THE
SILICON
JUNGLE
SHUMEET BALUJA
THE
SILICON
JUNGLE
A Novel of Deception,
Power, and Internet Intrigue
Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press
This is a work of fiction.
No events described herein have actually happened.
The views expressed herein are not intended to reflect the views of the author’s current employer, the author’s past employers, or the author’s future employers.
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,
Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
press.princeton.edu
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baluja, Shumeet, 1971–
The silicon jungle : a novel of deception, power, and internet intrigue /
Shumeet Baluja.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-691-14754-3 (acid-free paper)
I. Title. PS3602.A633S55 2011
813′.6—dc22
2010043865
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Goudy
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
The characters, companies,
and numbers are not real.
Don’t worry.
In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Contents
Preface
Endings
Anklets
Anthropologists in the Midst
Mollycoddle
Touchpoints
Checking In
Working 9 to 4
Predicting the Future and 38 Needles
Contact
Two Geeks in a Pod
An Understatement
Euphoria and Diet Pills
To Better Days
Marathon
The Life and Soul of an Intern
Candid Cameras
Episodes
Liberal Food and Even More Liberal Activism
Subjects
Newsworthy
Patience
Hypergrowth
Little Pink Houses
Truth, Lies, and Algorithms
Negotiations and Herding Cats
The JENNY Discovery
I Dream of JENNY
A Five-Step Program: Hallucinations and Archetypes
Over-Deliver
A Life Changed in Four Phone Calls
Giving Thanks
A Drive through the Country
Control
A Tale of Two Tenures
Prelude to Pie
The Yuri Effect
Apple Pie
Thoughts Like Butterflies
Core-Relations
Collide
Control, Revisited
Fables of the Deconstruction
Control, Foregone
Foundations
One Way
Sebastin’s Friends
A Tinker by Any Other Name
When It Rains
I Am a Heartbeat
What I Did This Summer
A Permanent Position
For Adam
Faith
Counting by Two
Disconnect
Sahim
Epilogue: Beginnings
Acknowledgments
Know More
Privacy Policy of a Few Organizations
References
Preface
An interviewer once asked what the most interesting anecdotes and trends were that we’d uncovered with the data mining and user profiling system we had created. Fortunately, despite the meager amount of data we had at that time, there was still a tremendous amount of interesting material to draw upon. The discoveries about users and their online habits were always entertaining, sometimes awe-inspiring, and occasionally horrifying. Additionally, the process to uncover the findings was often illuminating in itself: equal parts technology, intuition, and black magic. There was certainly plenty of fodder for discussion. The interview, to this point, was going well.
The follow-up question by the same interviewer was what would happen if all of this information about our users was accidentally released and fell into the wrong hands? Silence. It was early in the Internet years, and everything was moving too fast—who had time to think about such things?
Almost a decade later, we find ourselves asking the same questions, still looking for answers. Now, companies routinely watch and record our actions—while in grocery stores, online, or in shopping malls with our families. We trust these companies because they provide safety and convenience, and to not trust them would require too much effort. But the seemingly inconsequential bits of information we so readily surrender every day can be meticulously pieced together into a rich mosaic that reveals more about our habits, goals, and secret desires than we would dare share with even our closest friends.
In a post-9/11 world, perhaps it is not surprising that we are willing to reconsider how much privacy we are willing to forgo. It is important to remind ourselves that the technology, policies, and sheer enormity of the amount of personal data amassed about all of us is new. It’s breathtaking. It’s unexpected. All of us, those who are being watched and those who are watching us, are, quite literally, in uncharted territory. To address this, some organizations have adopted or created policies that mandate how all of this new sensitive information should be handled and who should be granted access to the information. But few organizations regulate how and what information will be merged together, what disparate bits of our lives will be combined to reveal the ever-finer details of who we are. Such decisions are often left to young, inexperienced employees. In the end, our faith must reside in each of the individuals that comprise the companies we implicitly trust—we must believe they will have the wisdom and courage to make the right decisions about topics that did not exist just a few years ago.
The Silicon Jungle examines what happens when the brilliance, immaturity, and unbridled enthusiasm of an intern, Stephen, is mixed with unfettered access to people’s most private thoughts and actions. Stephen’s blind idealism and overwhelming desire to impress render him oblivious to the severe consequences of his actions and make him an easy mark for those willing to exploit his naiveté. The setting, a ubiquitous Internet company located in Silicon Valley, is chosen not only for the steady stream of innovative technology that consistently emanates from the area, but also for the prevalent maniacal pursuit of scientific immortality, “the next big thing,” and, of course, unmatched material excesses.
