A normal life was what Lindsay and I were hoping for. We were ready for the next stage and had decided to settle down. We had a nice backyard with a cherry tree that reminded me of a sweeter Japan, a spot on the Tama River where Lindsay and I had laughed and rolled around atop the fragrant carpet of Tokyo blossoms as we watched the sakura fall.
Lindsay was getting certified as a yoga instructor. I, meanwhile, was getting used to my new position—in sales.
One of the external vendors I’d worked with on EPICSHELTER ended up working for Dell, and convinced me that I was wasting my time with getting paid by the hour. I should get into the sales side of Dell’s business, he said, where I could earn a fortune—for more ideas like EPICSHELTER. I’d be making an astronomical leap up the corporate ladder, and he’d be getting a substantial referral bonus. I was ready to be convinced, especially since it meant distracting myself from my growing sense of unease, which could only get me into trouble. The official job title was solutions consultant. It meant, in essence, that I had to solve the problems created by my new partner, whom I’m going to call Cliff, the account manager.
Cliff was supposed to be the face, and I was to be the brain. When we sat down with the CIA’s technical royalty and purchasing agents, his job was to sell Dell’s equipment and expertise by any means necessary. This meant reaching deep into the seat of his pants for unlimited slick promises as to how we’d do things for the agency, things that were definitely, definitely not possible for our competitors (and, in reality, not possible for us, either). My job was to lead a team of experts in building something that reduced the degree to which Cliff had lied by just enough that, when the person who signed the check pressed the Power button, we wouldn’t all be sent to jail.
No pressure.
Our main project was to help the CIA catch up with the bleeding edge—or just with the technical standards of the NSA—by building it the buzziest of new technologies, a “private cloud.” The aim was to unite the agency’s processing and storage while distributing the ways by which data could be accessed. In plain American, we wanted to make it so that someone in a tent in Afghanistan could do exactly the same work in exactly the same way as someone at CIA headquarters. The agency—and indeed the whole IC’s technical leadership—was constantly complaining about “silos”: the problem of having a billion buckets of data spread all over the world that they couldn’t keep track of or access. So I was leading a team of some of the smartest people at Dell to come up with a way that anyone, anywhere, could reach anything.
During the proof of concept stage, the working name of our cloud became “Frankie.” Don’t blame me: on the tech side, we just called it “The Private Cloud.” It was Cliff who named it, in the middle of a demo with the CIA, saying they were going to love our little Frankenstein “because it’s a real monster.”
The more promises Cliff made, the busier I became, leaving Lindsay and me only the weekends to catch up with our parents and old friends. We tried to furnish and equip our new home. The three-story place had come empty, so we had to get everything, or everything that our parents hadn’t generously handed down to us. This felt very mature, but was at the same time very telling about our priorities: we bought dishes, cutlery, a desk, and a chair, but we still slept on a mattress on the floor. I’d become allergic to credit cards, with all their tracking, so we bought everything outright, with hard currency. When we needed a car, I bought a ’98 Acura Integra from a classified ad for $3,000 cash. Earning money was one thing, but neither Lindsay nor I liked to spend it, unless it was for computer equipment—or a special occasion. For Valentine’s Day, I bought Lindsay the revolver she always wanted.
Our new condo was a twenty-minute drive from nearly a dozen malls, including the Columbia Mall, which has nearly 1.5 million square feet of shopping, occupied by some two hundred stores, a fourteen-screen AMC multiplex, a P.F. Chang’s, and a Cheesecake Factory. As we drove the familiar roads in the beat-up Integra, I was impressed, but also slightly taken aback, by all the development that had occurred in my absence. The post-9/11 government spending spree had certainly put a lot of money into a lot of local pockets. It was an unsettling and even overwhelming experience to come back to America after having been away for a while and to realize anew just how wealthy this part of the country was, and how many consumer options it offered—how many big-box retailers and high-end interior design showrooms. And all of them had sales. For Presidents’ Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans’ Day. Festive banners announced the latest discounts, just below all the flags.
Our mission was pretty much appliance-based on this one afternoon I’m recalling—we were at Best Buy. Having settled on a new microwave, we were checking out, on Lindsay’s healthful insistence, a display of blenders. She had her phone out and was in the midst of researching which of the ten or so devices had the best reviews, when I found myself wandering over to the computer department at the far end of the store.
But along the way, I stopped. There, at the edge of the kitchenware section, ensconced atop a brightly decorated and lit elevated platform, was a shiny new refrigerator. Rather, it was a “Smartfridge,” which was being advertised as “Internet-equipped.”
This, plain and simple, blew my mind.
A salesperson approached, interpreting my stupefaction as interest—“It’s amazing, isn’t it?”—and proceeded to demonstrate a few of the features. A screen was embedded in the door of the fridge, and next to the screen was a holder for a tiny stylus, which allowed you to scribble messages. If you didn’t want to scribble, you could record audio and video memos. You could also use the screen as you would your regular computer, because the refrigerator had Wi-Fi. You could check your email, or check your calendar. You could watch YouTube clips, or listen to MP3s. You could even make phone calls. I had to restrain myself from keying in Lindsay’s number and saying, from across the floor, “I’m calling from a fridge.”
Beyond that, the salesperson continued, the fridge’s computer kept track of internal temperature, and, through scanning barcodes, the freshness of your food. It also provided nutritional information and suggested recipes. I think the price was over $9,000. “Delivery included,” the salesperson said.
I remember driving home in a confused silence. This wasn’t quite the stunning moonshot tech-future we’d been promised. I was convinced the only reason that thing was Internet-equipped was so that it could report back to its manufacturer about its owner’s usage and about any other household data that was obtainable. The manufacturer, in turn, would monetize that data by selling it. And we were supposed to pay for the privilege.
I wondered what the point was of my getting so worked up over government surveillance if my friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens were more than happy to invite corporate surveillance into their homes, allowing themselves to be tracked while browsing in their pantries as efficiently as if they were browsing the Web. It would still be another half decade before the domotics revolution, before “virtual assistants” like Amazon Echo and Google Home were welcomed into the bedroom and placed proudly on nightstands to record and transmit all activity within range, to log all habits and preferences (not to mention fetishes and kinks), which would then be developed into advertising algorithms and converted into cash. The data we generate just by living—or just by letting ourselves be surveilled while living—would enrich private enterprise and impoverish our private existence in equal measure. If government surveillance was having the effect of turning the citizen into a subject, at the mercy of state power, then corporate surveillance was turning the consumer into a product, which corporations sold to other corporations, data brokers, and advertisers.