“Thank you—”
“Gaia!” I grant you this largesse, to speak with me familiarly.
“—Gaia.”
“And they’re good enough for me to want to spend some time chatting with you about a little project we’re putting together at Lovability, something I’d like to tap you for. It’s still in the research stages. A small thing, but very exciting, with a lot of potential. Would you like to hear about it?”
“Yes, I would,” Rebecca said, hoping she’d successfully hidden her confusion behind her smile.
“Then let me cut to the chase. Or not, actually: if I cut to the chase you’ll probably run out of here screaming and call the cops and the newspapers or something, ha-ha! Let’s start from the beginning.”
“Rebecca,” Gaia said. “Think about what Lovability does, and what it is. From the point of view of the client, we provide a matchmaking service. People join up—they can even join for free with a Bronze Plan if they want—and they fill out a profile, and we use our algorithms to find them a suitable mate more easily than they could find one on their own by leaving the house. That’s what they think, based on what they can see of our systems and on how we present ourselves in press and advertisements. And that’s perfectly fair. It’s not false.
“But here, in this room, we have a different and more informed point of view. We know that Lovability’s—well, not its true value, but its most important value, is not as a matchmaking service, but as a collector and repository of self-reported data. And the longer an account stays open, and the more data the account’s holder adds to it, the more valuable the access to that account becomes to the corporations we sell those profiles to, and who are our primary source of revenue. The few extra dollars a month that we collect when we convince someone to upgrade to a Gold account or whatever: that’s just gravy. What’s more important to us is that Gold account holders stick around a whole lot longer than Bronze account holders, because with the payment of a fee comes a psychological commitment. They’re much more likely to link Lovability to their other social networks; they’re much more likely to click on several different profiles each time they visit; they’re much more likely to participate in our daily love quizzes and our market research questionnaires.
“So from our perspective we want to have as many genuine accounts as possible, but more importantly, we also want many of these accounts to be as persistent as possible. When we go to other companies with our rates, we charge roughly eight times the amount for access to a Platinum account holder as we do for Bronze account holders. And this is a bargain! Because the higher-level account holders have provided much more information about themselves, which makes them easier to target.
“Do you see the problem here?”
“Sure,” Rebecca said, recalling something that Philip had told her on their first date, when they’d met at the sculpture garden and he’d introduced himself by launching into a breathless, esoteric lecture. “Every time we do our job we cripple our own business.”
“That’s right,” said Gaia. “Whenever Lovability makes a match with an ideal long-term romantic partner, the repository of data that represents Lovability’s true worth declines in value, because the account holder loses interest in the site—even if they do log on now and again, it’s out of idle curiosity, and they pretty much stop providing us with additional information altogether. We need at least a few people to find true love or whatever on a regular basis, so that we can point to those success stories as evidence that Lovability actually works. But if everybody actually found their soulmate as soon as they logged on, it’d finish us!
“So from our point of view, the people who log on for a few weeks and meet the perfect guy and then leave, or who just nose around on the site for a little while and give up but leave their accounts open—they’re basically freeloaders. And we need some freeloaders to populate the system—we want to be able to say we have hundreds of thousands of members without buying profiles from defunct Russian social networking sites or something like that. But there are two general categories of people who are most likely to be our bread and butter.
“The first are serial daters with demographic profiles that make them highly in demand: you know, the guy who’s six foot two and clears six figures, who’s got a corporate job with a wordy title. Every time he logs on he’s got a full Smilebag; he spends hours each night sending out dozens of messages, each one hand-tailored to the recipient. He basically treats Lovability like a second job. This guy goes out on dates with different women a few times a week; some weekend days he doubles up, with a lunch date with one woman and dinner with another. He’s good for us and he’s easy to manage, because he’s going to get hit with choice overload: he’s always going to have in the back of his head that there could be someone better out there for him. And if he’s highly desirable demographically we can use his profile in the targeted ads we place on other sites to draw people in.
