Oudheid en Middeleeuwen 1501-1600 1601-1700 1701-1800 1801-1900 1901-2000 2001-nu Filosofisch Sociaal en Cultureel Politiek en Economisch Technisch Stalinisme Maoïsme Neoliberalisme Socialisme Neomarxisme en Kritische theorie Complottheorieën Irrationaliteit Irrationaliteit (Bijgeloof en religie) Leugens, desinformatie, propaganda Klokkenluiders
Dave EGGERSDelaney Wells is op weg naar de Every-campus, waar Algo Mas, 'the company’s algorithm thinktank' is gevestigd. Ze heeft een sollicitatieafspraak met Dan Faraday. Maar ze komt met een geheime opdracht.
"Delaney put her thumb on the scanner and a grid of photos, videos and data appeared on Rowena’s screen. There were pictures of Delaney she hadn’t seen herself—was that a gas station in Montana? In the full-body shots, she was slouching, the burden of her too-tall teenhood. Standing by the booth, Delaney straightened her posture as her eyes wandered over images of her in her Park Ranger uniform, at a mall in Palo Alto, riding a bus in what looked to be Twin Peaks."(11)
[En daarmee zitten we weer in de sfeer van The Circle, waarin mensen alles van je weten, zelfs dingen die je zelf niet wist.]
"Five years earlier, the Circle had bought an ecommerce behemoth named after a South American jungle, and the acquisition created the richest company the world had ever known. The subsummation necessitated the Circle changing its name to the Every, which seemed to its founders definitive and inevitable, hinting as it did at ubiquity and equality. The ecommerce giant, too, was happy for a new start."(16)
[De context: van The Circle naar The Every.]
"Delaney, rarely nervous, was rattled. She’d spent years assiduously building her profile, her digital self, with meticulous care, but there were so many things she couldn’t know if they knew. More pressingly, on the way to the campus, Delaney had been shammed. On the subway platform, she’d dropped a wrapper, and before she could pick it up, an older woman with a phone had filmed the crime. Like a growing majority of tech innovations, the invention and proliferation of Samaritan, an app standard on Everyphones, was driven by a mixture of benign utopianism and pseudofascist behavioral compliance." [mijn nadruk] (21)
"She’d written her college thesis on the folly of antitrust actions against the Circle, given whether or not it was a monopoly was immaterial if that’s what the people wanted. She coined the term Benevolent Market Mastery for the seamless symbiosis between company and customer, a consumer’s perfect state of being, where all desires were served efficiently and at the lowest price. Fighting such a thing was against the will of the people, and if regulators were at odds with what the people wanted, what was the point? She posited that if a company knows all and knows best, shouldn’t they be allowed to improve our lives, unimpeded? She made sure the paper was disseminated online." [mijn nadruk] (25)
"The Circle had disseminated hate a million times a day, causing untold suffering and death; they had facilitated the degradation of democracy worldwide. In response, they formed committees to discuss the problem. They tweaked algorithms. They banned a few high-profile hatemongers and added poorly paid moderators in Bangladesh."(26)
"“How was it received by your thesis advisor?” Dan asked.
She thought of her professor, Meena Agarwal, with a stab of regret. Delaney had taken Agarwal’s course, “Free Things > Free Will,” her sophomore year, and had fallen boundlessly under Agarwal’s influence, coming to believe that the Circle was not only a monopoly but also the most reckless and dangerous corporate entity ever conjured—and an existential threat to all that was untamed and interesting about the human species.
Two years later, when Delaney asked Agarwal to advise her thesis, she readily agreed, but was shocked when Delaney turned in a 77-page treatise on the anti-entrepreneurial folly of regulating the Circle." [mijn nadruk] (27)
"“Shall we?” he said, and guided Delaney toward a playground, designed by Yayoi Kusama and paid for by the Every. Adults welcome! a sign said, and then, below and in parentheses: If accompanied by a child. Delaney glanced at the small print, which emphasized the importance of Play (always capitalized) in the creative life of adults.
Capital-P Play was last year’s management theory, following multitasking, singletasking, grit, learning-from-failure, napping, cardioworking, saying no, saying yes, the wisdom of the crowd > trusting one’s gut, trusting one’s gut > the wisdom of the crowd, Viking management theory, Commissioner Gordon workflow theory, X-teams, B-teams, embracing simplicity, pursuing complexity, seeking zemblanity, creativity through radical individualism, creativity through groupthink, creativity through the rejection of groupthink, organizational mindfulness, organizational blindness, microwork, macrosloth, fear-based camaraderie, love-based terror, working while standing, working while ambulatory, learning while sleeping, and, most recently, limes."(29)
[Prachtig, die weergave van managementgeklets.]
"Any comparison, even in drunken jest, between Jim Jones, or David Koresh, or Keith Raniere, and Eamon Bailey—the Circle’s co-founder—was considered in poor taste and not remotely apt. The mention of Stenton, another of the company’s Three Wise Men, who had left the Every to form an unholy alliance with a public-private company in China, soured any conversation beyond repair. Knowing what to say about Mae Holland, now the Every’s CEO, was hard to know.
Mae had begun, ten years ago, in the Circle’s customer service department, soon becoming one of the company’s first fully transparent staffers, streaming her days and nights, and because she was utterly loyal to the company, and also young and attractive and reasonably charismatic, she rose through the ranks with startling speed. Her detractors found her dull and exasperatingly careful. Her fans—far greater in number—considered her mindful, respectfully ambitious, inclusive. Both sides, though, agreed on one thing: she hadn’t brought a significant new idea to the company in all her years there. Even after the merger with the jungle, she seemed perplexed with what it all meant and how the companies might be threaded together for maximum benefit." [mijn nadruk] (35)
[De aansluiting bij The Circle. Dit boek is echt een vervolg.]
"Delaney’s purpose in joining the Every was to kill it. She’d waited years for the chance to work at the company, to enter the system with the intent of destroying it. Her college paper had been the beginning of her on-again, off-again subterfuge. Even then she knew she’d need to appear to them an ally, a confrere they could welcome inside the gates. Once inside, Delaney planned to examine the machine, test for weaknesses, and blow the place up. She would Snowden it, Manning it. She would feel it out and Felt it. She did not care if she did it in the civilized, covert, information-dump sort of way her predecessors practiced, or through a more frontal assault. She intended to harm no one, never to graze a physical hair on a physical head, but somehow she would end the Every, finish its malignant reign on earth." [mijn nadruk] (37)
Ze gaat wandelen met haar platonische vriend Wes Makazian.
"Rose, the mail carrier, appeared. Delaney said hello and moved on; she knew Rose and Gwen would forget entirely about the mail and talk about their gardens. This, this needless chatting while on duty, was the kind of thing—there were so many things—that drove anti-trogs over the edge. The inefficiency, the opacity, the waste. Nothing was as wasteful and nonsensical to them as the post office. All that paper. All that money lost, so many tens of thousands of unnecessary jobs, trucks, planes, dead trees, carbon. After she killed the use of cash currency, and all paper and paper products (she’d bought a dozen paper mills so far, just to shut them down), it was Mae Holland’s mission to end the post office, the sacred cow of all things trog.
