The statistics were relentlessly analysed. Some users consistently worked their way through all nine Baits for the day; others rarely clicked and if they did, they clicked once or at most twice. Geography mattered as well, with users from developing countries consistently clicking on more Baits than users in the US and Europe. It seemed they were using the Baits as entertainment or information in their own right, while US and European users saw them more as advertisements. Andrei developed a further improvement in the functionality that allowed advertisers to bid at different rates for users by country, age group and gender.
All of this required a huge amount of work. Andrei, Kevin and the team of programmers, which now consisted of three additional Stanford undergraduates, worked through gruelling sequences of wheelspins to get the advertising functionality launched and then to keep improving it. Under Andrei’s direction, they focused tirelessly on maximizing its efficiency and integrating it seamlessly into the user experience. Ed Standish sent through a weekly financial report detailing Fishbowll’s earnings, but those were the numbers Andrei was least interested in. Now that he had a million dollars guaranteed for the next six months, he didn’t think about the money from advertising at all. It was the user metrics that fascinated him, the problems they raised, the opportunities for improvement that they signposted, and the elegance of the solutions he could devise. It was an area rich with programming possibilities, and the technical discussions he had with Kevin and the other programmers were some of the most stimulating since he had started Fishbowll. Andrei spent hours at the screen, taking the most technically demanding parts of the coding for himself, headphones on, Coke can to hand, coding alongside Kevin and the other programmers crammed into the common room in Robinson House.
It was around this time that Andrei began to think more deeply about Fishbowll. By now, user numbers were heading towards 10 million, covering just about every country on earth. To be a part of the lives of 10 million people was not something trivial. Fishbowll meant something to them, and those meanings had all kinds of shades. The feeling Andrei had had when Mike Sweetman had offered him $100 million and when John Dimmer had handed him their first National Security Letter – there had been fifty by now – was still fresh. Fishbowll had a place in the world, and that place was not simple; neither was it entirely under his control.
From the beginning, and especially from the time that he had taken off to fly home to Boston and forced himself to step back and look at what he was doing, Andrei had thought about what Fishbowll was for. But now he found himself pondering it more searchingly, recognising that it was something he needed to understand explicitly. What did Fishbowll mean? What was it trying to achieve?
He began to write down his thoughts in a series of black notebooks in which – ironically for someone who had founded a tech website – he scribbled his ideas longhand. It was in this period of extraordinary activity and mental ferment, around the time that advertising was introduced, in these notebooks written in his neat, dense script, that the fundamentals of Andrei’s philosophy of Fishbowll developed.
In its essence, Andrei saw Fishbowll as a tool with which to slice through the superficial barrier of place so as to enable anyone to engage with anyone else, anywhere, about the handful of things that most mattered to them. He began to conceive of the world and its population not as a set of physical agglomerations but as a set of clusters – of ideas, views, values, aspirations – spanning the planet, and Fishbowll as a means of bringing them together in a way that had never been possible before. Andrei began to envisage these clusters exerting an effect on the real world, dissolving misapprehensions by groups of people about others and creating a series of shared, global identities based on values and interests rather than on nationality, ethnicity or other artificial constructs of affiliation over which an individual is able to exercise little if any choice. He began to conceive of overcoming these artificial constructs as the great challenge for humanity, and of Fishbowll as playing a central role in beating the challenge. In short, he began to see Fishbowll not only as a way for people to connect but as a radical, revolutionary form of connection that would change the way people understood themselves and thus the way in which they understood others around them.
At some point in this period he began to use the term that would be associated more than any other with Andrei Koss: Deep Connectedness. To Andrei, this was the thing above all others that Fishbowll offered: the act and reality of connection; depth in both extent and meaningfulness.
