Fishbowl (28 page)

‘Andrei, that's just going to make things worse,' said Mendes.

It did. The levels of abuse aimed at Andrei from the Grotto reached new highs – or lows. Jerry Glick called and told Andrei that if everything he had heard was true, he couldn't approve of what Andrei was doing. Mike Sweetman again publicly condemned Andrei for the approach he had taken, stating that it gave succour to the enemies of internet freedom, who would now have another stick with which to beat the internet community. The DA announced ominously that she would pursue her investigation with all vigour. In the office, Alan Mendes and Louise Steinberg were at him every day, saying he had to issue a condemnation. Ben, of course, thought they should stop.

By now, Andrei himself wanted to declare the experiment over. But Chris was in the office every day as well, reminding him of the deal they had struck, reminding him that this was exactly the pressure he had told Andrei that he would experience.

The argument came to a head late one night towards the end of the second week of the crisis when Chris, Andrei, Kevin and Ben met to discuss the situation.

Ben had said little since learning of Chris's activities. Sometimes he wished he would just blow up over his exclusion from knowing about the palotl experiment, as Kevin would have done, but that wasn't the way he was. By nature, he couldn't help searching for reasons for the things people did. One part of him was angry and alienated over that exclusion, but another part of him saw that it could be interpreted almost as an act of kindness on Andrei's
part, a decision to spare him involvement in something he didn't support – provided you believed that Andrei was capable of that kind of sensitivity. Right now, given how Andrei had ignored his frustrations over having too little to do over the past several months, he wasn't sure that Andrei was.

The sense of alienation lingered in Ben, even though he had been finally brought into the loop. He couldn't help feeling that since Andrei had cut him out earlier, he would just have to solve the problem for himself. It was a childish attitude, Ben knew, but it wasn't easy to overcome. Anyway, his opposition to Chris's experiment had been clear from the start, and Andrei probably knew that that hadn't changed.

But tonight Andrei asked him directly what he thought. Ben said that, in his opinion, it was obvious that the users didn't want what Chris was offering and they should stop it.

‘It's not obvious,' retorted Chris, who didn't dislike Ben, but thought he had long outlived his usefulness to the company, if he had ever actually had any.

‘Even the Dillerman's saying he's not sure this is right,' said Ben.

‘I don't give a fuck about the Dillerman!' snapped Chris. ‘Andrei, listen to me. We always expected an uproar. We always expected the point one per cent of vocals to drown out the ninety-nine point nine per cent of couldn't-care-lesses. I know you've got people shouting at you, not only from outside but from within the company. Forget about them. It's just noise.'

‘What about the DA?' said Ben.

‘What about her? More noise. She's up for re-election. What has she said that's solid? Nothing. Legally, we're strong and she knows it. Let's wait until she comes up with something real. That's what we agreed. In the meantime, let's look at the numbers.'

Andrei glanced at Kevin.

Kevin nodded. ‘Dude, the numbers are awesome.'

*

Chris's three experiments had already yielded $200,000 in revenue for Fishbowl over the past four months, and, even if he did nothing more, the revenues could be expected to rise from the seeds he had sown. But those weren't the numbers he was talking about. What he meant were the user metrics he had discussed with Andrei at the start of the operation. What they showed was that the people protesting most on the School pages that had been set up in response to Chris's experiment were heavy users of Fishbowl. But they weren't using Fishbowl less heavily – they were using it
more
. The place where they were protesting was Fishbowl itself. It wasn't the behaviour of a group of people who were going to defect – even if there had been an equally extensive, independent meta-network that they could have defected to.

Light to medium users of Fishbowl showed no discernible change. Chris commissioned a survey and found that most of them weren't even aware of the controversy. Those who were aware fell mostly into the ‘Don't care' or ‘Oppose somewhat' categories of the questionnaire. Unlike the heavy users, for whom Fishbowl was so important that they couldn't leave, for light users, Fishbowl just wasn't important enough for leaving even to be on their minds.

But the awesome part of the numbers, as Kevin described it, came out of the registration figures for the website. New registrations were actually rising. People apparently were looking at Fishbowl out of curiosity – and staying.

The next day, Andrei showed Alan and Louise the numbers.

‘So what do we do now?' asked Louise.

‘Well, Chris has actually told us he's been doing the same thing in another product category,' said Andrei.

Louise stared at him. ‘This is going to get everything started again.'

‘Probably.'

‘Which product category?' said Alan.

‘Yachts.'

The third and final revelation came a fortnight later, a month after the initial rumour, when Andrei announced that they had discovered that they had been promoting luxury South African safaris. By now the response was cynical. What a surprise! But it was growing weary as well. There were only so many times someone would sign an e-petition without seeing it have any effect.