“But the second category—and really, these people are more valuable to us than the serial daters—are people who rarely if ever get dates through our site, but who stick around anyway. The disabled; the morbidly obese; the man or woman who will never take a good photo in her life. Middle-aged women; divorcées; women with a couple of kids. Black women. Look at our numbers: you can look at the numbers for any dating site and see that black women are more likely to send messages than women in any other demographic, and are most selective with the men they choose to message, sticking primarily to messaging black men. And yet they still get the lowest rate of return from the men they do message. And once they hit forty, forget it. And they’re highly desirable for marketers to reach, too, especially if they’re middle class and have a fair amount of disposable income. I’ll tell you, I’d trade a half dozen pretty blondes for one forty-three-year-old black woman with a white-collar job, career driven and childless, if she’d stick around on Lovability for a year or two—”
“Um, Ms. Williams?”
“Gaia, I said! Call me Gaia.” Her voice reminded Rebecca of wind chimes in spring.
“Gaia, this conversation is going in…a weird direction? I don’t know that—”
“Oh goodness. I can see that you’re a little bothered by this. I can see the wheels spinning in your head right now: I can’t believe she’s saying such racist things! This is why we’re having this meeting in person: otherwise it would be easy for you to misunderstand me. I don’t think I need to say that Lovability is not a racist organization. I don’t think I need to say that Lovability has a deep commitment to diversity.”
“Of course,” Rebecca said. (Maybe Gaia was Hawaiian or something? What did Hawaiians look like? Sort of Asian, but not really? Polynesian. Maybe?)
“It is extremely important in this business,” Gaia said, “to keep in mind the difference between a person and the data generated by a person as she moves through life. This is a distinction that is easy to forget. Information is not a person, and a person is made up of more than information. A person has beliefs and feelings and a will and a soul: information does not. You have to remember this because we do not want to dehumanize our clients by speaking of them in terms of numbers, but you must also remember that while it is possible to have a moral or ethical obligation to a person, it is impossible to have such an obligation toward data. The very idea is nonsensical. What would it mean to talk about being fair to…bits? How would you talk about treating bits with respect?
“And so because our language isn’t set up to express that distinction neatly, the distinction between the person and the data that person manufactures, we fall back on using the language in its old traditional way, and trust that between us the distinction is understood. I could have said, for instance, Messages that are sent from profiles whose gender is set to ‘female,’ and whose race is set to ‘black,’ and whose age is set to a numerical value greater than forty, are less likely to receive responses than those whose race is set to a value other than ‘black’ or whose age is set to a numerica
l value lower than forty. But if we had to spin out these long torturous sentences every time we wanted to refer to a phenomenon exhibited by the Lovability database, we’d never get anything done. So among ourselves, here in the office, we speak in an efficient shorthand, and trust each other to remember that our concern here is not with a person, but merely with the data that is actively and passively generated by that person. It’s possible to make sexist or racist or otherwise derogatory statements about a person, or a group of people, because people are sentient, and have individual identities, and can reason and feel. And to make such statements about people is despicable. But we are concerned not with people, but with information, and information has none of the traits that make humans what they are—it is not sentient, not even corporeal. To speak of having sexist or racist sentiments toward information would be the same as having sexist or racist sentiments toward a chair, or a table, or an abstract concept like grace or evil. It just doesn’t make sense.
“Do you understand, Rebecca? Do you agree with me?”
“I…I guess?” Rebecca paused. “I mean, I wasn’t expecting a metaphysical argument when I came in here,” she said. “I need to think about it. But I think I agree. People are more than just numbers: sure. And numbers aren’t people. All that’s obvious.”
