Read an Excerpt
Dear Google,
This application maintains a certain distance with respect to the power of words. It seeks to elicit an unfamiliar memory in whomever you’ve designated to read it, a voice that is visible the way wind can be seen in the things it moves: hair, branches, the red-and-white-striped windsocks on the side of the highway. Though Mateo and Olga prefer not to identify themselves, they assume you know their location and that it doesn’t concern you. Their purchasing power is trivial, they present no danger, and nothing in the social networks calls attention to them. They’re a number, one piece of data among the millions you store every second out of habit. They mean nothing to you. Although that could change.
Before he met Olga, Mateo wanted you to let him enroll in a course in your renowned Singularity University. At that time, he tried to follow the rules, to conform to the application: to express “in two hundred and fifty words or less, the marvelous idea by which he planned to impact a billion people in ten years and how he planned to leverage this idea into a company.” He should talk about the initiatives and start-up companies he had launched so far, and if he had launched any, he should talk about what had gone well and badly and how he’d measured their success. Then he was supposed to record a video, no more than two minutes long, so they could see his face, his gestures, and his English: two minutes in which to seduce with his body language, convey curiosity and passion, show that he wouldn’t cause trouble and could, in that short window of time, make the viewer smile with his entertaining, brilliant, and, of course, good-natured comments.
Mateo didn’t even finish checking the boxes. As you know, to enroll in courses at the university, rather than sending in an application one fills in the boxes of the form that appears on the screen. It would seem that this form only resides on the computer of the applicant until he or she clicks the send button. Nevertheless, someone on the other end notes that the form hasn’t been completed. And so, one day, Mateo received a standard email: They had noticed that the application hadn’t been completed, offered him advice, directions. They suggested, for example, that before recording the video—one of the attachments that was missing—that he write a script. The script that should be no more than two minutes long. Then they reminded him that the deadline was in three weeks. The message was unsigned. Mateo took it for granted that the email had been automatically generated.
But the next week he received another email. This time the sender introduced himself: His name was Nick, he asked Mateo not to wait any longer to complete his application, and he said that he was available to assist Mateo or answer any questions. That’s when Mateo got his hopes up. It’s not that he thought that he had any chance of getting admitted. But he did start to think that Nick might have found his ideas interesting. If they could tell that his application was incomplete, perhaps they could read it as well. He wondered how many people had abandoned their applications before completing them: six hundred, maybe a thousand. He imagined—don’t snicker—that his unfinished application might have caught someone’s attention. He thought that Nick might be one of the interns on the team in charge of the first stage of winnowing; they’d given him the task of following twenty or thirty people who were still writing their applications and whose words they might have found pleasing. Mateo even thought to himself: Poor Nick, what a drag. And he replied with something along these lines:
"Hey, Nick, no worries. You see, it’s not that I don’t know how to finish the application or that I’m putting it off. It’s just that I can’t go this summer. Things have gotten a bit complicated in my family. I won’t bore you with the details, I’m just telling you to let you know that I’m not going to submit the application because this summer, even if you chose me, and I convinced you to pay for my trip, too, I wouldn’t be able to go. Anyway, I hope to try again next year. Bye, Nick, and thanks for your message."
He deliberately ended his reply with “Bye” to make it clear that he didn’t expect an answer. The thing about trying next year he put in mostly for Nick. With the cheeky vanity proper to humans, he thought: If Nick is writing to me because he’s interested in the first part of my application, Nick will be able to show my email to explain that my submission might not be altogether hopeless. He imagined that this would give Nick points in his job or that, at the least, they wouldn’t dock him any.
The next week Nick wrote to Mateo again. Of course, Nick hadn’t read his message. It was nothing more than an automatic email program that activated every week until they received the complete application or the deadline passed. Which is to say that Nick said again that there was just one week left, that he had noticed that his application was incomplete, and that he as encouraging him to finish it right away. Mateo deleted the message. Some people might not appreciate such ingenuity on their part and would have answered Nick. Bear in mind, Google, that Mateo possessed a fairly advanced understanding of robots. This is constructive criticism: at Singularity University things should be done well. It wouldn’t cost you that much to build an automatic reply program with a range of variables and nuances, capable of responding to a previous reply.
Don’t think, Google, that your shoddy work bothered him, that he took it personally. You disappointed him a bit, he expected better. But that was the extent of it. Mateo wasn’t offended because in his world—a country in the south of Europe, a commuter city, people who for the most part didn’t own a house or have a piece of land to call their own— he was used to quite tolerable forms of non-existence. There were those who played and those who watched the games, there were those to whom things happened and the people who listened to the stories told by others, the risk takers.
Interestingly, Google, there is neither a partition nor a discontinuous leap between existence and non-existence, but rather, differences of degrees and approximations. Zones of non-existence shift, change. What doesn’t exist may have consequences. And what does exist may repeat until it erases itself. In addition, there is an infinite number of modalities. For example, would you consider the nonexistence of something large, solid, and ancient, like a lime tree, equal to or different from the non-existence of an intermittent sadness? That Russian novelist might have put it this way: All people who exist are alike, the ones who don’t exist don’t exist each in their own way. The thing is that there are no fixed partitions, they move around. The halo effect means that more attention is often given to the words of someone who has, say, a pleasantly symmetrical face and an athletic body than to those spoken by someone who is ugly and weak. And yet, the halo shifts too. It’s not common, but it does happen. Another novelist called it the brusque boulevards of the imagination. They appear, and sometimes they stay.
