Fishbowl

by Matthew Glass

  Sandy Gross marched with him. They were at the front, in a row with Boston celebrities and Democrat politicians who were leading the march. Andrei’s presence hadn’t been publicized in advance for fear of alerting disgruntled Fishbowl users who might want to stage some kind of protest at his compliance over the investigation of Buckett and Hodgkin, but as the march went on, news began to spread that the Fishbowl founder was in the crowd.

  As the march moved into Boston Common, where a stage and screens had been set up for the speeches, order began to break down. The front rows, flanked by security guards, were overtaken by others pouring into the common. Someone yelled that he could see Andrei Koss. Suddenly there were people all around him. Sandy grabbed hold of his arm to keep from being separated from him. Two of the security guards who had accompanied the front row of marchers were with them as well; they managed to hail over a couple more guards, who came pushing and shoving their way through the crowd.

  Andrei and Sandy came to a stop, surrounded. People were holding up phones trying to get a picture of Andrei.

  ‘Talk to them,’ said Sandy.

  Andrei looked at her uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Talk to them, Andrei!’

  She pushed two of the security guys slightly apart, reached out a hand and pulled someone through. He put up his hand towards Andrei for a high five. Instinctively, Andrei hit it.

  ‘Andrei Koss! You rock!’

  Someone else came in. Then someone else. Then a couple of people together. Soon the security guards were moving people through as if they had planned to do it all along. Most of the people just yelled, ‘Hey Andrei,’ or something like it and took a photo or grabbed his hand. There seemed to be no ill will over his policy after Denver – on the contrary, everyone just seemed excited to see him. Some wanted to talk, trying to tell him what Fishbowl meant to them as the security guys tried to move them on. They had stories about someone they had met, a connection they had made. Others had an idea for what they wanted from the site. Sandy was the master of ceremonies, holding the security guys back until they were done, then reaching out a hand for someone else.

  Andrei didn’t know what to say or do. Mostly he nodded and shook hands and bumped fists and said it was great to meet them and tried to smile as they took a photo on their phones. There were students, office workers, stay-at-home moms, off-duty cops – a kaleidoscope of the city passed in front of him, all wanting to touch his hand, say a word, hear his voice, make some kind of connection.

  Then a big man of around thirty with a blond goatee came through the ring, grinning widely.

  ‘I’m Barry Diller, man!’

  For a second Andrei didn’t make the connection.

  ‘Barry Diller, Andrei!’

  Andrei got it. The Dillerman.

  ‘Andrei Koss!’ Diller put both his hands around Andrei’s head and planted a kiss on his forehead, then grabbed him in a hug.

  ‘Hey!’ yelled one of the security guys.

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Andrei.

  ‘Giving data to the Feds,’ said Diller, standing back from him. ‘That was a dangerous thing, Andrei.’

  ‘It was only—’

  ‘I know. I stood up for you. You had to do it. I know you’d never betray us.’

  Suddenly Diller reached into his jacket. For a split second Andrei remembered the warnings he had had about disgruntled users. He had an intimation of danger. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Diller’s hand clasped something in his jacket. Out of the corner of his eye, Andrei saw a security guy lunging at him. Then Diller’s hand was out and the security guy had an arm around his neck and Diller held up a … phone.

  ‘Hey!’ he yelled angrily at the security guard. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

  The security guy let go of him.

  Diller put his arm around Andrei’s shoulder, thrust the phone out in front of them and took a photo. He looked at the screen. ‘Cool.’ He looked back at Andrei and clenched a fist, second and fifth fingers raised as if at rock concert. ‘Fishbowll! To me, it’s always got two ls!’

  ‘OK,’ said the security guy. ‘Come on. Let’s move.’

  Barry Diller held up his hands. ‘I’m going.’

  He took a step, then looked back into Andrei’s eyes. The two fingers of his fist were extended again, pointing straight at Andrei’s chest. ‘Don’t betray us, Andrei.’

