U/Me fine, that keeps us from meaningful contemplation, or any hope of a new idea.
Again, please leave.
Agarwal.
Wes poked his head into her room.
“They asked about my footwear,” he said. “What footwear I had on. How much I’d exercised that day and the day before.”
“Did you say none and none?” Delaney asked.
“I said I sleep ten hours a day.”
“You do sleep ten hours a day,” Delaney noted.
“Wearing a shroud. Next to a wood fire.”
“Vivid. Thank you.”
“And I only work in rooms without doors.”
Delaney pictured an army of handypersons getting to work on removing all the Every’s doors.
“Walk?” Wes said.
Hurricane had gnawed his paws into raw stumps; Wes couldn’t talk about it. Daily, he doused them with antiseptic, and periodically ground antibiotics into Hurricane’s food, but the dog was going mad. The chief enjoyment he took from life was running on the beach, but now he could only sit like an invalid in the child’s stroller Wes had bought for him. So Wes installed him in it and they made their way toward the shore. The day was breezy, the waves were good, but only one surfer had submitted to the tracking requirements. The lone figure sat up in the distance, like a black cat on the steel roof of the sea.
“You know they’ll tell everyone to sleep ten hours,” Delaney said.
“You think?”
“They’re desperate.”
“I really think they have a problem with ideas at the Every,” Wes said.
“That’s why they buy them. We knew this.”
“Right, but then something strange happens. They buy companies, and they buy the people who came up with the ideas from those companies. Then those people come to the Every and their brains die. Is it complacency? The fatted calf?”
“It’s fear.”
“Yes, but it’s not just fear. It’s an involuntary reaction to the frozen atmosphere there. Like when testicles shrink in cold water. They retreat.”
“Is it too late to add that to your creativity survey? People would benefit from your testicle theory.”
“I do think Mae’s in trouble,” Wes said. “Think about it. She hasn’t had an idea in years. They basically just update the same devices and hope people don’t notice the planned obsolescence. But revenues are flat. Even when they bought the jungle, there’s been no significant … shit, I have to say synergy. They’ve done nothing to connect their strengths with the jungle. I think she’s on the bubble.”
“She’s not on the bubble. Who would replace her?”
“Suddenly Stenton’s back,” Wes said. “He’s making himself at home. And the longer Mae treads water, the more vulnerable she becomes. It’s like I’ve been saying: that’s why she doesn’t show her face much around campus, at any of these Dream Fridays. She’s waiting till she has something new to offer.”
Delaney thought about that. It actually could be true.
“How’s the AuthentiFriend team?” she asked. “Are you making it as bad as possible?”
“My power is limited so far,” Wes said. “I’m just coding. They don’t bring me into the conceptual meetings. That’s all Holstein. I think she’s beginning to think she invented it.”
“Which is probably good,” Delaney said. “You don’t want to be noticed so much. Neither one of us should.”
Wes arranged Hurricane’s blanket such that he could see the surf and the dogs galloping past. On the wet sand, their reflections doubled Hurricane’s envy. “The weird thing,” Wes said, “is that while I was answering the survey, I had another idea. But it shouldn’t leave my head. If it were enacted it would change the species. It’s a bad idea. Vile.” Wes threw a stick over the promenade wall. It landed on the sand without a sound, and Hurricane let out a hopeless sigh. “It’s a reprehensible idea that seems, on the surface, virtuous.”
“That describes almost everything the Every does.”
Wes looked down the shore. “I think the company will love it, and regular people will, too. But overall it’ll bring a new kind of self-hatred and personal ruination upon all humans.”
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
Wes looked to Hurricane, who regarded him with pleading eyes. Forced to watch all that he could no longer do, the beach was doing Hurricane no good.
“You know those carbon impact calculators we used in high school?” Wes said.
Delaney remembered them well. A person could plug in elements of their lifestyle—car, house, commute, diet—and get a rough idea of the carbon implications. Every Earth Day for twenty years, students had been inputting in their family’s data and had been able to compare their carbon impact to, say, a Finnish reindeer herder. A family would think about the number briefly, question its accuracy, and then forget it completely until the next year.
“Well,” Wes said, “we have the data to go well beyond rough estimates now.”
“Did you just say ‘we’?” Delaney asked.
“Think about it,” he said. His face was grave. “For the average person, eighty-eight percent of their purchases are either going through the Every or an Every partner. The money is so easy to track. So if you buy bottled water from Iceland tomorrow, that’s known.”
“So?”
“Well, we can easily determine the actual carbon impact of that exact purchase,” Wes said, and pointed to a pair of container ships in the distance. “That water came thousands of miles by boat. Five hundred miles on a truck. The carbon impact is easy to calculate. You do that for every purchase—a pair of socks made in Cambodia, a light-bulb made in Malaysia. You could do it in real time. The moment you make the purchase, the carbon impact of that purchase is added to your total. The total is aggregated immediately.”
“If it were private, it could be helpful,” Delaney said.
