Patch #23: I bought a little social network
An homage to Donald Barthelme's 1974 short story "I Bought a Little City," loosely inspired by recent events
Photo via Wikipedia Commons
So I bought a little social network (it was Twitter) and told everybody that everything would stay more or less the same, excepting the wokeness and the lack of monetization, and a few other niggles. The users were apoplectic. They threatened to leave and go to places like Mastodon or Post — and even put their new handles at those places in their Twitter profiles — but most never left. I think they were having too much fun complaining about how bad Twitter was now that I’d bought it. These were the same people who were always saying what a ‘hellsite’ the place was long before I was in the picture, but I suppose when you buy a business many consider a public good, you should be prepared to take a little flack, and I was prepared.
You’re probably wondering why I bought it. It all started when I was smoking DMT in the Sonoran desert with a shaman who had gotten 4.8 stars on Yelp (I wish I had just bought Yelp). Prior to the smoking of the DMT, the Shaman did a bit of practiced preamble about how we all needed to hand over our cell phones until the journey was over. He told us that, no matter what, those phones wouldn’t be given back to the journey-goers under any circumstances. All of this was in Spanish so I might have missed something, but that was the gist of it. We smoked the DMT, and I told the Shaman I had separated from my earthly body and become one with the universe (the Shaman said that was good), and also that I needed my phone because I wanted to tell my wife that I loved her (I did not have a current wife at the time). The shaman considered my request in his spiritual way and decided to give me back my phone. What I did was, I sent a text to my lawyers and told them to buy Twitter and also posted about my intentions on that self-same social network for all to see.
Almost immediately, I regretted what I’d done. I threatened to sue my lawyers, and I took early steps to sue the shaman for handing me my phone, but he was a one man operation — ruining him would have been pointless and gotten too much attention in the press. So in the end I just had one of my assistants give him a one star review on Yelp, which was admittedly a little mean-spirited. The lawyers explored ‘all avenues’ for dissolving the deal, but once the Delaware Court of Chancery got involved, I decided to do the honorable thing and proceed with the transaction as promised.
I decided to take it slow and easy and not make any radical changes. The thing to do, I thought, was accentuate the good qualities of the social network, improve the fiscal strength of operations, and eradicate anything that annoyed me personally. So first thing I did, I auctioned off the kombucha taps and espresso machines and other sundries and got rid of perks such as the expensive fresh berries employees were eating by the handful like a bunch of goddamned bears.
Then it was time to let some people go. To manage the RIF fairly, I bought an industrial-grade ‘gravity pick’ machine like you see when they televise the lottery drawings. I also bought a bunch of ping pong balls for the gravity picker, and I had every employee’s name screen-printed on a ping pong ball, which, believe you me, took a bit of effort. I like games of chance and the sound of gravity pick machines, and I thought it would be festive. We put all of the ping pong balls in the machine (we had to do it in batches since there were 7500 employees) and those who ‘won’ the lottery by having their numbers pulled were fired immediately. Additionally, I also fired the neoliberals, the crafters, anyone who was on parental leave, this one guy in Iceland, and those who struck me as unwilling to execute my radical vision for the future or were just generally sus. Also, a bunch of the content moderators had written me a thoughtful memo voicing their concerns, so I fired the whole lot of them — plus anyone they spoke to regularly on internal communication channels.
I was pleased and considered the initial phase of my plan well executed. In just a few weeks, I’d managed to convey to the entire organization that we were in financial peril due to my ill-advised decision to purchase the thing. Folks were sleeping at the office, and the whole place was crackling with energy. It felt like the early days at X.com. I had the boys and girls in engineering tweak the algo so users would see my posts whether they wanted to or not, and I got some gruff for that, but I bet you would have done the same if you’d paid $44 billion for a failing business and found yourself sleeping on a couch in the company library. Still, I thought, something was missing. So what I did was, I sent a company-wide memo. You’ve probably seen the part in the press where I told everyone to be ‘extremely hardcore’ or leave, but what you haven’t seen is the part about the goats because, upon reflection, our comms team thought it would be misconstrued (this was before we fired the comms team for being a bunch of wet blankets and set it up so that any request by the press would get an auto-reply with a poop emoji).
Okay so the goat thing. What happened was, I decided to decree that 100 employees (randomly selected once again by the gravity picker) should all get a pet goat. Some of the chosen protested. You know, “I live in an apartment” and “I’m allergic to goat dander” and so on and so forth. I told them this wasn’t an optional deal, and if they wanted to stay gainfully employed, they needed to get a pet goat and also name it and show proof they were caring for and feeding their goat on an internal Slack channel named ‘Goat Rodeo’. We couldn’t publicize any of this for legal reasons, but I wish we could have, because I’d often look at the photos of goats tied up to trees in Noe Valley and whatnot and laugh so hard that one of my assistants would rush into the room and ask if I was okay. The truth is I was just laughing at the absurdity of human existence (I didn’t explain that; I just waved them away with my hand.).
After we’d had our fun with Goat Rodeo, I sent another company memo ordering all goat-minders to bring their goats to a set of geographic coordinates my team provided. I’d wanted to go back to the Sonoran desert, which would have had a certain narrative frisson, but the logistics were impractical and also expensive so we ended up picking a location in the Great Basin Desert, in Nevada, where I happen to own a little factory. There was some more amusement as people on the Goat Rodeo Slack channel caterwauled and cursed and said things like “How the hell am I supposed to get a goat to Nevada?” but by now the culture was shifting and someone would invariably just respond #hardcore, to which I would respond with an ironic *hug* emoji, which would get like 3000 likes. Then I’d fire the person who posted the stupid question. When you come for the king, you best not miss.