Andrei saw Deep Connectedness, as he began to conceptualize it, as an important and fundamentally good thing. He carried in him a sense that Fishbowll had been born in a kind of original sin – that secret deceit, long since discarded and not admitted to anyone, that he had had to employ in order to ensure that in Fishbowll’s first weeks and months, when registration numbers were low, people thought they were being sought by others. Andrei was by no means a mystical person, but he felt that there was a strange symmetry in this, that somehow such a fundamentally good thing as Fishbowll could only come about through something that had an inkling of evil in it. And if there was such an inkling in it, then only by ensuring that Fishbowll remained fundamentally good could that founding evil be counterbalanced.
But that didn’t mean that he saw Fishbowll as a vehicle to challenge law or authority. He was confirmed in the view that he had developed after the first meeting with John Dimmer: Fishbowll was a medium, not a message. The radical good at the heart of Fishbowll was Deep Connectedness and all that it made possible, not any kind of ideological objective espoused by Fishbowll itself. It was for others, facilitated by Deep Connectedness, to espouse their ideologies and test them in the crucible that Fishbowll helped provide.
Similarly, money in its own right was no objective. As Fishbowll took shape, Andrei saw the money that it could generate as purely instrumental, not an end in itself. Raising revenue would be necessary in order to run the service efficiently and to provide the opportunity to continuously improve and develop its functionality. Deep Connectedness was the goal – money earned by the website was nothing but the means.
The black notebooks scribbled in his small, impatient handwriting covered the same ideas over and over again, refining, clarifying, extending. Andrei came out of this period with a much more elaborate and sophisticated theory than he had had before, tying together his understanding of human history, the possibilities opened up by the internet, mankind’s future, and a vision for the role in all of this that Fishbowll could play.
Kevin, meanwhile, unbeknown to Andrei or Ben, was pursuing his old interests again. In doing so, he was about to throw out a challenge to Andrei’s new concept of Deep Connectedness in a way that Andrei had never foreseen.
14
IT WAS BEN who discovered what Kevin was doing. He came into the common room one day while Kevin was by himself at his screen, with his headphones on. Suddenly Kevin laughed out loud.
‘What?’ said Ben.
Kevin still hadn’t heard him. ‘That is so bad!’ he said to himself.
Ben went over to see what Kevin was laughing at.
On the screen was an image of a man in a light blue wetsuit with a black body panel and a bulge at the groin that looked as if he had packed a cucumber and a pair of cabbages down there.
‘What are you doing?’ demanded Kevin, suddenly aware of Ben looking over his shoulder.
‘Who’s that guy?’
‘No one.’
Ben peered closer at the message above the picture. ‘Who’s Tonya?’
Kevin shut the screen down.
‘Kevin,’ said Ben. ‘Who’s Tonya?’
Tonya, it turned out, was a 34-year-old South African whose passion in life was swimming with sharks – the bigger and scarier the better. Or it would have been, had she existed. Kevin had concocted her out of snippets of photographs he had found in various places. With all of Fishbowll at his disposal, he just hadn’t been able to resist the temptation to fa
bricate a personality. Or two. This, of course, was in direct violation of the terms of the probation the disciplinary board after the Cooley Affair had set down for him – but then so was just about everything else he had been doing since the day the board had handed down its sentence.
Kevin had learned that one doesn’t have to know much about something in order to sound credible. Past experience with other fabricated personalities had taught him that all that was needed was to listen carefully and play back to people what they had already said, or what someone else had already said, in a way that was slightly different to the original, or which seemed to express an opinion based on personal experience. Add a few choice snippets from a five-minute internet search and people would think they were dealing with an expert. In other words, give people what they expected to hear, and they wouldn’t look any further.
He was soon talking authoritatively about cage-diving with great whites in the waters around Dyer Island near Cape Town, Tonya’s favourite location. Thanks to his choice of face and body for Tonya’s photos – Tonya liked wearing very skimpy bikinis – quite a few sharks of the human variety showed remarkable interest in her messages.