For the first time, Fishbowl went public with its line that it would follow its users' preferences but would be sure to listen not only to the vocal minority but to the silent majority as well. Fishbowl, Andrei added, would always err on the side of the broader, more generous interpretation of Deep Connectedness and user preference. This was widely interpreted as meaning that Fishbowl would persist with the practice.

An ‘Andrei Koss is a Traitor' School page was started on Fishbowl. Overnight, membership exceeded half a million. Funnily enough, that didn't shake Andrei in his conclusions but strengthened them. Half a million sounded like a lot, but it was less than one in 700 of Fishbowl's users. They were getting more new users than that every day. The lesson Andrei had learned previously when he had introduced advertising, when he had issued the Mea Culpa statement – that you could seemingly do just about anything you wanted and it would provoke nothing from the users but a roar of protest that would soon blow itself out – etched itself more firmly than ever in his mind.

A couple of days later, Fishbowl was subjected to a denial-of-service attack from a previously unheard of group called Spring Uncoiled. For the first time in its history Fishbowl went offline. It was seven hours before it was up again. The infrastructure guys went into crisis mode and when the next attack came, twenty-four hours later, they were ready for it. Over the next week they were subjected to numerous attacks of various sorts, but the site didn't go down again.

Jerry Glick went public with his previously private repudiation of Fishbowl's new line of activity. A number of tech heavyweights
echoed his line. Chris said they were probably already trying to work out how to replicate the idea themselves. In Washington, Diane McKenrick followed events closely, toying with the idea of going after the industry again. But it was deep into primary season for the presidential nomination – a nomination she had once dreamed might be hers – and there was no support from anywhere in the Party to reopen that can of worms with the unpredictable effects it might have on voter patterns.

Andrei met the DA at her office in San Jose with his lawyers and explained exactly what Fishbowl was doing. He was confident from the advice the company had taken that there was no ground for a prosecution. The DA knew it, too. Even if she could have conjured up something that might have prolonged the saga, she was a smart political animal with ambitions for higher office. In public, tech companies were condemning Fishbowl, but she knew that wouldn't necessarily translate into support for her if she tried to force the issue. Curbing the money-making potential of an up-and-coming internet business wasn't going to prove strong grounds for re-election in a district dominated by tech companies and their employees.

The mainstream media lost interest. The protests died down. Barry Diller posted a message in which he had managed to persuade himself that this was part of the broader, more generous interpretation of Deep Connectedness to which Fishbowl was committed. The ‘Andrei Koss is a Traitor' School dwindled to a few tens of active users, the last resort for the irreconcilables. Privately, Chris thought it was hysterical. Not even they could tear themselves away from Fishbowl, preferring to bitch and moan on a page provided by the very website they professed to hate so much.

Fishbowl did lose a couple of employees at the height of the controversy, while the recruitment people reported that some candidates had turned down offers from Fishbowl, or at least had delayed giving an answer. But that effect quickly dissipated. The candidates who had delayed their answers scrambled aboard when
told they had a week to decide or the company would withdraw its offer. Fishbowl was an employer of choice for the cream of the Valley's programmers – it would obviously take more than this to change that.

Two months to the day after the rumour was first leaked, Chris turned up in Palo Alto and took Andrei, Kevin and Ben to Yao's, where he asked Andrei to state explicitly that he had been right.

Andrei didn't feel totally at ease about the outcome. He had been prepared to have his conceptualization of Deep Connectedness challenged and let the chips fall where they would – but there was still a part of him that would have preferred it if the users had risen up in revolt. But they hadn't. A tiny percentage of them had blustered, but even that had petered out. And in the meantime, the publicity had brought in new people in their hordes. Fishbowl's users had accepted the innovation. If this was a new form of Deep Connectedness, then he had a responsibility to provide it, so long as it didn't make the world worse and so long as a large group of the users accepted it. These were propositions that someone like James Langan, and even Ben, would have rejected, but which Andrei, under his principles of broad conceptualization and inclusiveness, felt obliged to accept.

The next morning, Chris arrived in the office with a couple of guys carrying crates of champagne and glasses. He had the crates put down in front of the aquarium. He climbed on one and called everyone over, then proceeded personally to uncork the bottles and pour the glasses. People wanted to know what they were celebrating. Chris told them to ask Andrei. Andrei wandered across reluctantly. Word had spread in the office and people were arriving from the other floors. Someone had set up links to the other Fishbowl offices. Chris put a glass of champagne in Andrei's hand. Before he knew it, Andrei was standing on a crate in front of the company.