Trog was a term with subjective connotations. Originally considered a slur against tech skeptics, those same skeptics reclaimed the word and wore it proudly, and soon it was applied by all sides to anything resistant to tech takeover. The Sea Shed contained no smart devices; nothing was permanently (or easily) connected to the internet. They could choose to get online via satellite but only with a maniacal attention to security and anonymity. Such living had become exceedingly rare and far more expensive. Insurance rates for trog homes were always higher, and the fight to outlaw trog housing altogether was entering its second decade. Citing a litany of dangers, Every lobbyists had successfully made it illegal to house children in trog homes; the law was soon expected to encompass all people and all dwellings. The neighbors, most of them anyway, were suspicious—a frame of mind supported by the Every. The company had acquired a series of apps where neighbors could share gossip and fear, and the apps’ algorithms elevated all posts that questioned just what might be going on in these unconnected homes. In most cities, there were neighborhoods holding out, though; San Francisco’s was called TrogTown, and the Every made sure it was perceived as a den of filth, crime and bad plumbing."(43-44)
Meer over de sollicitatiegesprekken van Delaney. Ze weet iedereen in te palmen.
"The Release had happened only ten years earlier. In a hack presumed to be orchestrated by Russia, the complete email histories of over four billion people had been made public. Just as with the hack of Sony by North Korea, jobs were lost, reputations ruined, marriages crushed and friendships shattered. The emails were passed around gleefully by tens of millions, and the media—its last, lost patrols—printed and discussed those emails that revealed hypocrisy or corruption by the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and many others who were none of those things.
And after six months of handwringing, recrimination, a few thousand murders and perhaps a half-million suicides, the world forgot about the Release, and what it said about our means of communication and who stored and controlled it, and simply accommodated it, kneeling before new masters. From then on, every message written by every human was assumed to be subject to exposure—to be permanently searchable and public." [mijn nadruk] (61)
[Dat zal dan wel de nodige zelfcensuur opleveren. Een feestje voor conformisten. ]
"There had been a movie made about the Circle—when it was still called that name—by a talented director and starring actors of consummate skill and renown, and yet the movie, despite its pedigree, was considered unsuccessful and was seen by few. The company, like an autocrat who survives an assassination attempt, emerged only stronger." [mijn nadruk] (62)
[Humor ... ]
Delaney's achtergronden die duidelijk maken waarom ze het Every-bedrijf onderuit wil halen.
"Mae became Delaney’s enemy, the enemy of all that made humans vital. She needed to be toppled and Delaney had the vainglorious belief that she could be the one to do it. But she had no power screaming from the woods. She’d have to get inside and start cutting wires. She quit the forest service and moved to San Francisco."(96)
"Through three interviews and an orientation, Delaney still hadn’t been allowed onto the main campus. Instead she had been relegated to outer buildings and, for the orientation, the auditorium, with about a hundred other new hires."(98)
"Delaney couldn’t elaborate. Everywhere around her were men in form-fitting bodysuits, their penises in stark relief, and this she had not expected. The third decade of the twenty-first century had been accompanied by a gradual but unstoppable transition to ever-tighter clothing for body celebration and the fanciful implication that the wearer might be a superhero. The last bastion of the demure was the area of male crotch, but Delaney realized that, in the spirit of equity, it had to fall away. A workplace like the Every couldn’t plausibly say breasts could be wrapped in tight lycra but penises could not." [mijn nadruk] (106)
"TruVoice had governed much of online communication since Delaney had been in high school. It started simply as a filter. A person would type or dictate a text, and TruVoice would scan the message for any of the Os—offensive, offputting, outrageous, off-color, off-base, out-of-date. O-language would be excised or substituted, and the message would be sent in a manner fit for posterity. Sound like yourself, TruVoice promised, and the vast majority of its users, some 2+ billion in 130 languages, saw it as a godsend.
“The update just builds on that,” Kiki said, “but for verbal communication. Obviously we can’t change your words in real time, but now TruVoice analyzes what you say, gives you a summary of your word usage at the end of each day, and shows you where you can improve.”" [mijn nadruk] (108)
"Then she was gone, replaced by the onboarding document.
The sentences were fascinating, written with the strangely florid and willfully capitalized style common to the industry. “You are invited to bring your most Joyful Self to campus each day.” “Your personal Fulfillment is our goal.” “You are Seen Here.” “You are Valued here.” “Touching, including shaking of hands or Hugging, is de-approved unless between signers of Mutual Contact Agreements.” “This is a plastic-free campus.” “This is a fragrance-free campus.” “This is an almond-free campus.” “Paper is Strongly discouraged.” “Smiling is encouraged but not mandatory.” “Empathy is mandatory.” “Guests must be announced 48 hours in advance.” “Vehicles that burn fossil fuels require an Exemption.” “This is a Collaboration zone.” “This is a Sacred place.” “Everyones with children under five are encouraged to bring them to Raise Every Voice.” “Non-company hardware is de-approved.” “Downloading of non-vetted Software is de-approved.” “All correspondence on company-provided devices is subject to screening.” “Attendance at Dream Fridays is required Because They Are Awesome.” “Attendance at Thursday Exuberant Dance is not required but urged because it is next level.” “This is a beef-free campus.” “This is a pork-free campus.” “Until further notice, this is a salmon-free campus.”" [mijn nadruk] (119)
[Over waarden en normen gesproken. ]
"“I’m assuming you had your DNA sequenced?” Kiki asked.
“For college, yes,” Delaney said. It had been required at most schools, first state then private—insurers had forced the issue.
“Good, so just have to get the vitals, blood, X-rays, things like that,” Kiki said, and they walked briskly to the clinic.(...)
When they stepped inside the clinic, Delaney saw no humans. There was no reception desk, there were no doctors. The medical professions had been decimated by doubt and litigation, with the vast majority of patients preferring AI diagnoses over those of humans, which they considered recklessly subjective." [mijn nadruk] (120-121)
"And when it was approaching interesting, she found, true to Mae’s insistence, the camera on her chest forced her to behave better. The catty comment she wanted to make did not make it past her self-censor. The double-dip she contemplated with her celery stick at the baby shower (client of Gwen)—this was thwarted by the expectation that it would be caught, examined by strangers with mouths agape, made part of her permanent history. So she modeled the behavior she wanted from herself. She was less interesting, surely, and less funny—for humor does not easily survive the intense filtering that the twenty-first century made mandatory—but she was also kinder, more positive, more generous and civil." [mijn nadruk] (127)
[Nog steeds een interessante kwestie. ]
"Mae had somehow synthesized the most potent of all their [Ty Gospodinov, Tom Stenton en Eamon Bailey] traits, and had an unflagging focus they all lacked. She rarely left campus, didn’t dabble in philanthropy or politics; she had no family ties; she was always public but never showy, embodying, with startling consistency, a life lived online and utterly open to view."(152)
"As she walked home, Delaney fumed. This was the Every’s doing—another public space brought within their field of surveillance. She was angry, too, that she knew nothing about this new restriction. But how could she have? There was no longer local news. Starved of advertising and attacked as inherently exploitive and predatory—people no longer trusted filters, curators, observers and intermediaries—journalism had died quietly and alone."(164)
The Every heeft belangstelling voor Wes die programmeert. Hij denkt er over om te solliciteren en dat leidt tot een stevige woordenwisseling met Delaney.
