Fishbowl

by Matthew Glass

  ‘Don’t they have a right to choose?’

  ‘Absolutely. Yes. But Sponsored Baits are the only time we ask anyone to state a motive. Why do we do that? Lot’s of other stuff is going on out there with all kinds of motives that aren’t declared, including commercial activities. So if we’re going to be consistent, I’m not sure that companies paying to use our service should be the only ones who have to declare their motive. And you know what? Like I said, companies who aren’t paying us are doing stuff all the time themselves – viral marketing, using our network. We all know that.’ He paused. ‘Look, the point is, I’m not the final authority on Deep Connectedness. Neither are you, and neither is anybody in this room. I don’t know all the forms it can take. I try to have a broad conceptualization. That’s my principle. I’m prepared to be challenged and think fresh. It’s a constant journey of discovery and if we think there’s a new form of Deep Connectedness that we can support, then it’s our obligation to find out if our users want it, and not just assume that we know. And anyway, before we jump to any conclusions, let’s see what the investigation shows.’

  A week later, in a post to the Grotto, Andrei announced that there had indeed been some activity of the type alleged, apparently involving high-value timepieces. He said that a review of the data showed that statements made in the course of this activity regarding the products had been purely factual in nature and didn’t involve any misrepresentation that he was aware of. He added that a number of people who had bought the watches in question had been contacted and were perfectly satisfied with their purchases. Now this had been discovered, he wrote, he would wait to see whether the user community wanted this kind of activity to continue before taking any further steps.

  The user community reacted with uproar. Hundreds of thousands of e-signatures appeared on petitions set up by outraged Fishbowl users. The announcement made prime time news. Mike Sweetman, locked in battle with Fishbowl over his users and beset by allegations of monopoly behaviour, demanded a probe into Fishbowl’s marketing practices. The Santa Clara district attorney announced that she was opening an investigation into potential charges of fraud and mis-selling against the company. In Washington, unknown to Andrei, the cyber crime division of the FBI opened a file on Fishbowl.

  The number of names on petitions rose. After three days, Alan Mendes told Andrei he thought the verdict was clear. ‘You said you wanted to hear what the users thought. I think they’ve spoken.’

  ‘I’ll issue a statement.’

  ‘Good,’ said Mendes.

  Steeling himself to push the experiment to its limit, Andrei issued a statement reiterating that the activity had taken place amongst buyers of extremely high-value watches who could be expected to have the ability to exercise independent judgement and that no misrepresentation had been involved.

  ‘Andrei, that’s just going to make things worse,’ said Mendes.

  It did. The levels of abuse aimed at Andrei from the Grotto reached new highs – or lows. Jerry Glick called and told Andrei that if everything he had heard was true, he couldn’t approve of what Andrei was doing. Mike Sweetman again publicly condemned Andrei for the approach he had taken, stating that it gave succour to the enemies of internet freedom, who would now have another stick with which to beat the internet community. The DA announced ominously that she would pursue her investigation with all vigour. In the office, Alan Mendes and Louise Steinberg were at him every day, saying he had to issue a condemnation. Ben, of course, thought they should stop.

  By now, Andrei himself wanted to declare the experiment over. But Chris was in the office every day as well, reminding him of the deal they had struck, reminding him that this was exactly the pressure he had told Andrei that he would experience.

  The argument came to a head late one night towards the end of the second week of the crisis when Chris, Andrei, Kevin and Ben met to discuss the situation.

  Ben had said little since learning of Chris’s activities. Sometimes he wished he would just blow up over his exclusion from knowing about the palotl experiment, as Kevin would have done, but that wasn’t the way he was. By nature, he couldn’t help searching for reasons for the things people did. One part of him was angry and alienated over that exclusion, but another part of him saw that it could be interpreted almost as an act of kindness on Andrei’s part, a decision to spare him involvement in something he didn’t support – provided you believed that Andrei was capable of that kind of sensitivity. Right now, given how Andrei had ignored his frustrations over having too little to do over the past several months, he wasn’t sure that Andrei was.

