The boardroom was the only space in the classical Victorian red brick mansion that had not been converted to a modern, you-could-be-anywhere office style. The glossy lacquered conference table could seat fifteen people to a side, and matched the wood-panelled walls, oil paintings of previous editors-in-chief of The Intrepid their only decoration. Wint could imagine his predecessors around this table, puffing on cigars, swirling glasses of cognac, in the middle of a raucous intellectual debate, conspiring with their writers to expose corrupt politicians and write scathing opinion pieces that would change the course of history.
Not so much today. At the end of the long table, a handful of people huddled around Zee, who was showing them something on his iPad. Wint could’ve done with a glass of cognac, but he had to settle for a vitamin fizzy water one of the assistants had placed at every seat of the long table. Wint let his body drop heavily to one of the sturdy period-style conference chairs slightly apart from the rest of the group and sipped from the bottle. It barely tasted like anything, maybe like a distant memory of fruit. He looked at the group of his colleagues and the board’s members at the end of the table and tried to focus on what Zee was saying, but he couldn’t make sense of the words. Whatever they were looking at could wait. He felt dizzy.
Zee put down his iPad. “Dope dope dope, looks like we have full stack”, he said, in his Valley speak that Wint found so irritating. The proper word he was looking for was quorum. Zee was a dope, that part he could agree on.
Most of the time in these meetings was spent on the same irrelevant business topics: ad revenue, behavioural metrics, conversion. Always conversion. Wint tried to listen in case he would be quizzed later, but the buzzing in his head made it hard to focus. Instead, his attention was drawn to a nagging little annoyance at the back of his mind.
Back at his desk when Merida fussed over him, Wint had browsed The Platform’s analytics dashboard. While he wasn’t a fan of the data-driven business model introduced by Zee after the company takeover, he was completely hooked on watching his own numbers: how many people read his articles, how long they stayed, how much they shared. Wint had never had a Facebook or Twitter account, but this is how he imagined people felt when they kept refreshing the sites for likes, pokes, shares, retweets, or whatever latest dopamine pump the companies invented to hook their users. The gamification was working, and in this game there were only losers. He could directly correlate his mood to how well the his articles did. Today his numbers were average for him, which meant well below the department average. If engagement was the measurement of a good writer, eighteen-year-old interns could write circles around him these days. Their content didn’t have any merit, but they knew how to churn out emotionally and socially manipulative clickbait that Wint himself refused to produce.
The thing that distracted him today weren’t his numbers, it was the comments. Specifically, one single comment he had seen just before it was time to leave for the board meeting. Most of The Intrepid’s writers unsubscribed from The Platform’s comment notifications because, frankly, most of the comments were worthless trolls or fluffy partisan political commentary that someone else had fed them, not to mention the flat out abuse the automated content moderation system seemed to be unable or unwilling to filter out. Wint wasn’t bothered by trolls, he was a master of ignoring things and a mean anonymous comment didn’t bother him. But today, one comment had driven itself directly to the part of his brain that moderated his insecurity, and wedged itself deep.
What really upset him about the comment wasn’t that it was particularly nasty. Wint was upset because he didn’t know whether the comment was nasty or not. It sounded vaguely rude, but the acronym the commenter had used was totally foreign to him. By now he was fairly familiar with the shorthand language of the Internet. He was comfortable with LOLs (joyous when in uppercase, dismissive when lowercase, at least the way Merida used it), STFUs, ROFLs and so on. At first he had had to look up every new acronym, but recently he had started to rely on his instincts and had learned to infer their meanings from context. His proudest achievement was correctly guessing the meaning of ICYMI: “in case you missed it”.
But the comment from today eluded him. It was short and consisted almost entirely of a single acronym he could not piece together no matter how hard he tried. The board meeting would drag on at least another hour before he would get to his computer to Google for the cryptic message. Not knowing made him feel like an old, irrelevant fool.
Only once had his ability to guess acronyms backfired, when he had decided “smdh” was an invitation for the recipient to perform fellatio. Thankfully he’d never use such a phrase himself, so he wasn’t publicly shamed, but once Merida and Nicky found out at the end of a particularly late office happy hour, they still occasionally made the international sign of sticking their tongues in their cheeks and making jerking motions before cracking up laughing. He could fire them, but in reality, he depended on them way too much to let either of them go.
