The Deep Whatsis

by Peter Mattei

  “Yeah but I hate it and don’t use it. Mostly iPhone.”

  “And you have a home computer with no fixed IP and your work computer. Any other computers?

  “No.”

  “You didn’t check your e-mail from, like, a friend’s computer, or a computer at a library? Or the Apple store?”

  “No.”

  At that point HR Lady comes up to Tan’s cubicle. She gives Tan a smile and says hi but I know she’s one of the ones who’s completely frightened of him, so she keeps her distance, as if his condition is something you can catch.

  “Fuck the server side,” Tan says without turning around to face her.

  “You guys finding anything interesting?” she asks.

  “There’s another ID here pointing to the ARIN database,” Tan says. He waves at a long number, then he copies and pastes it into a Google page and then he raises his left arm high in the air and, with a grand sense of theater, brings his arm down and with his index finger strikes the return key on his keyboard. He clicks on the top entry on the results page. What comes up is just a white page with a lot of info. He highlights a section of it with his mouse, touches his screen several times, says, “That’s it!” and points at the screen:

  NetRange: 192.168.0.0-192.168.255.255

  CIDR: 192.168.0.0/16

  NetName: IANA-CBLK1

  NetHandle: NET-192-168-0-0-1

  Parent: NET-192-0-0-0-0

  NetType: IANA Special Use

  NameServer: PLUTO-1.IANA.ORG

  Comment: This block is reserved for special purposes.

  Comment: Please see RFC 1918 for additional information.

  Updated: 2012-4-27

  “What does it mean?” I ask.

  “It means that there was a log-in from a computer that isn’t one of ours.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday.”

  I look over at HR Lady. See? She takes a deep breath. “So you’re saying someone hacked in?”

  At that Tan laughs so hard I think he is going to spit up. “No, no, of course not! Hacking! There is no such thing. Impossible. It’s all Hollywood. Lulz! I set up the firewall myself. No one can get through. Impossible! Wapner in eight minutes.” The last line he didn’t actually say.

  “Then how did they do it?”

  “Oh, that’s simple,” he says. “They know your password.”

  I look at HR Lady again. See? I told you. A minute later we are in the elevator together, alone.

  “Somehow she got my password?” I say to her. “How? Maybe my assistant wrote it down somewhere, she comes sniffing around my office, she sees it, who knows. I told you she was dangerous.”

  “Well, we don’t know it was her that got into your e-mail. We don’t even know if anyone did.”

  “But you heard him!” I am practically yelling at her. She gives me a look that is both Don’t yell at me and How can you believe that crazy Cambodian? He had been found, an infant crying, bloody, and alone in the killing fields. He was rescued by an aide worker and taken to Queens, where he was raised, which to her means he can’t be trusted and to me means he is a sage, although I’ve never been 100 percent certain of the Khmer Rouge backstory, it may only be company legend.

  “I’m not sure I believe him,” she says to me. “We’ve got some issues with him that I won’t go into.”

  “Like what?” I ask. “You think he’s going to go active-shooter-in-the-workplace on us? Tan is awesome. I love that guy.”

  “I can’t go into it, IT is not your department.”

  The elevator opens and a lovely young account executive gets in. Early twenties, doe eyes, short skirt, high black boots, and a sweater that props her tits up like fresh muffins on a bamboo tray from CB2. She smiles at me. I mean of course she does, I’m someone in a position of authority, so she’s acknowledging me the way any employee would, but at the same time one knows that young women are involuntarily aroused by power. Hey wassup, I smile back, with more gusto than I might have normally, if only to torture HR. The door opens at HR’s floor and we get off, me with a little nod to the nameless faun. HR walks ahead of me, striding toward her office, and she flings a look back at me as if to say The way you look at women is troubling to me!

  “I’m just kidding you!” I say to her, scaring her no doubt with my ability to read her mind. “I knew you were watching me, c’mon, have a laugh.”