  That day in Boston was the first time Andrei had come across the users of the service he had created in any number. He knew better than anyone that Fishbowl had 300 million registered members, but that was just one number in a long series of ever-increasing numbers on the Fishbowl growth curve. The people on the streets of Boston that day were only a tiny minority of that membership – thousands, not millions – but they were real people, right there, in front of him.

  He had known they were out there, but he had never felt what that meant. Fishbowl was a real, living thing in their lives. Their passion for it was palpable. To see it was humbling. Fishbowl wasn’t his, Andrei felt – it was theirs. He was its custodian. He felt an enormous sense of responsibility, so overwhelming that it was scary. Ensconced within the office in Ramona Street, he had never been confronted by the extent to which he had, like it or not, become a public figure. He had never intended to be one. But now he saw, like it or not, how his deeds were watched, scrutinized, evaluated, by the people into whose lives he had put the connectedness of Fishbowl.

  It had been the most powerful experience of Andrei’s life.

  That night, he rang Ben, who had marched in New York and had been equally swept up by the extraordinary sense of community he had felt in Central Park. Andrei told him that what had been most striking was the way people had been desperate to speak with him, if only for a second, the way they had wanted physically to touch him. What could they possibly have got out of that?

  To Ben, who actually knew something about human psychology, it was no surprise that people wanted to have some kind of contact with Andrei, no matter how trivial. He could hardly believe that he had to explain it. But, then, Andrei was Andrei. ‘You’ve done something important in their lives,’ he said. ‘You’ve given them something that’s meaningful.’

  ‘Sure, but what difference if they shake my hand?’

  ‘They crave a sense of personal connection. Some of these people will remember this for ever.’

  Andrei shook his head. It still made no sense. ‘I met a friend of ours, by the way. The Dillerman.’

  Ben laughed. ‘Really? What’s he like?’

  Andrei thought back over the incident. ‘He’s … intense.’

  ‘That’s a surprise.’

  ‘He said a funny thing,’ said Andrei, suddenly remembering. ‘To him, “Fishbowl will always have two ls”. What do you think that means?’

  ‘I don’t know. Two ls? I guess he wants it to be pure, like it was.’

  ‘He told me never to betray them.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. “Us”, he said. “Don’t betray us.”’

  ‘The greater the love, the greater the danger,’ said Ben, laughing. ‘They’re the ones you have to watch.’

  ‘He said he understood about sharing the data after Denver.’

  ‘There you are. Come on, it sounds like it was a great day.’

  ‘Ben, it was awesome. It was totally, totally awesome. The people … I mean, I still don’t know about this personal contact thing, but Fishbowl … it’s alive, Ben. What we’ve done … I don’t think I understood it until today.’

  ‘Sounds like it’s made an impression on you.’

  ‘Ben, it’s beyond an impression.’

  Andrei knew that he couldn’t ignore what he had experienced. He had never wavered in his commitment to bringing the greatest possible depth of connectedness to his users, but now he felt this commitment to be even more rooted, as if it had fed and hardened on the zeal of the people he had met.

  With that, something else changed for him as well.<
br />
  Chris and James had both been telling Andrei for months, even before the Denver bombing, that he had to be more visible. The company needed a figurehead who was accessible and, so long as he was the CEO, he had to be that person. Andrei had evaded the responsibility, but even before the march he had suspected that he wouldn’t be able to do that much longer. Now he knew not only that they were right but what it would mean to do it. It wasn’t any less intimidating – if anything, after the fervour that he had experienced on Boston Common, it was even more daunting – but the march forced him to accept that, if he wanted to be the CEO of the company, he would have to face up to this part of the role.

  But if he was going to be more visible, now wasn’t necessarily the time to start. If anything, now was a time to stay in the shell. Not just for him, but for everyone in social media.

