Trump Sky Alpha

by Mark Doten

  I’m going to read you a quote from “Birdcrash,” the leader of the nonfiction Aviary.

  Please don’t. I won’t be able to talk about it. It’s better to stick to the book.

  Okay, sure. John Perry Barlow isn’t the only whipping boy in the book. There are some interesting, contrarian takes on the Whole Earth Catalog, which is usually regarded very fondly when people talk about the history of the internet. Steve Jobs, in his famous commencement speech at Stanford, quotes the final issue, on the back of which there’s a picture of a country road and the words “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” Is it fair to say that you don’t like the Whole Earth Catalog?

  It’s fair to say that the narrator of part 4 of the book doesn’t! His point is how the Whole Earth catalogs are these revered countercultural objects, but the generation that grew up on them became the worst capitalists of all time—or at least, the richest capitalists. So where are their hippie ideals now? And just look at the language of it: the whole earth! What an American demand! It’s not enough to call it the American Catalog—it needs to take in the whole earth, under the guise of, you know, some hippie-dippie-new-age-let’s-change-the-world stuff, peace love dope, but what it really ends up being is let’s control the world, exploit the world, sell things to the world. To the whole earth!

  You’re a network—

  Hold on, hold on, I’m not quite done yet. This idea of “the whole earth” is very different when you’re from a country that’s been subject to multiple colonizations. As a person with that history, when I hear white people talk about “the whole earth,” even in a positive context, there are alarm bells going off. And this stay hungry, stay foolish—it’s just so perfect, it assumes such a different shading if you’re from a country that’s been colonized. Isn’t it clear that this is the logic of a swarm of locusts? Stay hungry, stay foolish. I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, but what this really is, is the voice of blind, endless consumption, a consumption that doesn’t care who it rolls over and destroys. In my book, I have a character rephrase stay hungry, stay foolish as Remain ignorant of all your hunger makes you do. And the whole earth, that’s what it has to be—the whole thing, everything has to be consumed, that’s the logic of capitalism, and that’s the same logic that’s accelerated by the internet. So it sounds like you’re pessimistic when it comes to the growth of the internet.

  Of course! We have to be pessimistic. But you know, there’s also hope. I’m from the Philippines, and the founding father of the country is a revolutionary writer—a novelist, I don’t think there’s any other country where that’s the case. I should say that this is canonical, if contested—some intellectuals today would say someone like Bonifacio was the true bearer of the revolutionary spirit. Be that as it may. Rizal, he learned to rebel because of the same global colonial networks that were oppressing him. I recommend a book, a very good book, Benedict Anderson’s Under Three Flags—it’s a book about Rizal and the Philippines and worldwide anticolonial revolution, and Anderson talks about how Rizal met revolutionaries from Cuba and other colonized powers, and they learned to resist together. There’s a part in my book—and I feel like I’m overexplaining things here, but since The Subversive is no longer available, I hope that’s okay. There’s a part in The Subversive—the title comes from Rizal, from his second novel, El Filibusterismo, and there’s a part in Rizal where his greatest character, a revolutionary and con artist named Simoun—he wears blue-tinted glasses and deals in gems and jewelry, he’s an adviser to the governor general of the Philippines, he’s just incredibly cool—this character, after traveling around the world, he comes to a provincial town and he’s showing off his wares from a box he has with him, and he keeps opening drawers and compartments in the box, revealing better and better gems, jewelry that’s more and more rare, necklaces of Cleopatra’s he said were discovered in the pyramids, and rings of Roman senators and knights, found in the ruins of Carthage, and you realize that this impossible box must be honeycombed with secret drawers and compartments. And I would say that it suggests that Filipinos can be very good at that thing—secret compartments.

  So any time you’re colonizing people, you’re also sowing the seeds of your own demise?

  That sounds like a bit of Marx. Which I of course approve of. And I’d say yes, you certainly could be sowing those seeds. You’re sowing those seeds, if people learn how to respond. You know—and this is another kind of writing—the first major global computer worm, ILOVEYOU, was written in the Philippines.

  And you see an analogy there?