  The sense of alienation lingered in Ben, even though he had been finally brought into the loop. He couldn’t help feeling that since Andrei had cut him out earlier, he would just have to solve the problem for himself. It was a childish attitude, Ben knew, but it wasn’t easy to overcome. Anyway, his opposition to Chris’s experiment had been clear from the start, and Andrei probably knew that that hadn’t changed.

  But tonight Andrei asked him directly what he thought. Ben said that, in his opinion, it was obvious that the users didn’t want what Chris was offering and they should stop it.

  ‘It’s not obvious,’ retorted Chris, who didn’t dislike Ben, but thought he had long outlived his usefulness to the company, if he had ever actually had any.

  ‘Even the Dillerman’s saying he’s not sure this is right,’ said Ben.

  ‘I don’t give a fuck about the Dillerman!’ snapped Chris. ‘Andrei, listen to me. We always expected an uproar. We always expected the point one per cent of vocals to drown out the ninety-nine point nine per cent of couldn’t-care-lesses. I know you’ve got people shouting at you, not only from outside but from within the company. Forget about them. It’s just noise.’

  ‘What about the DA?’ said Ben.

  ‘What about her? More noise. She’s up for re-election. What has she said that’s solid? Nothing. Legally, we’re strong and she knows it. Let’s wait until she comes up with something real. That’s what we agreed. In the meantime, let’s look at the numbers.’

  Andrei glanced at Kevin.

  Kevin nodded. ‘Dude, the numbers are awesome.’

  *

  Chris’s three experiments had already yielded $200,000 in revenue for Fishbowl over the past four months, and, even if he did nothing more, the revenues could be expected to rise from the seeds he had sown. But those weren’t the numbers he was talking about. What he meant were the user metrics he had discussed with Andrei at the start of the operation. What they showed was that the people protesting most on the School pages that had been set up in response to Chris’s experiment were heavy users of Fishbowl. But they weren’t using Fishbowl less heavily – they were using it more. The place where they were protesting was Fishbowl itself. It wasn’t the behaviour of a group of people who were going to defect – even if there had been an equally extensive, independent meta-network that they could have defected to.

  Light to medium users of Fishbowl showed no discernible change. Chris commissioned a survey and found that most of them weren’t even aware of the controversy. Those who were aware fell mostly into the ‘Don’t care’ or ‘Oppose somewhat’ categories of the questionnaire. Unlike the heavy users, for whom Fishbowl was so important that they couldn’t leave, for light users, Fishbowl just wasn’t important enough for leaving even to be on their minds.

  But the awesome part of the numbers, as Kevin described it, came out of the registration figures for the website. New registrations were actually rising. People apparently were looking at Fishbowl out of curiosity – and staying.

  The next day, Andrei showed Alan and Louise the numbers.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ asked Louise.

  ‘Well, Chris has actually told us he’s been doing the same thing in another product category,’ said Andrei.

  Louise stared at him. ‘This is going to get everything started again.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Which product ca
tegory?’ said Alan.

  ‘Yachts.’

  The third and final revelation came a fortnight later, a month after the initial rumour, when Andrei announced that they had discovered that they had been promoting luxury South African safaris. By now the response was cynical. What a surprise! But it was growing weary as well. There were only so many times someone would sign an e-petition without seeing it have any effect.

  For the first time, Fishbowl went public with its line that it would follow its users’ preferences but would be sure to listen not only to the vocal minority but to the silent majority as well. Fishbowl, Andrei added, would always err on the side of the broader, more generous interpretation of Deep Connectedness and user preference. This was widely interpreted as meaning that Fishbowl would persist with the practice.