A question that I am often asked is how much of this book is real. This book is a work of fiction. The events are fictional. The technology and science described are based in reality. The people are fictional. Their temptations are not. The justifications offered for the intrusions on people’s privacy are fictional. The ability, brains, and computational power to do so are not. Importantly, as to whether the companies described are real and whether any single company holds enough data to do all that is described in this book, this I can answer definitively: The companies are not real. As far as I know, no single company holds all of the data described herein.
Like the meatpacking industry in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a new, rapidly burgeoning industry is laid open for your investi
gation. For anyone willing to peek behind the sleek streamlined services and offerings we take for granted on the Internet, a profound conflict will be uncovered between the intellect of the scientists and their latest inventions, and the very human limitations and frailties of the people who handle, consume, and trust the technology daily. I hope you will find the science and the possible discoveries truly exciting—the insights unearthed by large-scale data mining initiatives provide an understanding into individuals and groups of people that, prior to the last few years, was impossible. How this newfound ability is used is where trouble can begin.
Perhaps all of this leads us to a conclusion that we already intrinsically know: It’s not technology or a newfound ability that should be labeled “good” or “bad,” it’s what we choose to do with that ability. Science and technology innovation will, and absolutely must, progress. It is up to the creators of new technologies to open our eyes to not only the mechanics of what can be done and how to do it, but also the limitations and dangers, as well as the beauty and excitement, of their creations.
I have encountered few places in the world that are using technology more effectively, directly, and for a more worthy cause than the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Their efforts to rescue children and stop the spread of violent and hateful images exploiting children are exemplary. I am humbled and amazed at the work they do. For this reason, I am proud to support NCMEC and other non-profit organizations that espouse the use of technology to explicitly make the world a better place.
Peace,
Shumeet Baluja, Ph.D.
P.S. A note to my former interns: No, this book is not about you.
THE
SILICON
JUNGLE
-ENDINGS-
August 28, 2009. Present Day.
“Is that your friend on TV, baba?”
He glanced up from the game they were playing to look at the news report flashing on the TV screen. He caught a glimpse of Sebastin’s face before it disappeared. It never ceased to astound him that his son, Adam, only six years old, could play checkers so well while paying such close attention to all that was going on around him.
“How do you know about him, Adam?”
“I heard you talking to ummi yesterday,” Adam replied with a mischievous grin. “You said you were going to see him.”
“You’re too clever, Adam. Yes, Sebastin was my very good friend. He answered our prayers.”
“What did he do?”
“He found our lost brothers. He found 5,000 of our lost brothers,” he responded. As he said the number aloud for the first time, he was overwhelmed again with his good fortune.
“Were they really lost?” Adam questioned with sincere concern.
He smiled as he reached over to Adam and pulled him into his arms. “Yes. They were really lost. They were so lost that they did not even know how lost they were. Can you imagine that?” With a flourish of his hand and a warm smile for his son, he said, “Now we can find them again.”
But Adam still looked worried. At six, worry was not hard to see; the child’s brow furrowed deeply and his face became unmistakably sad. “The TV says that he died today.”
He looked proudly at his son. He was always listening, always absorbing.
Adam stared down at his hands in his lap, and picked at his fingernails, a habit since birth. “Are you sad, baba?”
“Why, Adam? Why would that make me sad? It is God’s will. Why would I be sad that God has decided that it be so.” It pained him a great deal to use the word “God” with his son; everyone in his family had questioned his decision. But he had made it, and so it stood. He, too, would have liked to call God by His proper name, but it would be easier for Adam to grow up in America this way.
“Baba, did he know he was going to die?”
Thinking back to less than twelve hours earlier, concentrating on the still vivid memories of the few minutes in which the inevitability of his actions must have been apparent to Sebastin as well, he replied, “I believe he did, Adam.”
“I thought so.”
It amazed him how his son could say such things. “Now, let’s turn off the TV and finish playing,” he said as he freed Adam from his arms. “You are growing older, Adam. You know so much. This time, take care. I may not let you win.”
-ANKLETS-
January, 2009.
“Stephen, report to Allison’s office immediately,” the intercom blared. Stephen automatically walked past the all-natural sodas, recycled paper products, and the latest lawn and composting supplies toward the back of the store. GreeneSmart, Silicon Valley’s humungous and freshly rebranded “Earth-aware, all green” answer to large retailers like Walmart and Target, was about to open its shopping doors for the day. When it did, for Stephen, it would be more of the same—rushing to respond to the countless calls for computer, e-mail, printer, network, fax, and telephone support from every corner of the building.