  Well, I would say that between Rizal and the author of ILOVEYOU, you can’t tell a Filipino that writing doesn’t matter. Writing can change things. Of course, that connection is somewhat tenuous. You have to separate between the Spanish colonial period and the American colonial period. In the Spanish period, people were deliberately kept from the Spanish language. In the American period, English was forced on them. All this is common knowledge to some. So the dynamics were quite different, and Rizal, you know, he’s read in English in the Philippines, not in Spanish. What you have to understand, what it’s very hard for Americans to understand, is colonial power. And the system that the Philippines has been brought into, this whole process, it’s a colonial process. And the internet—if you want to talk Marx—it’s dialectical. It’s both produced by the economic conditions, and it produces them. In the Philippines, you have a country that went from a hacienda-based, big-house oligarchic system to a period of postcolonial economic nationalism when the country attempted to integrate itself into the world-system on its own terms, and failed—or lost. Manufacturing was stifled, ultimately, by international markets. The primary exports became not things but people—a distributed system of labor under Marcos, in which the country became reliant on remittances, people working abroad, so-called Overseas Filipino Workers, sending money home. The Philippines would make larger and larger financial bets on this distribution, relying not on labor at home but on remittance flows, bundled and sold … And so we have a situation where the Philippines provides labor to the world, and acts as a connector between power centers. This is nothing new: the twenty-first century runs through the Philippines. The revolutionary moment at the end of the nineteenth century, when the revolutionary spirit and tactics in the Philippines spread to other countries across the world. The anti-insurrection tactics of colonial powers—waterboarding was practiced here by the US extensively, and you can draw a line from there to the Iraq war. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Manila became the final link in the round-the-world telegraph, and one hundred years later, ILOVEYOU was the first ultramassive computer worm, also linking the world. For all that time, forces of global connection and disruption have been originating or running through the islands, and that is why I say that the world as we know it today runs through or is disrupted in or by the Philippines.

  These technological forces, you also write about how they’ve disrupted our perception of time. There’s a striking section that almost sits apart from the rest of the narrative, called “Notes for a Philosophy of Time.”

  I don’t think of it as “apart from.” For me, that’s the center of the whole thing.

  What will your next writing project be?

  I am 90 percent sure that I’m done with fiction.

  No! You’re just getting famous. Whatever’s going on with The Subversive, surely people would be interested in the second.

  We’ll see. I think that I may have said what I need to say. Writing is hard, and ultimately, I’m lazy in certain ways.

  I understand that in real life you’re a network engineer. Have you had to face down any hackers in that capacity?

  Well, I won’t answer that question directly. I’ll just say that I am very happy with my job, but it is not one that will make headlines. I do back-office networking for a fast food chain based in the Bay Area. I run their intranet and do basic IT.

  What do you hope for the future of the internet?

&nbs
p; Well, this is a question of great interest for our species, one that my novel was curious about, and I think the question is something like: Where does the internet stop, when is it enough? You see that with the internet of things. Millions of new connected devices. And the significance is not the objects themselves, the things being connected. The objects are in a sense mere pretexts, conduits through which the force and essence of the internet moves and exercises its power. Again, it is not the space of freedom that it was once billed as—that was itself already controlled and regimented in the ’90s, and then since that time, there’s been a mass consolidation of the experience of the internet in the hands of a few sites. Facebook, Amazon, et cetera. So I hope that people become more mindful of that.

  I have to ask. Are you Birdcrash?

  Of course I’m not.

  Any last words for Birdcrash or any members of the nonfiction Aviary?

  None whatsoever.

  The morning of the eighth day the ambitious young man walked me to a room with a desk and phone and several filing cabinets. A guard indicated for me to sit at the desk, and as soon as I touched the seat, the phone rang.

  It was Galloway. He sounded abrupt and hearty and frightened.

  Galloway said that he understood that I’d been inconvenienced, and that everyone was grateful for my patience.

  They’ve asked me, he said, to express to you that your cooperation is important to our project. It is very important for the New York Times and for both of our jobs that you be frank with them. They’ve also asked me to explain that it’s not a confidentiality situation. With old sources. Not in the new world.

  When the old world blows up, I said. Then the old confidentiality agreements are nullified.

  Something like that.

  I’m not protecting anyone. I’ve told them what I know.

  They need to understand your relationship to Sebastian de Rosales.

  There is absolutely nothing I haven’t told them. He was an internet person of considerable interest for a while. I set up an interview with him via email. I did the interview in person at a café in San Francisco. We spoke. There was a profile in the magazine, and the full interview was made available online. The interview as posted was essentially our whole talk.

  Was there anything in the interview that wasn’t included?

  Edited for length, no big crazy revelations.

