Close to the Machine_Technophilia and Its Discontents Page 5

  In this place, anything might happen. The laundering of money, because there was “excess capacity in the Caribbean,” according to Brian. The amassing of great riches by any means, all untouchable by governments, because here, in the Bank of Brian, we are between the rules of law.

  Every time Brian said the word “arbitrage”—his mantra, repeated over and over—an image of Ivan Boesky, infamous arbitrageur, rose up in front of me. It was as if Boesky had regrown his hair and found his way to my sofa one rainy night. Boesky was everything I was brought up to hate. I come from a family of hard-striving New York small businessmen. No one was averse to taking his cut on a deal, but those commissions and brokerage fees and bonuses came after some actual good or service had been exchanged. My family came from the world where “stock” meant inventory, not paper. Nothing could have been more anathema to them, or to me, than the idea of someone like Boesky sitting in an air-conditioned room, watching a ticker, and picking off millions on the tiny differences between, say, the price of gold in London and New York. “Ach! Rats like Boesky are what make them come for us Jews,” my father once said. “Scavenging!” is what he called it.

  “Smuggling” was Brian’s word for it: arbitrage as the ageless tradition of defying legal boundaries to carry desirable goods from a market where they’re selling cheap to one where they’re dear. The only difference was that Brian wanted to smuggle money itself, and he had no compunctions about it. On the contrary, he reveled in the very idea, turned it over and over in his mind, found in it an entire life philosophy. And there he sat on my sofa, drinking my tea, explaining, completely without apology, how he was going to “arbitrage” the United States legal code so that he could build himself a banking system that afforded complete privacy for wealth. A system that, incidentally, made the world safe for crooks, thieves, money launderers, and any average citizen who should just not feel like paying his taxes—a side effect of freedom, he said, the price of liberty, can’t be helped.

  “The system will be completely and mutually anonymous,” said Brain. “No one will know what’s in your account. And you won’t know anything about the bank’s finances. You won’t know about their money and they won’t know your balance.”

  Suddenly, something didn’t seem right to me. “They won’t know my balance?”

  “Anonymous. Completely. On both sides.”

  Right then, I realized that I had not exactly brought home Ivan Boesky.

  “So how will I get a statement?” I asked him.

  Silence. Adjustment of eyeglasses. Drizzle of hair. “That’s the responsibility part of the equation,” he said. “You’re responsible for keeping your own idea of your money.”

  “Are you kidding? Do you realize how few people can balance their bank accounts, even with a statement. How will accounts get reconciled?”

  Longer silence. More drizzling of hair. Apparently, I was the first human being to listen to Brian long enough to ask a reasonable question.

  “Well,” he said finally, “obviously we’ll need to do some more work on the infrastructure.”

  “Come over here,” I said. “I’m cold.”

  Near my desk was a gas fire. I settled us in front of the fire then went to put on some music. “Early or late?” I asked. “What do you feel like, Palestrina or Beethoven?”

  Another long silence. Another huge blank. “Classical music is not yet in my data banks,” said Brian.

  Now I wondered if he wasn’t indeed brought up by wolves. Brian was the first technoid I’d ever met who didn’t know music. Especially Bach and early music—rule-based, pre-passionate music—standards in the deformations of character that go into the making of a programmer.

  I chose Spem in Alium, a sixteenth-century, forty-voice motet by Thomas Tallis. Then I lay down on the floor in front of the fire. Beside me, Brian stretched himself along my side like a cat—he never touched me with his hands. The music swelled up, massively polyphonic, forty voices, each in its own part. Below a high, aching soprano was a sound like everyone in the world talking at once.

  After some minutes, I felt a light touch on my shoulder.

  “Turn it off.”

  “What?”

  “Turn it off. Please.”

  I hit Stop; I heard him sigh. “Thanks. I began to hallucinate.”

  “Hallucinate?”

  “It was just too much. I can’t explain. I began to hallucinate.”