"But they did not contact Wes on Wednesday or Thursday. Delaney went about her work these two days, digitizing and turning to paste hundreds of heirlooms, oil paintings, middle-school science projects, about twelve thousand photos, then sending their digital versions to clients from around the world with rudimentary and often incorrect captions made by an insentient system. The work was repetitive but just varied enough to induce a kind of hypnosis that Delaney found soothing. And Winnie [haar collega] rarely stopped talking.
On her desktop screen there was a grid of camera feeds—at least thirty-two by Delaney’s casual count. Each of Winnie’s children wore a cam, and their feeds each occupied one box, their schoolrooms another ten or so, her husband’s cam and workplace another six, with at least a dozen monitoring her home, her parents’ home, and what seemed to be an elderly relative in an assisted living center. There were no moments in any day that Winnie didn’t know where each of her children was, where her husband and parents were and what they were doing. If anyone did something out of the ordinary, AI would flag it and she could play it back to see if it merited her attention or correction."(168)
Over presidentskandidaat Tom Goleta die een hekel heeft aan The Every.
"Goleta was one of the few politicians who had not succumbed to going Seen. For ten years it had been the norm, whether the constituents wanted it or not. To broadcast one’s days, one’s meetings and hearings and campaign events spoke of transparency: I have nothing to hide, so watch me. Only a smattering of leaders were still dark, and most were anti-tech crusaders. Goleta insisted his interest in the Every was not that of a crusader, and that his frequent allusions to monopolies and the near-certain applicability of anti-trust legislation was not a crusade. But when he decided to run for president, the Every emerged as a central focus of his platform; his attacks, even if rhetorically mild, had a populist flavor and played particularly well in the thousands of towns that had acre-sized data centers in their midst that employed few or no locals in their construction and staffing or maintenance, and somehow found a way to avoid all taxes."(172)
"Delaney had no answer. Over the years, members of Congress, and governors, and presidential candidates long before Goleta, had tried and failed—had immolated in towering fireballs—while attempting to take on the Every. Invariably that candidate would find themselves on the wrong end of scandal. Invariably there would be mountains of evidence made conveniently available to social media and attorneys general. Digital messages would emerge containing unpardonable beliefs, statements, photos, searches. Invariably a digital mob would come for them and amplify these flaws and transgressions. With a hundred other battles to wage, more approachable dragons to slay, it had been years since any politician had suited up to fight the Every."(176)
Delaney heeft haar eerste Dream Friday. Victoria de Nord presenteert er Ramona Ortiz en haar plan voor Enlightened Traveler.
"The Every never stopped broadcasting, never took any video down. It was their interpretation of the First Amendment, and their status not as a publisher but as mere conduit. If you turned on your camera, that was your prerogative. If you watched, that was also your prerogative. If you chose to stop watching, up to you. Never did the Every interfere.
For years, there had been pitched battles between the Every and various governments around the world, who had weakly protested when bullies broadcast their conquests, when murderers streamed their killings, when terrorists beheaded and incinerated soldiers and innocents. Other companies caved and tried to keep ahead of the abuses, hired thousands to monitor and delete, but soon these companies realized that every horrific video was immediately copied dozens of times and disseminated in hundreds of different ways, the most wretched examples copied so many times they could never be removed.
When Mae Holland assumed power she put an end to the belief that the Every could or should be the censor to the world. The era was new, and violence and death would be broadcast, period."(206)
[Over seks geen woord natuurlijk. ]
"“You all are probably working on this already, but I was thinking how crucial this tech would be for detecting depression. As you know, it goes undiagnosed over twenty-two million times a year,” Delaney said, pulling the number from the air and finding only agreement among her audience. “That’s in North America alone,” she added, in a last-second addition that made her stat seem at once more inflated and more credible. “And this rate is highest among young people. I believe that AuthentiFriend could be made to look for symptoms of depression, and could assess them immediately and objectively. No months-long delays in getting help. The tech is already built into the app. Right now it’s there to detect, for example, truthfulness in voice and facial expression, but it could be programmed to look for tonalities and speech patterns that hallmark depression.”"(220)
Delaney realiseert zich bij een gesprek (XIV) met mensen van de Every hoe ze de zaak moet vernietigen, omdat iedereen bepaalde ideeën kritiekloos overneemt als ze maar de lijnen doortrekken van de Every.
"“Yes! We inject the place with poisonous ideas, the Every adopts them, promotes them, and pushes them into the collective bloodstream of the world’s people.”
“And they overdose,” Wes said.
“I was thinking get sick, but sure, okay, overdose.”
“And they finally say Enough,” Wes said, and held his knife high like a sword."(223)
"“All the people!” Delaney said, her voice rising. “The citizenry!”
“Ah, the citizenry,” Wes said. “I like them. They always do the right thing.” His voice sounded both hopeful and doubting.
“Humanity will finally turn away from the endless violations of decency, privacy, monopoly, the consolidation of wealth and power and control,” Delaney said.
Wes examined Delaney’s face. “You’re serious. Oh, okay. That’s good. And you’re starting with AuthentiFriend?”"(224)
"“Francis is with PrefCom,” Fuad explained.
“Oh,” Delaney said, a bit too enthusiastically. She’d wanted to meet someone from Preference Compliance—the darker, stricter, more punitive side of Are You Sure? PrefCom enforced brand loyalty and consistent consumer behavior through an array of punishments and disincentives. PrefCom was the fastest-growing division on campus and, Delaney thought, one of the key vehicles she could steer off a cliff."(232)
"Wes working at the Every was both horrifying and oddly comforting. Delaney felt the risk of her nefarious intention being discovered was increased tenfold with Wes on campus; he was at once guileless and forgetful. It seemed quite possible he would mention her subterfuge just as casually as he’d order a poke bowl."(246)
"Delaney still couldn’t believe he’d been hired after one interview. They wanted him to work on AuthentiFriend, the joke app they’d made up to get her a job she didn’t want."(247)
"There had been brief and briefly effective campaigns against the company’s amplification of hate, disinformation, gore and misery, but none had lasting effect. Outrage was rare and thus action impossible. And the one time the Every attempted to address the issue proved that their culpability was shared with a few billion willing collaborators. In an effort to appease the EU, the Every’s braintrust invented a new social media platform, Blech, which was designed as a home for all things ugly and antisocial. The hope was that the trolls and sociopaths would go there, would self-select and be contained in a festering netherworld of misspelled insults and cancellation-lust. One or two percent of users, Bailey theorized, were spoiling the web for everyone else. But when Blech went live, seeded by a host of the web’s worst offenders, millions, then billions, of seemingly normal humans followed. It became more popular than the rest of the Every’s platforms combined. People wanted the bile and blood and fireworks, so Blech was quietly merged into the mainstream Every platforms, then subsumed. The heaven of the Every could contain hell, too." [mijn nadruk] (255)
"“See, you get it. It’s just another set of guidelines, within which the writer has complete freedom. Like, the alphabet has twenty-six letters. That’s one set of constraints that no one seems to have a problem with. We only have so many words—another constraint. Sentences can only be so long—yet another necessary constraint.”
“Constraints are the key to liberation,” Delaney said."(277)
Een brief van haar oude leermeesteres Agarwal zegt:
"The early monopolies of the industrial age polluted rivers, lakes and groundwater because the government was too afraid to regulate them and the money was coming too quickly. Tens of thousands of people died.
