by Sam Byers
‘God no.’
‘But what you’re proposing is, I think, a kind of fucking, just as it is also a kind of attention. It’s almost … therapeutic, no? And I think it would ask Julia Benjamin a very valuable question: is this what you want? Is this really what you want?’
‘Like, OK, you want this? Well, here it is, have it.’
‘And now that you’re getting it, do you like it?’
‘I bet she loves it,’ said Robert. ‘That’s the thing. All those men piling onto her …’
‘All that abuse.’
‘You want to be a bigshot intellectual? Well, this is what being a bigshot intellectual feels like.’
DeCoverley laughed. He was not, Robert had noticed, a man who laughed often, and so when he did it was with the air of a man dancing at a wedding: hesitant, concerned about his veneer of cool, yet aware that if he didn’t certain judgements would be made.
‘And how,’ he said, ‘do you propose putting this little lesson into practice?’
A kind of prickling heat had begun to creep into Robert’s body, working inwards from the edges, his skin flushing first and then, seconds later, his organs and muscles feeling uncomfortably warmed. He wondered if it was the coffee, or perhaps the weather. Later, when he was alone and looking back on his lunch with DeCoverley, he would know the feeling for what it was: shame.
‘Well, as it happens,’ he said, slightly hesitantly, ‘I do have a degree of experience that might be relevant here.’
‘Oh yes?’ said DeCoverley.
‘There was … There was all that stuff with Jess a while back. I mean really … Really full on.’
‘Ah yes,’ said DeCoverley, ‘I remember.’ He paused before adding, ‘Terrible, obviously.’
‘Oh, horrendous,’ said Robert. ‘I mean, yeah. Just totally awful. But—’
‘But we’re not suggesting quite that level of—’
‘No, absolutely. But maybe if we just went to a few of those—’
‘A few of those places where that kind of thing flourishes.’
‘A few forums. I mean, I know some of the ones that—’
‘Of course you do.’
‘And actually, as it happens, my work seems to have … I mean certainly not through any deliberate attempts on my part, but—’
‘You have a degree of influence.’
‘Not that I’m proud of it, of course.’
‘Of course not. But it’s testament to your reach.’
‘Exactly. And anyway, once we—’
‘Once we set things going—’
‘Yeah,’ said Robert, sweltering now, the temperature inside his skin bearing no relation to the temperature around him. ‘After that, we’d have nothing to do with it.’
‘Fascinating,’ said DeCoverley with a smile. ‘You know, Robert, this could actually end up being an extremely important cultural intervention. It reminds me, in fact, of the chap your girlfriend ended up on the wrong side of. Ziegler. I know him a little bit, actually. Fascinating man. An important figure, in a lot of ways. What was his point at the time? That sometimes hyper-masculine culture serves as a kind of catalyst? Or even, which I think is the case here, as a kind of corrective?’
‘Something like that,’ said Robert.
‘We should bring him in,’ said DeCoverley. ‘I mean, not now, but afterwards. You and I could co-author something, maybe with Ziegler, maybe even with Stroud. What do you think?’
‘Like a sort of collective?’
‘A loose collective. A merging.’
‘Sure,’ said Robert, reaching for a glass of water.
‘I mean, I’ve been thinking for a while that there’s a book in the whole vexed question of masculinity,’ said DeCoverley. ‘All of this just makes me think I should bring it forward.’
‘A book on … masculinity?’
‘Masculinity as a kind of abject,’ said DeCoverley. ‘A new taboo. My stance would very much be: feminism, yes. But equally: men. N’est-ce pas?’
DeCoverley reached over and patted Robert’s shoulder.
‘Exciting times, Robert,’ he said. ‘Exciting times.’
*
Mildly hypnotised, Jess and Deepa watched the sequenced dissolve of faces on The Griefers’/you page. The speed was inconsistent. Faces hummed in a strobing blur, then stuttered and lagged at random moments. Each hangup brought a glitch in Jess’s breath. Was this the face? Or this one? Any of these faces, Jess thought, could suddenly become hers. She could find herself, without warning, confronted by her own gaze, staring into her own static eyes, unable to do anything but watch as who knew what elements of her digital and personal history were amassed into a ruinous public archive. What, she wondered, would unsettle her more: the leakage of everything she’d done into the places from which she’d withheld it, or the simple sight of it all collected, catalogued, for her to see?