‘Ummm … what I want to say is, this has been a tough couple of months. I want to thank you all for sticking through it.' Andrei
paused, trying to get his thoughts together. ‘Looks like we've discovered a new form of Deep Connectedness, one between individuals and corporations. Some people didn't like it and they made a lot of noise. But the vast majority of our users have accepted it and, more importantly, some forty million people joined after it was made public. Now, it feels as if a lot of people protested, but we've looked at the numbers and it was a lot less than forty million. So we got a lot more people saying “I like Fishbowl with this” than saying “I don't”. So, guys, this is here to stay.' Andrei raised his glass. ‘To Deep Connectedness, in all its many colours.'

There were murmurs from around the floor. Some people put their glasses to their lips, others stood watching, still not sure what they were celebrating.

Andrei was conscious that he probably hadn't sounded very excited. Part of his job, he knew, was to inspire people. ‘Guys, this is cool! And I just want to say, if you're wondering … no, I don't see a conflict between this and what Fishbowl is here to do. I see it as part of our mission. I was doubtful at the start, but I was prepared to be challenged. If we're going to keep evolving, if we're going to stay the meta-network of choice, we have to always be prepared to be challenged. Like I said, I was doubtful, but I kind of like what we've done now. Is this advertising? Or is it a service, a way of bringing people's attention to stuff they might need at exactly the right moment – giving them factual information, not randomly but when they actually need it? To me, that's kind of cool. And it's totally new, and that's what Fishbowl should be doing. Things that are totally new. And although it's a form of Deep Connectedness that's between people and corporations, it's a form that's natural, human and user-friendly. In other words, it's Fishbowl. And who knows where it will lead? There are other organizations than businesses. There are other things people need to know about than products, and other things you can do than sell them. You all know we have the principle of don't make the world worse. Well, let's add a second to that – don't tell lies.
If we stick to that, then I think what we have here is a new and exciting form of Deep Connectedness, which is what Fishbowl is all about – Deep Connectedness in all its forms.' He raised his glass and drank. ‘OK! Thank you.'

Andrei walked away. People came forward to get more of the champagne. Chris followed Andrei back to his desk.

‘Well said.'

Andrei shrugged. ‘Thanks.'

Chris rubbed his hands. ‘Let's get to work.'

32

A SECOND OFFICE
was rented four blocks from Fishbowl's existing office on Embarcadero. It was soon staffed with a team of advertising executives to sell the new service, a tech group to develop palotls, and an ever-expanding team of sales representatives learning how to use them. Chris, with the help of the human resources head, took ownership of recruitment. He sold the job to likely sales people as being like piloting a drone compared with being in the cockpit of a plane – a lot quieter, a lot more of a desk job, a lot more effective. And with a hell of a lot less travel.

It was probably only one in ten people he saw who had anywhere near the capabilities for the job. Chris looked for mature, experienced people who had worked with high-end goods and knew the kind of clients who purchased them. As he had learned through his experience over the previous months, it was the ability to appear to be just another guy with a couple of good stories to relate – the exact antithesis of a high-pressure sales person – that succeeded in these circumstances. They also had to be prepared to stick to a set of strictly factual remarks, knowing that all their conversations and postings might be monitored. Nothing Fishbowl's palotls said could be construed as misrepresentation.

As for the businesses the advertising executives approached to use this new form of promotion, many were initially sceptical. But their scepticism was tested when they were shown the results of the initial palotl experiments, and since the use of a link
restricted to Fishbowl-generated customers would enable them to define precisely the results of the campaign, Fishbowl could offer entirely results-based deals which represented no risk to the advertiser. The numbers of companies using the service soon grew exponentially.

Fishbowl's employees knew what was happening. There was no reason to hide it. Someone coined the term ‘Fish Farming' for it, and the second office soon became known as the Fish Farm.

Andrei spent very little time there. It was an entirely commercial place without a software engineer in sight. He was far more at home in the office at Embarcadero, which had expanded to occupy all five floors of the building. A new COO, Jennifer McGrealy, had been brought on board to replace James Langan, retaining Louise Sternberg as one of her executives. She had a strong commercial background in a number of tech firms and was fully aware of operations at the Fish Farm when she came on board. Jennifer saw it as a fascinating new revenue stream and, as part of her remuneration package, negotiated a deal that gave her a percentage of its growth.

Chris had been right – Fishbowl users seemed to have accepted that this was the shape of the world now. And he was right about the more efficient model crowding out the less efficient, just as the more efficient species in evolution crowd out the others. Rumours were circulating of other social media companies experimenting in Farming. Once someone started doing it, it seemed, everyone would. In addition to selling products, information gleaned from conversations on Fishbowl was fed back to the advertising companies, allowing them to tailor and improve their offerings. Naturally, companies were willing to pay for feedback of this quality. Jenn McGrealy soon saw the opportunity and built a lucrative business in customer intelligence.