  The collapse of the McKenrick witch hunt left social media in a strong but at the same time potentially vulnerable position. Their role as an enabler of free speech had been vindicated, and although it had not been formally tested in a court of law, officers of companies providing social media now seemed to be nestled in the protective shadow of the first amendment. On the other hand, the potential for that medium of exchange to carry obnoxious content had been admitted and exposed, and it was anyone’s guess what would happen if another Denver occurred that could be definitively linked to a social network in the planning phase. A second atrocity might bring back the McKenrick argument stronger than ever and make people think twice about the right to freedom of expression if it appeared to be measured against the right to life.

  The PR people in the tech industry and the Washington lobbyists they employed were virtually unanimous in recommending that this was a time for steady, quiet responsibility, keeping heads down, tightening policies on acceptable behaviour, abuse, hate speech and incitement, and increasing monitoring of some of the most egregious communications on their services. It was no moment for bragging or grandstanding. If tech companies were seen to be triumphalist, public opinion, which had moved in their favour, might just as soon move back again.

  For Fishbowl, however, keeping heads down was not so easy a proposition. From a network that was already the destination of choice for the socially adventurous and internationally minded, McKenrick’s campaign had now definitively made it a household name, familiar from New York to New Mexico, from the netizens of San Francisco who never left their apartment without a tablet computer to coal miners in West Virginia who couldn’t tell a tablet computer from a plate of hash browns. Interest in Andrei was intense. The company was under virtual siege by journalists bombarding it with requests for an interview.

  Fishbowl was close to two years old. Three hundred million people used it. Almost unbelievably, the only media interview Andrei had ever given had been the one to to a student journalist at the Stanford Daily when he had still been living with Ben and Kevin in Robinson House.

  Andrei decided that, if he was going to accept the responsibility of being more visible, he had no choice. The time had come to open himself to an interview again.

  26

  THEY TOOK THE photographs first. The interviewer, Deborah Handel, was a senior features writer for the New York Times and had flown out for the interview. Andrei was in his usual T-shirt, jeans and sneakers. The Fishbowl communications person, Alan Mendes, had wanted him in something with a little more gravitas – not a suit, but maybe a Steve Jobs-style roll neck – but Andrei said he’d think about it, and didn’t. They shot him sitting on the edge of a desk and standing against a wall. He felt awfully wooden and didn’t know what to do with his face. They told him to smile, then to look serious, then thoughtful. The photographer shot a glance at Handel and rolled his eyes.

  Coaching had been arranged for Andrei. Alan Mendes had organized two days of training, but even before the end of the first day Andrei had had enough. He and the coach, a retired features writer for the Los Angeles Times, had started by agreeing the things Andrei wanted to get across in the interview, and then the rest of the coaching, as far as Andrei could glean, was designed to make him appear in a certain light, while at the same time making him appear not to be trying to do so. ‘Remember, be yourself,’ the coach kept saying every time she asked him to say something in a way that was totally not himself. It seemed irrational and self-contradictory, and Andrei had had the strong feeling that the longer it went on, the more confused he was going to be when he finally sat down to answer the questions. Midway through the afternoon of the first day, he sent the coach home.

  Now, as Deborah Handel invited him to take a seat, he frowned, waiting for the first question to hit him.

  ‘Tell me about Fishbowl,’ she said.

  Easy. Andrei talked fluently and at length about Deep Connectedness, about his perspective on the world as clusters of ideas and values, about the way the world would change as facilities like Fishbowl made that model of the world a reality.

  Handel’s eyes glazed over a little, but he didn’t notice.

  ‘Tell me about the way it started,’ she said.

  ‘I just had the idea for it, as a way to get more connectedness. I had this idea that it would be a good thing.’

  She waited. ‘But where did you get the idea? Did something spark it off? What happened?’

  Andrei shrugged. He remembered Guy from Colombia and Aguila Roja but he didn’t feel he should talk about that. It was too nerdy, and he didn’t spend any time in chat rooms any more.

  ‘OK. Well, when was that?’

  ‘Around two years ago, in my junior year at Stanford.’