  An ‘Andrei Koss is a Traitor’ School page was started on Fishbowl. Overnight, membership exceeded half a million. Funnily enough, that didn’t shake Andrei in his conclusions but strengthened them. Half a million sounded like a lot, but it was less than one in 700 of Fishbowl’s users. They were getting more new users than that every day. The lesson Andrei had learned previously when he had introduced advertising, when he had issued the Mea Culpa statement – that you could seemingly do just about anything you wanted and it would provoke nothing from the users but a roar of protest that would soon blow itself out – etched itself more firmly than ever in his mind.

  A couple of days later, Fishbowl was subjected to a denial-of-service attack from a previously unheard of group called Spring Uncoiled. For the first time in its history Fishbowl went offline. It was seven hours before it was up again. The infrastructure guys went into crisis mode and when the next attack came, twenty-four hours later, they were ready for it. Over the next week they were subjected to numerous attacks of various sorts, but the site didn’t go down again.

  Jerry Glick went public with his previously private repudiation of Fishbowl’s new line of activity. A number of tech heavyweights echoed his line. Chris said they were probably already trying to work out how to replicate the idea themselves. In Washington, Diane McKenrick followed events closely, toying with the idea of going after the industry again. But it was deep into primary season for the presidential nomination – a nomination she had once dreamed might be hers – and there was no support from anywhere in the Party to reopen that can of worms with the unpredictable effects it might have on voter patterns.

  Andrei met the DA at her office in San Jose with his lawyers and explained exactly what Fishbowl was doing. He was confident from the advice the company had taken that there was no ground for a prosecution. The DA knew it, too. Even if she could have conjured up something that might have prolonged the saga, she was a smart political animal with ambitions for higher office. In public, tech companies were condemning Fishbowl, but she knew that wouldn’t necessarily translate into support for her if she tried to force the issue. Curbing the money-making potential of an up-and-coming internet business wasn’t going to prove strong grounds for re-election in a district dominated by tech companies and their employees.

  The mainstream media lost interest. The protests died down. Barry Diller posted a message in which he had managed to persuade himself that this was part of the broader, more generous interpretation of Deep Connectedness to which Fishbowl was committed. The ‘Andrei Koss is a Traitor’ School dwindled to a few tens of active users, the last resort for the irreconcilables. Privately, Chris thought it was hysterical. Not even they could tear themselves away from Fishbowl, preferring to bitch and moan on a page provided by the very website they professed to hate so much.

  Fishbowl did lose a couple of employees at the height of the controversy, while the recruitment people reported that some candidates had turned down offers from Fishbowl, or at least had delayed giving an answer. But that effect quickly dissipated. The candidates who had delayed their answers scrambled aboard when told they had a week to decide or the company would withdraw its offer. Fishbowl was an employer of choice for the cream of the Valley’s programmers – it would obviously take more than this to change that.

  Two months to the day after the rumour was first leaked, Chris turned up in Palo Alto and took Andrei, Kevin and Ben to Yao’s, where he asked Andrei to state explicitly that he had been right.

  Andrei didn’t feel totally at ease about the outcome. He had been prepared to have his conceptualization of Deep Connectedness challenged and let the chips fall where they would – but there was still a part of him that would have preferred it if the users had risen up in revolt. But they hadn’t. A tiny percentage of them had blustered, but even that had petered out. And in the meantime, the publicity had brought in new people in their hordes. Fishbowl’s users had accepted the innovation. If this was a new form of Deep Connectedness, then he had a responsibility to provide it, so long as it didn’t make the world worse and so long as a large group of the users accepted it. These were propositions that someone like James Langan, and even Ben, would have rejected, but which Andrei, under his principles of broad conceptualization and inclusiveness, felt obliged to accept.

  The next morning, Chris arrived in the office with a couple of guys carrying crates of champagne and glasses. He had the crates put down in front of the aquarium. He climbed on one and called everyone over, then proceeded personally to uncork the bottles and pour the glasses. People wanted to know what they were celebrating. Chris told them to ask Andrei. Andrei wandered across reluctantly. Word had spread in the office and people were arriving from the other floors. Someone had set up links to the other Fishbowl offices. Chris put a glass of champagne in Andrei’s hand. Before he knew it, Andrei was standing on a crate in front of the company.