  Did you ever speak to him after that interview? Think. This is important. Emails, social media, whatever.

  We talked for an hour, a little more. There were follow-up questions, maybe three or four emails. I may have emailed him a link to the interview when it ran, I don’t remember. That’s it. I am interested in getting to Prospect Park. I will burn whoever I need to to get there. That is a promise to you and whoever is listening in on this call.

  Galloway thanked me and hung up. Ten minutes later he called back.

  They’re going to take you to the place they’ve got de Rosales. A prison. They’d like you to talk to him.

  I told him thanks but no. They surely had people better equipped to talk to him. I said that if there was information they needed to get from him, they must have had ways of getting it.

  Well that’s the thing, they’re trying, but he’s dying of radiation poisoning, and he won’t talk. He’s very ill. He might die any day. You’ve talked to him before, maybe you’ll have better results.

  I’m sorry. It’s either Prospect Park or send me back to the Foshay. I think I’m just going to go back to being a Foshay person.

  That’s no longer possible.

  Make it possible.

  There was a pause. The Foshay Tower is no longer in government hands.

  What does that mean?

  I’m afraid that’s all I can say.

  The phone began to shake in my hand. I pressed it against my face. I said, You’re not serious. This is a tactic. You’re trying to get me to talk to de Rosales.

  It’s not a tactic. It’s good you weren’t there.

  What happened to the people?

  We don’t know. I don’t know. All I know is it’s not a place people can go right now and it’s good you weren’t there.

  What the fuck, Tom.

  I know.

  Okay, I said. Okay. I’ll do it if they take me to Dominique and Verena.

  Hold on, he said. I heard a muffled exchange, Galloway and someone else. He got back on the line. He said, De Rosales comes first. He’s here, he’s on the West Coast, afterward, they’ll fly you to New York. And one more thing—if he is Birdcrash, there’s a way to prove it. Birdcrash left an encrypted Pastebin document on 1/28. They need the password.

  So what is it? I see him and I go to Prospect Park? Or I have to get this password?

  Get the password. Think of it as the password to Prospect Park.

  He said, Just do your best.

  Sebastian de Rosales turned the title over in his mouth. The Subversive, he said. The Sub-verrrrr-sive.

  I was led through door after door to get to him, down staircases and cinder-block corridors painted institutional yellows and grays. I felt the heft of all those doors accrete within me, all those points that could stop you getting back to where you’d come from. I had a sense of one-way burrow—that I was not only lost, but deeply lost, positioned in a trap within a trap within a trap, and the only way out was to keep going deeper.

  Here in the final room there was a mirror across one wall, a chair, a standing lamp, and a hospital bed with a small, emaciated man in it.

  I had thought I knew who was in control, what I was doing here, but I held the bag with my notes, and wondered.

  He had been at this location for nine days, according to the Office of Communication Oversight. In other words, ever since I had found the quotes from The Subversive.

  When I interviewed him in 2015, de Rosales and I had met at a café on the Mission. He had worn a white shirt, tapered and pleated burgundy pants, and dark brown leather sandals without socks. He had a tattoo of a burning ship on his forearm. His hair had been up in a man bun. He drank a matcha latte.

  Now, in the prison, he was greatly changed. He was around my age, almost forty, but his skin had become withered and drawn, and his silver-streaked dark hair seemed shocked by, flung out from, his golden, drifting eyes—he was deep in radiation sickness, his pupils floating under a layer of gold, almost completely occluded.

  Sebastian, I said. I told him my name and reminded him where we had met.

  After a time, he turned his head my way. He spoke slowly and without connection between thoughts.

  The world around us was gone, it was just the two of us in the room, and I was losing the plot, I didn’t know who controlled anything, if he had stood up and walked out and left me locked there in his place, I would have thought Yes, this is what is happening.

  If they had brought me here to be tortured and murdered by him, if he had tools at his disposal, if hurting the woman who had found him was the cost of his cooperation, I would have thought Yes, this, of course this.

  He said that everything that happens, happens twice.

  He said that death is followed by a dream of death.

  Maybe it’s a simulation, he said, maybe it’s that.

  I could not tell how much of the disjunction in his speech was willful, how much involuntary, a mind actively evading questions or simply carried along the currents of cognitive loss.

  I thought about Prospect Park, tried to remember its contours, where the fields were.

  Sebastian, I said, it’s very important that we talk about The Subversive.