Wint zoomed back into the meeting. He looked at the swathe of printouts Merida had stuck into his hands before pushing him into the meeting room. It was The Intrepid’s news content strategy for the first quarter 2018. Merida had done all the hard work, and Wint couldn’t deny the proposal was actually quite excellent . It spoke about the importance of journalism in shaping public discourse, and devised a data-driven plan that wouldn’t entirely forgo rationality and rhetoric in search of increased engagement, while still being buzzwordy enough for Zee to swallow, hook, line and sinker.
The meeting lurched forward until it finally reached Wint’s part of the agenda. He had planned a speech, and although his head buzzed like a matchbox with a bee trapped inside, he was going to deliver. He threw a few printouts across the room, the last one landing in front of Zee Chakramurthy, who looked at it as if he’d never seen such quaint a thing.
“I read your email”, Zee said.
“You did?” Wint said confused. He didnt remember sending one.
“Yeah. It looks good. A real everything bagel, something for the intellectuals and the investors.”
Wint knew he’d regret giving Merida his password. She must have logged onto his computer and sent the email.
“Anyway, clever play, Bill.” Wint did not enjoy being called Bill, and thankfully nobody in England would even think of calling him that. Heck, nobody even called him William, except his mother, who on the last few visits to the care home had not recognised him, so what she did or didn’t call him was an academic exercise at this point. He preferred just Wint.
“Just raise the conversion targets by ten percent accross the board and cut off one of the writers whose contracts are done, we need to lean up.”
“No… I need each one of them. They’re all —”
“They’re all irreplaceable? Yeah, I know, it’s a tough job, Bill, but if we don’t trim some fat we’re all going to be on the streets soon.”
“Wha —”, Wint started. The blatant absurdism of Zee’s we’re-all-in-this-together rhetoric legitimately caught him by surprise. He knew Zee as a spin man, but this was just too rich coming from one of the richest men in the business.
“Just cut one, all right”, Zee snapped.
“Maybe that social media chick”, offered Laura, Zee’s PR girl. “All she does is drinks coffee and stares at people all day. Besides, the social automation part of The Platform is almost ready to ship in Q1.”
“Speaking of which…”, Zee took the segue. Just like that, Wint’s case was closed. “Let’s move on to the next agenda item. I brought in one of the data guys over to explain it. Simon?”
Simon looked up from his laptop. He was a scrawny kid, no older than twenty, wearing a stretched-out white t-shirt and complicated sneakers splayed on the surface of the Victorian walnut table, slumped in the chair in a position that gave Wint back pain just by looking at it. He dropped his feet on the ground, took out one of his earplugs Wint could hear from across the room were blasting hip hop, and kept the other one in, nodding his head to its rhythm while he spoke.
“Right so”, Simon said and paused chewing gum with his mouth hanging wide open, pressing a button on his laptop and waiting for the wood panelling on the far end of board room shift to two sides, revealing a big flat screen TV. When had they put that there?”
“So we call this the Panoptima.” Series of white numbers started to run across the black TV screen Wint handn’t realised was even on. “It’s the next version of Panopticon. It’s basically the same thing, except instead of just tracking your behaviour, we can actually influence your behaviour directly with microtargeted campaigns.” He paused for effect and when there was no response from the room, he shrugged and continued.
“We rewrote it ground up in OCaml and this sweet actor framework Shawn hacked together one weekend, so we can scale it up in a single data center per region, plus failovers of course…”
Zee cleared his throat. If he’d done that when any of the editorial staff were speaking, you could bet they’d be never seen again, but Simon didn’t seem to care. The kid clearly knew he was irreplaceable, or didn’t care if he wasn’t.
“Yeah so anyway, going forward we don’t need to do biffs by hand anymore, the Panoptima can handle that for you.”
“Biffs?”, asked Wint.
“Bifurcations. Like, I can’t remember what the product folks call it. The thing where you change the content based on folks’ implicits…” Simon looked at Wint to see if he was following. “Implicit preferences. Their profile analysis. The shit they like, politically and sexually, and like which laundry detergent they buy and all that.”
“Bifurcations are the biggest growth engine we’ve had this year”, Zee chimed in, “so we’re taking that experiment and pushing it to hundo.”
Hundo, Wint knew, referred to 100% of the users. On their website, different people saw different experiments, so that their engagement and other metrics could be analysed to see which experiments worked. Wint wasn’t happy about this one. It was one of his least favorite features of The Platform, both as a writer, and ethically speaking. The way “bifurcations”, or “Content Customizations” as they were called in The Platform’s user interface worked was that you wrote an article, and then you could add different “Variants” of the same article, and associate those variants to different types of people. Some of these were relatively harmless, like using a photo of a female model in an article about dating for male readers, and a male model for female readers — or vice versa, if they were gay, which The Platform knew more often than the user’s parents. This increased the engagement and shareability of the piece and seemed pretty harmless to Wint, who as a writer couldn’t really complain about getting a larger readership to his pieces. He wasn’t such a big fan of Text Variants, where he, or a junior content editor under him, would write multiple versions of the actual text for different audiences. He wrote the piece the way he did for a reason, and he didn’t like anyone messing with his prose.