Kevin hadn’t been able to resist trying a Cooley experiment with a guy called Ian, a 44-year-old businessman from Seattle who was a fan of O’Neill wetsuits and was always raving about how great they were. Kevin, through Tonya, had decided to try to convert him to Xcel suits. He waged the campaign both through the School group page and in personal messages with him. ‘Try it,’ Tonya urged him. ‘Try an Xcel.’ Then she added: ‘I bet it will show off your packet like no other suit.’
Ian did – and then sent her the picture of himself in an Xcel wetsuit with a vegetable-stuffed crotch that elicited the fateful, ill-timed laugh just as Ben had walked through the door.
Ben was genuinely angry at what Kevin had done. They had been rightly censured for what they had done to Dan Cooley – in retrospect Ben saw how damaging it could have been to Cooley, and he was deeply ashamed at having been involved. But there was a lot more at stake now. He and Kevin shared responsibility with Andrei for a website, and that website wasn’t some student gimmick or prank. The kind of deceit that Kevin was practising, as he saw it, ran counter to everything he thought Fishbowll was for.
By the time Andrei reappeared in the common room that day, the other programmers were there as well. Other people came and went. Ben waited until the programmers and everyone else had gone that night, and only he, Kevin and Andrei remained – then he told Andrei what had happened.
Andrei wasn’t happy about it, either. Kevin said he had done it in order to understand the user experience.
‘You don’t have to create a false personality to do that,’ snapped Ben. ‘Just be yourself. No, you’re right,’ he added acerbically, ‘that wouldn’t interest anyone.’
‘Very funny.’
‘About as funny as what you’ve been doing! This is supposed to be about people connecting, not figments of your sick imagination.’
Kevin turned to Andrei. ‘Look, half the people out there are probably using pseudonyms. We’ve never tried to stop them. And why should we? If someone is more comfortable connecting behind some kind of mask of anonymity, then who are we to stop them? Andrei, it’s a dating site for the mind, right? That’s what it says on the home page. Your words. If it’s a dating site for the mind, what difference does it make what the rest of you purports to be? Arguably, you reveal your mind more fully if you’re not encumbered by your own true appearance.’
‘Casuistry,’ said Ben.
‘Why?’ demanded Kevin. ‘We haven’t banned anonymity, right?’
‘This isn’t anonymity, Kevin. When you’re anonymous, everyone knows you’re anonymous.’
‘All right, we haven’t banned pseudonymity.’
‘This is more than that,’ said Ben. ‘It’s fantasy. How many of these personalities have you got going?’
‘Tonya. She’s the only one.’
‘She’s not. How many? How many?’
‘Two.’
‘Two now!’
‘There’s Tonya and there’s this … he’s, like, a kid who collects colonial Spanish coins.’
‘And?’
‘That’s it. I swear.’
‘Don’t swear when you’re lying.’ Ben turned to Andrei. ‘Whatever he says, double it. That’s what they teach us about addicts.’
‘What’s the addiction?’ demanded Kevin.
‘You will get your ass so busted if the OJA hears about this. You’ll be out of this university for ever.’
‘And who’s telling them? You? Lighten up, Ben.’
‘I will not lighten up! You did a freaking Cooley on one of them. You’re an officer of the company, and not only are you pretending to be someone you’re not, you’re manipulating them as well!’
‘Them? Who’s them? Dude, one Cooley. That doesn’t make a them. And it didn’t seem to worry you when we did it with Cooley.’
‘It was wrong! It was wrong and I regret it.’
‘Oh, now you’re so self-righteous.’
‘You’re an officer of the company!’
‘Officer of the company? Lighten the fuck up, Ben! Don’t take yourself so seriously.’
Ben shook his head, too exasperated for words.
‘Andrei, you can’t ban what I did,’ said Kevin. ‘You know that as well as I do. We can say we don’t want people putting pseudonyms on our site, but then we just look like idiots because they’ll do it anyway. If that’s true, we should embrace it. This is cyberspace. If you choose to inhabit it, that’s what you’re going to encounter. Anonymity, pseudonyms—’
‘Lies,’ said Ben.
