Sycamore (Near-Future Dystopia) (8 page)

“Come on, friends,” Minion interjected in a grating voice. “This should be a happy time. We’re arguing about how to make sure we succeed; different methods, same intention. Let’s talk business. Kurtonite just has to start realising that he can’t always be right.”

“My name’s Kurt.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Okay,” said Amos, pouring water from a bottle into the mug in front of him. “Business. Kurt, tell everyone your ideas on advertising placements. The rest of us already know what one another thinks.”

“Why are you drinking cold water from a mug?” asked Kurt, distracted.

“Let’s just say you’re not the only one who doesn’t like glass. Anyway, placements?”

“My feelings on advertising placements? Well, first of all, we need an outright ban on sticky pop-ups. You know, the relative ones that move with your eyes until you click them away. I heard that mistimed pop-ups have caused car crashes when people couldn’t see the road.”

“Fabrications,” said Amos. “Tall tales of corporate espionage. And anyway, that could
never
happen if cars drove themselves. See how it all comes around?”

“Pop-ups aren’t a big part of our plan,” said Minion, an expert on such matters. “See, right now most placements are static — ads in the sky or at the side of the road. Basically floating billboards. But a clickable interface changes everything. Think of posters advertising a gig, for example. We place the ad on a busy shopping street and any user focusing on it can click through to purchase tickets. It’s just like on a website: you see the ads and click the ones you want.”

Kurt considered the concept. “So it’s like a normal public ad but with a link attached? At least it’s less obtrusive than targeting people in their homes like I thought you might.”

“Well,” Minion sighed, “that’s the strength and weakness of public ads: they’re public. Everyone sees them, whether they’re part of the target audience or not. Premiums and Super Premiums are the next step. As well as location and basic demographic data, Seed integration will give us info on buying habits, viewing habits, actual behavioural habits… everything. We’ll know who consumers talk to and what they say, what they want for Christmas and what their partner wants for their anniversary.”

“Private data like that is precious,” said Kurt.

Minion grinned, exposing a gleaming set of fittingly sharp teeth. “And precious things are valuable. At Data Collection we take that information and offer it to suitable third-parties who will pay whatever we ask. A Premium placement might be for a concert featuring whoever you’ve just been listening to, but Super Premiums are the real story. Say a man has a fight with his wife. Her Forest or voice comms might reveal that she really wants a holiday in France for their anniversary but that she doesn’t think he would do something so romantic. A Super Premium ad would see a Sycamore worker show the man her comment and offer a competitive selection of French holidays. The man wins his wife over, the advertiser gets what they want, and they pay us astoundingly well for the honour.”

Kurt looked across the table to Amos. He didn’t know what Forest was but hated the sound of the Super Premiums. “This is a joke, right? We’re not really going to be reading people’s messages and watching the world through their eyes just so we can make money from opportunistic advertisers... are we?”

Amos signalled to Minion that he would handle the probing question. “We are. But only us. I’m happy to sell data and info but I insist on keeping communications analysis and vista monitoring in-house. Advertisers have no right to intrude on consumers’ privacy like that.”

“And we do?”

“As per the terms of the EULA, yes — quite explicitly. But we’ll only exercise that right in certain situations. When consumers are in the vicinity of a physical store, for example. Knowing where people look can inform effective store-layout so it’s valuable data. Other than that and the kind of thing Terrance was talking about, DC will analyse a cross-section of consumers’ TV habits to see which areas of the screen they focus on and when; again, producers want that data and are willing to pay for it. But the key point is that only we will ever see the live streams. No one else gets access. Ever.”

Kurt’s displeasure was distracted. “What about law enforcement, like I said last week? Surely we could make an exception to catch murderers and rapists.”

“We have something in mind to ensure that we can assist the security agencies without entrusting them with consumers’ streams. The police and so on will have access to the tracking grid, of course, but no more than anyone else.”

“What do you mean anyone else?”

Communications Colin cleared his throat before answering Kurt’s query. “A core function of our new social network, Forest, is automatic tracking and mapping of every consumer’s precise location via The Seed.”

