“That’s great,” she says. “I’m really happy for you.” She looks like she’s about to impart some wisdom, but instead she throws her hands up. “I’d better go, my cups runneth over.”
I stumble back into the boardroom, where Larry is grilling Jules on the MAU-WAU-DAU of the platform.
“Ah, Asha,” Jules says. “Gerard was just asking how you set up the framework for the community side.”
I run through the technical points with Gerard, who is at pains to inform me that he started his career as a programmer. “I was employee number eighteen at DeepMind,” he says.
I talk about how Ren and I have instrumented the platform so that you can see exactly what people are doing, how long they’re spending with us, how many posts and photos they’re sharing. “Our minutes per session are going up every month.”
“How do you deal with people who break the rules?” Hans asks.
It’s a good question. “The algorithm will not provide a ritual that goes against the values of the platform,” I say. “It’s programmed to send a red flag, and then we reach out to the user and let them know we are suspending their account.” It was one of the things Cyrus, Jules, and I had agreed to from the start—we wouldn’t tolerate any bullshit, we would just turn peoples’ accounts off if they behaved badly. There would be no bullying, no trolling, no lying, no conspiracy theories, no anti-vaxxers, no neo-Nazis or All Lives Matter activists.
“We’ve only had to do it a handful of times,” Jules says. “The community is pretty self-selecting.”
Gerard, Hans, and Larry put their heads together on the other side of the table. Cyrus, Jules, and I pretend we are busy doing other things, fiddling with our laptops, unplugging, rearranging the printed-out presentations in front of us.
Finally, Larry speaks. “We like it,” he says. “We like the growth, we like the ambition. No one’s really come up with an alternative social media platform in a decade, and we see this as a contender.” I’m waiting for the but, and then it arrives: “But we see some major risk factors here.”
“It’s about the burn,” Gerard says. “Five years ago, if you told me you needed a million a month just to police these people and make sure you head off a shitstorm, I would’ve said sure, as long as you have that kind of engagement, it’s worth it.”
“But you’re going to have to front all that without knowing where the monetization of the platform is really headed, and digital ad spend has already peaked,” Hans adds.
“And,” Larry says, “We’re concerned it’s too… political.”
“Political?” I ask.
Larry glances at the other two. “Yeah. Like only for certain kinds of people. A liberal echo chamber. Don’t get me wrong, we’re all on the same page here. But it might be off-putting to some.”
“We don’t ask people to declare their political affiliations,” Jules says.
“But you said so yourself, it’s a self-selecting group, isn’t it?” Gerard asks.
“Happy to take a deep dive into the numbers and give you a solid answer, but just to be transparent, those are our concerns,” Larry concludes.
They stand up. We stand up.
As I’m leaving the room, I figure I have nothing to lose, so I turn to Jules and say, “I think there’s a law, isn’t there, about women having the right to express breast milk in a private room?”
Jules looks at me like I just belched in front of everyone. “Um, I don’t know, I guess.”
Cyrus has gone ahead, but we are still inside with the other three. Yellow jumpsuit is holding the door open for us.
“We had to read all the workplace laws, remember, when we started hiring.”
“No one is even pregnant yet, Asha.”
“It’s just important to make sure we mitigate all forms of risk,” I say. And then the boardroom doors close behind us and I glimpse the last of the beige decor. “Bye, Larry!” I call out.
In the elevator Jules pounces. “Jesus, Asha, what the fuck was that?”
I tell him the story about the woman in the bathroom. “She was like a cow. In a cow stall.”
“You mean a barn.”
“Whatever. They’re not going to invest in us, anyway.”
“I thought it went well,” Cyrus says. “A liberal echo chamber. Now why didn’t I think of that?”
We step into the lobby. My knees are extremely cold.
“What makes you think it went well?” Jules asks Cyrus.
“They were really impressed with what we’ve built. I think we might get there.”
A second ago Jules was ready to throttle me, but Cyrus has a way of bringing us together. “Were we at the same meeting? They just broke up with us.”
“You heard them. They said they hate the status quo as much as we do.”
Cyrus is heading to the parking lot. “He drinks his own Kool-Aid,” I say to Jules, stating the totally obvious, which is that Cyrus is the smartest person in the world—except when it comes to getting rejected.
On the drive back, Cyrus tells Jules to run the financials again. “Just model it with a lower burn.”
“It’s too risky. If anything goes wrong, we’ll never be able to bounce back.”
Jules and I have run through all the scenarios. What if someone does something awful with one of the rituals from the platform. Uploads photographs of unspeakable things. Forms communities around racist bullshit. Ren promised me, swore there was nothing that happened without his knowledge, that he had built eyes into every corner of the platform, but we had all been taken aback by the speed of growth. There was something out of control about it already—that’s what Larry was alluding to. And if we didn’t spend a truckload of money assuring ourselves that everyone was behaving, sooner or later people would start to do bad things and it would be our fault.
Cyrus doesn’t see it this way. The platform is built around him—and the community, by extension, is also a part of him. Believing that the people who join WAI are inherently good is important to Cyrus—or, rather, imagining that people might do terrible things to each other in his name is admitting a personal defeat. He can’t do it. Now Jules has to recalculate all the numbers and claim we can monitor the site with half the staff and half as much money devoted to customer support.
“Did you know,” Jules tells us, “that there are entire warehouses full of people in the Philippines who are hired just to sift through the human trash that’s put out on Facebook? I mean, all day long people have to look at photos of the kinds of dark shit you and I don’t even have the words to describe, and they have to scrub all of it from the pretty blue-and-white-bannered site so that we can believe we live in a world of unicorns and cupcakes.”
“That’s never going to be us,” Cyrus says. “Asha would never let that happen, would you, Asha?”
I’m touched that he thinks I can solve the problem of human degradation with an equation. “Sorry, love,” I say, “my genius has its limits. Or rather, people are so fucked up that even I can’t build a code to fix them.”
Jules glances at me in the rearview mirror. “It’s not that we think anything terrible is going to happen. It’s that when it does, we need to be prepared.”
* * *