Surveillance (redux)(part 2)
Originally aired on Vol 1 Brooklyn the week I returned from Europe (the first time). Edited for fun, the progression of time, and Substack.
(Part one here)
Downtown, the morning was evaporating in small bursts of glitches, delays, and unwelcome conversations with his coworkers. Greg jogged back to his desk to check his monitor. His sneakers were coming untied. The city council met in 53 minutes and he was still running analysis. Each Monday, local residents trickled into the auditorium to discuss the city’s agenda and his presentation, which summarized the city’s emotional landscape over the past week. Where had the worry been located? The joy? The apathy, the under-considered angst, or indignation en masse? He was careful to paint a nuanced picture of each zip code’s passions and sensitivities, so that the council could write a more informed, humane set of policies.
Two years ago he had earnestly pitched himself to the New York City Council as a wunderkind engineer fresh from a tour of duty in the tech-forward San Francisco Department of Government Innovation. Greg had needed the change. He had squandered most of his twenties on work that seemed to go unnoticed by the public, while his classmates from college posted updates about riding the most recent wave of emotive-tech startups with names like Geomote, Arhythmia, and Valentine—company names that fit the milieu of Silicon Valley so neatly, half the class might as well be billionaires already. He channeled his envy into reading psychology textbooks and building experimental projects that attempted to fit anthropologically-rendered, individualistic world views into bureaucratic policy.
Eventually he was hired to build a mobile app for New York City where any resident of any neighborhood could report how they felt at any time—whether they were inspired in downtown Brooklyn, angry in Forest Hills, or joyful in Harlem. The more progressive wing of the council pressed him to capture social issue nuance too. They wanted to know if a resident felt too impoverished to live in their own neighborhood next to the impending high rise. They wanted data on whether residents felt underwhelmed with their choice of grocery stores, or if they felt safe or surveilled on a block with public cameras. By the second interview Greg had prototyped a flimsy website that showed the council how they could examine the social effects of their zoning laws, such as backlash to a particular policing method or lingering doubts about the sovereignty of bikers in bike lanes. He was hired after two more perfunctory interviews despite the fact he wore the same nice button-down shirt to each one.
Greg recognized a good name for an app, but could never come up with his own. He originally called his program “NYC Emotions Index.” No one at the city had suggested anything better and so the name stuck as NYCEI–pronounced nigh-see with most of the civil service putting an uncomfortable emphasis on the first syllable to avoid saying anything like ‘nazi.’
Now, after two years on the job, he was weary, but still ambitious. Not yet 32, he felt he still had a chance to make a name for himself. There had been setbacks though. Early on Greg had begun to suspect the extent to which emotions can tell more than one story and, more insidiously, tell a different story in retrospect. After listening in at enough Council meetings Greg realized that residents had a tendency to interpret his summary reports so their words and actions more closely matched the popular understanding of good politics. Of course they had meant well when arguing against a new restaurant, the residents would argue. Of course they had simply overreacted when calling in a suspicious character. He learned from these meetings how people could ignore their own actual, historical words and instead retort with what I meant to say at the time was.
The AC was on too high for how late it was. Greg was still at work. He was having trouble deciding if a person’s outrage over a biker’s death from vehicular manslaughter decayed over days, months, or years. He couldn’t keep polling people for their thoughts on new bike lanes, so he would have to guess at how many days their emotions for proxy events, like death, were valid.
Greg wrote in a few final numbers, picked up his keys, and turned his monitor off. His mood shifted quickly and he was now desperate for company. He pulled out his phone and typed, “Late night at the office, you still out?” He copied the message to five different friends, moving among three different apps to do so.
He went back to iMessage where his original text was registering a read receipt. Three dots appeared and he knew Katie, the recipient, would indulge him. She texted, I can’t watch any more of this god damn cleaning show. Yes. Please. 169?
See you there in ten?
Thank god
Greg eventually got three other responses, all some form of excuse, and he didn’t respond to any of them. Within fifteen minutes he was walking into a bar on the east end of Canal Street. The bar wasn’t a place for people like him, and every unconcerned face that looked his way knew it. Katie sat in an unoccupied corner, her dark curls tossed upward into a bun, sipping on a mixed drink. Her face was perilously close to a palm frond that had dipped over the table from a window sill. She waved at him and, with her foot, pushed out a chair opposite her at a table preset with a whiskey sour.
“What’s the crisis tonight, Greg?” she asked with twinkling green eyes.
“Katie. Hello, Katie. I am in the middle of a wonderfully stupid problem at work and I need someone else to weigh in.” He paused and scratched his beard. “For how many days do you think you tend to care about an event that made you angry?”
Katie blinked at him and said, “Nope, gonna need you to ask that again. Like a human.”
