Fishbowl

by Matthew Glass

  Andrei nodded, still flustered, his mind working over the previous senator’s remarks.

  ‘What if you gave non-factual information?’ said McKenrick.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Andrei shook his head, trying to put O’Brien’s questioning behind him. ‘I’m sorry, Senator. Can you repeat that, please?’

  ‘I said, what if you give non-factual information?’ said McKenrick impatiently.

  ‘We don’t give non-factual information.’

  ‘What if you did?’

  ‘We don’t.’ The questioning was on easier ground, and helped Andrei focus again. ‘We’re happy to be audited on that if anyone has a specific complaint.’

  McKenrick made a show of sighing. ‘Let me ask you something else. You sell products, correct? What if you chose to sell something different?’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking,’ said Andrei.

  ‘What if you chose to sell an idea, an ideology.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Jihad.’

  Andrei had practised this one, or something similar, a dozen times. He even had the delivery down pat.

  ‘Senator, do I look like someone who’s going to sell jihad?’

  There was a wave of laughter in the audience behind him. McKenrick scowled.

  ‘What if you chose to disseminate an ideology? You have a program that makes people think they’re talking to friends. Isn’t that the best way to influence people?’

  ‘This seems like a totally hypothetical question, Senator. I have no ideology to disseminate.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem like a hypothetical question to me. It seems to me that you have developed something that could be used for dissemination of any kind of idea, and if it has the artificial intelligence you say it has, if it can learn and adapt to the people it’s talking to, that must make it all the more dangerous.’

  Andrei had no problem dealing with this line of argument. It had none of the emotional punch that he had found so unexpected, and disorientating, in O’Brien’s attack. Always more comfortable in the realm of theory, he was again calm, methodical, unperturbed.

  ‘Senator, I’m an advocate of Deep Connectedness, which I explained before. I’ve spent the last seven and a half years of my life building Deep Connectedness. If you want to call that an ideology, call it an ideology. I don’t class it as an ideology any more than being an advocate of free speech is an ideology. Deep Connectedness is about allowing other people to express their ideologies, just as free speech is. So unless you’re saying that free speech is a danger, then I don’t understand what the danger is that you think you’re pointing at.’

  ‘Let me help you, Mr Koss. Your Farming program, or IAP, or whatever you want to call it there in your office in Silicon Valley, is an immensely powerful program. Would you agree?’

  ‘I think it is a major advance, yes. I said that before.’

  ‘Immensely powerful in selling products. Almost unimaginably powerful.’

  Andrei didn’t reply.

  ‘Why don’t you tell us how it works? In detail.’

  Andrei’s lawyer leaned over and whispered in his ear.

  ‘Certain details, Senator,’ said Andrei, ‘are commercially sensitive.’

  ‘I don’t think we need that level of detail, Mr Koss. Tell us, in principle, how it works.’

  ‘I believe I already told the first senator.’

  ‘Then tell us,’ said McKenrick, through gritted teeth, ‘again.’

  Andrei gave a summary. McKenrick listened with a show of disgust on her face. Then she asked a series of questions to elucidate some of the things the program could do.

  ‘So if such a thing is so powerful in selling products,’ she said eventually, ‘wouldn’t it be just as powerful in selling an ideology? No, selling’s not the right word … spreading an ideology. Infiltrating our society, subverting it. Perhaps an ideology directed against the United States. An ideology that might directly or indirectly take the lives of American citizens.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’ said Andrei.

  ‘It could take on the face of an Islamic preacher, couldn’t it? It could radicalize our young people.’

  Andrei was genuinely bemused at the suggestion. ‘Why would I want to do that? Is there anything in anything I’ve ever done that suggests that I would?’

  ‘So it all comes down to trusting you, does it, Mr Koss? You hold our destiny in our hands? On your whim we live or die?’

  ‘Senator, that’s very flattering but—’

  ‘What if someone else had this technology, Mr Koss? Couldn’t they do what I’ve described?’

  ‘But someone else doesn’t have this technology, Senator.’

  ‘You said yourself that they will. You said yourself that you’re one of the giants they’ll stand on.’

  ‘I didn’t mean I was one of them. I just meant that every advance, every development, builds on previous ones.’

  ‘And someone will build on yours.’

  ‘I don’t see what that has to do with me.’

  ‘Without you, they wouldn’t build.’

  ‘I would argue, Senator, that without me, someone else would do what we at Fishbowl have done. If it can be done, it will be done.’

  ‘So you do agree there is a danger?’

  ‘I suppose, in the wrong hands—’

  ‘Exactly, in the wrong hands.’

  ‘But you can say the same about a gun, Senator. In the wrong hands, the gun is an instrument of terror. Are you saying you’d like to take it out of everyone’s hands?’

  Another murmur of laughter fluttered through the audience. Andrei hadn’t intended the remark as a jibe, but McKenrick was a well-known gun advocate and supporter of the NRA. She had voted against every gun-control measure that had come up during her long senate tenure.

  She was flustered for a moment. ‘Do you really not see the difference, Mr Koss?’

  ‘No, ma’am, I really don’t.’

