He was wrong, of course.
His board of directors had pressured him to move into interactive advertising. Someone goes to a movie, you hit Explore, and a trailer for Rubber Meets the Road III starts playing. Someone has dinner at Felipe’s Mexican Cantina, you “explore,” and the menu scrolls through your feed to the accompaniment of mariachi music. Your best friend Jake claims a coupon for a buy one, get one free latte at Pappy Chino’s, and your feed offers you the same deal. It was the obvious evolution of the software, but it wasn’t what Wes had in mind the day he stormed out of Professor McGregor’s office. Nor had he imagined then what would eventually become the site’s most popular feature, the daily roundup of Deep Pocketz and Big Spenderz, sortable by country, zone, city, and even personal friends list, though it was Wes himself who had suggested that some system of rewards, however trifling, might help to solidify the program’s popularity. Now, each day the news feeds reported the top five in each national feed. Wes was ranked seventh in Deep Pocketz as of yesterday morning—his usual slot—and he usually didn’t even rate in the top 100 of Big Spenderz, though booking the OLE tour a month ago had edged him briefly into the eighty-third slot.
He had tried for most of the last two years to design a new and better program. His mistake with Pocketz, he had decided, was relying on Cost as the reference variable—that is, measuring value against the existing system of credits instead of creating a brand-new virtual credit system with its own reference variables, such as Intellect, Morality, Creativity, Humor, and Spirituality. He thought it might be possible to commodify Societal Values, and therefore move them from the periphery to the center of value exchanges. Then, it wouldn’t matter if a music track were illegally downloaded; you’d be paying for the musician’s talent rather than the product of that talent.
But he couldn’t make it work. The beta version of Virtuz, which he had test-run on a group of college sophomores, was a failure. “Boring,” according to Wes’s survey-processing software, was the most frequently used adjective in the discursive evaluations, followed by “confusing” and “useless.” The test subjects hadn’t liked the rewards system. The updates in the feed made them feel guilty and inadequate rather than inspired.
Betsy Chang volunteered 2 hours at Calabash County Soup Kitchen.
Explore Share High-five Two hours ago, near Wilmington, AtlZ
Ely Singleton wrote 986 words for Sociology 256.
Explore Share High-five 30 minutes ago, near Greensboro, AtlZ
When Wes complained to his girlfriend, Sonya, about the failure of the trial run, how it was indicative of the superficial nature of young people today, she had said, “Well, what on earth did you expect? It’s a feed for Goody Two-Shoes. Hey, wait—that’s what you should call it.” She synced her tablet so he could see on the wall what she was writing: Goody Two-Shooz. She used the Fontastic! app to make the letters gold and sparkling, with halos tilted over the letters G and S. Then, mouth slanted in thought, she erased the halo over the S. “There you go,” she said. “That’s your logo.”
Granted, they were having a rough go of it lately—and this wasn’t the first time one or the other of them had snapped and said something nasty—but that stung.
“Well, if you felt that way all along, why didn’t you say so?” Wes yelled, swiping her stupid logo out of sight.
“I did. Half a dozen times I said to you, ‘This isn’t how a virtue works.’ That the minute you try to attach a precise value to it, you turn it into something that isn’t a virtue. The whole system’s a paradox, and I told you so, but you never listened.”
Wes found himself pouting, childishly sullen. “You didn’t say it in so many words.”
She shook her head in a disgusted way, so that her chin-length, auburn hair swung back and forth. She was thirty, five years older than Wes, and a Pocketz employee, head of the team of graphic designers who came on last year to freshen up the main-feed interface and create subtle, pleasing avenues into what Wes had started calling the “ad opps.” She had been his first real girlfriend—his first sexual partner—taking the initiative in almost every negotiation, from the night she asked him if he wanted to join her at Ozzy’s for a beer (“I don’t drink,” he had said, and, unruffled, she replied, “Well, you can just watch me”) to the night a week after that when she put his hand on her warm, full breast and asked him, “So, are we going to fuck or what?” Wes lived a life of precision and self-discipline. Each morning he washed down half a dozen vitamins with a glass of fiber-infused orange juice, had one bowl of plain oatmeal, and then went for his usual six-mile run before the urge came, like clockwork, for him to empty his bowels. He ate a strictly vegan diet, did not drink, did not smoke (even Smokeless), and abstained from refined sugars, caffeine, and gluten. Sonya, on the other hand, never exercised (though she was tireless in bed), drank daily, smoked leaf tobacco and pot, and subsisted on a diet of sugary cereals and vacuum-sealed cold-cut sandwiches that she purchased in bulk each weekend from Tesley’s. Her favorite meal out was a rare steak, salty fries, and most (or all) of a bottle of red wine. She was Wes’s only indulgence, his only bad habit, and Wes had assumed all this time that he, on the other hand, was the point of light in her life, the voice of reason. Her daily vitamin.
“Not in so many words,” she muttered. They had been sitting at Wes’s small kitchen table together, Wes with his oatmeal, Sonya with her bowl of Salty Caramel Crunch Nuggets and a tall mug of sludgy black coffee, and she stood and flipped the cover of her tablet closed. She went to the living room, grabbed her backpack from the credenza (where Wes always stowed it, since her habit was to simply sling it into Wes’s recliner, or on his coffee table, or in the middle of the floor, where anyone could trip on it), and shoved her tablet roughly into it.
“What are you doing?” Wes asked.
She was tall and lean but not scrawny, her hips a little on the wide side compared to the rest of her, good-sized hands and feet, toenails always painted some garish hue but never, somehow, freshly. He would have liked to paint her toenails for her, to work the color neatly into the tiniest corners, even on her funny-shaped pinkies, getting it exactly right; but he had not, in their eight months of courtship, had the courage to make the suggestion. She stalked around his living room in a cropped T-shirt and boxer shorts, hunting down her things: two balled-up socks, a lipstick, an old paperback mystery novel. Into the bag they went.
“You’re leaving?” he asked, bewildered.