“Right. If only you knew this number, you’d make better decisions. Like knowing your caloric intake. You could voluntarily change your habits. It would lead to better buying, better sourcing.”
Wes threw another stick over the wall, and Hurricane, still in the stroller, watched its trajectory with only academic interest.
“But it won’t stay private,” Wes said. “The Every will make it public, because secrets are lies, right? They’ll call it Individual Carbon Impact. Or Personal Carbon Impact.”
“TipToe,” Delaney said. “It’ll have a name like that.”
“God that’s good,” he said. “TipToe. Jesus.”
Wes crouched down next to Hurricane, who stretched his neck from the stroller to rest his snout on Wes’s arm.
“It’ll be about shame,” Wes said. “Surveillance, data and shame as behavioral modifier. That’s been where all of this has been heading all along.”
“You can’t tell anyone about that one,” Delaney said. “For now we stick with sillier things.”
Wes stroked Hurricane’s snout. Hurricane looked desperate. His eyes were restless, shining, and he was trapped in a body that no longer worked.
“Look at what they did to this guy,” Wes said. “He used to be a god, a goliath. Now he sits and gnaws at himself.”
Delaney didn’t know what to say.
“Part of me thinks we should speed things up,” Wes said.
“Speed up AuthentiFriend?”
“Everything. Flood the zone. It takes no time at all to get some moronic app out there, and we’re in the perfect position. We have dumb ideas, and they have the means and motive to claim and distribute them. Ten ideas just as bad as AuthentiFriend. Ah, you like it. I see that smile.”
“They will kill us,” Delaney said.
“No,” Wes said, “they will love us.”
XX.
THEY STARTED SMALL. They created an app that told eaters, after they ate, whether or not they enjoyed what they ate. Delaney threw together some metrics that the users’ ovals could detect, and applied terms like pulse-rate optimization, endorphin count and pleasure center. They called it Satisfied? and it was an immediate hit. For a week it was the most downloaded app on campus, then in California, then the world. No one thought it too silly, no one thought it evil. Instead, Wes—who got credit for it—was feted as a new force in food-related tech, given Satisfied? followed so closely on the heels of Bananaskam. Everyones were dazzled by his tech-aided diet dichotomy: You should not eat what you should not eat, but what you should eat should be enjoyed, and here’s the app that tells you if you enjoyed it.
“That didn’t work out as I expected,” Wes said.
“And we shouldn’t have had you take credit,” Delaney said.
They invented a way to introduce ideas anonymously, and called it AnonIdea. It was a way for selfless Everyones to toss a notion into the mix, and have any other Everyone take the lead in developing it. No credit needed, no credit asked. This was seen on campus as a radically benevolent and selfless platform, and so only Delaney and Wes contributed any ideas to it.
Their next notion was simple but just offensive enough that they thought it would provoke widespread disgust. HappyNow? built on Satisfied? but was expanded to answer, in real time, whether the user was happy. They applied the same metrics used for Satisfied? but added the user’s recent purchases. It only made sense that a happy person would be buying happy things—workout gear, flowers, champagne, bright clothing, sex-positive toys—and in healthy quantities. HappyNow? analyzed your purchases and provided a Happy/Healthy rating (HH), illustrated by a range of expressions on the face of a cartoon hippo. Retailers and marketers loved this, given its circularity: to be considered happy, one only needed to buy more happy things, given who but a happy person would buy so many happy things?
Building on HappyNow? Delaney came up with Did I?, which used users’ ovals to determine whether orgasm was reached during any given coital session. A follow-up measured orgasm duration, intensity, and overall quality. Another update allowed the user to compare their orgasms with their friends, relatives and high-school crushes—and finally with any group in the world, the data divisible by region, demographics, income and genetic predisposition.
People loved it.
“I guess we have to get sillier?” Wes mused. They were back at the Shed, and Hurricane was chewing on his back paws. His fur everywhere was patchy and coarse; he looked like moth-eaten rug. Wes had him on hormones and antibiotics, but nothing worked. He only wanted to run. Wes dropped to the floor and rubbed Hurricane’s tummy; Hurricane wheezed.
“And flood the zone,” Delaney said. “There has to be a point where there’s too much nonsense.”
Wes looked up. “Too much nonsense,” he said dryly. He held Hurricane’s snout and locked eyes with the sick dog. “She thinks there’s a limit to nonsense. Isn’t that interesting that she thinks that?”
Delaney’s next notion was obnoxious and served no purpose but to prove the limitless self-regard of the Every and its staff. Henceforth, our campus should be called Everywhere, Delaney proposed. And anything not on campus is Nowhere. This was picked up by a Gang of 40 member named Valerie Bayonne, and was codified in days. People on- and off-campus found it delightfully irreverent and even clever, which gave great satisfaction to Valerie, who had been irreverent and clever enough to recognize these qualities in the idea.
Wes thought of Kerpow!, an app made to “encourage spontaneity” among the world’s peoples. “Spontaneity is the spice of life!” he wrote, “and so important to our emotional and intellectual lives!” Kerpow!, once downloaded, reminded the user, every two hours, to do something unexpected. It was a hit.