‘We can’t fight it,’ continued Kevin, ignoring him. ‘It’s a dating site for the mind, Andrei. And if the mind creates one kind of personality or another, it’s still that same mind. That’s perfectly honest. And if that mind can free itself to think or say things it wouldn’t think or say when tied to its real physical body or its physical existence, then I say it’s even more honest.’
‘That is so full of shit,’ said Ben, ‘I don’t even know where to start.’
‘Why don’t you start by listening to what I’m saying instead of replaying your own prejudices?’ retorted Kevin angrily. He was making up the rationalization as he went along, but he found that it was actually making sense to him.
‘Don’t say there’s nothing physical in this,’ said Ben. ‘It’s a fantasy. If this was purely about the mind, you wouldn’t attach any physical characteristics to yourself.’
‘Yeah, and people are really going to respond to that.’
‘I think you’ve got a fantasy about being Tonya.’
‘Dude, I do not have a fantasy about being some South African shark-swimming freak.’
‘So why create her?’
‘Maybe I created her because somehow … Look, maybe it’s like that’s the way I become fully identified with that thing.’
‘Swimming with sharks?’
‘Yeah, in this case, swimming with sharks. That personality, that construct, somehow maximally puts me in touch with that.’
‘Even if you really did swim with sharks? Which you don’t, of course.’
‘Well, even if I did, maybe that construct would somehow enable me to connect with the experience even more fully. Who are you to say it wouldn’t? Maybe it’s an important part of connection.’
‘And maybe pseudonymity is an open invitation to obscenity and abuse.’
‘No doubt it is! Have you seen what’s out there on the School pages?’
‘Exactly! See?’
‘What? That it’s already there?’
Ben glared at him. ‘I think you’ve just got a fantasy about wearing a bikini,’ he muttered. ‘Have the guts to wear it at least.’
‘Very funny,’ retorted Kevin. ‘I don’t know what you’re so pissed off about.’
Ben found it hard to say himself. He was the one who had watched
– sometimes even egged him on – as Kevin had made up personalities in the past. As Kevin had said, he had been part of the original Cooley experiment. But something about the thought of Kevin doing it on Fishbowll, on their network, made him wildly angry.
Ben looked at Andrei. He hadn’t said a word as Kevin and Ben fought it out.
Kevin looked at him as well. ‘What I’m saying is that we can fight a battle to stop people doing this, but that’s a battle we’re going to lose. But my point is, we shouldn’t even want to fight that battle. It’s a bad battle. It’s a persecutory battle. I don’t want to persecute anyone – the pseudonymous or the non-pseudonymous.’
Ben rolled his eyes. ‘There’s no equivalence. It’s outrageous to say there’s equivalence.’
‘Well, I think there is. Here’s Charles. Let’s see what he says.’
Charles Gok, who had just come in from working late in the physics lab, stopped in the doorway. Since the common room had become the worldwide centre of Fishbowll, he rarely spent any time there. Sometimes the others forgot he even lived in the suite.
‘Grab a beer,’ said Kevin.
‘Kevin, I don’t drink,’
Kevin put one in Charles’s hand anyway. ‘We need your opinion.’
Charles hesitated. The atmosphere in the common room was heavy with tension. ‘I’m not sure I’ve got one,’ he murmured nervously.
In a few sentences, Kevin told him what he had been doing and summarized the discussion they had just had. Ben watched sceptically.
‘Well,’ said Charles, after a pause, ‘it does feel kind of spooky, thinking you’re talking to this Tonya woman in South Africa when you’re actually talking to Kevin in this hellhole of a common room in Robinson House. But, you know, I guess, on the other hand Kevin’s right. It must be happening all the time. If you can’t stop it, then I think you have to embrace it.’
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