  ‘Do you really not see the danger you bring to the community through this deceitful, underhanded program?’

  Andrei was silent for a moment. He did see the danger, but not while the program was in his hands. ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘What if a foreign government got hold of it?’

  ‘I really don’t see how that’s going to happen.’

  ‘You said yourself, others will build the same thing. Others will stand on your shoulders.’

  ‘How can I stop them?’

  ‘I don’t think you’re taking this very seriously, Mr Koss.’

  ‘I’m taking it extremely seriously, Senator. I think it’s people who think they can hold back technology who aren’t being serious. Our IAP program is a major advance and I don’t think there is anything else in the world that I’m aware of that is remotely comparable to it. But that won’t last for ever. Nothing that can be built remains unique. We built the atom bomb and four years later the Soviets had done the same. We’re working on our program constantly to improve it, to develop it, but—’

  ‘I understand you’ll license it, won’t you?’

  Andrei sighed.

  ‘Of course you will. Everyone knows you stand to earn an enormous amount of money if you do. What if you license it to people who won’t use it as scrupulously as you pretend to?’

  ‘I don’t pretend anything, Senator. And I won’t necessarily be licensing it. I have no plans to.’

  ‘No plans to … That’s what you tell us today. As I said before, it all comes down to trusting you, doesn’t it? What you choose to do. When you choose to license it and who you choose to license it to.’

  ‘Senator, we have laws in this country. If anyone is disseminating an ideology, as you put it, and there’s some illegality about it, then surely they’re the ones to target. Not me. Isn’t this the same argument we were all having after Denver?’

  McKenrick didn’t want to let Koss turn the argument in that direction. ‘Mr Koss,’ she said, ‘you say other people will eventua
lly develop this kind of program even if they don’t license it from you.’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘So people to whom you won’t license it, because you’re so scrupulous, might develop it themselves. Governments might develop it themselves.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Foreign governments. Hostile governments.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Isn’t that something you should have thought of first?’

  ‘They would have done it anyway. Someone would have done it.’

  ‘But it’s easier, now that you’ve done it. Don’t you agree?’

  Andrei shrugged. ‘No one else has access to our program. We’ve proven the concept. I guess once a concept is proven, development tends to happen.’

  ‘So there will come a time when everyone has it, or something like it?’

  ‘Not everyone, Senator. It does still require some resources and talent to do it.’

  ‘But others will have it. And others will use it for their own purposes.’

  ‘Like others have radio, Senator, and television, and internet, and every other means of communication that we all have today.’

  ‘Can’t you see the difference in what you’ve created? Extend what you’ve said, Mr Koss. Everyone has this program. Think of the picture you paint. An internet where no one can be sure of anyone they see, anything they’re told, anything they believe they can trust, because they have no idea if it’s a person or a program, and, if it’s a program, who’s behind it.’

  ‘Senator, in many ways, isn’t that already the case? I’m no intelligence expert, but don’t you think hostile governments already have people posing as regular individuals on social networks to influence opinion when it matters to them?’

  ‘And you paint it on an industrial scale. You paint a world where every corporation, every institution, every government no matter how evil or corrupt, has at its disposal the ability to spread its opinions and ideology, no matter how vile, in a way entirely unapparent to the unsuspecting citizen.’ McKenrick waited. ‘Well, Mr Koss, what do you say to that?’

  ‘That’s an extreme.’

  ‘And you’re taking us there. And the only thing you can say is, “If it wasn’t me, it would be someone else.”’

  Andrei shrugged. ‘But it would be, Senator. My question is, what do you want to do about it? Do you want to censor everyone who’s putting out an opinion you don’t agree with, either through an IAP or as themselves? Do you want to shut the internet down? Television? Radio? Newspapers? The telephone? Where does it end? Do you want to start opening everyone’s post?’

  McKenrick gazed at him, suddenly wondering where to go next. She felt Koss painting her into the same anti-free-speech corner where she had ended up after Denver.

  ‘What does that do for internet transparency?’ she demanded suddenly, reverting to one of her prepared questions. ‘Isn’t that important? Isn’t that something we need to guarantee?’

  ‘I don’t believe I’ve ever claimed the internet, as we have it today, is transparent, or that it even should be.’

  ‘Haven’t you?’ retorted the Senator, trying to buy time as she thought of another line of attack.

  Andrei looked at her, genuinely puzzled. ‘No, Senator, you must be thinking of someone else. I know some people say the net will lead to a kind of radical transparency. I think that’s delusion. The internet is just as much about opacity as transparency. It always has been. For some people, for many people, it’s about having as many personalities as you want, being a part of as many clusters as you like, being as many people as you wish, and having Deep Connectedness between all of these and the other personalities you want to connect with. In future, why won’t individuals have multiple personas, some of them true reflections of parts of themselves, others entirely fictitious? Why won’t there be connectedness between humans and their online personalities and programs at a level of engagement that is utterly new and fascinating? That’s where we’re headed, Senator. Unless someone pulls the plug, unless someone switches the internet off, nothing that you or I can do will stop that.’

  There was silence in the hearing chamber.

