“Why don’t we let him start working for us before you steal him away?” a voice said from over the man’s shoulder. As the man stepped aside, they both saw Atiq smiling back at them.
“Ah, Atiq. Good to see you. But it’d be only fair if he came with us. Ubatoo has managed to take two of my best. You’ve got them sequestered far away somewhere in your organization,” the man replied as he shook Atiq’s hand. Bitterness, despite the toothy smile.
“I warned both of them they were leaving the best boss they could hope for,” Atiq replied graciously. Just how many of the same conversations had he already had that night?
“Of course, Atiq, I’m sure you did.”
“I’m afraid I must steal Stephen for a few moments,” Atiq said.
The man took the hint, shaking Stephen’s hand a final time. But the anger in his face, which he did little to hide, hadn’t diminished.
“Stephen, I want to introduce you to a dear friend of ours, Sebastin Munthe.” Atiq motioned to someone who, as if on cue, stepped forward with his hand extended.
As Stephen and Sebastin shook hands, Atiq continued, “Mr. Munthe, besides being a successful serial entrepreneur, serves a much higher function now, as Silicon Valley’s moral conscience. He’s the head of the ACCL—the American Coalition for Civil Liberties. A non-profit that I believe was started right here in Silicon Valley several years ago. This man single-handedly protects our civil rights that Washington, DC seems to take great pleasure in whittling away. I’ve offered to create any position he would like in order to work with us at Ubatoo, but he keeps telling me he has more important things to do,” Atiq said with an easy laugh. “I’m sure you’ll be hearing from him when you start here. Be sure to give him whatever he needs.”
Stephen’s confusion as to what to say at this point must have been apparent. Although unmistakably Stephen’s turn to talk, he was naturally uncomfortable meeting new people, and the fact that Atiq was standing there, watching, wasn’t helping. Thankfully, Mr. Munthe volunteered a few words before the awkwardness reached the point of no return.
“First, Atiq, as I mentioned earlier, please do call me Sebastin. That mister stuff is a bit too stuffy for a party. And, second, Stephen, let me assure you that Atiq is being far too generous with his kind words,” Sebastin said in a thick, dignified, perhaps German, accent. “I hope that I will not take too much of your group’s time. My colleagues who worked with your group last year offered nothing but the most outstanding praises for your team.” Then he lowered his voice. “I firmly believe it was because of the work we did together last year that we were able to protect several dozen innocent people from God knows what forms of harassment and privacy invasion from certain parties in DC. Our entire team, and of course the people you helped, owe Ubatoo an immense amount of gratitude.”
Some conversations you can nod along with, hoping that the tiny bits you understand will be enough if you are called on to contribute. This conversation, though, was not one of them. Stephen wasn’t sure how his group could have possibly helped Sebastin, “Silicon Valley’s moral conscience.” Atiq was still watching him, and the fact that Atiq hadn’t yet left to find another guest to talk with made it abundantly obvious that Atiq highly valued Sebastin.
“I’m certainly glad we could help,” Stephen replied awkwardly, choosing his words too cautiously. “I hope I can be as helpful as my colleagues were last year. It would be great to do some good for the world together.” He wasn’t quite sure if it was appropriate to stop yet, so like he was too prone to do in such situations, he continued talking. “You’ll have to tell me more about how we actually helped you preserve people’s rights, though. That’s a use for our data that I hadn’t foreseen, I have to admit. Anything I can do to help further your work would be an incredible way to spend the summer.” Sebastin seemed quite enthusiastic about the response. Atiq left—his work was done.
Besides a few minutes of vehement agreement about the evils of privacy invasion by governments around the world, and the witty, acerbic comparisons to the previous administration in the U.S., it was difficult to embark on a new topic. Sebastin kept returning to this one. It would have been beneficial to have been more prepped for the night, Stephen thought. They could have dived straight into the technical details of the projects, a conversation that Stephen would have been much more comfortable having.
Nevertheless, listening to Sebastin fervently speak about all that ACCL did and all the further good they could do with Ubatoo’s help was the first conversation that excited Stephen. He was sold on the importance of Sebastin’s work, especially when compared to finding thirty-eight more buyers for luxury sports cars.
As for Sebastin, as far as he was concerned, seeds were planted, doors were opened, lights were turned on . . . Whatever the appropriate analogy, the night went exactly as planned, and his plan was set in motion.
-TWO GEEKS IN A POD-
April, 2009.
“So what do you think of my new thesis title?” Molly asked as she crawled into bed next to him. It took Stephen a few minutes to wake from his sleep enough to focus on the piece of paper dangling a few inches from his face. “It’s my eighth tweak this morning,” she added, seeing his eyes open.