Deepa’s computer speakers emitted a rhythmic, scratching rustle – the sound of an antique dip-pen moving across heavy, textured writing paper, a ninety-minute video of which was playing in one of Deepa’s browser tabs.
‘No no no,’ said Deepa, almost musically, clicking around the Griefers’ website, inspecting the shuffling faces and blunt, hyperlinked instruction to submit at the bottom. ‘Noooo no no no no.’
The ASMR video – scrabbling, insistent – was getting under Jess’s skin. Now Deepa was going in with her whole talking-to-the-cursor schtick and Jess wasn’t sure she could take it.
‘What?’ said Jess. ‘No no no what?’
‘Touchy touchy,’ said Deepa, in a tone that suggested mere distanced observation as opposed to accusation.
She went back to inspecting the webpage, opening up chunks of embedded code and picking around in the strings. Jess decided to let Deepa go through her own sequences rather than hurrying her.
‘It’s just an animation,’ she said finally. ‘Very simple. They’ve put some stutters and slow-downs in it to make it look like it’s happening in real time but it’s basically just a looped video.’
‘But it gives the impression of some kind of artificial intelligence, parsing people’s data histories at random.’
Deepa shook her head. ‘Just an impression. It’s bollocks.’
‘They could still have all that stuff though. I mean, just because the front end they’ve put together is kind of basic—’
‘Doesn’t mean they’re not sitting on all the data at the back end, no. But then we’re saying, what, that a bunch of boys so enamoured with their own mythos that they stage a kind of masked thing in the middle of town might choose not to show off the brilliance of their hack?’ She shook her head.
Jess stood up and paced the room, stretching. When she briefly closed her eyes, the faces remained, like the after-image of a harsh light.
Deepa took her hands from her keyboard and sat back in her chair.
‘This isn’t making me feel paranoid,’ she said. ‘And I’m very uncomfortable about that.’
‘You don’t trust how not frightening it is,’ said Jess, tuning into Deepa’s distinctly individual wavelength.
‘Right,’ said Deepa, bouncing a little in her chair. She had a tendency to get excited when her idiosyncrasies went unchallenged. ‘Because obviously these guys could frighten, and want to frighten, and sort of are, in some ways, frightening, but then you look at it and think, yeah, but are you going all the way though? And if not, why not?’
‘I’m torn between wanting them to go all the way and, obviously, not wanting them to go all the way,’ said Jess.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Deepa. ‘Because if you go all the way, at least you’ve gone all the way. I mean, it would be disruptive and awful and shaming and probably sort of violent and maybe offensive in a kind of town-level fappening kind of way but at least it would be committed and it would be in the name of something, whereas if you go out there with your dicks swinging around going, oh, we’re going to go all the way, and then it turns out that not only are you not going a
ll the way but you don’t even really have any, like, way to go, then that’s just … shit.’
Jess experienced a delay in processing what Deepa had said – the words piling haphazardly in her mind, shaping themselves into meaning only when all of them had arrived.
‘Whatever they’re doing and however or wherever they’re doing it, the feelings they’re producing in people are real, so you want what they’re doing to be real as well, to merit the feelings. Otherwise, it’s just, what? A prank, basically. A big empty joke that leaves everyone feeling shitty but that changes or achieves nothing.’
‘At least if it’s for real, then there’s a point, meaning that even if I hate the point, and I think I probably do hate the point, I can concede that they had a point, right?’ said Deepa. ‘Otherwise, like, don’t waste my time by not having a point. Don’t say you’ve got some kind of AI roulette system when all you’ve got is a GIF and a limp dick and you’re just pissing on my leg and telling me it’s raining.’