“Wait. What? You can’t share people’s location without their consent. And why track The Seed’s location in the first place? The UltraLenses are already tracked.”

“Exactly,” said Amos, trying to allay Kurt’s tiresome privacy concerns. “The UltraLenses are tracked anyway, like you just said, so what difference does it make if The Seed is, too?”

“It makes every difference!” Kurt slammed his fist down into the table harder than intended. “People can take the Lenses out and throw them away. What happens when there’s a chip in your hand that you can’t switch off? Do you not hear how evil that sounds?”

“There’s no such thing as evil,” Amos said absently.

“Tracking everyone’s location via a chip under their skin and sharing it without their consent must be as close as it gets. If you launch with that, the press will eat us alive and everything will be for nothing.”

Amos felt that Kurt was being disrespectful in raising his voice in the meeting room, but his love of money overpowered his love of respect and commanded him to consider the point. He looked around the table and tried to gauge the feelings of his men without asking for them. Minion’s face rarely reflected anything and Communications Colin utterly lacked the capacity to stand up for his opinions, so Amos concentrated his gaze on the hitherto silent Head of Marketing.

“Gary, what do you say?”

Red-tie Gary from Marketing, no friend of Kurt’s at the contest, was candid in his response. “I think the kid’s right about this one, sir. Compulsory location-sharing is the one thing that our research suggests people aren’t likely to stand for. Even having it activated by default will garner a lot of negative attention for our launch. It has to be opt-in.”

“Fine,” Amos conceded, “we’ll ask them to opt-in. Everyone will, though. I’ll ask nicely.”

“Good,” said Kurt. “What’s the idea with the new social network anyway? Why Forest?”

Communications Colin answered again. He liked talking about his brainchild. “With Forest we’re aiming to connect everyone and to represent those connections visually. Each user will have their own publicly-visible tree. The tree will grow branches as the consumer connects with others and its branches will grow twigs to represent indirect relationships. Imagine I’m Forest friends with Terrance. If someone looked at my tree, they would see a branch containing his info which could be clicked through to his tree. At the end of that branch would be twigs representing all of his friends who weren’t also mine. Twigs will grow from twigs until the world is connected as one. Before long, any one consumer’s tree will contain a link to everyone else’s.”

“So a tree is a profile?”

“No, it’s a visual representation of your relationships. A good social graph, if you will. Profiles will be accessible as normal but the tree is a more immediate image. My branch to Terrance will grow thicker the more we communicate, and my tree will grow taller the more people talk about and communicate with me. Think of your tree as a vivid depiction of your social relevance — how much you mean to the rest of the world.”

Kurt hated social graphs and the reductionist metrics behind them more than any other aspect of social networking. “So what happened, anyway?” he said. “Did you wake up one morning, look out of your window and think that what the world really needed was more social networks?”

“No, less. We need less social networks. Ideally just this one. Consumers will have their wall, their friends, their status updates, their microblogging, their photos and their videos all in one place.”

“And you really expect people to make new profiles and abandon the ones they’ve been using for nearly a decade?” Kurt knew that they wouldn’t, whatever Colin thought. “People have built their lives around this stuff. Walls, timelines, friends... none of you seem to understand; kids these days live on their profiles. They
are
their profiles.”

“Don’t worry,” said Colin. “Forest profiles are automatically generated on seeding. As such, Kurt Jacobs is officially the first member of Forest. Congratulations. And as for existing social networks... they won’t be supported by The Seed, and Terrance’s scraping algorithm will collate consumers’ external data and import it into Forest. Once everything is in one place —
our
place — the rest takes care of itself. The transition will be seamless and it will change everything. Imagine looking into someone’s eyes and having your Seed look up everything on that person and present it to your Lenses instantaneously. You’re looking at this person and everything is written in the air beside them: age, interests, friends, dating history, popularity, political and religious views… everything. It’s far more detailed than the Lenses’ previous ‘
name / age / status / occupation’
display, and it all appears faster than you can blink. Literally.” Colin was smiling ear-to-ear. Forest excited him.