“Okay. Do you ever think about a delay on the subway for more than a day or two? Or if a biker goes through your crosswalk after the light turns? Or, say, you got a notice about an eviction? Shit like that? How long do you stay mad?” He eyed her like a salesman, then nodded to his drink and picked it up.
“Shit like that. Like what? That sounds like everything in life.” Katie laughed at him with a wide, turned up smile and leaned back, crinkling her nose while considering his question. She had met Greg in college, the lone STEM matriculate in Katie’s collection of philosophy snobs and aspiring musicians. She had strong feelings about Greg’s cohort of engineering peers. To her they were all assholes, all dying to make the next Anthropic or Tesla. Three years after graduation Greg admitted to her that he felt very lost. His whole career was based on the advice of one civics professor who had steered Greg away from the fountains of wealth in Silicon Valley with compelling lectures on the moral necessity to work towards democracy wherever possible. While Greg had pursued a career in government, his classmates had largely joined a growing revolution in AI and then psychological data managed by AI. Katie had told him once he was the only good computer engineer she knew and that was the nicest way she could put it.
“Katie?”
“Right! Sorry. I’ve never been evicted, but I think it would be infuriating and scary. If you’re talking about traffic problems…mostly I forget something that’s inconvenient once literally anything else happens—like, I get home from work or whatever. There are some things that stay with me though. I remember I slapped a minivan on the front window once,” she said. “I was biking down Clinton Street, just off the bridge. Have you ever biked the Williamsburg Bridge? That ride is…it’s one of my favorite things about New York. There are people everywhere, buildings everywhere, honking, yelling, and you take it all in and you’re going incredibly fast but nothing bad happens because there are no cars, there’s no traffic. So, I’ve just biked off the bridge and my helmet is still on my handlebars because I always take it off on the bridge since nothing bad happens. And I’m biking down the bike lane on Clinton Street when a black minivan swerves in front of me to grab a parking spot, which I’m pretty sure is illegal because the minivan is, I think, a taxi. So I swerve to the left to avoid crashing and nearly get hit by a box truck. I’m so scared and so fucking livid that I smack the minivan on the driver’s window and yell, ‘Fuck you!’ then bike off as fast as I can. And I swear to god, I swear to you, Greg, someone on the sidewalk yelled, ‘You go girl!’ which is as humiliating to hear as it is for me to say right now.”
“Christ, you almost got hit by a car? I’m sorry, Katie.”
Greg frowned and briefly considered the distant possibility that his friend might have become a city statistic. He had always felt Katie’s exuberance was familiar and comforting but he was only now coming to appreciate the way she ended monologues that made some obtuse political point: by settling smug and animal-like into her chair. She sometimes reminded him of his old coworkers in SF. Their politics had leaned left or far left and, despite California’s Democratic supermajority, there had been an air in the department they were all underdogs fighting the good fight together. He and his coworkers had suspected the wealthy libertarians south in the Valley were secretly conservative and secretly building conservative technology they would need to counter.
“So. How did that end up affecting you? What does the whole experience mean to you now?” he asked.
“I don’t think it means anything,” she said bluntly. “It’s a memory. Not a discrete object. It’s not a reel.”
“But do you want to do anything with that memory? Did it change you in any way?”
“Greg, are you watching mind-control videos again?”
Among the Silicon Valley social circles that Greg was envious of, the writing of Edward Bernays had made a resurgence, prompting a flush of VC funding to anyone willing to work out the problem of capturing emotion with enough accuracy to reliably predict consumer behavior, voting patterns, or even tendencies toward violence.
“Katie, it’s not mind-control. I’m trying to figure out–”
“Whatever, I heart you. But no, I don’t want to do anything with that memory. Whatever that means. I like it when people yell at asshole drivers and I support safe biking initiatives, but I don’t think there’s anything else there. The question is very…abstract.” She stared at him, fixing her face into a dare.
“I mean, specifically, do you vote on anti-cab policies or support biking rights through voting or organizing or advocacy?”
Katie pursed her lips in a smile and shook her head no. She had lost her conversational spark and Greg turned to his drink for a way out.
“Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “The mayor has this dumb plan to reduce bike deaths, and I don’t think it will work, but I have a hard time not thinking about my job and I’m sorry you were almost hit by a car.”
Katie accepted the apology by leaning forward and asking, “How’s the wide world of app dating treating you?”
Every weekday around 6pm Greg slipped into paranoia. He imagined his coworkers glancing around the office, assessing the body language of others, their eyes landing on him, while he, stalwart, typed furiously, continuing the work that would prove foundational to how governments would be run in years to come. He was never the first to leave, often the last, and he privately took pride in his adherence to a protestant work ethic—though he publicly moralized that no one should prop up an unfair labor market to maintain the illusion of dedication.