The Every is the same. There is too much money and too little regulation. Move fast and break things indeed. They have broken three generations now. Your generation entered my classroom presenting every symptom of addiction. No one is sleeping. Half of my students are asleep during class. Each night, in bed, they’re on their phones or earpods till they pass out. You know this. I wonder if you too are overwhelmed. All of my students are overwhelmed. It is not because the workload has changed, because it has not. The students now are taking a normal college courseload, which has been stressful enough for hundreds of years, but they have added a thousand messages to read, write, send, process. It is too much.
They take drugs to stay awake. They drink and get stoned to get to sleep. All of this will get far, far worse. There is simply too much. A student told me recently she’d written twelve hundred and six messages in the last twenty-four hours. She communicates daily with at least forty-nine people. That is manifestly a form of madness, of monomania. And yet this level of contact and availability is seen as a prerequisite to participating in society." [mijn nadruk] (292)
Om Every te ondermijnen beginnen Wes en Delaney allerlei onzinnige apps te maken in lijn met de Every-filosofie.
"Building on HappyNow? Delaney came up with Did I?, which used users’ ovals to determine whether orgasm was reached during any given coital session. A follow-up measured orgasm duration, intensity, and overall quality. Another update allowed the user to compare their orgasms with their friends, relatives and high-school crushes—and finally with any group in the world, the data divisible by region, demographics, income and genetic predisposition.
People loved it.
“I guess we have to get sillier?” Wes mused.(...)
“And flood the zone,” Delaney said. “There has to be a point where there’s too much nonsense.”"(302)
"Delaney introduced Thinking of You, an app that automatically sent a brief message—a T.O.Y., or toy—to each of the user’s contacts, twice a day. Thinking of you! the message might say, or could be modified, personalized, made more frequent as needed. Delaney hoped people would be driven mad by the addition of hundreds, minimum, of new messages a day, but most humans felt happy to be thought of, even if by an algorithm, and so the introduction of the toy, too, was a success.
Wes upped the ante with Show Your Love, which insisted that any messages of love, support, well-wishes or birthday greetings to family or friends be made public and counted. It caught on immediately, and the arms race began: it was ludicrous and selfish and weird to send any loving messages privately, so all were made public, and had to be sent often, to prove that love. The grandmother who sent thirty messages to Khalil or Siobhan by lunch loved her grandson or granddaughter abundantly, and clearly more than the grandmother who sent only eleven. The numbers could not lie."(304)
[Waaruit maar blijkt dat het merendeel van de mensen bestaat uit conformistische meelopers die nooit een kritische gedachte hebben. ]
"People wanted this kind of certainty and now could get it."(305)
"After seeing a child shammed one day for leaving his dog’s feces on the street for a full half-minute while he retrieved a baggie, Delaney thought of Takes a Village, or Tav, which allowed the user to film and tag children for their misdeeds and deviances, and connect that evidence to the tracking-chips most children wore in their ankles. Both Delaney and Wes had high hopes that the idea of tavving would nauseate all humans, would be the last straw, but instead most people were grateful; it removed guesswork from parenting, and illuminated the few remaining blindspots between children and those rearing them."(306)
"As a palate cleanser, Wes thought of ShouldEye, a decision-making app whereby a person could ask the general public to help them make a decision. From dating to burrito-purchasing, a user could announce a conundrum, ask for a quorum, and put their trust in the wisdom of the crowd. This was the most popular idea yet, was renamed Concensus, and, when municipalities and nation-states began adopting it as their chief tool for decision-making, and when Del’s parents relied on it to make any choice, and when millions began using it to decide whether or not they should leave the house, eat lunch, talk to family members or friends, or breed—given the environmental impact of babymaking, the inherent narcissism of the notion—Del and Wes decided to take a step back to regroup.
“Nothing’s working,” Delaney said.
“Actually, everything’s working,” Wes noted.
“Nothing goes too far,” Delaney said. “Nothing’s breaking.”"(308)
Delaney's Welcome2Me loopt volledig uit de hand.
Delaney gaat weer over naar een nieuwe afdeling. Herdenking van Eamon Bailey's dood.
Ze ontmoet Joan Pham. Met haar praat ze over de Welcome2Me excursie.
Nog meer over die excursie en ene Syl.
Over het StayStïl-programma dat Delaney die Syl heeft ingefluisterd.
"Applications for EveryoneIn leapt a hundredfold in a day. No one wanted to be living off-campus (known now as Nowhere), unsure of their daily carbon footprint and terrified of being seen slinking onto campus (now Everywhere) from off-world each day, having defaced the planet in uncountable ways en route. The Every’s senior executives, not wanting to be shamed, swiftly and quietly moved onto campus, hoping to convey the impression they’d been living there all along. “I have to move in,” Delaney said."(384)
En dat doet ze. Ze woont in een eenheid met Joan en de Francis waaraan ze zo'n hekel heeft.
"Delaney had heard rumblings and now it was done. In the wake of her Welcome2Me and the Death of Athena—the incident was now a proper noun—a vocal group of Everyones had begun questioning the rightness of pets on campus and the idea of pets in general. Problematic was the first word agreed upon. This led to unacceptable and barbaric and finally prohibited. A digital poster was circulated showing a cat behind bars, the words LIBERATION! below, rendered Soviet-style, and from there, the momentum was impossible to reverse. For a second, the emotional-support animal caucus put up a fight, but support animals were seen as another example of animal subjugation and they were quickly shamed into silence. The word pet would soon be banned and the animals’ former owners ostracized."(421)
"Delaney checked the video of the murder of the Widower’s wife; it was still there. She checked the video of Bailey’s death: still there. All the murders and suicides were left up, but the pet-videos were gone and would stay gone."(423)
"As Friendy caught fire in the next days, Delaney waited for the outrage. It did not come. Friendy burned through South Asia in a week and then went east and north. In Japan and South Korea, it was the most downloaded app in a decade. Delaney planned to check in with Wes, to see what he knew of an American rollout, but before she could, it was everywhere. There had been no announcement, no fanfare. It was simply on everyone’s phone and then the topic of half of all conversations. Friends used it on friends, and when all friends became wise to its ubiquity, they used it on relatives. A billion lies, small and large, were told and were caught, and a remorseless wave of sorrow and suspicion swept over humanity. It was far worse than Delaney had imagined.
And yet no one blamed the Every. The company had done a brilliant job of concealing their role in its rollout, wanting to first see how it played out before taking credit. A smattering of family-welfare associations issued admonitions and a handful of psychologists and pundits explained the problems with friends and family subjecting each other to data-driven analyses of sincerity, but in short order, the app was instantly as acceptable and common a tool of measurement as the thermometer or yardstick. Because, humanity said in one unified voice, a person has a right to know if they’re being lied to, and who in their midst was a true friend." [mijn nadruk] (441)
"“You don’t understand,” Wes said. “Half the Friendy users are kids. Mostly girls. The parents just shrug as the girls go at each other with a new level of ferocity. It’s so terrible, Delaney. And the divorces! You can’t get an accurate number, but it’s got to be thousands. In weeks. In a year it’ll be the main hiring tool for most companies. There are already apps that promise to improve your Friendy scores. Therapists who say they can make you more trustworthy."(445)
"“You have to understand, they have the best people on the planet working on it. And the AI is fine-tuning itself every hour. It grabs every available piece of information. Body language in videos, photos. It sees things you can’t even personally control. You can’t train yourself like you could with an old-time lie detector test. It’s measuring minute muscle-indicators on your face you have no way of suppressing. And there’s a new tool that measures not just truth, but degree of truth. You say something, it assigns a numerical value to its candor.”"(446)
"And what can any opposition say? That we should have more lying? Deception? Duplicity? How do you defend our right to lie?”"(448)
"“You don’t want to know about the government contracts,” Wes said. “Think of the uses by police, the army. Interrogations. I mean, even simple negotiations between diplomats. Think of those without any ulterior motives, or possibility of deception.”"(449)
Gaat over Tom Goleta.