Dirty Laundry:
Quantifying the Transformational
Effects of the Internet on the Perceptions
of the United States among the
People of the Middle East
by
Molly Byrne
A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Dual-Title Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of
Political Science and the Department of
Anthropology at Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island
“It looks impressive,” he said, squinting at the title. He had promised yesterday that he would be a sounding board for her latest thesis plans, though he hadn’t expected it to be before he got out of bed. He read the page again. “I could never have come up with anything like this. I’d be embarrassed to tell you what I was working on for my thesis years ago.”
“I didn’t come up with the topic by myself. If I had, you can bet it would have had something to do with migration and Cameroon. But that’s how my advisor and I compromised,” she said with a roll of her eyes.
She climbed on top of the covers and stood up, straddling his chest. Stephen waited without saying a word. “You ready to hear my thesis pitch?” she asked. She was still wearing the tiny baby blue shorts and tight tank top she had worn to bed last night.
He sunk down further into the bed, continually looking up at her. He held on to her long smooth bare legs as she started immediately gesturing with her hands. “Before the Internet, there was no way for us to record what effect something had on a closed culture, or a town that we weren’t allowed to enter. Imagine us throwing a bunch of books at some school in some village and the villagers actually taking the time to read them. We wouldn’t know whether they appreciated them at all until we could study their changed behavior, and who knows how long that would take. Maybe years.” She glanced down to make sure he was still paying attention. “But think about it. If the Internet really has an effect, people will write back and create their own web sites and blogs, post messages, or at the very least just search for more information. Its use alone will tell us the effect that it’s having. Best of all, it’s a closed system that we can monitor, track, and quantify. This is the first time in history we could ever do this and get immediate results and not wait for years like researchers had to before.”
She finally took a breath. “I want to be the one who does it first. Come on, you’ve got to think that’s pretty cool.”
Just a few weeks ago, when they first met, he would have shied away from asking any questions or challenging her. Not anymore. If there was one thing graduate students were taught from their first day, it was to be critical of anything they heard, especially w
hen it didn’t come out of their own mouths. “It seems like the effect is kind of . . . ,” he paused a second, knowing the reaction he was about to incite, “. . . obvious. I’m not sure your findings are going to be that interesting.”
Molly’s expression became stern as she wrested her legs free of his grasp and jumped onto the floor to look him in the eyes. “No, Stephen, that’s not true at all. How can you say that? We don’t know how things are going to turn out. You’re thinking of what you see around you in Silicon Valley. Here, people are already skeptical of anything they read on the Internet; they know what to believe and what not to believe. Try to think about other countries just getting access to the Internet. It’s not the same as here. Let me think how I can phrase it in terms you can understand.”
She was pacing around the bed. “Imagine, Stephen, you live in a world without access to many books or to more than a single TV station. Now, all of a sudden, you get an Internet connection, maybe even for just a few hours a week. But, for those few hours, you get to see what’s out there. You see new ideas, religions, politics, places that you never have before. All of a sudden, you’re connected. How can you ever go back? Think about how incredibly transformed people will be when they learn about this other world out there. Sounds good, right? Now, instead, imagine that all you saw were hate messages on some discussion forum, or all you saw was even worse—just unabashed, unforgiving calls to violence or God knows what other extremist views.”
She stopped to scan Stephen’s face for any reaction before continuing, “We really need to understand how people are influenced by this type of propaganda on the Net. It’s easy to see the need for understanding it in some terrorist-laden remote village, or some extremist camp far away where we can’t see it, right? But think about it here, in the U.S. When someone uses the Internet, what would happen if all they encountered day in and day out were hate messages and hate discussion groups? There are plenty of them out there. What do you think they would believe?”
Stephen ignored the question; he was fairly certain it was rhetorical. “I know. I got it. You’re going to measure the influence of Internet propaganda in countries just getting Internet access. And that’s important because—”
Before he could finish, Molly had taken over. The next few hours were filled with politics, religion, technology, and back again. Molly had clearly been looking for a sparring partner, and Stephen was happy to oblige—one of the many relaxing Sunday morning coffees in bed with his half-naked girlfriend that he could look forward to.
Because of the myriad PBS and National Geographic documentaries (particularly those on the Maasai tribe in Kenya) that her parents had substituted for shows like Three’s Company and The Facts of Life, her mind had been set on doing something good for the world for as long as she could remember. Hence, the Peace Corps.
When that came to an all-too-quick end, she didn’t abandon her resolve to make the world better, even though she accepted that she might have to take a more circuitous route. Still, she wasn’t about to find some vague justification of how some “normal” job did the world good. No, to make up for not being in the villages herself, she felt that her impact needed to be just as long-lasting and much bigger. From this, rose Molly’s ambitions to help people like Sandrine escape the villages that offered them no opportunities and to give them hope of finding those opportunities elsewhere. She would study, from an anthropological and political science perspective, the migration from, and within, Africa.
In her department at Brown, this was considered a radical departure from the norm. It was a far more pragmatic topic than what her contemporaries in the Department of Anthropology chose to study—the cultural mores and social constructs of a long-past tribe or civilization, and the inevitable conclusions about how that particular tribe was uniquely relevant to the development of modern culture as we know it.
