The Word Exchange (17 page)

But at lunch Max didn’t bother to explain; being Max, he just started his pitch. And to explicate this party trick—of making up words, like
cake, more or less from scratch—he invoked GWF. “According to Bodammer,” he began, “Hegel calls for the mind to ‘kick name and meaning away from each other,
treten Name und Bedeutung auseinander
,’ to create ‘names as such’—senseless words—which are blank, and ready to receive pure thought.”

Which means, I
think
, that he’s using Hegel to justify creating fake words, claiming that they qualify as “names as such,” one of Hegel’s lesser-known concepts. And I don’t know if that’s what Max actually believes, if he’s being intellectually lazy, if he feels compelled to justify profiting from manipulating language, or if he really thinks he can fool me—that I won’t know the difference. But of course that’s
not
what Hegel meant by “names as such.” He precisely
wasn’t
talking about inventing nonsensical “words.” He meant words we’ve mentally stripped of all meaning so we can consider words qua words, in formal relation, as a practice of consciousness. The mind acquires language because it anticipates sharing in communal expression. There’d be no point to learning private words only it can use.

But I decided not to go into all that. I hate getting in pissing matches with Max. I always get peed on. Besides, his soliloquy coincided with the arrival of our food. I did wonder, though, what had happened to his longstanding concern with “context”: his belief that language suggests a wobbly ecology of meanings and that words can never be divested from the who, what, where, when, and why of their use. That
I’m
a right-wing crank for proposing that words are molds into which we can pour thoughts. After I’d scarfed a few fries, I said as much.

“Well, Bart,” Max said, fixing me with his freakishly lambent eyes, “I’m glad you said that. Because context
is
important. Very important. It’s a big part of our motivation, actually.” Then he launched into a sort of confusing treatise on how Hermes’s methods offer the historically marginalized and voiceless a “new opportunity to enter the sociocultural conversation.” By co-opting words and “creating more useful ones,” disenfranchised people could “reclaim a language that has for centuries conspired to keep them in their so-called place. Think of how powerful it would be if ‘primitive’ morphed into ‘sovereign,’ or ‘empire’ became ‘salt’—or some word that hasn’t even been invented yet.”

Then he pulled out the big guns. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” he continued with a one-sided smile, “that Samuel Johnson compared cataloging English to taming a savage land. Johnson said”—here he
wiped the rabbit-kidney juice from his fingers and picked up his Meme to read—“ ‘though I should not complete the conquest, I shall, at least, discover the coast, civilize part of the inhabitants, and make it easy for some other adventurer to proceed further, to reduce them wholly to subjection, and settle them under laws.’ ” Then he looked up and pierced me again with the hazel lasers of his eyes. “Imposing ourselves on other people—our language, style of governance, way of life—it just isn’t right. Even when the ends seem worth it—spreading democracy, more open lines of communication. ‘Liberty’ and ‘free expression.’ How free are people, really, when you make them say what you want?”

I thought of pointing out some of the more gaping holes in this rhetorical set piece, and also of asking how exactly inventing fake words at a “gala thing” would help upend the hegemony. Some people, though, can justify anything, at least to themselves.

“I wish the answer was easy,” he said. “But we can’t fix things with just skillful elisions, or by learning Urdu or Kazakh or whatever. Might not be a bad start. But if we really want to try to understand each other, we have to communicate not just better but differently. Invent a completely new kind of exchange.”

At that moment Floyd leered at a girl on her way back from the bathroom, and (surprise) she recoiled, knocking into Vernon’s cane. It clattered to the ground, nearly taking out a sprightly busboy loaded down with heavy plates. Vernon (not Floyd) began profusely apologizing; the girl turned the color of rare steak, and Max leapt heroically into the fray, gripping the busboy’s shoulder, righting the cane, and reassuring the girl that it had been Floyd’s fault and everything was okay. Later she looped back by our table and, flushing crimson again, passed Max a napkin, on which—in a cute nostalgic gesture—she had scrawled her number and name. (Normally girls just look at him boldly and say, “Share contact”—often when he hasn’t even asked—and their information apparently then leaps right into his Meme. In fact, I think it was the Hermes boys who devised this app.) When she was gone, Max scanned her into his Meme—which told him, among other things, that she was 22, originally from Phoenix, and trying to make it on Broadway—high-fived Floyd, and unceremoniously handed him the napkin.

