Moments before the collision, Wint was dreaming of the North. Hanging from the ceiling grab handle of the red London bus, he pictured himself abandoning the city and moving to a remote location, away from everything. Somewhere on the coast of Scotland maybe: Inverness, Aberdeen, Peterhead; places he’d only seen on the map. It didn’t matter, as long as it wasn’t here.
Over the past year he had become prone to immature escape fantasies like this one. It seemed he was never short of reasons to leave everything behind and disappear.
A common reason were the daily challenges and humiliations of his job, which had slowly begun approaching intolerable. The new owners of The Intrepid, the newspaper of which he was the editor, had brought with them a wealth of “fresh ideas” that didn’t quite reconcile with Wint’s idea of journalistic quality, or for that matter, ethics. He was a veteran journo, an award-winning writer, an exacting editor, and the longest-tenured employee of the once-illustrious paper, and he thought his word should carry at least some weight. With the new owners, he didn’t seem to be able to get one in edgewise.
The paper had been sold for a good reason, even Wint had to acknowledge. They were struggling, just like the rest of the publishing industry, and the paper had not been able to give him a meaningful raise for half a decade. Meanwhile, the city which sprawled outside the windows of the slowly tottering bus was getting prohibitively expensive. That was another reason for his desire to take flight: paying the bills and supporting his mother’s care had wiped out his savings to the point where he was now taking the bus to work. Maybe, somewhere up north, there would be a house where he and his mother could live out the remainder of her years, a dwindling number he didn’t like to think of. It was two weeks before Christmas and he was overdue for a visit to the care home. He dreaded the thought nearly as much as he dreaded the idea of having his mother spend Christmas without a visit. All of her family was back home in the US Midwest where she had come from, and from where Wint had inherited his straight-spoken manners and the Americanisms he as a writer for the British press had spent his career trying to unlearn. He was the only visitor she was likely to receive. He didn’t like seeing her like this. But he would go, soon.
However, this particular morning his wish to disappear had a novel reason. Today he wouldn’t have objected to the option of being swallowed into the depths of the earth, if it meant escaping the deep, boundless shame of last night.
He’d gone on a date, and the date had gone horribly, horribly wrong.
He’d been set up with the younger woman by an old friend from his days at The Post, who would’ve undoubtedly by now received a full recounting of his shortcomings of the night before. Having cancelled all his afternoon meetings, Wint had left his office on time, but after a couple of impromptu pints of dutch courage on the way to the restaurant he was already late and smelled of beer; not the best of entrances.
He wasn’t sure what pictures Sarah, their shared acquaintance, had shown his date to persuade her to meet him, but odds were they were of an older vintage. He’d been careful not to be photographed the last few years, as his formerly black hair had taken on a sombre shade of grey and his waistline had expanded worryingly. He wasn’t yet stocky, he simply had a “dad bod”, without the excuse of having fathered any children. Similarly, his clever writer’s sense of humour tended strongly towards “dad jokes” that elicited more groans than outright guffaws. Sometimes he thought it would be easiest to just sire a child, that way he could excuse not going to the gym, and maybe at least someone would find his jokes funny. Maybe, if this date would go well…
Dad bod or not, catching his reflection in the window of the restaurant, he thought he wasn’t that bad looking — he was tallish, recently groomed, his face cleanly shaven apart from a rakish little moustache and a seven-o-clock shadow, and underneath his classic peacoat and his burgeoning potbelly, he had good bones and the build of a former Cambridge lacrosse team captain — granted, it had been a good few years since. But as he was shown to the table at the brightly lit minimalist sushi joint he had chosen, his date’s disappointed look made it clear she did not agree with his generous, lager-enhanced self assessment, and that the evening would not end in great romance, as they rarely had in recent years.
As the morning commute crawled past King’s Cross, Wint audibly gasped and winced as new details emerged from the hazy memories of the night prior. In the ruthless light of the morning, he could clearly see what an absolute arse he’d been. The bus 205 during rush hour was not the place and time to have an anxiety attack, so he tried to breathe through the waves of embarrassment that kept washing over him.
The first thing he had done was to plop himself down on the japanese wooden stool opposite his date and howl after the retreating waiter for a bottle of sake without bothering to ask his dinner companion — what was her name again? — whether she would like any. Turns out, she did not.