  ‘And you had this idea of Deep Connectedness? That was the idea back then?’

  Andrei nodded.

  ‘And did you think it would ever be as big as it is?’

  ‘We’re not as big as we could be. We’re still growing. There’s a hunger for Deep Connectedness, and my job is to find ways to help people to find it.’

  ‘You talk so much about Deep Connectedness. Do you really think it’s so important?’

  Andrei stared at her, wondering what exactly it was that she didn’t get.

  ‘Why Deep Connectedness? Why this obsession?’

  ‘Do you use Fishbowl?’

  Handel smiled. ‘No, I don’t. I mean, I’ve looked at the site.’

  ‘But you registered, right?’

  ‘To be honest, Andrei, I just looked at as part of the background for this interview.’

  ‘And you don’t use it?’

  She shook her head.

  Andrei frowned. ‘That’s interesting. Do you use other social media?’

  ‘Sure. Homeplace.’

  ‘What about Worldspace? Sorry, I mean Openreach..’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You see, when I hear that, and when you tell me you went onto Fishbowl but you don’t use it, it makes me wonder what I can do to make the experience more appealing for you, so you have the motivation to explore Deep Connectedness. Tell me what it is that I can do.’

  ‘Maybe I just don’t need it.’

  ‘Everyone needs it.’

  ‘Maybe not.’

  ‘We’ve always been able to find people with your interests, but what if we had a function that could take your profile and select what we would consider to be the most fascinating people for you among them? They could be anywhere in the world. What about that?’

  ‘I guess that might be quite interesting.’

  ‘Not just those who are most similar or dissimilar to you with your particular interest, which we can do already, but those who, by our algorithms, we identify as those you would find the most fascinating – or the most influential, or the most educated, or the most vocal. Or anything. You could set the parameters. For example, you could be looking for us to find the most interesting of the most influential people among those with different views than your own about whatever it is you’re interested in. You might want to try to understand them, debate with them. You know, for a journalist, you might find this qui
te useful. What are you interested in?’

  ‘Orangutans,’ said Handel, citing the most outlandish thing that came into her head to see where it would go.

  ‘Cool,’ said Andrei, taking her seriously. ‘Conservation, I guess? OK, say you’re interested in orangutans, but you want to find people whose view is that we shouldn’t be spending money on conservation. You want to understand their argument, maybe so you can combat it. What if we could get to that level of specificity, so we’d be able to find you people in the countries you’ve specified with an interest in orangutans but opposed to conservation efforts, and, of those, the ones we think would be most interesting for you.’ He paused. ‘Would that function be useful to you?’

  Handel smiled. ‘I guess so. If you could do it.’

  ‘We’re working on it. Now, how about this? What if we could provide you with photos, videos, text from public sources that are directly relevant to what you’re talking about with someone as you’re talking to them? Instead of having to try to remember where you saw something, it would be there for you right away.’

  ‘You’d be reading what I’m saying?’

  ‘No, no one’s reading anything. It’s totally automated. Just think, how cool would that be. It’s a form of connectedness not only to the present but to the past. To things people have said or photographed or whatever. If you’re talking about orangutan conservation, for example, there’d be data and pictures right there, as you’re talking. You wouldn’t even having to go looking. Now, as a journalist, wouldn’t that be useful? If we could do that? Would that change your mind?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘What if we could …?’

  Handel watched him as he reeled off another idea Fishbowl was working on, and then another, wondering whether he really was interested in exploring what would make her use the site or whether it was just a way to avoid talking about himself. It was obvious that he was comfortable talking about Fishbowl, his vision for it, its functionality, but she was about as interested in that as she was in finding out about his grandparents – actually, she was more interested in finding out about his grandparents. She didn’t want to know about Fishbowl, she wanted to know about him. As he spoke, Handel wondered how best to get around his defences, get him talking about himself. Asking about Fishbowl, she thought, but about something that had a personal angle was probably the best way to put him off his guard.