  “That doesn’t excuse you,” she answers, and at that moment I have a sudden thought that perhaps HR Lady is bisexual or at least open to it, and not as angry as she is pretending to be; is it all just foreplay anyway for the inevitable drunken night when we have a go? No, she’s far too serious, far too moral for that, this is what I like about her. She stops in the hallway in front of a big poster with the Tate logo at the bottom and on top it says FAILURE IS THE ONLY PATH TO SUCCESS™. She looks me in the eye, then looks up and down the hall to make sure we are alone.

  “If I were you I’d go work from home or something before your friend gets back from the doctor. Barry and I will talk to her and we’ll sort it out tomorrow. If there’s an issue I’ll call you.”

  “You’re kicking me out?” I say to her.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m, what, suspended? Double secret probation?”

  “Unofficially,” she says. And then, “It was Barry’s idea.”

  “Barry’s telling me to go home?”

  “Yes. Barry’s telling you to go home.”

  “Well, fuck Barry,” I say. “Fuck him. Barry can’t tell me to go home. Barry can’t tell me shit.”

  “Yes he can, and he did, so go home,” she says, and walks off, and I stand there looking at her not half-terrible ass.

  The whole incident has bored me a bit and so I decide to go to Western Sunshine, which is a Korean massage place over by Penn Station. I’ve been there twice before. It would be wrong to call Western Sunshine a whorehouse because as far as I can tell you can’t actually have sex with the girls, but they will give you their famed Upbeat Conclusion, which is perhaps what Western Sunshine means in Korean, and this leads me to believe that Korea is superior to all other countries on earth.

  I get a cab to Eighth Avenue and as I get in I look at my device and see there is a text:

  eric eric ow my eye

  how’s the cacti?

  hey dat rhymes

  where u @?

  This one I don’t delete because I realize I will need all the proof I can muster, in my attempt to get Intern dismissed, which I will do tomorrow, mark my word, because clearly she is unbalanced. I make a mental note to talk to Tan and see if he can’t figure out a way to get a hold of her medical records, if that’s possible, or even legal, I don’t know, but shouldn’t a company reasonably be allowed to look into the mental health and wellbeing of one of its charges? Especially one so young and new to the world of work? Ever since the TAN IS THE NEW BEIGE™ campaign Tan loves me like a brother, he’ll do anything for me if I ask him. Of course there’s the problem of Barry, who doesn’t love me like a brother at all, and who has never liked me one bit, but that will be a minor issue: my new motto in regard to Barry being “the time is now fuck-this-shit o’clock.” Once I lay out the situation for him, he will understand and get on board, because what male hasn’t had the experience, at some juncture in their lurid past, of sloppy hook-upping with the all-wrong desperate needy chick who then won’t stop calling you no matter how many times you tell her you aren’t available, or you’re gay, no you really are gay, you just wanted to see what all the hetero fuss was all about, and so on? Who hasn’t banged the wrong girl only to have her fall on her face to get you in trouble with the law? I tell the cabbie I’ve changed my mind, would he mind turning around and taking me back to whence we came? Then I touch the 347 number, her number, and create a new address book entry in my phone. I label it Intern, then I change that to??? then change it to Her then back to Intern and save it. If I get rid of her, I realize, if I succeed in that regard, however unlikely t
he prospect is, I will still not know the one thing I need to know: Why. Why she found me, what she wants from me, why do I have these achingy feelings for her? I resolve to find out. FAILURE IS THE ONLY PATH TO SUCCESS™, after all, it’s dogma, it’s doctrine, it’s hanging on the wall.

  part two

  2.11

  During my temporary exile from the Tate Worldwide headquarters I spend the afternoon and evening at home working on my interview for AdBeast. AdBeast is the number one magazine for creative professionals in our industry, and they run a series in the online edition where leaders in the field (of which I am one, even though I haven’t won an award in three years, and even then only on the coattails of my colleagues) are asked to interview a peer in the creative community, someone they envy or admire or, perhaps, despise. So, in order to underscore how creative and out-of-the-box my thinking really is, I decide to interview myself.