  ‘That, Mr Koss,’ said Senator McKenrick, knowing even as she spoke that the high-sounding but largely empty pronouncement that she was about to make was a poor substitute for the knock-out punch she had hoped to land, ‘is a deeply disturbing and dystopian vision. One could say that any person holding such a vision has no place in the senior team of any internet company.’

  ‘That’s your opinion, Senator. You keep saying the IAP program is a danger. My users keep using Fishbowl. No one makes them do that.’

  ‘So you take no responsibility?’

  ‘For what? For bringing together a team that has made one of the greatest advances in programming since the invention of the personal computer? For employing four and a half thousand people? For giving my soon-to-be shareholders three point eight billion dollars in profit? Senator, explain to me. Which of those things am I supposed to feel ashamed about?’

  McKenrick was silent. Andrei Koss had slipped away from her, wriggling through the escape hatch of an argument that whatever he had done, others would do anyway – an argument she hadn’t foreseen, and didn’t know how to counter without looking like a dinosaur.

  After the hearing, Andrei’s lawyer and Alan Mendes were effusive. Didier Broule, who had watched the stream live out of the Senate, called him minutes after he stepped out of the committee room. Andrei had nailed it. The security issue was dead, said the banker confidently, and there were some great soundbites about the commercial power of the IAP. McKenrick’s hearings still had another week to run, but unless she could produce a Dr Evil with a smoking gun in his hand, they were effectively over. Andrei could forget about them. The IPO was on.

  Bob Leib, Chris Hamer and Jenn McGrealy were ecstatic. Sandy told him that he had been awesome.

  Broule proved to be right. In the week following Andre’s testimony, the Senate committee questioned a series of CEOs, technologists, security analysts and internet specialists, but their evidence was too complex and too little was known in detail about Fishbowl’s IAP to reduce to simplified soundbites. The media largely ignored the hearings. It was all too abstract, too theoretical. Where was the harm, where was the clear and present danger? Who were the victims?

  But there were things from the Senate hearing that Andrei couldn’t forget, things he kept hearing in his head, again and again. Not do with the security issue. Other things. Things that he had been asked – things that he had said.

  43

  SOMETHING HAPPENS INSIDE a management team as a company heads towards an IPO. A kind of fever takes hold. Will the shares be fully subscribed? Will the price meet expectations? The level of the work going on to be ready for the IPO is extreme. The sheer intensity stokes the flames. No one can think of anything else. Everything that happens in the business is seen through only one lens: what impact will this have on the float? No one, no matter how much they try to detach and focus on the business, can remain entirely immune.

  By the time the Senate hearings closed, the IPO programme was ramping up; a month later, it was in full swing. A new, expanded board for the company had been constituted, with the bankers recruiting half-a-dozen serving and ex-CEOs from some of America’s largest companies to lend their imprimatur. In order to stoke demand for the shares, a gruelling three-week roadshow was planned in the lead up to the launch – East Coast, West Coast, Chicago, Dallas, London, Frankfurt, Milan, Moscow, Delhi, Sao Paolo, Shanghai. Jenn McGrealy was signed up for the whole tour. Andrei fought off repeated demands to do the roadshow but, eventually, getting caught up a little in the fever himself, he agreed to appear in Silicon Valley and New York in the final week of the campaign.

  Broule said it was critical for Andrei to make one European appearance and he agreed to appear in London. China was essential as well. Huge investor funds were available though the wealth accumulated by the families
of leading figures in the Communist Party, with whom Broule’s bank had assiduously cultivated relationships over a period of decades. Shanghai was added to Andrei’s schedule, all in the week before the IPO.

  Rooms had been booked that could hold 500, and there were inquiries from ten times that number, eager to see the legendary Andrei Koss in the flesh. Broule said he could have sold places to the presentations for $1,000 a head. ‘We could forget the IPO,’ he joked, ‘and just do the roadshow.’

  The figure of a share price that would value Fishbowl at $100 billion dollars, comfortably putting it into the handful of largest IPOs ever executed, had been in the air for over a year. The actual share price of the offering would not be set until the day before the float, when the underwriting syndicate, led by Broule and his team, would take a view about the degree of demand at various prices. Ideally they would want to go out with a number that would leave room for a bounce of 5 to 10 per cent on the first day, getting the market for the stock off to a buoyant start. It would also ensure that they could offload at a gain the stock that Mann Lever and the other underwriters were committed to take, while making a profit for favoured clients, who would receive large allocations of shares

  Right from the beginning, Broule had been confident of bettering the $100 billion figure. Privately, he had been talking about a market capitalization in the order of $120 billion. By the time the roadshow started, he was talking of figures ten or twenty billion north of there, perhaps as high as $150 billion, which would make the Fishbowl IPO the largest ever seen. And the projection kept getting higher. By the time Andrei joined the roadshow in the last week before the launch, the media were speculating that the offering would value Fishbowl at $160 billion, and even at that level investors hoping for shares would be left empty-handed. Broule told Andrei that it was looking as if $180 billion wasn’t unrealistic. At that valuation, Andrei’s personal wealth on paper, with 44.7 per cent of the company, would stand at $80 billion dollars.