The “Audience Traits” they could use to “pivot” the content wasn’t limited to just things like age, sex or consumer preferences. The system also knew everything about the political affiliations, psychological triggers and moral sensibilities of its users, often probably better than the people did themselves. It knew this without ever asking a user how they voted, what they felt like, or believed in. It could read your social media likes, the links you clicked, the times you logged on, and even the times you didn’t, and accurately predict your current mental state, financial situation, how hungry you were, or which fabric softener your shirt smelled like. The first time they had experimented with Traits, Wint didn’t see the harm either. He didn’t have the best spider sense for Silicon Valley shenanigans. In fact, he thought it would be quite convenient for the user to see ads that were better suited to their needs. He had seen enough mattress ads in old print newspapers to know that adversting was often a waste of space. How often did you need to buy a mattress? Once a decade? Seeing one every Sunday did not make any sense to him.
When they had introduced the Content Customization experiment, Wint finally woke up to what had been happening under his nose all along. The thing that really bothered him was the political stuff. Using combination pivots based on political affiliation, socioeconomic background and mental states, the system could be used to swing democratic elections by pushing targeted campaign ads to people when they were most vulnerable. A single mother struggling financially? Show them an ad promising the candidate will improve economic stability. A father of three who is upset about a school shooting across the globe? Sell them that the candidate represents security. Meanwhile in reality, the candidate says nothing and promises nothing, and in the end will change absolutely nothing that the people who voted for them care about.
“Yeah so when you were using Panopticon”, Simon continued. “You had to design the biffs yourself. It was tricky. Over time we got better at segment prediction and we could offer you some ideas, but turns out that people are really dumb.” Simon, chewing gum and a tinny backbeat emanating from the white earplug hanging from the collar of his shirt fidgeted with the wooden necklace around his skinny throat. The kid looked like a tweaker. Ritalin, Wint guessed, but could’ve been some new synthetic he wouldn’t have even heard of.
“People make emotional choices. They look at the suggested experiments and they pick the ones they think are right, although they have absolutely no damn idea how the system works. So, over the last few months we’ve been working on this thing we call Panoptima. We’ve been A/B testing human biffs with our machine biffs, and the machine beats the meatbag three nines outta hundred for engagement, stickiness and conversion.”
“Wow!” Zee said, theatrically, as if to a group of children. “That’s what we’re all about! Three nines is basically perfect. So from first of January, we are rolling out Automatic Content Customizations across The Platform. This means less work for you, and better quality targeting for all of us.”
Wint was dumbfounded. He looked around the room. Around the table were the editors from different departments of The Intrepid: Entertainment, Lifestyle, Science & Tech, Intrepid Femme, Intrepid Kids, and the other sub-brands Zee had split out of the main newspaper after buying out the remaining stock from the founders’ family estate and canning the print edition. Previously these sections were all under Wint’s editorial control, and he had staffed the departments with solid writers. After the reorganisation, most of them had left and been replaced with sycophantic stooges hand-picked by Zee’s team. If any of them had any problems with this, they knew how to hide it well. Their reactions ranged from approving murmurs to an actual, out-loud “woop” the meathead editor of Lifestyle let out at the end of Zee’s spiel.
Wint rubbed his eyes. His head was still buzzing and the pain from the injury on the left side of his head was spreading to the rest of his skull. As each department head around him competed for their turn to congratulate Zee Chakramurthy for yet another fantastic product launch, Simon put back the dangling earbud and began making subdued and so-uncool-they-were-cool dancing motions with his hands, defiantly staring directly at Wint.
Wint’s brain zoomed out of the situation and back to the cryptic acronym in the comment of his article.
Not only was the acronym unknown to him, but the article on which the comment was posted couldn’t have been more curious. It was nearly ten years old, one of the first ones he wrote after having been fired from The Post and having had to join The Intrepid. Writing of this particular piece had sent Wint to one hell of an emotional tailspin that he still sometimes woke up thinking about.
The comment, posted nearly ten years from the article’s publication by an anonymous poster, read: “I hope you HODLed!”.