It helped that Cassie herself never saw the design elements that the company’s designers created to barely distinguish the native content from content content. Each morning she would open a new Google Doc with a list—“Seventeen Great New Recipes that Use Splenda Instead of Sugar,” or “Eight Grate New Emo Records Not Featuring Ben Gibbard,” “The Thirteen Most Heinous Hate Crimes of the Decade”—and tackle them as she would any other piece she was doing research for. She did a fair amount of communicating over e-mail with the pieces’ writers, but again there was no reason for her to think about whether they’d been hired to write copy for regular content or native, given that many of the same writers were doing both kinds of pieces now.
One afternoon after winter began to set in, as Cassie walked up Canal Street from her N stop—she liked the long walk up to the RazorWire office, it gave her time to decompress after the mass of morning subway riders—she noticed something conspicuously lacking. It wasn’t something she didn’t see but something she didn’t smell. It was cold enough now that the fish waste on the Chinatown sidewalks no longer baked its emetic waft with the heat of the morning.
She sat at her desk and found two unrelated documents. The first was a Facebook message from Mark. He was not all that happy again, he said. Even with Costco in town now he was a little lonely. A lot. Lonely. He missed her. He’d been saying he missed her, but this was more explicit. He really missed her. He’d been thinking about her more since she came to town and … there was innuendo but that was it, he left it there.
She didn’t know what to say back to him so she didn’t reply. In fact she’d noticed that of late she did a lot less e-mailing, a lot less responding quickly—or at all—to messages she received over social media. It was as if in the past six months or so the sheer quantity of written messages she received in a week was insurmountable, and so in response people had collectively decided not to answer all messages. Texts—sure, she’d reply to texts. But not e-mail or FB Messenger.
The second document she found was a list in the RazorWire Google Docs folder entitled “Eleven Vulnerable Baby Boomer Venues.” The piece was by one of their riskier writers, who had been covering the Boomer Boomers in their early days, and was getting tons of hits for pieces that seemed to cross a boundary from reporting on the movement, to advocating for it. In the past months he’d published a kind of data-dump of e-mails from Social Security officials, detailing the vulnerabilities to hackers of the organization’s firewall that seemed to invite hackers to attack it. He’d made three lists of new baby boomer targets—Jeffrey Koons, Denzel Washington, Stephen King, Shel Silverstein’s childhood home, and more—that hadn’t yet been hit. His third list even included a target that only two days later was vandalized—Jim Davis’s cartoon factory in Muncie, Indiana, where Garfield comic books were still manufactured. But they each had accrued hits into the hundreds of thousands, and it wasn’t clear that there was any actual intent in their having been written, and they went viral, so legal let them keep posting.
Even with all that in mind this latest list felt like an escalation: it had specific addresses for a baker’s dozen of government offices, national and local, that the Boomers might take next. It was one thing when private citizens were attacked, or when there was an almost tricksterish bent to the list-making and speculation: Was anyone really going to go after Neil Young’s Northern California ranch? Cassie texted Regan to see if she wanted a cig. Regan texted back to say that she didn’t have time to leave the office, had a couple deadlines she needed to hit by lunch, but why not bocce. Smoking had grown to be an even more fraught activity than it had been before—now every time they went out for a cig a baby boomer would attempt to serve as a kind of in loco parentis and tell them they should quit, to which Regan would say, “Who the fuck do you think you are to tell me anything,” and launch into a diatribe about how it was the baby boomer generation that was the first and last in human history to smoke machine-produced cigarettes on such a prodigious level, and fuck them if they didn’t think we could enjoy just a little of that experience ourselves on our own time and on our own dime. By the time her jeremiad had ended, the misguided boomer would be long gone down the street.
So they stayed inside among their fellow twenty-something-year-old colleagues and played bocce. They played to twenty-one, and within three minutes of starting their game, Regan was already up fourteen to three.