The second thing he did was what he always did when he was nervous and felt deflated: he put on a show. He briskly and enthusiastically shook his date’s hand — a lovely hand belonging to a diminutive 30-something Asian woman… really, what was her name? — and with his best impersonation of an established newspaper editor and a self-styled man of letters, introduced himself:
“William Winter Webster”, Wint said, pumping her slightly reluctant hand. “Dot com.” Although this joke referencing his initials, ‘WWW”, was as hilarious as it was clever, it had never yet elicited a laugh from anyone.
The joke didn’t land, but it did set the topic and tone for the rest of the evening, as it transpired that his date — Stephanie? Steffie? — knew a thing or two about dot coms. She was an intellectual property rights lawyer at a high-octane Fleet Street law firm, and she worked with some of the hottest startups in town. It was safe to assume that she knew a lot more about the internet economy than he did (most people did, in fact, since he had never bought a single thing online) but that didn’t stop him from talking down to her about it, while she politely smiled at him between artfully served courses of nigiri, sashimi, and things Wint didn’t know the proper names for. (Oh god, he just realised, had he picked the restaurant subliminally because he knew she was Asian, and would that be considered racist?)
The bus dropped off a load of commuters into the bustling Euston station. Wint considered hopping off there and then and boarding the first train to Edinburgh, and a boat to the Outer Hebrides, though it was unlikely there was a point remote enough where he could escape himself. It would still be a good twenty minutes until his stop (or it would’ve been, if the bus service wasn’t about to abruptly, tragically, and fatally terminate a few minutes later), and at this rate his proustian reminiscences of his failures of last night might bloom into full-on panic sweats.
Despite being the editor at a digital news outlet, Wint wasn’t what you might describe as tech-savvy, which made his previous evening’s mansplaining doubly devastating. His wilful ignorance of most topics related to technology was why he was only the “content editor” — a ridiculous title, Wint thought, what else was there to news than content? Still, his new owner had decided to give him this new diminutive prefix in contrast of his own grandiose and, frankly, rather wanky title of Chief Executive Editor. However silly the title, Wint had clearly internalised the power dynamic between them, judging by how frequently he made this same slip of the tongue: his new owner.
It was unclear to Wint why Zee Chakramurthy, the new, equal parts Californian and Indian owner and “CEE” of The Intrepid had taken such a hands-on role at the paper. Wint thought that, being a 27-year-old billionaire in charge of a broad portfolio of companies far more flashy than his struggling London newspaper with more historical baggage than future prospects, he might have found better things to do with his time than to come up with new ways to make Wint’s life a living hell. Yet, that did not seem to be the case.
And while Wint wasn’t a stranger to an occasional rant among colleagues down at the pub, the person who’d so far received the worst of his frustration was his innocent date, who Wint decided either was, or might as well be for purposes of simplicity, called Stephanie.
“The thing about these Silicon Valley kids”, Wint complained, “is that they don’t really care what it is you write as long as it gets clicks. Or no, not just any clicks, clicks on the ads”.
“But isn’t it great that thanks to the advertisers, people get to read news and get all kinds of online experiences for free, no matter whether they can afford to buy a paper”, Stephanie said.
It was a good point, but half into the bottle of sake his date wasn’t touching, Wint wasn’t about to concede any points, no matter how good. Instead, he pressed on:
“It used to be that when we still had a paper, a real, physical paper you could hold and crinkle and spread over a breakfast table, back then the only metrics we were judged on was the clarity of the writing and whether or not you made the front page. Anything beyond page three wouldn’t have any effect on that day’s sales, so as long as you got frontpaged every now and then, the rest of the time you could spend writing stuff that was important even if it wasn’t popular.”
“These days though, it’s different.”, he continued. “Everything you can analyse, they analyse, and there’s not a lot of things you can’t, soon. It’s like a damn Pavlovian experiment, except the subjects are all humans and the writers are worked like dogs.” He had used this line before.
Wint smirked when he thought back to the first online articles he wrote for The Post in the late 1990’s. All they measured then were the total amount of page views. The paper’s management had been giddy about the level of feedback they could divine from this single data point: what kinds of stories sold, and who could write stories that brought the numbers. In retrospect, that had been the beginning of the end for Wint’s long career at The Post, and, he wryly noted, his entire profession, if not the concept of truth at large.
“It’s pretty incredible actually”, Wint continued. “The detail of it. Every piece we write now has so many metrics. We used to have a leaderboard on the flat-screen on our wall that counted page views, but now nobody even cares about the views anymore, that’s just the tiniest tip of the iceberg.”