‘But then equally there being no point could be the point,’ said Jess. ‘They’re called The Griefers, right? What if it’s all just for the lolz? Maybe their whole point is there’s no point to anything.’
Deepa thought about this.
‘I’d rather be properly attacked than distracted by student-level subversion,’ she said.
‘Say it’s real,’ said Jess, pausing in her pacing to lean against the wall. ‘How everyone feels about it is going to depend very much on who it lands on, and what gets leaked.’
Deepa nodded. ‘As in, full marks for exposing corruption or something.’
‘But nul points if it’s just another shaming exercise.’
‘Another cache of nudes for the schoolboys.’
‘Either way,’ said Jess, ‘it’s invasive.’
Deepa leaned forward, peering again at the faces. There was that switch again, Jess noted: dissonant, full-spectrum manic interpretation right down to narrow-bandwidth concern.
‘It’s the volunteer element that bothers me,’ she said after a few seconds of observation. Then she nodded, as if she’d quickly run her own answer past herself and found it satisfactory.
‘Me too,’ said Jess.
‘They must know, unless they’re very, very stupid, that the minute you suggest someone should volunteer, the whole town is going to pressure someone to volunteer?’
‘Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the whole thing builds to a kind of public burning.’
‘And then what?’
‘Flip it, maybe? Let everyone bully someone into disclosing and then leak everything about all the bullies?’
‘Kind of moralistic.’
‘Also kind of short-sighted. Because by the time they made their point about collective morality—’
‘Someone would already have been shamed.’
‘Exactly. Whichever way you cut it, someone potentially suffers so that they can make their point. Which is all very well if that someone turns out to be some privileged, powerful, corrupt, scheming piece of shit for whom no-one has any sympathy, but quite frankly we’ve seen no evidence of that being their agenda at all. I remember thinking at the screening thing, when they all got out of the van: these aren’t people who are suspicious of power. They love power – the feeling of it, the idea of it. This is just the same. They’re holding something over people. If their point is that power is unevenly distributed, their solution sucks, because their solution is just: grab more power.’
‘OK,’ said Deepa. ‘But they wouldn’t be the first movement or protest to go down that road.’
She swivelled in her chair so that she was facing Jess, the blur of avatars still visible over her left shoulder, pulling Jess’s gaze from Deepa’s, which suited Jess because Deepa had very obviously gone into scrutiny mode.
‘This is all very theoretical,’ said Deepa.
‘You can’t be serious, Deepa.’
‘I’m very serious.’
‘You can’t seriously be saying, you, Deepa, who only very superficially inhabits the fully analogue, non-theoretical dimension, that we’re being too theoretical about this?’
‘Not we. You.’
‘Me?’
Deepa nodded.
‘You’re saying, what? That I should think less? Be more practical? What?’
‘Say it’s real,’ said Deepa. ‘And say it’s you.’
Jess had been about to say more, but pulled up short. She nodded, let out a long exhalation that wasn’t quite a sigh, more a tentative measuring of her own stability. There was, she noticed, a flutter of uncertainty, a warp in the waveform of her breath.
‘It’s like a one-in-fifty-thousand chance,’ she said.
‘Is it?’
‘How many people are there in Edmundsbury? How much data is flying around? How many other—’
‘Say The Griefers really do have all this information on everyone. Say that right now, as we speak, they’re sifting around in it. And say they do go ahead and select someone to expose. You really think they’re going to do that randomly? Because let’s be realistic. If you select someone randomly in this town, what you’re likely to get is a load of shopping lists, some round-robin emails about how the family are doing, some low-level porn, and maybe some extramarital activities. It’s not like we’re in the fucking seat of power here. What kind of impact is leaking that even going to have? It’s not exactly going to make headlines. But say on the other hand you went through what you’ve got, picking out the best stuff, selecting people for whom exposure actually means something, maybe even people who might be open to a bit of blackmail or manipulation. I’d say that list is shorter, wouldn’t you?’
‘I see your point,’ said Jess. ‘But even if you put me in that company, I still don’t see why they’d pick me over, what, politicians? Green?’
‘You really think they’ve got that kind of weaponry?’