“I’m not sure about this latest list from Edmund Steiner,” Cassie said. She bent down to pick up all three of her heavy balls and cradled them against her midriff. “It just seems so specific, going out with a list of the addresses of government agencies. I did a little poking around and in three instances, he’s included addresses of D.C. offices that aren’t publicly listed.”
“Then he’s doing a public service, don’t you think?” Regan said. “More like traditional journalism if you ask me. Bringing information to readers they wouldn’t already have.”
“Under the auspices of advocating illegal attacks against them.”
“Advocating? Absolutely not doing so. It is a satirical piece in the form of a list. A satirilisticle. Very much in keeping with the work we publish.”
Regan reached back and bowled a green ball through the sand, through the mix of Cassie’s balls. It hit the pallino and the two went spinning together against a wall. Two points.
“And what if one of those venues was hit?” Cassie said. “Would we have those FBI agents coming around my cubicle once again, asking questions?”
“Would it matter?” Regan said. “You would bear no culpability. The shadow of the First Amendment looms large over what we publish. There’s always Times v. Sullivan in the background.” She walked over to where all six of their balls were and picked her own up. It would be too heavy to bring Cassie’s over for her, and Cassie knew it, but something about it still felt ungenerous. She came back to where Cassie was standing. “And aren’t there venues on that list that maybe should, after all, be hit?”
Cassie didn’t respond. She went to pick up her balls, brought them back, threw them as if it didn’t matter. And it didn’t. Regan won by fifteen points.
Back at her desk Cassie went through with the full fact check on the piece. Regan was right: there was nothing more controversial about that piece than any other they’d published. She went through and confirmed the addresses on each. Cassie finished checking the piece, got up from her cubicle, and with a force she’d almost never had in their now months of dating, she grabbed Regan and said, “I need a cig. Come roll me one.” They walked out of their still-frigid office into the frigid streets below, two young people working together and in love.
FUGUE
BOOMER MISSIVE #3:
“TODAY AS I START OUT MY FIRST DAY as a Boomer Boomer, I will take on a new name. I was—I was. But now I am. I am. I am Isaac Abramson. Every day for the rest of my life, from this day forward, when a Boomer fist brought the word of the Lord to my face, I will be Isaac Abramson. God told Abram to go to the top of Mt. Moriah, to take Isaac there for the sacrifice. Abram did as He said. He would have done it. He would have picked up that knife and put it through his son’s chest if at the last minute God hadn’t said to stop, hadn’t given him the lamb for the sacrifice in Isaac’s place.
“We are all Isaac now. Sacrificial lambs every one of us, to the person. Your baby boomer parents are all Abraham, every one of them. Remember every day of your life that they aren’t afraid to take you to the top of Mt. Moriah for sacrifice to keep their jobs. Their way of life. The knife they wield is the debt they’ve accrued, the seventeen trillion dollars in debt in the form of Social Security and in Medicare, another three trillion-plus still accruing from these wars they’ve gotten us into. We didn’t vote for it. We weren’t old enough.
“They did.
“We are all lying on the altar. But there is a difference: Isaac did not know what Abraham’s intentions were. He had not heard the voice of the whirlwind in his ear.
“We have.
“I am the whirlwind.
“Hear me in your ear.
“We have heard the voice of the whirlwind. I will be the voice of the whirlwind. I will be the Behemoth, I will be the Leviathan, I will speak from your desktop in the words of a burning bush, in the sound of the flood and the force of the deluge. I will be Isaac Abramson, Isaac son of Abraham. Hear the whirlwind.”
“Social Insecurity.
“I am Boomer1. We are all boomers now.
“Resist much, obey little.
“Propaganda by the deed.
“Boom boom.”