He instinctively made his way to the door marked “Employees Only.” Crossing that threshold, the cold floors of the showroom were replaced with carpet that felt good under his feet. Hours of standing every day made him thankful for even the cheap stain-worn industrial carpet that had been laid years ago. He stopped at the open door to the inner HR office marked “Allison Glace” and walked in.
“Good morning, Mrs. Glace. What’s going on?” He sounded like a child when he spoke, and he knew it. He’d been doing that ever since he left SteelXchange.
“The usual. My keyboard isn’t working again,” Allison replied.
Stephen knew the problem before he began his investigation, and he strongly suspected she knew what the problem was, too. At least two or three times a month, Allison accidentally kicked the keyboard cable out from the back of the computer when she took off her shoes. The effect was that the computer stopped responding to any of her typing. It was an easy enough fix, and he’d told Allison numerous times how to plug the cable back in, but here he was back in the office again.
He crawled under the oversized particle board desk that Allison had managed to obtain for herself (by saying HR must exude a good image if they were to make the best hires). He lay down on his back and scooted toward the rear of the desk. This wasn’t even close to the work he was doing at SteelXchange, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as some calls he’d endured the past two and a half years.
“We have to strike while the iron is hot!” Stephen’s roommate, Arthur, implored. “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. We do it now or someone else will,” he continued urgently. “You’re crazy,” Stephen replied unconvincingly the first few times. But within three weeks, Stephen gave up completing his Ph.D. a year before he expected to finish. In exchange for a piece of paper that would proclaim him a doctor of computer science, he and Arthur founded their first company, Pittsburgh Steel Exchange. It was a company whose mission statement was primarily a number of invogue buzzwords strung together in a single wonderfully captivating sentence. It was 2004, the second coming of the dot-com craze was nothing less than a certainty. To not partake in the euphoria, especially after having cowardly shunned the first Internet boom in 1999, would have been regretted for eternity. Leaving the Ph.D. program was hard, but technically Stephen was still classified as ABD (All But Dissertation) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Realistically, as far completing his Ph.D. was concerned, he might as well as have been classified as DOA.
Instead of just plugging the keyboard cable back in and being done with it, he lay there a few minutes, savoring the time he wasn’t in GreeneSmart’s loud showroom. By now, the doors would have opened, and the early shoppers would be swarming the store.
“Stephen, do you mind if I talk to you while you’re down there fixing my computer again?” Allison asked in her motherly tone. It was a voice that could too easily comfort him to sleep if he wasn’t careful. “I was thinking, while you’re in here, we could talk about your career development. You know you were suppos
ed to have your review meeting with your manager last month. Now he’s gone on vacation and asked me to do it for him.” Stephen had been avoiding the meeting as best he could; another review would mark another six months at GreeneSmart. He didn’t want to think about so much time passing, but now he might be trapped. Perhaps she had planned it this way.
Arthur was standing on top of the mahogany conference table in front of the projection screen passionately urging, “You have to understand, we have an intimate knowledge of steel. We live in Pittsburgh. Steel runs in our veins.” Stephen stood, too, though not on top of any tables, “Combine this with the world’s best computer science talent at CMU, and it’s going to be an unstoppable startup.” The dog-and-pony show was airtight—the theatrics well rehearsed. This was their seventh meeting with top-tier venture capitalists, VCs, in Silicon Valley to fund their idea. Pittsburgh Steel Exchange proposed selling steel through an open auction, much like how eBay works today. And what had made all this possible? Simply, the Internet. It was declared brilliant, and they wound up with promises for more money than any graduate student knew what to do with.
Stephen plugged the cable back into the computer, no point in delaying the fix. He didn’t bother to get up. If the career talk must happen, he would do his best to make sure he didn’t participate more than he needed to.
“You’re hired!” Stephen and Arthur had said thirty times in as many days. Flush with money, Pittsburgh Steel Exchange hired its core team without delay. “Thirty people? You’ve outgrown Pittsburgh,” the VCs warned. “It’s time to move to California. We’re going to help you make it to the next level.” The next level? That sounded promising. “And, what’s with the name? We thought you guys knew the Internet,” the VCs admonished. With thirty-two people in the company (all who eagerly relocated to the West Coast with their own visions of “the next level”), what had originally started as Pittsburgh Steel Exchange was reborn in Palo Alto, California, as SteelXchange.com.
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