Molly and her advisor, Gale Mitchell, didn’t see eye to eye on just how pragmatic, pragmatic should be. This starry-eyed idealism about changing the world was all well and good. She was absolutely free to select any topic she desired, but if she wanted funding from the department to continue her studies, it would have to be much closer to a topic that Gale actually cared about. And what Gale cared about was whatever she could obtain funding for, which didn’t include “making the world a better place.”
And so the thesis topic, the title of which Molly had just revised for the eighth time, was cemented. Molly would study the way the Internet changed how people felt about the U.S. Gale was happy. And Gale’s funding, through whichever defense agency was currently backing research on the Middle East and the Internet, two of the trendiest topics in her field, was secured.
The topic was a far cry from migration in Africa. But Molly felt that though she may have compromised on the topic, she had not compromised on the magnitude of the positive effect her work would have. If she had her way, the effects of her research would do more long-term good for the world than she could have done with her old research ideas, and far more than she could have done in the Peace Corps by herself. It was an ideal compromise, one in which both parties felt like they wound up getting the upper hand.
From the outset, Stephen had numerous reasons to be drawn to Molly. She was smart, passionate, attractive, and had a quality he never thought he would attribute to anyone in real life: She was inspiring. He admired what she had done in Cameroon—from the fact it was the Peace Corps to the reason she was kicked out. Like most people, he wouldn’t have ventured to Africa by himself and he wouldn’t have gone back into the room with the doctor, but he deeply admired people who possessed the courage to do so.
Since the first days of their relationship, there had been a small inkling of her feelings, too. In his own way, Stephen had cared about the people he felt responsible for at SteelXchange. He didn’t abandon them as would have been so easy, as even his co-founder, Arthur, had. That, she understood whole-heartedly at a personal level. She hadn’t found that quality in many; her colleagues in graduate school were far too jaded and sarcastic, too removed to care, and her acquaintances in California were far too hurried and self-absorbed.
The intensity with which Molly lived her life was exactly what Stephen needed to remind himself of what his life had been like before GreeneSmart. For Molly, the intensity she reignited in Stephen only served to increase her own, a renewed reminder of the responsibilities she had felt with Sandrine. It was like why so many doctors married each other—a shared base of fervency and experiences that didn’t need explaining and didn’t need repeated justification. It was simply their reality that others on the outside needn’t understand.
On top of all that, there was the fact that neither of them had been in a relationship for over a year. That, coupled with their intensity, gave them enough passion in the less-than-cerebral pursuits of each other’s bodies to keep them lavishly distracted in the precious little time they had together.
-AN UNDERSTATEMENT-
June 1, 2009. Start of Intern Season.
Stephen didn’t mind the extra few minutes in the car. Today was the first official day of his internship. He knew enough about himself to recognize that once he started at Ubatoo, he would not be able to avoid, even if he wanted to, the irresistible ease of falling back into his old habits: no sleep, too much caffeine, and a complete lack, and even disdain, of “balance.” He would happily neglect everything else in his life for his work. He had done it before in college, in grad school, in his old company, and now he would unquestionably do it again.
Since Ubatoo’s party, Molly and Stephen had managed to spend at least several hours together every day. They could often be found sitting next to each other on a small sofa in GreeneSmart’s employee lounge, anxiously talking about one or the other’s “other job”—how Molly’s research was going or how excited Stephen was about his internship. It wasn’t long before their co-workers just gave the couple their space; neither had many close friends at GreeneSmart anyway.
Hop
efully, the time lost not seeing Molly at work would be made up for by the fact that they would be moving in together this week. Though the decision had been made quickly, only three months after meeting each other, it came naturally, and neither of them had needed to think twice. They decided to move into Molly’s apartment since it was within walking distance of Ubatoo. Like the rest of their very deliberate lives, it was well reasoned—there was no point in waiting to do something they would ultimately do anyway.
Upon entering Ubatoo, Stephen was escorted to a large cafeteria where more than a dozen other interns were quietly waiting to be greeted by their sponsors. He joined the other data-mining interns, Aarti, William, and Kohan, who were already sitting together.
Beyond the standard beginning-of-job litany of forms, a nine-page document describing Ubatoo’s code of ethics required his signature. Like everyone else, Stephen signed it without reading. Then, like with all tech companies, there were the non-disclosure and non-compete forms. These forms ensured that any thought from this day forward, valuable or otherwise, Ubatoo owned. No problems there either, Stephen thought.
By far, the strangest form was the one marked “Rules and Conditions for Data Access.” In no uncertain terms, it clearly specified Ubatoo’s immediate right to terminate employment, without recourse, if there was any unauthorized use of Ubatoo’s data that it collected on its users. The data included, but was not limited to:
e-mail
e-mail response times
deleted e-mails
e-mail attachments
contact information
contact usage statistics
home address
The Silicon Jungle Page 6