‘You really think they’ve got the weaponry to get through what I’ve done?’
‘I think we don’t know. And I’m not you but if I were you that would give me pause for thought.’
‘A minute ago, you were saying you weren’t frightened. Now you’re saying I should be frightened?’
‘I’m saying it would worry me if you weren’t even a tiny bit scared, because that would suggest either that you’re far too confident, which obviously is totally dangerous, or that you don’t give a shit any more, which is frankly even more dangerous.’
Jess slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor. She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, clenching herself.
‘I don’t want to see this go bad for you, Jess,’ said Deepa.
‘It’s not going to go bad for me.’
Deepa said nothing, merely held Jess’s gaze.
‘It’s not,’ said Jess again. ‘Or, I mean, what if it does, you know?’ She shrugged.
Deepa shook her head.
‘Don’t get beyond caring,’ she said. ‘It’s a shitty place to get to.’
‘I’m not beyond caring, Deepa.’
‘Good,’ said Deepa. ‘Because neither am I.’
Jess nodded, looked away for a few seconds, thrown by the stern, almost admonishing compassion in Deepa’s gaze. For a while, neither of them said anything. The noise of the anachronistic pen on rough paper seemed louder in the stillness, giving Jess the feeling of ants weaving through the hairs on her arms. She felt tender, she realised; raw.
‘Aren’t you curious though?’ said Deepa.
Jess looked up.
‘You’ve got a very suspicious glint in your eye, Deepa.’
Deepa leaned forward, suddenly energised.
‘Don’t you want to meet this a bit more … head on?’
‘You don’t mean submit?’
‘Not me.’
‘Me?’
‘Not you either.’
Jess let her eyes roam the room while she gave herself a moment to consider the possibilities. She took in the computer screen over Dee
pa’s shoulder, the roulette of faces still spinning its way through Edmundsbury’s inhabitants, and then the wall behind the computer: the array of Deepa’s digital lost. She was back on Deepa’s wavelength again, tuned in to her thinking.
‘What if they don’t buy it?’ she said. ‘What if they know it’s bullshit?’
‘Then we know they’re for real.’
‘And if they do?’
‘They’re bluffing. And the game is over.’
Jess swept her finger round the room.
‘Given the material you have to hand,’ she said, ‘how long will it take you to make a person?’
‘You tell me,’ said Deepa. ‘You’re the one that’s done it before.’
*
Robert left his lunch with DeCoverley, who had sent him off with one of his customary wistful gazes and an embrace that felt to Robert more like having a heavy cardigan briefly draped over his shoulders than any kind of meaningful physical or emotional exchange, fizzing with a combination of dread, guilt, and excitement that would have been invigorating were it not so problematic. He was appalled at himself, yet thrilled at having the means to appal himself so completely.
He tried to remember the last time he’d felt a similar feeling of power. The attempt was depressing because, as he thought about it, he began to wonder whether he had ever experienced a genuine sense of power. His whole life, it seemed to him now, had been a kind of deflated capitulation. Now, suddenly, an issue had arisen in which he was invested, of which he, and he alone, was genuinely at the centre. For so long, he’d written about others from a distance, and tailored what he wrote to the imagined tastes of still more distanced others. This, now, was about him. The power of autobiography, so much in vogue, and so infuriatingly out of reach to a man like Robert, was now available to him. Even as he squirmed at the exposure, he thrilled at the potential.
He was driving, he realised, extremely fast with no real idea of where he was going. Leaving the café, climbing into his car, Robert had been fairly certain he was heading home to immediately put his plan into effect. But now that he was on the move and alone, he was beginning to think that home was the last place he should be heading. If he was going to do this, he thought, he shouldn’t do it from his personal computer, not with all this Griefer business going on. He pictured, briefly, the sinister facial scroll, unwatched while he went about his business, slowing, stuttering, and ultimately coming to a halt on his own image, triggering some online dam-burst of disclosure, a portrait of his obsessions and ire. No, he thought. Things were too close to him now. He needed to manage and express everything elsewhere.