Some non-existences radiate their own intensity. The non-existences of factory workers somewhere in Asia, for example, get up at five in the morning and return to their beds exhausted. Bah, you sigh, those people bore you, even if they happen to work for you indirectly. Look here: six-thirty in the evening, autumn, a grimy street in Madrid. Grown old, a father, fifty years old or so, pushes the wheelchair of a sick child: it’s hard to see whether it’s a boy or a girl, the child must have suffered a severe brain injury, doesn’t speak or move, can’t control their gaze or their tongue, may be smiling. The two of them have little income. As you know, tragedies also change when one is strolling well-dressed through a garden adorned with statues and hedges. As far as the universe is concerned, the father and child exist; as far as they’re concerned, as well. As far as you’re concerned, Google, just barely. Neither their stifled longings nor the endless nights when a creaking or something else keeps them awake bother you, who seek to organize all knowledge.
You should watch those forms of non-existence instead of concerning yourself about trivialities like the guide who tells the tourist the name of the monument they are standing in front of. Already in the year 2001, John McCarthy, one of the fathers of artificial intelligence—do you remember him?—expressed a certain skepticism about the usefulness of the innovations being proposed by the futurists and people of Silicon Valley. He said he didn’t think it was worthwhile to make a webpage for a toaster. He surely would have had a similar opinion about the commercial health apps that turn people into toasters. He believed that there were other innovations that could truly add something of substance to the lives of human beings. He didn’t express this idea in terms of just and unjust, didn’t see investing in an inanity to be in any way an act of robbery. Mateo and Olga do conceive of it in these terms. For example, Google, you might have concerned yourself with how to share your power with people. By doing so you would prevent them from having to desperately scrape together their own power. If you had given them the appropriate tools to build, invent, participate: slivers of the power that you extract from those who work for you, and which you then use for purposes that are stupid but easy to commercialize. If you had done that, many people would probably be in better shape—according to their own ideas of good shape and not those imposed on them—have more energy, more intelligence, and less financial distress. When life itself cracks, there are those who give up, there are those who plan to rob a bank to insure the subsistence of their families, and there are those who forge new paths. Perhaps peaceful ones. Not always harmless ones. Few people imagine the fearlessness of a weary intelligence.
You might now want to know who Olga and Mateo are, what they do. They are forty years apart in age. They are two anodyne creatures, dissimilar and alike. They looked up the word “anodyne” to confirm that it originally meant free from or alleviating pain. Only later did it come to mean insubstantial, uninteresting or unimportant. What kind of civilization comes to equate that which takes away, mitigates, or postpones pain with that which lacks importance? The word originally referred to pain medicines, which came to look insubstantial compared to medicines that cured. Mateo and Olga disagree. Despite their difference in age, both have come to realize that pain is like conflict: it’s never over. At times it relents. But there’s no definitive cure, and every now and then it returns. Which is to say, the medicines that relieve the pain are altogether substantial and significant. They’re of interest, they matter.
The future for both of them is dim. Olga, because of her age and other factors; as for Mateo, he’s given up on the fairy tale that acting well and getting scholarships, embracing the discipline and going to work will allow him to climb the social ladder. In fact, it already was a fairy tale for millions of people. For those who lacked a financial cushion from their family, even a slight one—a grandparents’ house in a small town, a garden, a trade—it was always a lie. As it was for people born in cities with neighborhoods that lacked sewerage and had extreme infant mortality rates. The unlikelihood of that fairy tale is now spreading throughout southern Europe, the plundering of the impoverished sectors and of new generations is ramping up. It seems understandable that a large part of Mateo’s generation and the ones coming up wish to live their lives on the screen when the world outside lurches from one side to the other, as if on the verge of collapse.
Mateo sleeps with his brother. Their bedroom: bunk beds, a long table with two chairs and a window that looks out onto the roofs of the suburb, which mostly resemble one another, though here and there a rooftop looks pleasant enough. They’re on the top floor of a five-story apartment building; other, taller apartment buildings wall off the landscape.
Sometimes Mateo’s little brother calls him over to read him a phrase: “To those who think a shipwreck’s over in four days, I extend my heart.” I like it, says Mateo. Is that yours? I found it on the internet, his brother says. It hits the mark and doesn’t. One day I’ll hear it sung aloud, or maybe I won’t. Mateo’s brother isn’t too concerned about who wrote it; he doesn’t have a strong understanding of the concept of authorship: the internet is his repository. It would be sweet to think that the internet is the accumulation of thoughts, dreams, reflections, the work of billions of human beings. That’s not the case, and you, Google, have a lot to do with that. Not just you. As we speak they’re concocting new ways of framing bits and pieces of reality, of generating them, linking them together, and offering them in exchange for something. On the outside, there are different conventions, but on the inside, you all are businesses.
Olga is sixty-two and a mathematician. She was one of the first in her country to start businesses dedicated to building models to forecast outcomes in a variety of scenarios. Her models were useful, valuable. Nevertheless, a series of crises derailed several of her projects. She had to sell. She nearly went bankrupt twice, bounced back.Neither Mateo nor Olga has anything against businesses, conceived of as units capable of imagining and implementing organized activities that serve to alleviate needs, all well and good. Of course, as Olga soon found out, they then start to function differently. Capitalism, exhausted natural resources, the planet, and ravaged social classes? They won’t tell you about any of that, Google. Why should they—you already have the data. They want to tell you what happened to them but wonder if Google as a company will be capable of considering it or whether that person there in its midst might be able to alter the circuitry, amplifying it, modifying it, tracing an arc.
Olga and Mateo believe that people create the world they perceive. Careful, though: when they say that people create the world they don’t mean that no reality exists outside their heads. No, Olga and Mateo know that reality exists; they bump up against it frequently. What they’re saying is that people select and modify the reality they perceive so that it reflects, in one way or another, their beliefs about the kind of world they live in, as well as the type of world in which they imagine life would be good, beautiful, and true.