The office AC was steadily generating its night time chill. It was Friday, but Greg hadn’t made any plans and so he stayed at his desk late into the evening, catching up on The New Yorker online and shuffling through impersonal emails. He checked to see if a sale on bluetooth headphones was worthwhile. It wasn’t.
He picked up his phone and scrolled through his feed. He felt compelled to repost outrage from a colleague in San Diego on how privacy was an afterthought for digital immigration status. He pressed ‘like’ on the posts of several microcelebrities in his field, most of them women in their late twenties or early thirties who had made a professional name for themselves through their prodigious social media habits. Greg felt lonely.
He refreshed his feed for a second time, when he felt his phone vibrate. A notification for a text from one of his college friends bounced around at the bottom of Greg’s screen, so he nudged it upward into full view.
might as well kill myself
Attached to the message was a link to an article about their mutually hated classmate’s company, Arhythmia, the app that collected biometric readings from users. Greg quickly scanned the article and groaned when he read that Arhythmia had broken through an important benchmark: amassing enough users to start selling a valuable data set of geotagged emotional reactions. Apparently three of the big box store chains had already purchased this data, pinpointing moments of calm satisfaction in customers in order to adjust the order of the aisles and rearrange the products they displayed.
Most people were better at articulating themselves through visuals than through language, the article explained. The article did not question whether the interpretation of colors and shapes, on either the part of the user or a data analyst, had any claim to objective truth. The company had received 700 million in funding, the article explained.
Greg acted on the dispiriting information by opening up another tab to research technical specs on disposable sensors. As he was typing into a new search bar his desperation waned and he paused. Maybe the whole thing was bullshit. Maybe the tech wasn’t that good. Maybe real people didn’t actually use the app. He stood up and double-checked that no one else was in the office, double checked his headphones were plugged in, and started a new search for review videos. He toggled the filter to show the most watched results and at the top of the page was a thumbnail image of a pretty woman’s face. Greg immediately clicked the video and opened it full screen on his second monitor.
The video was made by a user named N_elle_smoked_you. Greg noticed her eyes soften as she described the app. His heart sank as she praised Arhythmia. He saw her point out the sensor. He saw her stand up and then the video flickered and she sat back down.
“What the fuck is she doing?” he mumbled, transfixed, as he watched her move the x-acto knife. N_elle looked at him and smirked. Her face lit up at capturing her indiscretion on camera. Greg saw the visualizations she generated, much more vivid and strange than the screenshots shown in the article, and he thought of thermal imaging in spy movies.
Greg heard N_elle say something about pathology but it blurred out into background noise. A great idea was forming within himself. He had access to every CCTV camera on public property. He could fit them with thermal lenses to capture body temperature and use that as a proxy for emotional state. Even without the lenses he could use video to analyze facial expressions. He could jump right past the need for individual sensors and instead capture the emotions coming off every individual in the public sphere. How did people really feel when a cop car rolled by? Did anyone actually give a shit about bike lanes? This could be the project that would make him famous.
He pictured Katie’s provocative face sailing down the Williamsburg Bridge and the curve of her cheeks inflating from her smug smile. How her expression turned porcine and haggard when she smacked the van. She was probably overreacting and being a bitch to that driver. He imagined how the driver threw up his hands, his eyebrows contorting into an upset surprise. Greg realized how irrefutable a facial expression can be. You can’t litigate a grimace, he thought. You can’t say it meant something everyone knows it didn’t. The full weight of what he wanted to pull from the residents of New York began to seep in. He wanted to wrench people from their polite politics and have proof they were all actually assholes.
Greg quickly downloaded a copy of N_elle’s video to his personal hard drive in case it got banned. He subscribed to her channel using his personal account and then cleared his history. He wanted to win the game he and his industry had invented.
Janelle shuffled into the front row of a roped off switchback line for a salad counter. She was only eight minutes into her lunch break yet melancholy gnawed at her. She pulled out her phone to swipe through the history of her day. A blue light radiated up to her face; her morning had been bright. The lines on the screen pulsed out in thin curves and she remembered how weightless her steps into the office had felt. She scrolled forward from those earlier hours to the current moment, then double-tapped the screen to confirm how she felt: reddish-brown, thick, viscous. The sludgy animation pulsed slowly. She thumbed backwards in the timeline to the morning and, as she saw the blue light radiating again, she felt happy to know she had felt alive for those few moments.
Arhythmia could articulate feelings she’d had her whole life but never knew how to describe—never even knew they were worth paying attention to. Like her hands getting sweaty before walking into a party. Like recognizing months later a text message had mattered. Or seeing her own face change shape in the first few years of her twenties. The app allowed her to live life twice: in the moment and while scrolling. She smiled to herself then ordered a salad she really couldn’t afford. It had exactly one protein, five vegetables, and 389 calories. She was calm, satisfied.