"“A monopoly is an autocracy in business clothes. And the Every is a monopoly. I’m Tom Goleta, and I’m running for small business. For free enterprise. For freedom. For president.”"(462)
"The global debate about the ethics of eye tracking, which began that afternoon, was vigorous, but anyone hoping to hold back the advent of ETR was proven a fool. The unexamined glee with which it was embraced followed a familiar pattern. First hobbyists explored its limits, producing results both innocuous (which parent does your baby prefer?) and terrifying (which parent does your teenager prefer?). Heedless capitalists leaped in, apps and related products proliferating; first and most popular were those that built on the Goleta incident, enabling anyone with a self-cam to determine where the eyes of any other humans around them were landing. The software and hardware necessary had been built into Every phones for years; it was only a matter of activating it.
In a rare formal statement issued through her feed, Mae Holland provided guidance. “Like every other progression from darkness to light,” she said, “ETR allows the truth to emerge.” She was in her glass office box, dressed in a white bodysuit sprinkled with faint purple sunbursts, staring unblinkingly at the camera. “What had been hidden is now known. What was in doubt will now be certain. And the more we know each other, and the more our behavior is seen and recorded and illuminated, the better we become. Overnight, there can be no doubt, countless lives have become better. Those who leer have been tamed. Those who ogle have been shamed. We’ve caught child predators, we’ve caught potential thieves and prevented assaults and soon we’ll thwart terrorists, too. The eyes are the windows to the soul, and they tell no lies.”"(473)
"Whatever the name for the offenders, eyeshame was the term that stuck to the crime. The Every resisted it, tried to push ocular offense, but eyeshame was more direct and descriptive. It was not strictly speaking a crime, of course; no laws prevented anyone from looking where they shouldn’t. But shame ensued, and shame was deserved, and shame was the internet’s currency and lever for change. As ETR spread without resistance among the vast majority of the species, there were occasionally calls to ban it, and trog areas did so preemptively and predictably, but otherwise, like most innovation in the twenty-first century, the spread was caterwauling, without organization or caution, and thus unstoppable."(474)
"IT WAS ANOTHER REASON TO STAY INSIDE. A few billion people, who did not trust their own wayward eyes, huddled in their homes. People were accustomed to being inside anyway; the pandemics had given the human race much practice in isolation and fear. In the wake of the Goleta Pivot, sunglasses were quickly invented that thwarted eye tracking and saved people from eyeshame, but soon ETR was improved to see through all lenses. More people, called isos, chose to work from home, refusing to be seen, lest their eyes wander.(...) Meanwhile, enterprising developers created software that could discern eyeshame in old footage, and a half-million reputations turned to ash."(474)
"“Start shower,” Delaney said, and went to her section of the communal closet for her robe. The HereMe assistant knew her voice, and her shower-heat and water-pressure preferences. She was entitled to six minutes of water a day, which she chose to split in two brief but restorative sessions."(477)
"Delaney closed her eyes but saw Francis. She needed, she knew, to remain friendly with him. She expected PrefCom to be key to her murder of the Every, and wanted to rotate in with Francis soon."(481)
"So PrefCom is a way to make consumers aware of the advantages of staying within their established preferences.”"(482)
"Delaney sat on the couch and checked the time. 6:07. She woke her phone. By now she knew the general parameters. There were about 120 all-Every messages a day that had to be at least eye-scanned. This took her about eight minutes. The 15,000 or so humans on the Treasure Island campus produced, daily, about 14,750 memos, notes, reminders and invitations, which Delaney’s AI auto-sorter cut down by 88 percent. The sorter would auto-decline all the invitations that conflicted with her own calendar settings and commitments. Her auto-sum skimmed longer messages and boiled them down to their essence, usually less than twenty words. These would go to her Actual Essence (AE), which would filter the messages through her own custom filters for relevance. Her settings, for example, filtered out anything related to sports, childcare, pet care, yoga, and kayaking. These messages would not be deleted, though—they would appear, to the sender, as if she had opened and read them. Wes had given her an app which remembered friends’ birthdays and sent them original, personalized messages the night before the birthday, so as to be first. For zings and pops, again Wes had set her up with an auto-smile algorithm, which would scan Everyone social media accounts and smile at things she was known to like—marmots, mudskippers, three-legged dogs, Idaho, trees, mountains and anything like that she figured people would figure she’d like. At the end of any given day it would seem, to any aggregating algorithm, that she’d read about 8,250 messages and sent about 750 smiles."(485)
[De waanzin hiervan ... ]
Een plan van Francis met de thuislozen rondom het The Every - complex mislukt door naïviteit.
Een bomaanslag op de Every-campus.
"The damage was minimal but the psychological impact was significant."(518)
"In all her research, Delaney had not come across the existence of surveillance zeppelins, but two weeks after the bombing, its shadow circled the campus, never stopping. Bailey had bought a Turkish blimp company years earlier but hadn’t done much with it; his interests had migrated to Io. Now, with the blimp flying silently overhead, two hundred feet up, the majority of Everyones couldn’t figure out how they’d ever lived without its soothing shadow. It saw everything, and everything it saw was available to everyone. At any given time, anyone sitting on the Daisy lawn could watch themselves as the blimp watched them, and this delighted all. The lens was so powerful it could read the text on your phone; it could count the hairs on your head. And most important, it could detect any unauthorized thing coming from any direction—land, air or sea."(519)
Delaney maakt de laatste overstap: ze gaat stage doen bij HereMe. Over Smart Speakers.
"The activating phrase, the Every decided, would be “Hear me.” It was a phrase that no one said in daily life, and yet it was clear and to the point. The user simply said “Hear me,” and could begin. The words were then combined to make the device’s name, HearMe, and shortly thereafter, the slight change in spelling, to HereMe, was just one of those unfortunate Every-isms that diminished the dignity of the species and shamed whomever had to type it."(528)
"Delaney lay in her bed that night with a terrible idea. It was world-wrecking and immediately she knew she would have to let it loose. The day had repulsed her, had fascinated her, had enthralled her. She’d heard thirty-six conversations, all of them desperately private. In almost every instance the speakers had said “HereMe, activate” and “HereMe, shut off,” with no effect whatsoever; the recording was activated automatically whenever any voice was heard. The owners’ control over their HereMe devices was akin to a child in the backseat of a car, playing with a toy steering wheel."(540)
"Delaney said. “What I’m talking about is something different. I’m talking about full access, and known access. The same kind of monitoring there is in public. I don’t think anyone argues anymore that the precipitous drop in crime is a direct result of the prevalence of SeeChange cams.”
