Fishbowl (11 page)

Kevin, meanwhile, unbeknown to Andrei or Ben, was pursuing his old interests again. In doing so, he was about to throw out a challenge to Andrei's new concept of Deep Connectedness in a way that Andrei had never foreseen.

14

IT WAS BEN
who discovered what Kevin was doing. He came into the common room one day while Kevin was by himself at his screen, with his headphones on. Suddenly Kevin laughed out loud.

‘What?' said Ben.

Kevin still hadn't heard him. ‘That is so bad!' he said to himself.

Ben went over to see what Kevin was laughing at.

On the screen was an image of a man in a light blue wetsuit with a black body panel and a bulge at the groin that looked as if he had packed a cucumber and a pair of cabbages down there.

‘What are you doing?' demanded Kevin, suddenly aware of Ben looking over his shoulder.

‘Who's that guy?'

‘No one.'

Ben peered closer at the message above the picture. ‘Who's Tonya?'

Kevin shut the screen down.

‘Kevin,' said Ben. ‘Who's Tonya?'

Tonya, it turned out, was a 34-year-old South African whose passion in life was swimming with sharks – the bigger and scarier the better. Or it would have been, had she existed. Kevin had concocted her out of snippets of photographs he had found in various places. With all of Fishbowll at his disposal, he just hadn't been able to resist the temptation to fabricate a personality. Or two. This, of course, was in direct violation of the
terms of the probation the disciplinary board after the Cooley Affair had set down for him – but then so was just about everything else he had been doing since the day the board had handed down its sentence.

Kevin had learned that one doesn't have to know much about something in order to sound credible. Past experience with other fabricated personalities had taught him that all that was needed was to listen carefully and play back to people what they had already said, or what someone else had already said, in a way that was slightly different to the original, or which seemed to express an opinion based on personal experience. Add a few choice snippets from a five-minute internet search and people would think they were dealing with an expert. In other words, give people what they expected to hear, and they wouldn't look any further.

He was soon talking authoritatively about cage-diving with great whites in the waters around Dyer Island near Cape Town, Tonya's favourite location. Thanks to his choice of face and body for Tonya's photos – Tonya liked wearing very skimpy bikinis – quite a few sharks of the human variety showed remarkable interest in her messages.

Kevin hadn't been able to resist trying a Cooley experiment with a guy called Ian, a 44-year-old businessman from Seattle who was a fan of O'Neill wetsuits and was always raving about how great they were. Kevin, through Tonya, had decided to try to convert him to Xcel suits. He waged the campaign both through the School group page and in personal messages with him. ‘Try it,' Tonya urged him. ‘Try an Xcel.' Then she added: ‘I bet it will show off your packet like no other suit.'

Ian did – and then sent her the picture of himself in an Xcel wetsuit with a vegetable-stuffed crotch that elicited the fateful, ill-timed laugh just as Ben had walked through the door.

Ben was genuinely angry at what Kevin had done. They had been rightly censured for what they had done to Dan Cooley – in retrospect
Ben saw how damaging it could have been to Cooley, and he was deeply ashamed at having been involved. But there was a lot more at stake now. He and Kevin shared responsibility with Andrei for a website, and that website wasn't some student gimmick or prank. The kind of deceit that Kevin was practising, as he saw it, ran counter to everything he thought Fishbowll was for.

By the time Andrei reappeared in the common room that day, the other programmers were there as well. Other people came and went. Ben waited until the programmers and everyone else had gone that night, and only he, Kevin and Andrei remained – then he told Andrei what had happened.

Andrei wasn't happy about it, either. Kevin said he had done it in order to understand the user experience.

‘You don't have to create a false personality to do that,' snapped Ben. ‘Just be yourself. No, you're right,' he added acerbically, ‘that wouldn't interest anyone.'

‘Very funny.'

‘About as funny as what you've been doing! This is supposed to be about people connecting, not figments of your sick imagination.'

Kevin turned to Andrei. ‘Look, half the people out there are probably using pseudonyms. We've never tried to stop them. And why should we? If someone is more comfortable connecting behind some kind of mask of anonymity, then who are we to stop them? Andrei, it's a dating site for the mind, right? That's what it says on the home page. Your words. If it's a dating site for the mind, what difference does it make what the rest of you purports to be? Arguably, you reveal your mind more fully if you're not encumbered by your own true appearance.'