  So, Eric, who starts?

  I do.

  Me? Why you?

  I’m tired of this already.

  OK, let’s start. What is advertising?

  Advertising is how corporations outsource their lies.

  You’ve said that before.

  Advertising is a vessel. It’s nothing more than a means to an end. For some, a paycheck that allows them to create a family, a home, have children, grow the human race, put more people on the planet and live safe in the knowledge, some would say delusion, that they are contributing to something larger than themselves. For others, it is about increasing the worldwide level of consumption, and therefore wealth, of things, things we don’t need but that we believe will make us feel safe and happy. This is a fantasy. I say a fantasy because not only are these things we don’t need, they are also in most cases things that aren’t even good for us, are actually harming us and threatening our survival as a species. Food, shelter, sexual relations, and security (guns) are the only things that we actually require in order to survive; everything else is entertainment, or what I call Tush. The system, in other words, has become solely about Tush and that’s why I say it is nothing but a game. Let me give you an example. Recently one of our clients, a manufacturer and marketer of household products, created an extension to their famous line of synthetic disposable diapers. They embedded a small microchip into the diaper that can sense when the diaper is wet. The chip then immediately sends a message via Bluetooth technology to the caregiver’s phone or via Twitter or whatever Mom chooses; Mom then gets a message telling her that her child’s diaper needs to be changed. Now this is very interesting for a number of reasons that we discovered while doing some basic market research prior to the launch of the product. First, young mothers who we interviewed in a focus group setting all told us that this diaper innovation was hogwash, and that they were perfectly capable of knowing when their infants had wet themselves, either by touching the baby’s diaper physically with their hands or by the baby’s whimpering and crying, or by what some of the women called their “sixth sense” when it came to their babies, they just knew when help was needed. So right off one might think, well, this is going to be an uphill battle, these women certainly don’t need this product and they don’t want it either; in fact you could make the argument that they were hostile toward it because the product was somehow insulting their sense of themselves as loving, capable caregivers.

  So what did you do?

  Well, we looked at what the real purpose of the product was, and that was to be an object of play in the game. Remember, the basic needs have been met and so now it’s all entertainment. And so the purpose of the product was not to relieve any kind of basic need but to be something one comes across in the game, a prize, and then the question is, Will she pick it up as she plays the game, as she moves to another level, or will she pass it up and pick up some other, shinier, more interesting piece of Tush? Well, obviously we want her to pick it up and put it in her shopping satchel as she moves through the game space of her life. Now in any game there are two kinds of objects: there’s Treasure, and there’s Bombs. Treasure are the things that get you more points in the game and Bombs are the things that allow you to transcend the barriers that are keeping you from acquiring Treasure. And here’s where it gets interesting. This particular diaper is, in a way, both Treasure and Bomb. It’s Treasure in the sense that it’s an item whose sole use value is in being shiny, it increases world Tush, it’s something a young mom can talk to her friends about at the playground or Starbucks or wherever, “Did you guys see those new diapers with the Bluetooth chip? No? Well they can actually send a text!” And the other mothers will look at her with at first disdain and immediately thereafter a sense of envy. Not envy that this mom’s children are somehow more cared for than their own, no, in a sense the non-chip-diaper children are better cared for because they get some actual human attention from their mothers, they get held and touched more frequently, and so on. Instead the moms’ envy will come from the fact that they will suddenly realize that they are not on the same level as this Early Adopter Mom in terms of their game status. They have fewer points, they are playing at a lower rung. And that’s how it’s actually a weapon, a Bomb, because the other mothers, in this version, are in fact the ones who are out there trying to beat you and get more Treasure, or keep you from getting more Treasure than they have, at least that’s the way the Tush is set up in our society. And so the real purpose of the product has nothing to do with its intended usage; its real purpose is as a Treasure-Bomb by which Mother A can demean Mother B and thereby lessen the risk that Mother B will impede her success in the game. The advertising that we created for this particular product, which is now famous if not infamous, having been parodied countless times on YouTube, and called the worst advertising in history and so on, the advertising shows a group of mothers in various settings, cafés and playgrounds and a home. The mother with the chip diaper always knows first when her child has wet itself, and the other mothers are embarrassed. The tagline WHEN NATURE CALLS, WILL YOU BE THE LAST TO KNOW™? underscores this sense of embarrassment and guilt. In other words, we have created a product, if not a meme, in which we are making moms feel guilty for loving their kids: that’s what Wall Street calls Creating Value.