Andrei didn't keep track of the mounting revenues that Farming was bringing in. For him, all of this was merely a facet of Deep Connectedness, with information flowing in both directions, and the additional revenues it generated merely provided
even more funds for Fishbowl to continue refining and improving the service. When interviewed, he spoke as if the massive valuations that were regularly put on the company were a side issue in comparison with the mission of delivering Deep Connectedness. To listen to him when he spoke at tech gatherings, it would have been easy to imagine he was still a dewy-eyed novice running a start-up in a dorm room without a cent of revenue to its name.

Sandy Gross, who was now in graduate school at Stanford and living with Andrei in the condo, supported what he was doing. If what wasn't illegal was legitimate, and if this was the most efficient model – as the rumoured efforts to copy Fishbowl suggested – there was no reason to hold back.

In other respects, however, Andrei did pay something of a price. Farming had made him a controversial figure, and many of the internet moguls who had befriended him were now wary of being seen with him. His weekend visits to Jerry Glick's barbecues came to an end. But Jerry, he thought, had always had something of the holier than thou about him, and Andrei had already been getting a little tired of him. Andrei was starting to build a small but vocal following in the tech press and amongst other young internet executives who saw him as a brave, radical visionary of the new world that the net was inevitably ushering in. It was hard not to begin to think of himself somewhat in this way.

Only one thing happened in the months after the Farm was set up to disturb his equanimity. And that came not from outside the company but from within.

By the time the Fish Farm had been set up and was functioning fully, it was over a year since Ben had finished his degree and been back full time at the company. One night he called to see if he could come around to Andrei's apartment. He arrived at about ten o'clock. Sandy had gone to a club with some friends. Andrei opened the door for him in shorts and a T-shirt and found Ben holding a large, flat package wrapped in brown paper.

‘What's that?' asked Andrei.

‘It's for you.' Ben walked past him into the apartment, still holding the package. ‘Want a beer?' he said, opening the fridge and helping himself.

They sat together with a beer each on the only sofa in the huge living room of Andrei's condo. By now the paucity of furniture had become a source of pride for him.

Ben handed him the package.

Andrei looked at it warily. ‘What is it?'

‘The convention when someone gives you a gift is that you open it to find out.'

Andrei put down his beer and unwrapped the package. It was the napkin from Yao's on which he had written his growth projections back in the January after Fishbowl was founded, the day he had asked Kevin and Ben to buy into the company. Ben had had it framed, with a brief description of the event and the date inscribed underneath.

‘I'm going to leave the company, Andrei.'

Andrei continued to gaze at the napkin, then put it down on the floor.

‘Andrei?'

‘I heard you.' He looked at Ben. ‘Why?'

‘I'm done. I don't really feel I offer anything. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing.'

‘You offer a huge amount. Ben, we wouldn't have got anywhere if you hadn't been there. Right at the start—'

‘That's a long time ago now, Andrei.'

‘I still need you.'

Ben gave a short laugh. ‘You've got Chris.'

‘Chris isn't the same.'

Ben shrugged. ‘Could have fooled me.'

Andrei felt a slight sense of panic. There had never been a time when Ben hadn't been a part of Fishbowl. Even during his senior year at Stanford he had been involved. Andrei knew that Ben's earlier functions at the company had dissolved and that he should have found a more concrete role for him. Ben had told him that he wanted
more to do, and James Langan had talked to Andrei about the need for Ben to have defined responsibilities. Ben had no team, unlike Kevin, President for Getting Things Done, who was responsible for the hardest of the hard core of programmers, coding the most challenging innovations that went on the site. James had had Ben sit in on meetings of the customer intelligence team, and he had come up with ideas from time to time and overseen the research that followed. Some of the ideas eventually made it into practice, but that wouldn't have justified the position he held or the salary he earned. But none of that, or that fact that Ben and he no longer spoke as they used to in the old days, meant that Andrei was ready to lose him. He had never even contemplated a time when Ben wouldn't be around. He was one of the original three, the founding Stakhanovites. That was a bond that could never be broken.

‘We can be more specific about your role,' said Andrei. ‘I know I should have done that.'

Ben shook his head.

‘We'll give you some people. You can have a team.'

‘To do what?'

‘To do … I don't know … stuff …'

‘Andrei, there are other things I want to do. I want to be a therapist.'

‘You want to listen to people whine about what their parents did to them when they were in diapers?'

Ben smiled. ‘You want to tell me?'