A few people did quit. Apparently, it’s one thing to make someone care for and feed a goat for a few weeks; it’s another thing entirely to ask them to transport that goat to Nevada. But most of the people came to the coordinates. I’d done some planning. We had plenty of water and sunscreen, a station for the signing of NDAs, baskets of life-enhancers for those who partook, and a stage where I’d hired a Norwegian metal band named Darkthrone to play their previously unreleased second album Goatlord. In retrospect, some of these decisions were ill-advised, but at the time I remember gazing out as the busses pulled up and people tugged their goats toward the venue and some people whose life-enhancers had already started to kick in screamed in terror and I felt, once again, like I was at one with the universe. Or, more accurately, I thought this is completely insane! But at least it didn’t feel boring.
The plan was to slaughter all of the goats and then roast them on a large bonfire. I was going to put on a kind of red velvet robe, and goathead crown, and pronounce myself “Edgelord of the Universe” while Darkthrone played menacing riffs in the background. It was going to be funny. There was going to be a feast. That turned out to be unfeasible so we had to call in catering. People had grown attached to their goats, you see, and preferred that we donate them to families and petting zoos and whatnot. We only ended up roasting one (Hector), and even that was kept on the DL. In fairness, despite the natural splendor of the setting, which really was spectacular, the combination of the life=enhancers, the death metal, and the bonfire was a little bit more apocalyptic/ satanic than was advisable, and I probably should have just done something basic like hire David Guetta, who is actually a sweet guy, and handed out a bunch of glowsticks. I could have just given a little speech and sent everyone on their way, but I guess that would have been too easy.
Anyway the shaman from the Sonoran Desert had come. I’d invited him as an act of atonement and also had my team delete the one-star review, so he’d been willing to join me. We were talking in my private tent, an opulent affair done up in high Bedouin style, and the shaman, who was displeased, made a lot of good points about childhood trauma and dark energy and the dangers of turning animal suffering into entertainment. Seeing the whole thing through his eyes, it was clear he was right and maybe I’d gotten a little carried away. So I decided to stop the event and make it go away and wrote the whole experience off as a teachable moment.
Next day, I drafted a Slack post lambasting my own leadership and detailing all of the points made by the shaman, plus a few additional ones about my general cruelty and callousness. I used plain language and didn’t pull punches. One of my lieutenants posted the message as if he’d written it to the company-wide Slack channel, and of course I didn’t fire him because I had written the damn thing and made him post it. I followed with an apologetic note of my own and then I made a goat sandwich with a brioche bun, a touch of mayo, and some pickled onions of the sort they serve with cochinita pibil.
So I ate my goat sandwich on the brioche bun with the touch of mayo and the pickled onions, which was actually quite nice, and decided then and there that I would sell Twitter back to the employees. The Slack post I’d planted denouncing my own leadership had the desired impact on employee morale for the 1000 or so employees left after the fiasco in the desert, but it hadn’t done anything to improve the financial picture. The way I saw it, I’d take a bath no matter how things turned out, so I might as well give the company to the remaining employees and let them see if they could do better. Also, this way I could avoid additional legal persecution by the Germans and so forth — so there was that.
All in all, after processing the entirety of the experience with the shaman in subsequent encounters and integration sessions, it struck me it had been more or less a colossal clusterfuck, but I’d learned a few things. For instance, when a shaman says he wants to lock up your phone for your own good, it’s probably a good idea to listen to him. For another, it got me thinking some important things about the laws of the universe and the problem of shaping energy and matter to your own ends just because you can. Because what happens is, to paraphrase E.O. Wilson, you realize, even after all this time, we still have Paleolithic emotions and godlike technology. There is a certain irreconcilable tension inherent in this state of affairs that necessitates, on some occasions, a modicum of restraint. I guess if I could boil it all down, I’d say that what we should do is bend the will of the universe for good and not so much for our own amusement.
So what happened? What happened was that I took the rest of my fortune and moved down to Brownsville, Texas near the Gulf of Mexico. I decided to live inconspicuously in a simple house and work around the clock and get offline for all but essential purposes. I remember after a healthful period of living like this, there was a rocket launch down on Boca China Beach, and I wandered down there to watch. It was 6 am, and as the sun rose over the Gulf of Mexico, I began to feel a certain peace within myself. The launch was a success, and as the rocket arced through the sky, my heart was pumping as if powered by a boundless universal energy source. Someday, I thought, anyone who wants to will travel through those same stars and look with wonder at the earth below. We are all so deeply flawed, I thought, but look at what we can do if we focus our efforts. Then some reporters and paparazzi stumbled out of the bushes, snapping photos and shouting questions. They asked me if I had any comments about the launch or some recent reports about something called a ‘Goat Rodeo’ and I said no, I did not.
This week’s recommendations:
Reading: God Human Animal Machine by Meghan O’Gieblyn and “I Bought a Little City” by Mr. Barthelme.
Listening: A Tension of Opposites, Vol. 4 by O Yuki Conjugate
Music credits for article audio:
Opening Theme: “Friendly Evil Gangsta Synth Hip Hop” by mesostic via Wikimedia Commons
Closing Theme: “Hopes” by Kevin MacLeod via Wikimedia Commons