  So how did it do in the marketplace?

  Sales were 800 percent higher than goal, and we’ve seen month-to-month lift in virtually every launch market.

  All I can say is: wow.

  We’ll be introducing the adult version soon.

  Next question: Why do you do what you do?

  Hmm, OK. You mean besides the fact I make three-quarters of a million dollars a year?

  Yes, besides that. How does your work feed you as a creative person?

  Well, the answer is that it doesn’t feed me. What’s the opposite of feeding?

  Starvation?

  You see, what I think is interesting about what I do is that I personally don’t believe in what I do, or I should say that I believe very strongly that technology (and these days advertising is completely dependent upon technology, from geo-targeting online ads to Facebook-enabled mobile apps) is actually destroying us as human beings, it’s taking away the fundamental truths about our humanity and making us pay to get them back: again, that’s called Creating Value.

  Can you give us another example?

  No.

  Why not?

  One should suffice.

  You’re being a jerk now, Eric.

  By taking away a mother’s, one might say, natural empathy and making her pay to get it back, we keep the economy going. And the economy is also just a game, a fantasy, one might even say at this point a shared delusion. Now you might argue that we are in charge of the game, we write the rules, and if we don’t want to destroy a mother’s ability to care for her child we can simply not sell diapers with microchips in them. But who, I ask, would dare to stop such a thing? Imagine if I were to say to our clients, “Dear men of Unabrand, does the world really need text-messaging diapers? Shouldn’t we be promoting better infant care instead
of convincing mothers that their natural instincts are inadequate?” Well the agency would be fired within the hour and myself along with it. So we do nothing, in fact we cheer and trumpet these so-called innovations, which are in fact ruining us as human beings, and this is why I say that the Tush, which others have dubbed Late Capitalism, is in fact a form of madness, a madness which will end in the slow, not even tragic mass suicide of the human race.

  And that’s a good thing, I take it.

  Thank you so much for the opportunity, I enjoyed our informative discussion.

  Likewise! You’re really smart and interesting.

  No, you are!

  When finally I look up from my screen the sky is almost fully lit. Is it the morning of the day after or the afternoon of the day before? I don’t know; the empty Belevedere bottle on my desk strongly indicates that I have been drinking. And my utter sense of calm in the face of yet another day on this earth without food but semi erect strongly indicates that I have taken all my pills.

  2.12

  Barry’s office is on the fourteenth floor; HR Lady and I have agreed to meet there at 9 AM. She called me at 7:30 this morning to tell me the situation wasn’t good, and I just listened patiently and then hung up, not bothering to tell her that I was going to meet privately with Barry on this, without her, because her presence in the room might skew the conversation.

  When I got to work I was early and so I went directly to HR’s office which is also on fourteen, the floor where all the top executives live; I liked to remind them, on the odd day when I came up here, that it was actually the thirteenth floor regardless of what they were calling it. The creative department was on three and four, account services and planning were housed on five, six, and seven; eight is for production; nine, ten, eleven, and twelve are floors that Tate formerly occupied but as they downsized over the past three years they were forced by M. Jean-Christophe, who owns the holding company that owns us, to rent out. These were now a rabbit warren of ambulance-chasing lawyers, an internet-fraud insurance company that was based in Romania, and I think a company that resold unused space on billboards.