  I lay back down beside him. Mathematician who does not know classical music. Cryptographer who can crack information scrambled into nonsense by 40-bit keys—No problem!—and he can’t bear the sound of forty separate human voices. I knew I should see this as a lack. I knew I should see this young man as a case of hopelessly arrested development. I should tell him to go sleep on the sofa while I put on my crisp Brooks Brothers pajamas and got some sleep. But again: there: I saw something more in him. I saw that Brian was aware of this lack in himself, and that he suffered from it. Then, instead of dismissing him, finding him deficient, someone who could never give me the soul companionship I wanted, I betrayed myself utterly: I found him poignant. A wash of tenderness took me over. Right at that moment, with tremendous irritation at my own stupidity, I knew I would get involved with him.

  His lovemaking was tantric, algorithmic. I once thought that love could not be programmed, but now I wondered. This sex was formulaic, had steps and positions and durations, all tried and perfected, like a martial arts kata or a well-debugged program. My own role in it was like a user-exit subroutine, an odd branch where anything might happen but from which we must return, tracing back to the mainline procedure. I felt again as if I’d come in on a private process, something that Brian had worked out all on his own and which, in some weird expression of trust, he had decided to show me. I should have felt dissatisfied. I should have called it off. For a time, I even looked fondly at the neat monogram on my pajama pocket where it lay on the dresser top. But again I gave in to curiosity and tenderness. He has been with himself too long, I thought.

  Morning pillow talk with Brian was about transaction processing. It was not about parents or past lovers; I did not learn the numbers of his brothers and sisters, who his friends were, if he loved anyone. It was as if the hours of actual touch, the damp pillows and wrinkled sheets, had not intruded on our conversation.

  Or, for Brian they changed everything. They freed him to race deeper into the obsessions he thought we shared. We lay in bed and discussed the Internet backbone. Wrapped in stained sheets, we pondered the expansion capacity of the global transaction processing network. Amidst the latex detritus of postmodern sex, we talked about the World Wide Web.

  And of course we returned to arbitrage.

  It seemed that art could now be arbitraged. Indeed, any content, any information, anything posted on the Web was now ripe for the skim. Said Brian, “See, the content no longer has any value. Who would buy a book when you could pick it off the Net for free?” Small moment of embarrassment as Brian remembered that I was someone whose work sometimes appeared in now worthless books. Then he moved on. “But the new value is in the transaction itself. The click. Every time someone clicks, someone makes money.”

  And it would not be the “content makers”—the artists, writers, multimedia makers—who would be making the money. Of course, the ones making the money would be the owners of the transaction itself. The new breed of entrepreneur: Net landlord. Content is worthless, art is just an excuse to get someone to click; meanwhile, artists watch their work circumnavigate the globe while “value arbitrageurs,” the Brians of the world, pick off a fractional cent at every click, making a fortune.

  “Is all this a good idea?” I asked.

  “Sure. In principle. In a moral-less universe.”

  I imagined Brian’s universe, anonymous stolen bits transmitted from node to node. At each node, a little program, a little bit of “moral-less” intelligence. Value arbitrageurs feeding freely, circling the Net like sharks in the Caribbean.


  “Do you have morals?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “I said, Do you have morals?”

  “Yeah,” said Brian. But he waved his hands at me. It was clear I was interrupting a brilliant train of thought. He seemed disappointed in me. He thought I was smart, that I understood him, that I was technical and analytical. I think he even respected me for seeing the little flaw in his anonymous banking scheme; it made me interesting, challenging, a worthy companion. But now, in bringing up morals, I’d gone and ruined it: I’d brought up something dull.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, still waving me off. “I have morals. But I don’t want to get into that right now.”

  [3] REAL ESTATE

  “TALK TO ME ABOUT OPERATING SYSTEMS,” I SAID TO the property manager.

  “I wish I could, sweetheart.”

  “Talk to me about software,” I tried again.

  “You know I can’t, sweetheart.”