Delaney introduced Thinking of You, an app that automatically sent a brief message—a T.O.Y., or toy—to each of the user’s contacts, twice a day. Thinking of you! the message might say, or could be modified, personalized, made more frequent as needed. Delaney hoped people would be driven mad by the addition of hundreds, minimum, of new messages a day, but most humans felt happy to be thought of, even if by an algorithm, and so the introduction of the toy, too, was a success.
Wes upped the ante with Show Your Love, which insisted that any messages of love, support, well-wishes or birthday greetings to family or friends be made public and counted. It caught on immediately, and the arms race began: it was ludicrous and selfish and weird to send any loving messages privately, so all were made public, and had to be sent often, to prove that love. The grandmother who sent thirty messages to Khalil or Siobhan by lunch loved her grandson or granddaughter abundantly, and clearly more than the grandmother who sent only eleven. The numbers could not lie.
The natural next step was WereThey?, which called upon the wisdom of the crowd to determine whether one’s parents were any good. The user supplied data, photos, emails, texts, video evidence, and the child’s subsequent success with college, romance and career. Between AI assessors and the experts and laypersons who weighed in from near and far, the quality of any given parental performance, birth to present, could be deduced. Wes added a tagline—Data for Dada, Metrics for Mama—which Delaney considered gilding the lily, but in any case, neither Delaney nor Wes expected much pushback on the app, and none arrived. People wanted this kind of certainty and now could get it.
Delaney conjured Departy, but couldn’t take credit; it was inevitable. Departy notified you of the death of anyone in your network, and then assessed who in your network knew the deceased and to whom you ought to send condolences. DepartyPlus connected the user with florists, travel agents and estate lawyers, and DepartyElite handled all these things, including the messages of condolence, for you. It was adopted by millions in weeks.
Wes created PassionProject, which grew out of research proving that people were happier when they had a passion—one overarching hobby or pastime in their life. For those unsure of what their passion was, PassionProject would scour all of the user’s available social media feeds, searches, purchases, posts and real-world movements and determine, “with 99.3% accuracy,” Wes said, the user’s favorite thing to do. People found it enormously helpful.
After seeing a child shammed one day for leaving his dog’s feces on the street for a full half-minute while he retrieved a baggie, Delaney thought of Takes a Village, or Tav, which allowed the user to film and tag children for their misdeeds and deviances, and connect that evidence to the tracking-chips most children wore in their ankles. Both Delaney and Wes had high hopes that the idea of tavving would nauseate all humans, would be the last straw, but instead most people were grateful; it removed guesswork from parenting, and illuminated the few remaining blindspots between children and those rearing them.
Delaney suggested something she called FictFix, expecting, correctly as it turned out, that Alessandro would claim it. The main thrust of FictFix was to take old novels and fix them. Unsympathetic protagonists were made likeable, chiefly through aggregrating online complaints and implementing suggestions; problematic and outdated terminology was changed to reflect contemporary standards; and superfluous chapters, passages and anything preachy was removed. This could be done instantly in e-books, even those purchased long before. When FictFix rolled out, it was done gingerly, Alessandro assuming the blowback would be extreme. But there was not much, and it was confined to a few irrelevant academics, whose own back catalogs were soon fixed by their former graduate students.
“That one surprised me,” Wes said.
Delaney could no longer be surprised. But she tried.
She introduced an extension to FictFix that invited the correction of all texts, from 20th-century newspapers to 16th-century treatises, to avoid offense and improve clarity. These texts were opened to group editing, wiki-style, which allowed the texts to be quickly and continuously improved. The response was universally positive.
EndDis was Wes’s creation, an app where users could present a picture of anything, and ask the internet if it should exist, or if it should be eliminated in the real world and historical record. Wes’s notes on it insisted the subjects be inconsequential, things like pumpkin bread and wall-to-wall carpet, but EndDis was quickly hijacked to pass judgment on people, mostly celebrities, most of whom the internet said should die and be stricken from the human chronicle.
As a palate cleanser, Wes thought of ShouldEye, a decision-making app whereby a person could ask the general public to help them make a decision. From dating to burrito-purchasing, a user could announce a conundrum, ask for a quorum, and put their trust in the wisdom of the crowd. This was the most popular idea yet, was renamed Concensus, and, when municipalities and nation-states began adopting it as their chief tool for decision-making, and when Del’s parents relied on it to make any choice, and when millions began using it to decide whether or not they should leave the house, eat lunch, talk to family members or friends, or breed—given the environmental impact of babymaking, the inherent narcissism of the notion—Del and Wes decided to take a step back to regroup.
“Nothing’s working,” Delaney said.
“Actually, everything’s working,” Wes noted.
“Nothing goes too far,” Delaney said. “Nothing’s breaking.”
“But maybe it’s bending?” Wes said doubtfully.
“It could be bending,” Delaney said, though she’d never been so scared.