‘Casuistry,' said Ben.

‘Why?' demanded Kevin. ‘We haven't banned anonymity, right?'

‘This isn't anonymity, Kevin. When you're anonymous, everyone knows you're anonymous.'

‘All right, we haven't banned pseudonymity.'

‘This is more than that,' said Ben. ‘It's fantasy. How many of these personalities have you got going?'

‘Tonya. She's the only one.'

‘She's not. How many? How
many?'

‘Two.'

‘Two now!'

‘There's Tonya and there's this … he's, like, a kid who collects colonial Spanish coins.'

‘And?'

‘That's it. I swear.'

‘Don't swear when you're lying.' Ben turned to Andrei. ‘Whatever he says, double it. That's what they teach us about addicts.'

‘What's the addiction?' demanded Kevin.

‘You will get your ass
so
busted if the OJA hears about this. You'll be out of this university for ever.'

‘And who's telling them? You? Lighten up, Ben.'

‘I will not lighten up! You did a freaking Cooley on one of them. You're an officer of the company, and not only are you pretending to be someone you're not, you're
manipulating
them as well!'

‘Them? Who's
them?
Dude, one Cooley. That doesn't make a
them
. And it didn't seem to worry you when we did it with Cooley.'

‘It was wrong! It was wrong and I regret it.'

‘Oh, now you're so self-righteous.'

‘You're an officer of the company!'

‘Officer of the company? Lighten the fuck up, Ben! Don't take yourself so seriously.'

Ben shook his head, too exasperated for words.

‘Andrei, you can't ban what I did,' said Kevin. ‘You know that as well as I do. We can say we don't want people putting pseudonyms on our site, but then we just look like idiots because they'll do it anyway. If that's true, we should embrace it. This is cyberspace. If you choose to inhabit it, that's what you're going to encounter. Anonymity, pseudonyms—'

‘Lies,' said Ben.

‘We can't fight it,' continued Kevin, ignoring him. ‘It's a dating site for the mind, Andrei. And if the mind creates one kind of personality or another, it's still that same mind. That's perfectly honest. And if that mind can free itself to think or say things it wouldn't think or say when tied to its real physical body or its physical existence, then I say it's even more honest.'

‘That is so full of shit,' said Ben, ‘I don't even know where to start.'

‘Why don't you start by listening to what I'm saying instead of replaying your own prejudices?' retorted Kevin angrily. He was making up the rationalization as he went along, but he found that it was actually making sense to him.

‘Don't say there's nothing physical in this,' said Ben. ‘It's a fantasy. If this was purely about the mind, you wouldn't attach any physical characteristics to yourself.'

‘Yeah, and people are really going to respond to that.'

‘I think you've got a fantasy about being Tonya.'

‘Dude, I do not have a fantasy about being some South African shark-swimming freak.'

‘So why create her?'

‘Maybe I created her because somehow … Look, maybe it's like that's the way I become fully identified with that thing.'

‘Swimming with sharks?'

‘Yeah, in this case, swimming with sharks. That personality, that construct, somehow maximally puts me in touch with that.'

‘Even if you really did swim with sharks? Which you don't, of course.'

‘Well, even if I did, maybe that construct would somehow enable me to connect with the experience even more fully. Who are you to say it wouldn't? Maybe it's an important part of connection.'

‘And maybe pseudonymity is an open invitation to obscenity and abuse.'

‘No doubt it is! Have you seen what's out there on the School pages?'

‘Exactly! See?'

‘What? That it's
already
there?'

Ben glared at him. ‘I think you've just got a fantasy about wearing a bikini,' he muttered. ‘Have the guts to wear it at least.'

‘Very funny,' retorted Kevin. ‘I don't know what you're so pissed off about.'

Ben found it hard to say himself. He was the one who had watched – sometimes even egged him on – as Kevin had made up personalities in the past. As Kevin had said, he had been part of the original Cooley experiment. But something about the thought of Kevin doing it on Fishbowll, on their network, made him wildly angry.

