Rush has barely spoken a word to any of them, but he knows what they do just by glancing around the room. This is the opposite of that Brooklyn party—no upturned skull you have to put your spex in, far from it: not wearing them would seem not just unusual but suspicious. Rude, even. This is an unashamed networking opportunity, a chance for a sliver of the 1 percent to come together and reinforce the connections that make them what they are. Rush just has to look at someone and blink and there it all is, floating around their head, their digital exhaust fumes—their name, their occupation, their social-media feeds. Photos of their beautiful kids, snapshots from their holidays in Italy, sunsets from the decks of yachts. Perfectly curated and out on display, as immaculate and polished as their pantsuits and manicures. Scott told him he’d brought him here so he could check out the view, but he knew it was because he wanted to network himself, on the hope he might find a buyer for some of his art, that he might be able to fulfill that ever-present desperation to be accepted into a circle like this.
The view is impressive, though, there’s no denying that. He’s out on one of the apartment’s two balconies, catching some much-needed air and space. Manhattan both towers above and falls away from him, spires built from concrete and capital giving way to valleys of brick and asphalt. The whole island rolled out in front of him in infinite detaiclass="underline" automated traffic and subway trains snaking across to Brooklyn through the exposed dinosaur rib cages of the bridges crossing the water to the east; to the west New Jersey’s shoreline fading into sunset burned red. As he leans against the railing he’s suddenly aware of being above this vital node in global infrastructure, of floating over a principal network point of global capitalism, and he can almost feel the data pulsing through the city, the buildings shaking from subterranean traffic as the cables that span the globe merge beneath their foundations. He breathes deeply to stave off a sudden rush of vertigo, and looks instead to the horizon, where the skeletal frames of the giant, automated cargo cranes of the Bayonne container port stand against the orange sky. Another network node, an input/output gate, where the capital becomes physical, and physical goods from unseen foreign factories flow into the system as freely as the data.
“Helluva view, huh?” says a voice beside him.
Average white guy, in an above-average suit. Immaculate hair. The very latest Apple spex. Rush smiles weakly. He can’t bring himself to expend the energy on blinking to find out more, looks back out over the view.
“You could say that.”
“Place must have cost John and Christie a bomb. Quite the spot.” He takes a sip from his martini glass. “I’m Brad, by the way.” He extends a hand.
Rush reluctantly takes it. “Rush.”
“Good to meet you. How you know these guys?”
Rush glances back into the crowded apartment. “I, ah, don’t really. I’m just here with my boyfriend.” The word falls out of his mouth easily, but he’s suddenly aware it might be the first time he’s used it to describe Scott. He feels his face blush. “Scott? He knows them. He’s sold them some of his work in the past. He’s an artist.”
“Ah. Gotcha. And you? You an artist too?”
“Oh, no. Not at all.” Although he’s wearing spex, Rush has got his privacy settings locked down tight. His social-media feeds—at least the ones that matter—are secured away from public eyes. Brad can blink all he likes but he won’t see anything. He could, of course, take a snap of Rush’s face and run it through Google, and blink through to any one of the top results: VICE, the BBC, the Times, even, then he’d know exactly who he was dealing with. But perhaps he can’t bring himself to expend the energy either.
“I, ah… I work with computers.” Rush laughs quietly. Doesn’t everyone? “It’s not very interesting, really.”
“Fintech?”
“No. No, not at all. Security, mainly.” He tries to deflect. “And you?”
“Ah, that’s not very interesting either. I’m a trader. Y’know.” He shrugs.
“Oh, really? I didn’t think people did that anymore.”
Brad laughs. “Touché. Yeah, it’s all pretty automated now. Most of what I do is software procurement. I sit in sales pitches for new algorithms all day. Well, not all day.”
“Really?” Rush knows a little about this stuff—mainly the stories everyone heard about how fucked it all is—but it’s fascinating to him. Fascinating and scary. “So that’s high-frequency trading stuff, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“So how’s that work?”
Brad takes a sip from his drink and glances over his shoulder, as if to check nobody is listening. His demeanor seems to change, he seems to relax, like’s he’s just dropped some front he’s been carrying around all day. “Honestly? I’ve no fucking clue.”
“Really?”
“Really. I got no fucking idea how it works.” Brad’s accent slips into something less refined, more honest. More Jersey Shore than Manhattan high-rise. The change is jarring. “I don’t think anybody does. I don’t even think the guys making the algorithms know. I mean, they come to sell me new ones and they don’t have a clue what they do, or how they do it. I mean, they say they do—this one watches for buyers, this one finds leads, this one monitors Twitter, this one reads the Journal and the Times—but then you buy them, they install them for you, and they walk away. I don’t think they know what they’re doing in there. The algos are all in there talking to one another, they say. But they don’t really know what’s going on. Y’know?”
“I don’t.”
“That’s the point. Nobody does. I mean, I know what my business is meant to be, y’know? I specialize in facilitating trades between various public exchanges and corporate dark pools. It’s making money off other people’s deals mainly, thousands of transactions a second and all that. Like, when I was a kid and I started at Citi it was different. I used to chase my own leads, I’d watch the markets all day. Shit, I even used to call clients on the phone. Now I just sit in the office and watch money scroll across the screen. I mean, that’s if I’ve got meetings. Otherwise I can just sit in bed and watch it while I scratch my balls.”
“Really. Wow.”
“The whole thing is too complicated, man. I mean everything, y’know? It’s impossible for any one person—the banks, the investors, the traders, the Goldmans, the kids writing the code—it’s impossible for any of them to understand what’s happening anymore. The markets are too big and they move too fucking quick. People might know what’s going on in their little bit, in their tiny corner, but otherwise they’re just sitting there letting the algorithms get on with it. Market basically runs itself. Just nobody knows how anymore.”
“Shit.”
Brad suddenly becomes animated, defensive. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, bro! Don’t get me wrong at all. I ain’t complaining. Not in the slightest. It gets a bit dull, but you should see what I banked last quarter. No joke. I’d blow your mind telling you how much money went through my office last year. Trust me, I ain’t complaining.”
“I’m sure.” Rush suddenly feels flushed with anger. Brad seems nice enough—weirdly naïve, even—but Rush can’t shake the realization that he represents everything he hates. All the greed and the ignorance, all the willingness to hand over control to the machines, to take away any sense of human self-determination and to put it in the arms of the network. And all just to keep a few people rich, to squander technology’s potential for real change in order to make a quick, lazy buck.