“But what do you mean? Someone from the Every is listening in the whole time? To every home in the world. The cost would be—”
“No. No one has to listen, not in real time,” Delaney said. “It’s AI monitoring first of all. And the key thing is that everyone assumes they are being heard. That would provide the same behavioral inhibitor as cameras in stores and streets. People assume they’re being watched in public, so they behave better. Now we take it into the home. And we already have 260 million HereMes already in place.”
Delaney watched Karina think, then pushed it further.
“We have smoke detectors, right? Those are legally required. Because they save lives. Any surveillance that saves lives is inevitable.”
Karina’s face froze. She saw the light. “Okay …” she said.
“This is no different,” Delaney said. “Instead of sensing smoke or carbon monoxide, it’s sensing strife. Signs of trouble. Prelude to abuse or violence.”"(544-545)
"When the twenty-one team leaders had assembled, nine of them isos, Karina summarized the conversation thus far, and Delaney was invited to continue where they’d left off. Delaney kept her foot on the gas.
“The debate about smart speakers has been puzzling to me from the start,” she said, “because I see these as possibly the best weapon we have against child abuse.” She’d decided to focus on this angle. There could be no resistance."(547)
[Inderdaad.]
"“So why wouldn’t a smart speaker be required, too?” Delaney asked. “And for the same reason—to protect the inhabitants of the home from harm. The two things are virtually identical, when you think of it. The smoke detector senses smoke or carbon monoxide, and sounds an alarm. The people inside hear the alarm, and the fire department is notified.”"(548)
"“Just like any situation where you feel you’re being observed,” Delaney said, “your behavior improves. That’s been demonstrated here in myriad ways, from SeeChange on. But I would argue that the most dangerous place in the world is the home. The majority of violent crimes are perpetuated by someone you know.”"(548)
"Delaney saw the future. Cameras would be required in any place where there were children: schools, churches, libraries, homes. There was no possibility of it being any other way. Anyone refusing or resisting would be de facto allowing, planning, or engaging in abuse."(549)
"For the day, the HereMe team created a presentation that they believed irrefutable. Karina insisted she go alone, and she did so, with the HereMe team tearfully bidding her good luck.
She returned two hours later, her eyes apoplectic. She looked around the room and composed herself.
“We have more work to do,” she said steadily. “At this moment it seems that the constitutional obstacles are significant—the Fourth Amendment being chief among them.”(...)
Delaney was mildly shocked at the outcome. It was highly unusual for the Every to give in to legal boundaries. They had long been inclined to try new notions in the real world and let them play out—well before inviting any regulation."(550)
"“Maybe on this one we go around the lawyers. We prove the concept to the public, and it becomes something the public wants. The lawyers and the law follow the people’s will. Security cameras in ninety percent of the places they are already are blatantly unconstitutional, but the public wants them. And no one challenges them. Who could prove they’re harmed by the presence of surveillance cameras? Criminals? A class-action suit brought by burglars?”"(553)
"And yet the Every lawyers still wouldn’t authorize its release. Using it as evidence would be tricky for the district attorney, that much was known. But releasing in-home audio to the public was counter to the HereMe’s consent agreement, and had no precedent, they said, in the Every’s history.
But what about social media? Rhea asked. Postings and photos and video have been admissable for years, she insisted.
Those are posted, the attorneys said. They are voluntarily self-published, they said. Or those people are caught, in public, in the committal of a crime. At home, in the privacy thereof, it’s different, they said. It’s different when the evidence is accumulated without consent."(563)
"And that was the end of Rhea’s patience. She did what she felt she had to do, and what had been the way of things for three decades now, and would be the way of things forever more. She leaked the video, with all identifying characteristics intact but the Every’s participation opaque. The video was a sensation, viewed a hundred million times in a week. She authorized more; they made one each day, and pushed them out through a variety of cloaked accounts."(564)
"The clips were hugely popular; the most dramatic of the first batch was the most-watched video for eight days, amassing 420 million views. The father in that particular instance was caught screaming threats and obscenities at his eight-year-old twins, was arrested and kept in jail for seven days before being released on $500,000 bond. The district attorney, though, had no evidence to go on beyond the vague threats and loud voices in the HereMe audio. It was not against the law—not yet—to yell inside the home. The twins had not yet been abused, it was determined.
Still, a new kind of justice was done. What the letter of the law could not or would not do, the public would. The father was fired from his job on the following Monday. On Tuesday, the mother—who public opinion determined was complicit—was fired from hers. The nation seemed satisfied, and while the legality of HereMe, SaveMe was being worked out, the program proceeded at an urgent pace." [mijn nadruk] (565)
[De sfeer van MeToo.]
"From the public, Delaney expected a deluge of resistance. There was something off-limits, she was sure, about the home—something far beyond the reading of emails, or the surveillance on the street, or the presence of cameras in taxis and subways and libraries and stairwells and schools and restaurants and bakeries and offices and government buildings and groceries and corner stores and boutiques and candy shops and movie theaters and the DMV and art galleries and museums and hospitals and retirement homes and boat-supply retailers and off-track betting centers and chiropractic practices and hotels and motels and vape shops and public bathrooms.
The home, though, was different. She expected a hundred million people a day to do what she’d done at her old place with Wes—she expected a mass tossing-out of the HereMes in one global show of disgust.
But this did not happen. Instead, people saw the wisdom in it. They saw the gains in safety and security. They wanted to show their virtue by demonstrating it, all day and night, to the AI listeners.
People grew quieter at home. They were more careful with their words. They did not yell at their spouses or children. They did not threaten. Sex became quieter, laughter more cautious. Those who shrieked when they laughed or sneezed or came found a way to suppress their noisemaking. The happy screams of children confused the AI for a long while, and brought authorities to a few million homes before the machines learned. By then, children knew to be quieter—or, better yet, just quiet." [mijn nadruk] (567)
"Towns and states, and finally nations, would find ways to make them mandatory, and after some desultory legal opposition, they would become ubiquitous and beloved in most every corner of the globe, giving humanity a new sense of control and safety, and all this would be vastly improved—and the human race far closer to perfection—when HereMe added video, and this became law, too."(568)
"Delaney said nothing, numbed to the unintended consequences of every goddamned thing she and Wes had proposed."(570)
Delaney gaat over naar de afdeling PrefCom. Maar voor dat gebeurt nodigt Gabriel Chu haar uit voor een bijeenkomst. Daar wordt ze doorgezaagd over haar intenties.
"“How is freedom best exercised?” he asked. He hadn’t looked down at his screen. This seemed to be an improvised question.
“Willfully,” she said. “Irregularly. Through the refutation of custom. The breaking of patterns. The rational flouting of irrational rules. Keeping secrets. Being unseen. Solitude. Social indifference. Fighting ill-wrought power. Irreverence for authority. Moving without limit or schedule through the day and the world. Choosing when to participate and when to withdraw.”"(587)
Delaney en Wes zoeken Wes' familie en hond op. Ze krijgen woord over de Every. Wes wil de Every niet meer met de grond gelijk maken.
"“Fuck, Delaney,” Wes said, and spun away. “I’m pretty tired of your self-righteous individualist bullshit. There are issues larger than getting to run the water as much as you want. I’ve evolved a lot since all this began. I’ve learned a lot. They gave us a breakdown between the carbon footprint in the old house and this one, and I have to say the old house was just irresponsible. Indefensible. That kind of living is cloaked in the language of personal freedom, but in the end it’s just selfish. It’s anarchic, really. It’s anti-community. It’s anti-social. It’s anti-human.”