Ben looked at Andrei. He hadn't said a word as Kevin and Ben fought it out.

Kevin looked at him as well. ‘What I'm saying is that we can fight a battle to stop people doing this, but that's a battle we're going to lose. But my point is, we shouldn't even want to fight that battle. It's a bad battle. It's a persecutory battle. I don't want to persecute anyone – the pseudonymous or the non-pseudonymous.'

Ben rolled his eyes. ‘There's no equivalence. It's outrageous to say there's equivalence.'

‘Well, I think there is. Here's Charles. Let's see what he says.'

Charles Gok, who had just come in from working late in the physics lab, stopped in the doorway. Since the common room had become the worldwide centre of Fishbowll, he rarely spent any time there. Sometimes the others forgot he even lived in the suite.

‘Grab a beer,' said Kevin.

‘Kevin, I don't drink,'

Kevin put one in Charles's hand anyway. ‘We need your opinion.'

Charles hesitated. The atmosphere in the common room was heavy with tension. ‘I'm not sure I've got one,' he murmured nervously.

In a few sentences, Kevin told him what he had been doing and summarized the discussion they had just had. Ben watched sceptically.

‘Well,' said Charles, after a pause, ‘it does feel kind of spooky, thinking you're talking to this Tonya woman in South Africa when you're actually talking to Kevin in this hellhole of a common room in Robinson House. But, you know, I guess, on the other hand Kevin's right. It must be happening all the time. If you can't stop it, then I think you have to embrace it.'

‘It's one thing to embrace it,' said Ben. ‘Even if I agreed with that, it's another thing to … you know, we're officers of the company! This is not something we should be doing.'

‘Absolutely it is!' said Kevin. ‘If we embrace it, we embrace it. That means we do it. We above everybody else should be doing it.'

‘That's going a little far,' said Andrei.

‘All right, at least we shouldn't
not
be doing it. If one of us wants to do it, and we can't, then basically we're saying this is wrong. And that's not what we're saying. What we're saying is this is part of cyberspace. This is part of what it is to be here. And if one of us wants to participate in that aspect of cyberspace, then we do.'

‘That's not what we're saying,' said Ben. ‘That's what
you
are saying.'

‘If we're really embracing it, we should be transparent about it. Right, Charles? That's what you're saying, isn't it?'

Charles stared.

‘Who appointed him the expert?' demanded Ben, saving him from the ordeal of answering.

‘Let's admit this is happening,' demanded Kevin. ‘Let's admit it's part of what a dating site for the mind is, and not deny it. We don't have to say we encourage it – fine – but we should be prepared to point out that we accept it.'

‘Now you want to publicize it,' said Ben in disbelief.

‘It's nothing to be ashamed of. That's the point, dude.'

‘Whether we can stop it or not, officers of the company shouldn't do it.'

‘That's hypocritical,' retorted Kevin.

Andrei glanced at his watch, a habit he had when he wanted to get away from a conversation and think about something. Ben and Kevin recognized the sign.

‘We need to talk about this again,' said Ben ominously.

‘Whenever you want,' replied Kevin, rising to the challenge.

The matter simmered. It was the first issue that had significantly come between the three founders since the inception of Fishbowll. Advertising was something that each of them had known they would have to face at some point, and by the time they had faced it there had been little choice anyway, and none of them had been implacably opposed. But this, with Kevin and Ben entrenched in opposite positions, threatened to cause real damage.

Discussions became increasingly irritable and ill tempered. They were all sitting their end of quarter exams, for which they were spectacularly under-prepared and which they all feared they would fail, which didn't help their mood. Kevin became increasingly extreme in defence of his pseudonymous activities, elaborating a strong libertarian argument that challenged the imposition of any kind of censure or control on any of the various ways one could represent oneself on the site. Ben felt just as strongly that pseudonymity, while something that couldn't necessarily be eradicated, ran counter to Fishbowll's primary objective of providing a place for people to find meaningful connections, and therefore the less of it there was, the better. Andrei listened to the arguments, using them to test his own bias and trying to understand how all of this fitted into his conceptualization of Deep Connectedness, or whether that conceptualization needed to change.