  I looked over at my sister. She is six years older than I am, once a huge gulf. But since the death of our father two years before, we’d become partners in the terrors of financial liability, which has a way of making people surprisingly appreciative of one another. “What do we know about this stuff?”

  We were in a freezing basement restaurant in lower Manhattan. The stuff in question was a stack of papers that described, in great and incomprehensible detail, one hundred twenty-six arcane violations of the New York City building code. When my father died, he left the family two small commercial buildings in the Wall Street area. If it were up to my sister and me, we would sell these buildings, in all their state of violation, despite the small income they’d given us over the years. But our mother lives, in part, off the proceeds. And she also lives with the memory of my father telling her never, ever to sell the real estate. To him, these buildings, New York, Wall Street, represented everything of stable value in the material universe.

  “They won’t sign the lease if we don’t clear the violations, dear,” said the property manager.

  I liked these buildings better when my father tended them, before I knew the buildings in all the realness of their real estate. I preferred them when they existed for me as paper, checks made out in my mother’s neat Palmer Method script, sent monthly with little enclosed notes: “It was great to talk to you on the phone yesterday,—Daddy, dear.” “Looking forward to seeing you for Pesach,—Mommie.”

  Earlier that day there’d been a steady, cold drizzle as my sister and I waited for the arrival of the property manager. It was afternoon and already dark. The streets were nearly deserted. From across the street, the black faces of empty storefronts stared back at us.

  “At least we don’t have empty stores,” my sister said.

  Thank God for that, I thought, aware it was the exact thing my father would say.

  It was also what the property manager would say: he continuously scared us with the prospect of empty storefronts. Our buildings are around the corner from the New York Stock Exchange. When my father bought them, in 1961, they were in the very center of the capitalist world. Our “good” property is by the subway, where every morning legions of men in perfect blue suits once surged up the stairs and into the brokerages, onto the trading floors and up into the high-rises. They hired managers and underlings, secretaries and clerks, all of whom emerged at lunch hour to eat, buy handbags and shoes, dresses and suits, watches and knives. Then New York had its real-estate crash of the ’80s, then its recession. Next came the stock market crash of 1987. Now we had the empty storefronts.

  “Here you girls are,” said the property manager, who came at us out of the gloom with a huge, too-bright golf umbrella.

  “Here we girls are,” I echoed. My sister and I have not been girls for a long time.

  The property manager is only slightly older than we are, but he is a man of my father’s world and time. He has the relentless, cheerful smoothness of the salesman, which makes me distrust him implicitly. But he is all that stands between us and the buildings. Our father told us almost nothing about his business dealings. All we know is we have inherited the properties; and we inherited the property manager along with them.

  “The tenants are expecting us,” said the manager.

  My sister and I hate these ritual meetings. It’s bad enough to be confronted with our ignorance of all things pertaining to real estate. But in meeting the tenants we must acknowledge to ourselves what we really are and really had been all those years of paper checks and little notes: we are landlords. Me: communist turned software engineer slash landlord. I’m no better than Brian, I thought. From this distance, Brian’s schemes for owning the world seemed naive and almost sweet. His unregulated electronic universe seemed still promising, as if all its potential evils, unlike mine, still lay ahead and might yet be avoided.

  We started on the upper floors. The office tenants are mostly Russian immigrants, refugees from the command economy who, all beknownst to themselves, have come all this way only to wind up the tenants of an ex-communist, something they could have done at home. There is a woman lawyer whose office is thick with cigarette smoke. Some odd company that gives questionable “training” seminars. Another Russian immigrant setting up a franchise for some strange health-food beverage in a foil pouch. (He pressed a sample on us; we demurred, then relented to be courteous.) My father was a sentimental man. He started up his accounting practice during the Great Depression. No doubt he saw himself in these boot-strappers. To me, though, their enterprises look fruitless and improbable—dying echoes of my father’s old-fashioned burgher capitalism—all doomed.