Delaney couldn’t speak.
“Don’t give me that look,” Wes said. “I might as well tell you now. I can’t be part of your plan anymore.”"(600)
"“Neither of us is operating from a place of purity and honor,” he said. “Your approach is predicated on deceit. Your very existence there is a lie.”
“But I have a plan,” she said.
“Do you? It hasn’t worked so far. Every terrible idea you’ve fed them—that we’ve fed them—has been embraced inside the Every and out in the world. How are you calling that success?”
“It’s building to something. The outrage will grow.”
“There is no outrage, and it’s most assuredly not growing. You’re making the company stronger.”
“It’s bending. It’ll break.”
“It’s not bending and won’t break,” Wes said."(601)
"If they disappear, the power vacuum will only invite a new kind of chaos. There’ll be no attention paid to an ethical supply chain. I don’t know how you could have spent so much time at AYS and not realize the good they’re doing. Stop+Lük has already reduced carbon by 22 percent. The people of Kathmandu can see the Himalayas again. Respiratory problems are down 74 percent. The impact the Every can make in weeks is more important than whatever little privacy offenses they commit.”
“Like the end of freedom and free will.”
“I’m not excusing that. But I’d call it the end of the society of the self, and the birth of a more communitarian one.”"(604)
Gabriel Chu vindt haar in TrogTown. Hij weet wat ze van plan is met de Every. Hij hoort ook bij de opstandelingen, bij een soort van Underground-beweging in de Every.
"The idea that there was an insurgency at the Every seemed impossible. But if there was one, she was intoxicated by the idea that she was not alone. That people like Gabriel and Holstein, far better placed than herself, were already working to destroy the company. But she did not trust Gabriel Chu. He’d inhabited her nightmares for weeks; no one who wanted to position himself as her ally would have performed an interrogation as ruthlessly as he had. It showed a sadistic side that couldn’t be reconciled with an idealist. And by following her, Gabriel had compounded her paranoia when he was trying to gain her trust. This was the Every way."(618)
Een nieuwe bomaanslag op de Every campus slaagt wel. Delaney is een van de slachtoffers.
Delaney in het ziekenhuis en alle bezoekers die langs komen.
"“This registry was our right and has been, for millions of families, a safeguard and comfort. As parents and indeed as citizens, we have not just a right, but a duty, to know this. When you commit a crime on the public, that crime itself should be public and forever knowable.”"(650)
"Now Stenton’s eyes took aim. “I have lost patience with the chaos of the world. And chaos is possible because we allow it to fester in the shadows. Well, I vow to eliminate those shadows."(655)
"Wes and Stenton then demonstrated how AI would scan all conversations—anonymized, of course, they were quick to note—and when they found instances of a certain level of dishonesty or guile, that person would be flagged for closer scrutiny. A disproportionately dishonest or cagey person would be referred to the proper authorities, who could keep an eye on them as needed.
“Friendy will continue to assess the quality of your relationships. Don’t worry about that, L-O-L,” Stenton said, and forced a mirthless chuckle. “But in addition, it will be one of our primary instruments in keeping you safe. Thank you, Wes, for your vision and your sacrifice.” Stenton turned briefly to Wes and then back to the camera, which zoomed in, removing Wes from the frame.
“And thank you, Delaney Wells, for your role in all of this. We wish you a speedy recovery, and we can’t wait to get you back on the Every team.”"(657)
"Delaney could have sued. Even the threat of a lawsuit for the Every’s failure to protect her would mean she’d walk away with an eight-figure settlement. But she’d signed every release the Every had given her. She did not hold them responsible, she said. And she did not want ten million dollars from the Every. She wanted them to cease to exist. The alacrity with which she signed the forms kicked off a steady drumbeat of admiration and gratitude from an ascending colonnade of Every executives.
With bandages still covering her feet and hands and ribs, she was feted at a private dinner in one of the senior pods, with twelve Gang of 40 members in attendance. They thanked her in tones of great sincerity and promised they would find the culprit, would do so within the week. They asked about Idaho and her work as a ranger, and they all wanted to know her hopes for her permanent placement at the Every. What did she want to do when she was done rotating? they wanted to know."(658)
Ze mag met Mae Holland praten. Die blijkt erg aardig. Alles buiten de camera's en zo. Mae wil haar vaker zien, bijvoorbeeld in Oregon als Delaney haar ouders gaat opzoeken, en heeft plannen voor haar.
"IT TOOK DELANEY a few days to return to sanity. Or at least to her previous state of mental disarray and paranoia. She had regained her healthy cynicism regarding Mae and her motives, and had regained her rage at the Every for co-opting her friend Wes and turning their gag software into a tool of global interpersonal suspicion. But she wondered if the real problem was Stenton. Was it Stenton who turned every innocent-enough idea into a weapon of control and suppression? Was it possible to separate Stenton from all of this, and to save Wes, and to bend Mae into a less dangerous purveyor of internet diversions?"(667)
Ze start in de Reading Room. Ze leest van papier over zaken die behoorlijk geheim lijken. Haar baas daar geeft haar een manuscript van Agarwal die ze natuurlijk heel goed kent.
"Beyond the letters Agarwal had sent, Delaney hadn’t read anything new of hers for years. She’d been careful not to look Agarwal up online, and even ordering Agarwal’s papers had represented untenable risk. So to find herself being encouraged to read Agarwal inside the confines of the Every sent Delaney into an out-of-body experience. Afraid she’d be caught any moment, Delaney jumped to the middle.
“Each year, we spend more time examining each other, judging each other, mentally murdering each other. And we wonder why the pills continue to get stronger. We are numb and want to be number.”
Delaney looked up. No one had moved. No one seemed at all interested in what she was reading, and yet she felt sure she was being watched. She skipped ahead."(682)
Ze besluit Agarwal op te zoeken op haar weg naar huis in Ghost Canyon, Boise, Oregon.
Delaney zoekt dus stiekem Agarwal op.
"“They should have listened to you,” Delaney said.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Agarwal said, and sighed. “I don’t know. It came from both sides. I didn’t quite see the complicity coming. The motivations of the companies, yes, to consolidate and measure and profit from the data, I saw that. But the everyday human side, no. Our overwhelming preference to cede all decisions to machines, to replace nuance with numbers … It surpassed all my nightmares. Every day, we make another machine that removes more human agency. We don’t trust ourselves or each other to make a single choice, a diagnosis, to assign a grade. The only decision we’ll be left with is whether to live or die. This is the changing of the species from a free animal to a kept pet."(697)
Agarwal gaat voor de Every werken. Delaney weet niet wat ze hoort.
"“The Every. You’re still there, I hope! They gave me a grant and offered me a job. You truly didn’t know? I’m allowing myself to be co-opted. To be digested by the monster. I can’t believe you didn’t know.”
The floor seemed to tilt. The ceiling sagged. Delaney needed to sit but the kitchen had no chair. She leaned against the sink.
“You okay?”
Of course they’d found Agarwal. Of course they’d subsumed her.
“When did this happen?” Delaney managed to say.
“I guess the first call was three weeks ago. Do you know someone named Gregory Akufo-Addo?” Agarwal asked. She was riffling through a drawer of tea boxes. “He calls himself the ‘Ostensible’ something. I have his business card somewhere. Here it is. Do you know of the Reading Room?”"(698)
"“I know it sounds incongruous,” Agarwal said, “but things here are untenable, and … What’s wrong?”