The interruption disoriented me. (The girl was really very pretty.) Instead of offering my planned rebuttal, I just said, “It’s a nice idea. But how’s it supposed to work, exactly?”

“Sounds like someone feels a little threatened,” sneered Floyd, drooling on a mouthful of ice from the bourbon he’d just drained. “An interactive dictionary might just put you out of a job, bro.” He winked at Johnny.

“An ‘interactive dictionary,’ whatever that means, is a
terrible
idea,” I said, making sure to keep talking over Floyd, who was saying, “Why? They did it with the encyclopedia.” “I mean, it seems like you’re not really suggesting a new, shared language but a unilateral one that’s constantly changing. You’re emphasizing the
destruction
part—tearing down the old temples or whatever. But what would you erect in their place?”

“We’d erect
this
,” Floyd grinned, wanking into space. Max gently stilled his fist.

“Okay, Horse,” said Max, shifting in his seat. “Habermas would say that Hegel sees language as a means of submitting to the state. Which of course Hegel would have approved of. Language, like labor, like domesticated ‘love,’ is a means of subordinating the individual to the larger civic sphere. And what we’re advocating isn’t necessarily insubordination but freedom from subordination. We can get words to mean whatever we want.”

I had so many objections I didn’t know where to start. And I didn’t get why Max was being willfully obtuse. Maybe that’s why, at about that point, I ran out of steam for the debate. Besides, let’s be frank: I wasn’t weighing the job on the basis of ideology. The fee Max had quoted me was
obscene
. I could buy my mom a car with it—and still have some left over. I shrugged and told them I’d sleep on it.

“Great,” said Max. “I’ll send you deets in the morning.”

Then he rummaged under the table and produced a small black box glinting with the words M
E
M
E
on one side and N
AUTILUS
on the other. But it was also printed with a picture, and it looked nothing like the Memes I’d seen. I thought a Meme was just a slim silver screen and a little pair of fern-furled Ear Beads attached to a misnomed Crown (aka headband), its one weird little silver arm that hooks forward to lightly kiss the center of the forehead always seeming as if it might fall off. But this was different. It didn’t look like much, just a small silver circle imprinted with a spiral that glowed in the photo with a bluish light.

“Here,” Max said, holding out the box.

“Thanks,” I said, shaking my head. “But no thanks.”

“Sorry, brother,” Max said, smiling aggressively. “It’s a condition of employment. You’re impossible to reach. Time to join the 21st century.”

But when I still didn’t comply, Floyd reached over, slurring, “Shit, I’ll take it. I’ve been wanting one of these. Heard it works way better with the chip.”

“You can get your own,” said Max, roughly swatting Floyd’s hand.

“No I can’t,” Floyd said, shaking the hand Max had smacked. “You know we don’t have any of the new ones yet.” Max, ignoring him, passed the box to Vernon, miming that Vern should tuck it in my hoodie hood. “Sorry,” Vernon murmured very quietly, just to me, so close I could smell the cigarette smoke clinging to his sweater. “You don’t have to use it.”

That was a little odd.

But I had a question for Floyd. “Did you say ‘chip’? As in ‘microchip’?” I was incredulous. “I thought only people with, like, spine injuries got those.”

“Naw, dumbass,” said Floyd. He sounded sullen and therefore more lucid, his cheeks flushed at the edges of his furry face pets. “We’ve all got them. Except Vern. Pussy.”

Aghast, I stared at Floyd’s big, fatuous head. Imagined a microchip implanted under his skull.
Electrodes
embedded in his
brain
. I couldn’t tell—as was so often the case—whether he was telling the truth or fucking with me.

“But actually,” Max interrupted, “like with other Memes, you don’t need the chip.”

“Can I ask,” I said, gingerly removing the box from my hood, “what does it … do?”

“What—the Nautilus specifically?” Vernon said, forking dressing-glossed arugula leaves. “Or you mean a Meme?”

I shrugged evasively. (I’d seen them up close and even held them, but I’d never actually used a Meme.)

Floyd, eyes goggling, laughed. “Are you fucking serious?”