  On the ground floor are the stores: a tiny jeweler, a magazine stand, a shoe store, a dress store, a bag shop. Some have been tenants for twenty-five years. Almost all were behind on their rent. “What’ll we do, kick them out?” said the manager. “At least we don’t have empty storefronts.” My sister and I exchanged looks. We decided to save the stores, in all their threatened emptiness, until after lunch.

  It’s here that we went down to the tiny cold restaurant. It’s now that I had to consider the one hundred and twenty-six violations or risk empty stores. Old pipes. Asbestos insulation. Erratic sprinklers. Cracked sidewalks. Elevators that came too slowly and left too quickly. Stairways that had taken people up and down for decades and were suddenly declared to be too narrow.

  “And who knows what else?” said the manager, “They go back to 1978.” He made it sound like an eternity. We had to hire someone just to research the violations—a former building inspector who would get $100 per violation just to tell us what we had to fix. I imagined the labyrinthine corridors of the New York City buildings department, acres of ancient file cabinets guarded by surly civil servants. Our ex-inspector putting down his briefcase to keep his place in endless lines, slipping fifties here and there to “research” violations that may well turn out to have been written by the man himself.

  “Now remember,” said the manager, “that’s $12,600 just for the research.”

  “How much will it cost to actually fix it all?” I asked.

  “I wish I knew, kiddo.”

  “I feel like I’m stuck in a Borges story,” I said to the manager’s complete incomprehension. “Talk to me about software,” I tried yet again.

  “I wish I could, sweetheart.”

  The drizzly day, the dark storefronts, my confusion over being a landlord, the terror of losing the property, the hundred and twenty-six violations, the ex-inspector, the smiling property manager I can’t quite bring myself to trust—it all just crashed in on me for a minute. I felt rage at my father for leaving us so ignorantly unprepared. I hated him for “protecting” us all those years. In the next instant, I yearned for the American-dream story I was brought up with: His mother, still 14 years old, escapes illegally out of Russia, supports herself in the sewing sweatshops. In the kitchen, she hangs up a portrait of Eugene V. Debs, and the old socialist looks down hopefully while my father goes to college during the Depression, starts his acc
ounting practice, moves out of Bedford-Stuyvesant to Flushing, Queens, where he leverages ten thousand dollars, risking a million in debt, to buy himself a piece of Wall Street.

  “Morty is expecting us,” said the manager. Morty. The bag shop. The oldest tenant. The worst visit of all.

  The store reeked of failure. It had an abandoned feeling, as though Morty, in his seventies, and his son, nearing fifty, hadn’t left the place in twenty years. The stock was fashionable enough but it always had a dusty, disused look. Three blocks away, a huge discount chain couldn’t keep enough handbags and wallets in stock, while Morty and his son sat in their empty store. Why don’t they just give it up, I wondered? I could hardly think about the awful lack of choice that kept them sitting here year after year, asking for rent reductions, as their livelihood slipped away.

  “It’s the modems,” said Morty.

  What? Did he actually say this, or did I dream it. Was someone really going to talk to me about operating systems?

  “Did you say modems, Morty?”

  “Yeah. It’s the modems. Used to be nice vice presidents took the train down from the East Side or in from Scarsdale. Now and then they bought a bag, a wallet, a briefcase. Now we get a different class of customer.” He folded his hands over his belly and leaned back against the shelves behind the counter. “This class of customer—they want cheap, or they walk around and don’t buy anything. Meanwhile the managers sit home in Connecticut. They don’t pay city taxes and they don’t buy bags. They telecommute, they call it.”

  He stopped, rubbed his arm. “It’s the modems, I tell you.”

  I peered over at Morty, whom I’d clearly never seen before. This round old man in his empty store, for whom I’d never felt anything but pity, had just told me off in ways he could not imagine. He put it all together: Brian’s networks, the bank vice president’s universe of transactions, the software I write, the systems I install, the sexy bouts of software writing—all that was suddenly and clearly related to the world’s financial center now all emptied of people. It’s the modems: computing as a kind of neutron bomb, making all the people disappear, leaving the buildings.