  ‘Ummm … what I want to say is, this has been a tough couple of months. I want to thank you all for sticking through it.’ Andrei paused, trying to get his thoughts together. ‘Looks like we’ve discovered a new form of Deep Connectedness, one between individuals and corporations. Some people didn’t like it and they made a lot of noise. But the vast majority of our users have accepted it and, more importantly, some forty million people joined after it was made public. Now, it feels as if a lot of people protested, but we’ve looked at the numbers and it was a lot less than forty million. So we got a lot more people saying “I like Fishbowl with this” than saying “I don’t”. So, guys, this is here to stay.’ Andrei raised his glass. ‘To Deep Connectedness, in all its many colours.’

  There were murmurs from around the floor. Some people put their glasses to their lips, others stood watching, still not sure what they were celebrating.

  Andrei was conscious that he probably hadn’t sounded very excited. Part of his job, he knew, was to inspire people. ‘Guys, this is cool! And I just want to say, if you’re wondering … no, I don’t see a conflict between this and what Fishbowl is here to do. I see it as part of our mission. I was doubtful at the start, but I was prepared to be challenged. If we’re going to keep evolving, if we’re going to stay the meta-network of choice, we have to always be prepared to be challenged. Like I said, I was doubtful, but I kind of like what we’ve done now. Is this advertising? Or is it a service, a way of bringing people’s attention to stuff they might need at exactly the right moment – giving them factual information, not randomly but when they actually need it? To me, that’s kind of cool. And it’s totally new, and that’s what Fishbowl should be doing. Things that are totally new. And although it’s a form of Deep Connectedness that’s between people and corporations, it’s a form that’s natural, human and user-friendly. In other words, it’s Fishbowl. And who knows where it will lead? There are other organizations than businesses. There are other things people need to know about than products, and other things you can do than sell them. You all know we have the principle of don’t make the world worse. Well, let’s add a second to that – don’t tell lies. If we stick to that, then I think what we have here is a new and exciting form of Deep Connectedness, which is what Fishbowl is all about – Deep Connected
ness in all its forms.’ He raised his glass and drank. ‘OK! Thank you.’

  Andrei walked away. People came forward to get more of the champagne. Chris followed Andrei back to his desk.

  ‘Well said.’

  Andrei shrugged. ‘Thanks.’

  Chris rubbed his hands. ‘Let’s get to work.’

  32

  A SECOND OFFICE was rented four blocks from Fishbowl’s existing office on Embarcadero. It was soon staffed with a team of advertising executives to sell the new service, a tech group to develop palotls, and an ever-expanding team of sales representatives learning how to use them. Chris, with the help of the human resources head, took ownership of recruitment. He sold the job to likely sales people as being like piloting a drone compared with being in the cockpit of a plane – a lot quieter, a lot more of a desk job, a lot more effective. And with a hell of a lot less travel.

  It was probably only one in ten people he saw who had anywhere near the capabilities for the job. Chris looked for mature, experienced people who had worked with high-end goods and knew the kind of clients who purchased them. As he had learned through his experience over the previous months, it was the ability to appear to be just another guy with a couple of good stories to relate – the exact antithesis of a high-pressure sales person – that succeeded in these circumstances. They also had to be prepared to stick to a set of strictly factual remarks, knowing that all their conversations and postings might be monitored. Nothing Fishbowl’s palotls said could be construed as misrepresentation.

  As for the businesses the advertising executives approached to use this new form of promotion, many were initially sceptical. But their scepticism was tested when they were shown the results of the initial palotl experiments, and since the use of a link restricted to Fishbowl-generated customers would enable them to define precisely the results of the campaign, Fishbowl could offer entirely results-based deals which represented no risk to the advertiser. The numbers of companies using the service soon grew exponentially.