“And it gets better,” Minion chimed in. “Down in DC our systems will aggregate and compare that person’s data with yours to formulate a compatibility metric for a premium app called Aura. A good romantic match will be surrounded by a white aura — almost a halo — and a potentially excellent friend will be blue. Imagine walking into a bar and knowing straight away who’s worth your time. It’s the stuff of dreams! You only approach girls who are right for you, and you instantly know what they’re interested in. There’s no more, “
so, what kind of music are you into?
”... you just look her in the eye and say “
have you seen how high our musical compatibility is?
” It’s going to be huge.”

Kurt didn’t particularly like the reductionist sound of Forest but nor did he expect the public to be as ready to move on as his new colleagues postulated, despite the impressive-sounding scraping algorithm. “People will just use their computers and phones to access their old profiles like they do now,” he said.

“Wrong,” said Amos. “Once consumers see and feel The Seed in action they won’t go back to those old devices. You said it yourself: devices will become obsolete.”

“Not straight away.”

“Yes they will,” said Minion, certainly. “The phone networks will be gone in a few months and the internet as you know it will be dead within weeks. Watch and see.” The turnaround in Minion’s position was remarkable. It was evident that he knew something Kurt didn’t.

“The Seed isn’t even out yet and you’re acting like we’ve taken over the world,” he said.

“Like Terrance said, give us a few weeks.” Amos smiled and shuffled some papers on the table. “I think I’ve kept all of you late enough for a Sunday afternoon. Tomorrow Kurt and I will be hosting a Meet The Press event to ensure favourable exposure in the week leading up to our big launch, which as you know is scheduled for next Monday.”

It was the first Kurt had heard of either the press event or the imminent launch. Eight days seemed awfully soon given the amount of convincing that would be necessary to win consumers round to The Seed. The smartphone market was crowded, with a handful of giant players who endlessly sued each other on pathetically flimsy grounds for alleged patent infringements. Sycamore’s arrival as a genuine contender for their collective throne, however, saw the industry unite as one against a common enemy. In the week since the contest, collaborative attack-ads had already been run to discredit the concept of a consumer biochip. The ads had been everywhere and Amos had done nothing to respond. How could he win the public over in such a short space of time?

A hidden clock chimed. The meeting was over and Kurt’s presence no longer required. He used his hand to zoom in on Amos and saw his eyebrows twitching slightly. Kurt wasn’t sure if it was excitement or impatience. He zoomed back out. “I’ve got one more question,” he said.

“It’s five o’clock,” said Minion. “Go back to your ghetto.”

“Terrance, please! Ask away,” said Amos, smiling at Kurt.

“Well, if you really want to have a huge launch next week, and if you’re as confident as you say you are that The Seed will open up massive revenue opportunities, why don’t you do what I suggested at the contest and offer seeding for free?”

Minion laughed heartily.

“Shut up,” said Kurt.

“Ignore Terrance; I’ve been thinking about free seeding since you first mentioned it and it’s a sounder idea than he thinks. But our world has two laws that trump all others, Kurt: freedom is everything and price is value.”

Kurt didn’t follow. “How does that relate to this?”

“If we made The Seed compulsory, the people would resist it. If we made it free, the people would ignore it.” Amos paused to make sure Kurt was listening.

“And?”

“And when we charge $500, they’ll take the day off work to queue around the block.”

5

A familiar black car arrived for Kurt at eight o’clock on Monday morning. Amos greeted him in the back seat with a smile and a question: “So, how is it?”

“Amazing,” Kurt replied. “The zooming and everything is just how I wanted it. I’m getting the hang of using the trackpad to navigate the OS, too. Most of the time my index finger moves the cursor and my middle finger does the clicking. I know my design was for multitouch but I didn’t honestly think a virtual trackpad could do it.”

“There’s very little The Seed
can’t
do, Kurt. Once the SycaStore and Relive are up and running you’ll start to see just what we’ve done here.”