‘You really want to do that?'

‘Yeah, I really do. That's why I finished my degree. I've got postgraduate training to do. It's, like, it's time for me to do it, Andrei. I've organized a place in New York on a doctoral program. And, to be honest … I'm just not that interested in Fishbowl any more. It's not my thing like it's your thing. It never was. I mean, it's been a hell of a ride. I wouldn't have missed it and I'm grateful you gave me the chance. Really. The day you wrote that thing …' he gestured to the framed napkin on the floor ‘… the day you asked me to be a part of this … you only get one chance
at something like that in life. In many lifetimes, and that's if you're lucky. You gave it to me. Not to mention nine per cent of … what was the latest valuation I heard? Fifteen billion?'

‘Something like that.'

‘How much is nine per cent of that, anyway?'

‘Around one and a third billion.'

‘I think I'll be comfortable.'

‘You could have had fifteen per cent if your folks could have raised another twenty thousand.'

‘You know what? I'm not going to lose any sleep.' Ben looked around. ‘And buy yourself some furniture.'

‘I'm OK.' Andrei sighed. ‘You really want to leave?'

Ben nodded.

‘Let me ask you the Chris question. Is being a therapist the ultimate, absolutely most important thing you can do?'

‘I never liked that question. I don't think anyone can really answer a question like that. There's no one answer. There's multiple answers.'

Andrei looked at him blankly. He didn't see why there couldn't be one answer.

‘Look, Fishbowl has been a hell of a ride. Really. It's been awesome.'

‘OK, so if there are multiple answers, is Fishbowl one of the most important things?'

Ben sighed again. Andrei was looking at him as if it was desperately important that he said yes.

‘Is it?'

‘Maybe. Yes, OK, it is, one of them. But right now there are other things that have risen up the scale.'

‘So maybe Fishbowl will rise up again.'

Ben shrugged.

‘So maybe you'll want to come back.'

‘Nothing's impossible.'

‘So you should stay involved. That way, when you're ready to come back, you can just step back in.'

‘Andrei, I can't stay involved. I mean, we can always talk, I'll always be there. But I have to be able to concentrate on other things. I have to be able to put my whole mind to it.'

‘You did that in your senior year and you stayed involved.'

‘No, I didn't. It was hell. I was constantly torn. I couldn't do anything properly. I hated it. I don't know how I got through. I shouldn't have come back. I should have left then. I knew it, actually. It's my fault.'

Andrei was silent. He gazed down at the framed napkin. For some reason he thought of the notebooks in which he had written his thoughts about Fishbowl. He hadn't looked at them since putting them away after the move from La Calle Court.

‘Hard to believe it was only three years ago,' said Ben, glancing at the napkin as well. ‘It feels like longer. It's like we've lived a lifetime.'

Andrei frowned. It felt like yesterday to him.

‘I just thought it wouldn't hurt for you to have the evidence of how wrong Andrei Koss can be. A memento mori, if you will.'

Andrei didn't smile.

‘That came out wrong. Look, I just thought you might like to have it. We don't have much from those days. We should have kept the aquariums. Where did they get to, anyway?'

Andrei shrugged. Robinson House, La Calle Court, Ramona Street, they had each had an aquarium.

‘Is this because of Farming? said Andrei suddenly. ‘Is that why you want to leave?'

Ben shook his head.

‘I'm sorry I didn't involve you. You just didn't … you didn't want to know about it.'

‘It's fine. I'm over it. I didn't want to be involved. You did the right thing.'

‘But you don't like it.'

Ben shrugged. ‘Andrei, it's your company. It's always been your vision—'

‘It
is
because of Farming! Ben, we always said we'd debate freely and move on. That's what always made it work.'

‘I have moved on.'

‘I don't mean like that.'

Ben sighed. ‘It's not Farming. OK. I mean, it's not only Farming.'

‘People had the chance to say no and they didn't.'

‘A lot of them did.'

‘No, not a lot. A tiny fraction. And they
said
it, but they didn't mean it. They weren't prepared to do anything about it. It's a form of Deep Connectedness. We gave them a chance to say no and they didn't.'

Ben watched him. ‘Andrei, do you really believe it's about Deep Connectedness?'

‘Yeah. I do. Your conceptualization of Deep Connectedness was always a little too narrow.'

‘Don't you think there's a deceit involved?'

‘What deceit?'

Ben almost smiled. Yes, which deceit? The deceit involved in Farming, or the one going on inside Andrei's own head? Could he really believe that this was about nothing but Deep Connectedness?

‘Ben, people know they might encounter palotls. What difference does it make if it's a person or a company? If people don't like it, they'll leave.'