PART FIVE
MARK
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
IT WAS AS IF THERE WERE three lives Mark Brumfeld, Isaac Abramson, Boomer1, was living, in the months after moving back into his parents’ house in Baltimore. The first of these lives was lived online, and that life online was as fractured as his offline life was—between taping missives, engaging in IRC chats, and finding ways to allow his missives to reach as many viewers as possible. The second of his lives was lived in his parents’ house almost as it was lived when he was a teenager—quietly, desolate, and with extreme reticence. The third life he lived was the one anyone could observe if they saw him outside his house, the life of a man dejected, living in his parents’ basement, lovesick, yearning, and alone. In those early days it was the component of life that felt least in his control.
It was as if he were living three lives in this new existence in Baltimore, but for the first couple of weeks after uploading the initial video he’d made, Boomer Missive #1, Mark walked around like the world was being shown on a newly unveiled Apple Retina display, and as if there was just the one life: Life Online. Maybe this was what it was like for the callous shale gas purveyor, after years of studying petroleum geology, having discovered that no matter what wasn’t working aboveground, the sand and rock beneath his feet were as valuable and procurable as oil was in Texas a century before, like the first Brit to bend down and in the soil outside Baghdad feel sticky crude so plentiful it was bubbling up out of the very sand. Natural resources so abundant and so near to hand one almost couldn’t help but plunder them. Anger in the moment, newfound powers of manipulation and control accessible simply by logging on, met by people typing away all across the country, all across the globe.
He didn’t want to go back to the JCC after his altercation with Finkel. For the next couple of weeks he drove over to the outdoor basketball courts at the middle school he’d attended before he was a teenager. It was hot and his eye was healing, the cut having sealed into a small, tight scab. Each afternoon for the rest of the month at four o’clock a foreboding swarm of gray-blue clouds crowded the hazy sky. An hour later thunder boomed in the distance. Then the skies opened. He sat in his parents’ Volvo and waited for it to pass before hitting the courts. As the skies cleared he watched as first finches, then ravens, began to return from wherever they sought refuge from the rains, to forage for the easy kill of worms and insects and rodents doing the same. For the first time since he was a kid he had pulled down the Stone Tanach, the best English translation he knew of the Hebrew Bible. At his magazine job if someone alluded to the Bible, he was forced to use the New American Version their style guide required. Now he was reading the Stone Tanach, and taking it in. He was halfway through Exodus by the time his eye healed.
The response to Isaac’s initial handful of missives was a jolt, but soon watching it grew stale. The jolt wasn’t jolt enough. It did not bring even the same charge as hearing his bluegrass band applauded when they were onstage in front of three dozen people, and if he wasn’t careful his thoughts would turn too far back to Cassie, to what he was missing in New York. It was just plain different to be alone, in a room, in front of a computer. It was controlled on his end and volatile and capricious on the other, and when the response wasn’t enough, he found he needed more. He would e-mail Cassie from his Mark Brumfeld e-mail address—nominally to see if they had any more gigs, but he knew that in his heart what he wanted was to just hear anything from her, maybe even a sense that she wanted him to come visit—but beyond that he didn’t talk to anyone much.
Midsummer he made a trip up to the city to see Cassie and to play a gig they’d already had on the books. The night before they went out to dinner and then went to a party for the magazine that had published his Emma Goldman essay. While what he most wanted was as much time alone with Cassie as she would grant him, Mark found the scene at this magazine party something else. He was shocked at the response he got there, not for any of the three lives he was now living but the single life he’d led before. People recognized him from the first missive, before he’d put on the Crosby mask. His editor, Deron Williamson, who had been aloof while they were working on the piece and had provided him only radio silence since, showed him a ton of attention. While he’d expected to spend all his time at the party with Cassie, Mark quickly forgot about her as he sat down with Deron and Regan Lightman, whose work on Foucault he’d read when he was in grad school though she was younger than him, and they talked about how best to push his missives out.