“Good,” Gaia said. “Then we can move on. Where were we? Oh yes. Black women are going to have a really tough time finding love on our site, especially if they’re old. And so these people tend not to remain at Lovability. Except that when people from undesirable demographics are contacted, even once, even if that contact does not lead to a face-to-face meeting, then they’re much more likely to stick around. And we offer mediated communications with varying degrees of intimacy: there are Smilebag Smiles, and messages, and then the People Peeks, the video chats that customers can request that have a ten-minute time limit. Ever since we’ve instituted the video chats last year, they’ve been astronomically successful! A black female who engages in even one People Peek is highly likely to upgrade her account status, and highly likely to stay on Lovability for several months more. If only more black women, or severely overweight men, or other people from demographics that are considered desirable by marketers but undesirable by our dating pool, could have more People Peeks. Our data repository would be so much richer, so much more robust.
“This is where our romantic avatars come in.”
“Goodness, you look just like your picture,” the woman on the other end of the connection said as she stared into her webcam.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say I look just like that picture,” Rebecca replied, her voice in her own ear full of melodious gravitas. “It was taken about a year ago: I’ve gotten a little older. But I do appreciate the compliment.”
The two women shared a deep, long laugh.
Then silence descended as the woman on the other end fished around for something to say. Rebecca usually found it safest to wait out the mark on the other end. She looked over her profile on another monitor: her handle vrksasanalady, her real name Sara Ross. Forty-one, with a seven-year-old girl from a previous marriage. Her profile photo showed her in loosely fitting yoga gear, standing on one leg with her foot tucked in against her inner thigh and her hands extended in the air: she had looks that would make a man turn his head if she walked up behind him unannounced. It was baffling that she’d even need a site like this, but then Rebecca saw what she’d filled out as a career: adjunct prof in the history departments of two different universities; yoga teaching on the side. No wonder: with the kid she’d rarely have a free minute. The salary from one of the adjunct jobs probably went entirely to day care.
On the screen Marcus continued to go through his idle animations. Finally vrksasanalady said, “So it says here you’re into Ella!”
“Oh, yeah, Lady Ella!” Rebecca said. “I love that old stuff. There’s just something pure about it: something beautiful about a voice that hasn’t been overproduced and processed with computers, like all music is these days. Her voice just rings out, you know? She can take any standard and just fill it with surprises. You know ‘Angel Eyes’?”
“Absolutely. Ella took that song. That’s her song.”
It turned out that vrksasanalady was an expert in twentieth-century jazz. (Not Sara, Rebecca reminded herself. vrksasanalady was an electronic golem, a construct of pixels and signals made by Sara, one that resembled her and spoke with her voice: there’s a difference; it’s important.) She burned three minutes of the ten-minute chat time with what Rebecca assumed was a learned disquisition on the changes rung on “Angel Eyes” by various musicians: Nat King Cole; Pat Metheny; Shirley Bassey. (“I feel a touch guilty about loving Dame Shirley so much—I think I’ve got a dozen of her albums, and she never met a tune she couldn’t belt—but you can’t help it!” “No need to feel guilty at all,” Rebecca said.)
“In fact,” vrksasanalady said, “I know a place. A little place in Greenwich Village, a club where you can get in for next to nothing late at night. Not crowded and noisy, like a lot of New York clubs. Going into this place is like going back in time. A lot of musicians just drop in unannounced when they’ve finished up a gig somewhere else in the city, just to jam for a little while—you’ll see a guy stride up on stage when the band is in the middle of a tune, pull a sax out of a case, and start blowing like he was there all along. I’m thinking maybe I could drop the little rug rat off at my sister’s for an evening and you and I could, you know, go there sometime?”
“That sounds great,” Rebecca replied. “That sounds really interesting. Here is the thing.” She paused. “My secretary: she keeps track of my schedule for me, and without her I’m a mess. No idea if I’m coming or going, where I’m supposed to be, who I’m on the phone with: hell, who I even am sometimes.”
“I hear you!”
“So how about this. I’ll talk to her and see where the blank spaces are in my calendar, and then I’ll send you some dates and times. How about it?”
“Sounds like a plan. I am—it was really great to meet you, Marcus. I’m looking forward to seeing you again.”