But before I could feel too sheepish, Max coolly responded, “Everything.” And together they proceeded to rattle off a list that did in fact succeed in blowing my mind. The Meme did all the “obvious things,” they explained: anticipating wants and needs. “It’ll do your groceries,” Vernon said through his napkin. “That’s pretty convenient. Oh, but taxes is the best. There’s a pop-up sometime in March asking if you want them filed, and you just hit ‘yes.’ ” That’s the moment my interest increased.

But it also transformed life in more extraordinary ways. Max claimed, for instance, that anyone could create a “masterpiece.” As proof, he
nudged the least obvious artist in our party. Floyd put on his Crown, concentrated for a minute, and beamed the results to Vern so I could see. Astonishingly, it was true: the image, of women bathing, was
breathtaking
. Sort of Baroque, with golden, Flemish light, the figures drenched in pathos and grace. “And it’s dialectical,” Max explained, “which is part of what makes it so moving, or whatever—it senses what you want to see and augments those aspects. There’s no fixed image. And you can do it in any medium—music, film, glyphs.”

If I was willing to get a microchip—a minor, outpatient procedure—my Meme could do even more for me. Make it easier to remember certain incidents in full, lustrous color, or forget things I’d rather not revisit (again and again). It could change my visual field so that walking or driving or riding in the train would feel like performing in a video game.

“What happens if you want the microchip out?” I asked, looking around at all of them. “Is that—that’s a minor procedure, too?”

There was an edgy silence. Vernon shifted next to me.

“Yeah,” Max acknowledged. “That’s a little more complicated.” But he quickly changed the subject, listing more Meme functions: it could yield access to whole fields of study—macroeconomics, 17th-century Italian poetry, mixology. “You don’t necessarily ‘learn’ the stuff,” Max explained. “But it doesn’t matter—it’s all right there for however long you need.” It could suppress or increase appetite. Help you focus. Coach you to enhance some physical abilities.

Needless to say, my defenses started getting worn down almost painfully—and Max hadn’t even started to describe the Nautilus.

When he did, his face was deadpan. But his voice was a little too muted; I knew it was big. “It’s the first commercially available device that integrates electronics with cellular biology,” he said.

Obviously I needed to have that explained—and I suddenly had the uncomfortable feeling that the machine then nestled in my lap cost more than my childhood home.

Unlike his own Meme, Max said, which utilized electroencephalography; an abundant array of chips, sensors, and transmitters—“Enough for a small island country”—and (he tapped his skull) a microchip; my new Nautilus Meme required far less “messy hardware,” because it utilized the already existing infrastructure of the brain.

He invited me to think of the brain as having all the functions of a computer. It has computational power; it can filter, sort, and rank
data and stimuli (determine what to pay attention to, what to ignore). It has the capacity to visualize and conjure auditory sensations through imagination and dreams. By building strong neuronal pathways, it can become very efficient at certain things. But like a computer, it can also form new networks. “Which is how it’s able to work with the Nautilus,” Max said mysteriously.

Synchronic had spent years perfecting a device that, instead of maintaining separate, parallel systems that have to interface constantly, could simply integrate them—literally. The cellular components in the Nautilus combined with sensory neurons. That’s why it didn’t need a screen or mouthpiece or mic, or “any of the cumbersome light-to-sensor-to-signal transitions.” (I jotted down a few hasty notes on my grease-freckled napkin.)

And with its electronic and digital elements, the Nautilus created a gateway that would convey information directly from the Internet to the brain. It required a little neural “rewiring,” Max said. But especially with extended use, it could create what he called a new “relay center,” exploiting the brain’s plasticity and “changing native topology” to engage directly with visual, auditory, and other sensory systems.

That was how, Max claimed, you could get a “text” without a screen to see it on: it would simply appear, like a mirage. Eventually, he went on, you’d no longer even need any vestigial cues, e.g., a ringing sound to alert you to a call. After months, or maybe only weeks, of use, you’d simply sense the call—and perhaps be able to respond without words.

At my request, the guys went into a lot more detail about the Nautilus. It was named for its spiral design, reminiscent of the eponymous mollusk, and like its namesake, it has to be stored in fluid. (“Comes with enough for the first six months,” Max said, tipping his chin at me.) Parts of the device are electronic. But it needs to be kept in special solution when not attached to skin because it also contains biological tissue. “Sort of a logical extension of biological computing,” Max offered casually.