By some wild coincidence it turned out that Cassie saw his first missive along with them and all three knew he was Boomer1. But Regan seemed concerned by the idea that he could be identified if someone saw his face in that first missive. She showed him all the ways he could clean up his footprint, cloak his identity, and continue apace with his missives without fear of anyone but her, Deron, and Cassie knowing he, Mark Brumfeld, was Boomer1. When he went back out into the party Cassie showed him more attention than she had in ages—it was enough light and energy to carry him all the way back to Maryland. Mark returned from that trip to the city full of the verve that accompanies purpose: He took down Boomer Missive #1 and, filling himself with the same angry energy he’d been full of when he first recorded it—which was easily done, the feelings and thoughts he’d presented then having been kept inside for so long—he rerecorded it wearing a vocoder and David Crosby mask he found in his old closet. This new version was even more convincing, a second draft given time to percolate, imbued with energy and contained by inchoate command. After recording it Mark dove deep into the Dark Web, posting videos and chatting with people in IRC chat rooms with new resolve, new confidence. He discovered how to cloak his identity, how to communicate with people without their having any sense of who he was. He only posted under the screen name Boomer1, and never logged on to the web without first encrypting what he was doing using TOR.
He supposed this wasn’t entirely unlike his experience of working for a traditional magazine—publishing pieces that were edited under his byline, e-mailing sources and publicists in the early days of the Internet, a faceless name behind an electronic message. But by degree, if not kind, this felt different, chatting anonymously on IRC channels, negotiating the world as Boomer1, which itself was an alias for Isaac Abramson, which itself was an alias, a nom de cyberguerre. It was what made it feel most as if the three lives he was living were separate: there was no Mark Brumfeld when he was chatting online. Isaac Abramson hadn’t been jilted by Cassie Black. Isaac Abramson hadn’t grown up in this suburban basement, didn’t depend on his mother at the age of thirty to have a sandwich made for him at lunchtime. It was as if Mark Brumfeld wasn’t even in the room during those times, as if he could feel however distantly what Edgar must’ve felt when he donned his Poor Tom disguise in Lear. There was a semblance of safety about it, and yet something that felt like a risk, the freedom that came from combining anonymity with purpose, to a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Life went like this for the rest of that summer: chatting in chat rooms and posting Boomer Missives in the morning once Julia left the house to do whatever it was she did during the day, basketball in the late afternoons, pastrami-on-rye when Julia was home to make it, Torah on the dash of his parents’ old Volvo when it rained too hard to play ball. All the missives that were posted now had him behind his Crosby mask, the vocoder he
spoke into making him sound like a cross between Darth Vader and the Jerky Boys. The fourth missive was taken up by legions on Facebook, shared dozens and then hundreds and then tens of thousands of times. As soon as it went viral, so did the previous missives, just as Regan suggested they would, the rising tide of viewership floating all diatribular boats. Each time he imagined his own success from outside of himself he imagined it through Cassie’s eyes, imagined her impressed, alongside him. Mark watched as the number of views beneath his videos went from the hundreds, into the thousands, and up into high tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands, caught in a matrix of viral growth. There was an undeniable sense of success, data to back up the quality and importance of his words—it was quantifiable and it was knowable and it was public, confirmed viewership trackable in a way magazines and newspapers, pamphlets and protest had never been trackable.
While he bumped around in different chat rooms over the course of his first weeks, behind the cloak of TOR, most of his chatting took place on a channel in an IRL chat room Regan had suggested called #micromacrohackro. He chatted there, and posted links to his videos. At first he didn’t say anything, just posted links and then lurked as he watched others talk about his postings. The chat room itself was ostensibly for talking about issues related to economics, and Mark later learned that it was started by the son of a famous macroeconomic theorist at McGill, a kid who clearly didn’t know much about economics at all but pretended to because of his famous father. He was the chat room’s moderator. As discussion tended toward one of Isaac’s missives—and then toward a discussion of the effect on baby boomer profligacy more broadly—the chats went on unabated and were joined by dozens of users. As Isaac watched he saw that three users kept popping up: Coyote, HHH, and Silence.
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