“It was great to meet you, too, finally,” Rebecca said. “I’ll send you a message soon.” Then the clock in the corner of the chat window ticked down to zero and the line disconnected, vrksasanalady’s feed replaced with the Lovability logo next to a caricature of Gaia Williams’s smiling face.
“You were laying it on a little thick there with the bit about the secretary, don’t you think?” Felix said as Rebecca removed her headset and wiped the motion-tracking dots off her face with a handkerchief.
“It was the first thing I thought of! Listen, it’s hard enough playing the guys, and when the women get aggressive and go off-script it’s even harder to think through it. But it was okay. Look: we’ll wait a couple of days and then message her—say someone special came back into his life unexpectedly, and it wouldn’t be fair to his old flame to continue communicating with her. Say he’s sure she’ll find someone. Be a total gentleman about it. She’ll be fine. She’ll even switch up to the Gold or the Platinum: watch.”
Rebecca stood up and rubbed her eyes: even ten minutes as an avatar made it weird for her to hear her own voice coming out of her chest. She liked to talk aloud for a couple of minutes after a session to get rid of the sense of disorientation. “Marcus is good,” she said. “Better than Helen, even, in the visuals.” (Helen was the avatar that Rebecca liked to play as a conspiracy theorist: there were a lot of conspiracy-theory types on Lovability. She had the strong chin, wide brown eyes, and dark-haired bob of a young Ayn Rand, and she was a hell of a lot of fun to pilot: Rebecca would go to town for ten minutes with the craziest monologues, not even letting the guy on the other end get a word in edgewise. The trick was mixing the language of skeptic rationalists with a bit of the “everything is connected” stuff that Felix liked to go on about, along with a small dose of batshit insanity: “I’m just throwing the question out there—remember, it’s still okay to ask question
s in America—but I just have to say it’s really curious that the media has completely failed to report on the clear evidence that this persistent insurgency in the Dakotas is a false-flag op perpetrated by our own government. You’ve seen plenty of evidence in favor of that hypothesis, but none against it, have you? Yeah let’s get coffee somewhere sometime: I’ll send you an e-mail, but we’ll have to figure out a way to do this with a one-time pad cipher. You send an unencrypted message these days and you’ve as good as called up the Feds and whispered it right into their ears.”)
“I’m getting better at the avatar visuals,” Felix said. “Every time we get a software upgrade I can get a little fancier, more subtle, with the animation. Marcus’s skin has layers, like a real human’s does, and when the software renders his image it actually computes the way light moves through them differently. In real time! Really sophisticated stuff. And do you know how many profiles of African American women I looked at to work up that avatar? Hundreds. Thousands!”
On the way out of Gaia’s office after their first meeting, Rebecca had paused. “Gaia?”
“Rebecca.”
“I just wanted to ask: you have a beautiful voice. Where are you from?”
“The San Francisco area. My parents met there—they were working at competing tech startups. Very Romeo and Juliet, but without all the murders at the end.”
Rebecca smiled and turned to leave, then felt her body swiveling back, her mouth opening. “I meant—”
“Goodbye,” Gaia said, “Ms. Wright.”
23
FILE MANAGEMENT
When Rebecca clocked out and left the tower that housed Lovability, her car was waiting for her in the autonomous-vehicle holding area out front. Forty-five minutes before, it had roused itself in the garage in Jersey City where it parked itself after dropping her off at work each morning; then it had driven itself out to Manhattan in time to pick her up. (The fuel expenditure was wasteful, sure, but the avoidance of New York City’s exorbitant parking fees made up for the extra tank of gas every few days.) Rebecca got inside, kicked off her heels, pulled her flask of bourbon out of the glove compartment, and poured two fingers’ worth into the plastic tumbler she kept in the cup holder next to the driver’s seat. Her father would have blanched at her choice of glassware, but it’s not like she was drinking top-shelf stuff: merely Jim Beam, a booze with no pretensions, a decent enough sipping whiskey to celebrate the day’s end. She reclined the seat, punched a button on the dashboard’s touchscreen, and settled back for the hour-long ride home.
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