“Is that a smart speaker?”
A next-generation HereMe stood on Agarwal’s windowsill.
“I know, it’s madness for me to have one. But they sent it for free. Someone even came out to set it up. And if I’m going to work there, I might as well get used to the devices.”
Delaney had no choice but to pretend. “Yes,” she said. “They’re so generous.”"(700)
Nu gaat Delaney op pad om Mae te ontmoeten die ook in Oregon is.
"Delaney had insisted on meeting Mae on a trog trail off a trog road, fifteen miles north of Ghost Canyon. The bike ride was sublime, utterly silent but for her own dusty rattling, and she found her mind wandering, then empty, then at one with the sun. She hadn’t been like this in months, maybe years—body and brain in one place, thinking of nothing but the turns in the path and the pressing of foot to pedal. I could live out here, she thought. Why had she put herself in the middle of the fight for the soul of the species? It was useless. Wes was lost, Agarwal was lost, her parents were lost. I am alone and will be alone, she thought. No one else wants what I want."(702)
"She decided to play out the day, to pitch Mae one last idea, the idea that would end all ideas—that would finally drive the company over the cliff. On the one hand, thinking it would make any difference at all was absurd. Somehow she had a perverse gift for conjuring ideas that sounded terrible to her but tickled the rest of humanity. This last one, though—if there were any bite left in any nations, any regulatory bodies, any monitors of global trade—it should trigger an avalanche of revulsion. She held out the remote hope that this final proposal would finally trigger the collective outrage she’d expected so many times. This would go so far that any free being would be rattled into rebellion."(703)
"We’ve had three generations now for whom the greatest stress in their lives is choice. And I’m convinced that people simply don’t want it. It’s not that they want fewer choices. It’s that they want almost no choices. And more than anything, they want no bad choices.(...) The manufacturer’s overall pricing has to account for all that waste. Everyone manufactures far more than what they sell. It’s far worse for produce. That’s a terrible and outdated way of doing business. And it destroys the world. Almost half the world’s resource consumption is not even consumed.”"(711-713)
"Limitless choice is killing the world."(715)
"They continued, passing through lupine and arrowleaf balsamroot, and Delaney had a terrible thought. It might have been the endorphins, but she was beginning to believe what she was saying. All through the trip home from Agarwal’s, she’d struggled with the fact that her plan actually would reduce waste. Would create order. Would drastically limit the unnecessary exploitation of land, energy, animals. But it would also give the Every historically unprecedented power. It would make the Dutch East India Company look like a lemonade stand. What she had just described would surely mean the end of much of what makes a human free. It would be a doorway to far tighter restrictions on movement and choice. But it did have perhaps the best chance to slow the catastrophic warming of the planet. It would usher in a new, ever-more obedient era in the human procession, but our reckless freedoms and thoughtless whims were precisely what brought the planet to the brink. And with Wes on hand, she thought, with Agarwal in the fold, there seemed at least a passing chance that they could maintain some balance at the Every, carve out some space for idiosyncracy, for private thought. Maybe this was the only way—that only a monopoly could save the world." [mijn nadruk] (719)
"There are dozens of ways we provide assurances to people—so many ways we clarify their lives, snuff out doubt, and help them self-optimize.”
Mae turned slightly, looking over her shoulder, her eyes amused.
“But it’s still not enough,” Delaney continued. “There’s still uncertainty, and I’m convinced that it’s because we’re not being bold enough. We’re leaving too much out there for people to wonder about, too much unsaid and unmeasured and, most importantly, unaggregated.”"(720)
"“One number that includes everything, cradle to grave. Grades in school, childhood behavioral issues, missed days, college records, test scores, any criminal behavior, workplace demerits, traffic tickets, suspicious travel, anomalous walk patterns, TruVoice dings, HereMe revelations, PrefCom adherence …”
“Your Shame Aggregate,” Mae suggested."(721)
"“And the scale would be …”
“One to a thousand,” Delaney said. “To better reflect all the subtleties of a person. At birth, you’re in a pure state of nature—500. You misbehave in first grade, and you’re at 499. Help an old lady across the street, you’re at 502.”
“People love credit scores,” Mae noted."(722)
"Yes, yes, she saw Wes’s way now. It was far better to be in the machine, with access to the levers, than outside, attempting juvenile sabotage."(730)
"As Mae watched Delaney’s back, a slashing hatred grew within her. For months she’d known about Delaney’s treachery; it was ludicrously obvious. How did this idiot think she could plot against the Every—within the Every? A spy within the global epicenter of surveillance? It was insulting. Gabriel had sniffed her out on day one. Observing the daily movements of a would-be saboteur on campus had yielded some insights, and they’d collected mountains of data about trogs, but more than anything it had been a pathetic demonstration—like watching a spider try to climb up from the downward swirl of a flushing toilet.
Delaney Wells had ideas, this was undeniable, and these new ones, this braided pair that might truly save the planet and perfect the species—they would give Mae a thousand-year reign. But it was time for Delaney to go. Gabriel had found Delaney’s clumsy machinations vastly entertaining, even inventing an underground resistance within the Every, planting the idea that Mae was pregnant to see if Delaney would reveal it—he’d enjoyed toying with her while he could. But Mae was less amused. Delaney embodied everything she’d been trying to rid the world of—deceit, withholding, hidden agendas, lies. For months Mae had pictured a confrontation with Delaney, in some public forum, standing over her, finger wagging, thundering about betrayal, duplicity, and the pitiful hopelessness of Delaney’s scheme. But now that they were out here, alone, there was no point. Who would hear such a diatribe? Who would remember it? Only Delaney Wells, and Delaney Wells was about to be pushed off a cliff."(732)
"Otherwise, no one seemed to know Delaney Wells or would miss her. A memorial was unnecessary. Mae monitored the campus mood with a hundred metrics and found no reason to make a fuss.
Such a shame, Mae told her followers. She decided her eulogy would be brief, twenty seconds, in between other, more glittering announcements. An Everyone has fallen to her death in a remote Idaho canyon, she said. She’d gone off the known path—had gone into the wilderness without a phone, untracked and unknown and unseen."(735)
"Soon it was Dream Friday and Mae was finished thinking about Delaney. This would be Mae’s first Dream Friday presentation in years, and she had no bandwidth for saboteurs. From the wings of the stage, she looked out on the audience, and wondered if there could be any other insurrectionists in her midst. She saw a few thousand people in lycra using the same phones, the same tablets, their hearts and health measured by the same devices fastened tightly to their wrists. And Wes Makazian in the front row! Gabriel and Stenton, Mae’s stalwart partners, had been watching him and determined that he was no danger; he wanted to improve the future, not prevent it."(736)
"The Everyones were primed; this would be so easy. She would outline SumNum and the Consensual Economic Order, the seamless way they would work together, and the world’s last bits of chaos and uncertainty would evaporate like dew in sunlight. Where there had been din and disorder there would be the quiet hum of a machine that saw all, knew all, and knew best—that was committed to the perfection of people and salvation of the planet. The applause continued until she raised her hands and clasped them together in gratitude.
“Thank you,” she said. “Now, let me tell you about my idea.”"(737)