When Zee Chakramurthy bought The Intrepid, a lot of things changed almost overnight. The first thing he did was to bring on his developers, a bunch of young men who rarely spoke to the rest of the staff and barely ever ceased to type on their Mac laptop computers covered in stickers. Within weeks, they had been given a preview of The Platform, where the measurable tidbits of information they now gathered ranged from the amount, frequency and length of comments, number of link shares, time spent reading, ad display revenue, stickiness (whether the reader would stay to read another article or “bounce” back immediately), conversion (whether the reader would buy a subscription — or a support donation, as it they were now pathetically called to underline the charity case nature of Wint’s work). The editorial board headed up by the CEE would frequently run “experiments” on the site, though to Wint it would’ve been more honest to say that they experimented with their readers. Some of these experiments had become a standard operating procedure, such as displaying different titles and ledes to different readers to test which titles translated to most shares and link clicks. Recently, the board had decided that apparently it wasn’t enough to track how much time their readers spent reading one of his articles, or at what point they lost interest and stopped reading, and were now experimenting on eyeball tracking — which words and phrases did peoples eyes land on as they hurriedly skimmed over his carefully crafted sentences. Wint wasn’t sure what would be the outcome of this experiment, but he suspected one day he would come to work to find a memo instructing him to use more two-syllable words and exclamation marks!
“So there’s this thing”, Wint said while pouring himself more sake, ignoring the fact that the glass he had poured Stephanie was still untouched. It was getting late, and the after-work crowd had changed to a more refined dining clientele, whose sober, hushed manners made his rambling stand out even further. “There’s this thing called Engagement”, Wint continued. “Everything we do is about the Engagement. If I didn’t know better, the whole tech industry was just a stereotypical single girl, waiting for that engagement ring”. Another flop of a joke that he’d tried before, and continued to elicit equally tepid reactions every time.
“Basically we try to track everything the reader does, and what exactly that means changes every week. We give all these facts weighted numbers and we add the numbers together using this mystical arithmetic nobody can explain, and that number adds up to Engagement —”
“It’s like alchemy!” Stephanie said.
“Right!”, Wint replied. Finally, they found some common ground. The plot wasn’t large, but Wint hoped it would be big and solid enough for them to build some conversational momentum. Maybe this date might turn around yet? “Except that if you look at the stock prices of these companies, the alchemists’ gold is actually real!”
Stephanie told him a story that began promisingly. It was about one of her clients (for legal reasons, she couldn’t name which, but she ensured he’d know the name) and it seemed to Wint that the story might develop in a direction that would present the wealthy client as a fool, and support his point of view that money was not an object worth endeavoring. Quite the contrary, it seemed his companion was earnestly impressed by her client’s ostentatious displays of wealth — the story concerned some kind of a boat party, Wint wasn’t sure of the details as his concentration slipped halfway through the story.
When it came to money, Wint was a hypocrite, and he knew this very well. Although he disdained the type of middle class bourgeoisie whose life revolved around the making and spending of money, the truth was, he spent a large share of his mental resources on the very topic. Living in the city was getting more expensive, and since taking a large paycut to join The Intrepid (not entirely out of his own choice, though that’s not how he spun it to his friends and colleagues) nearly a decade ago, his wages had barely kept up with inflation. At 43 he shouldn’t have yet had to worry about retirement, but in his profession he worried about everything, as he never knew when The Platform would become powerful enough to make him redundant. If that were to happen, where would he go? Nobody was hiring, and his savings wouldn’t take him through to the end of his forties.
Wint hadn’t been listening to Stephanie, but the contents of the now nearly empty bottle of sake in his belly made him feel warm and momentarily happy. She was nearing the end of her story, and he laughed at all the right times. He could’ve been mistaken, but they were having quite a good time.
Thanks to a temporary gap in the gridlocked traffic, the bus picked up speed, and Wint too fast-forwarded to the end of the previous evening’s memories.
Stephanie, enthusiastically sharing a story of one of her anonymous clients: “ — they have so many people working just PR. If only they’d spend half that trying not to mess up so bad they wouldn’t need to —”
“So”, Wint interrupted her mid-sentence. “What do you say we split the bill and head to mine for a nightcap?”
The smile fell off her face. Everything about her screamed no, and she didn’t have to open her mouth to say so.
At that moment his shame reached such heights he could have simply jumped off the bus to be rid of it, and coincidentally, that’s what he nearly did as the bus driver let out an alarmed yelp, almost a bark, and slammed the breaks, sending William Winter Webster and a busful of morning commuters flying into the air, suspended for just a moment in a shared understanding that they’d soon land, and that it would hurt.