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Book of Numbers
Book of Numbers
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
Book of Numbers
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
[...] In America, even the smallest portions were too big for him, except with “frozey yozey.” His favorite places were always selfserve and charged flatrates for small and large cupsizes, regardless of the amount of yogurt and toppings. Moe would stagger in vast crockery to fill, and the staff was unequipped to charge in excess of the maximum. It was not as like anything was returnable, melting probiotics crammed back into dispenser, the carob chunks replaced. It was because of this that all the places switched to retailing by weight. [...]
vast crockery is fantastic
Some tech obsolesces, some has been engineered to obsolesce, all is basically nonrecyclable. Moe was manic about that recursion, the tech afterlife, the device eschatology. When products die, they are exported back to where they were made, to the nativity of the East, to India. This being the true cosmic cycle, the pdas and comps and printers illegal to dump in the West instead leaching their mercury, lead, cadmium, beryllium, barium, into the foreign groundwaters, and rewarding the same populations that manufactured them with silicosis and neurotoxicity, just enough to numb against irony. Meantime corporate atrocities are offset by quarterly donations. 10% of gross to related causes.
Knock knock? Who’s there? Aaron. Aaron who? Why Aaron you replying to email? Though the other punchline is Aaron the side of caution. Dear, dear—this is your personal assistant again. Your Lisabeth. Telling you that your mother’s been ringing nonstop. She’s worried. You haven’t been answering her emails, and she’s been telling Lisabeth that the only reason she got involved with paying Verizon $54/month, and she can’t understand why her first month’s bill should be $88, incidentally, was to be in touch with her son! and then Lisabeth went through explaining her plan, the Quantum, 15/5 Mbps, 10 MB of hosting! I told her you were off on an investigative project, something about unfair wage labor practices in telecom manufacturing because that’s what was in the NY Review under my latte (rhetorical latte), which was how I found out you’d told her you were doing something about scandals between donors and museums relating to deaccession policies and I apologized and agreed, you were overcommitted and overdue on both without an alibi, and she wondered how I held my soap, which was faintly erotic, and already today the answer’s on my desk (your mother made me a soapdish).
i really like the aaron emails
My friends in publishing were skeptical when I told them where I was going to work. They had a lot of questions I felt uneasy answering. Wouldn’t a subscription model undercut author royalties? Wasn’t it basically a cynical, capitalist appropriation of the public library system? Wasn’t an app like this parasitic at best? Was it all that different from the online superstore, and wouldn’t the app’s success come at the expense of the literary culture and community? I didn’t have a good response to most of these concerns. Mostly, I tried not to think about them. Smug and self-congratulatory, I translated most of my friends’ questions to mean, simply, What about us?
lol yep
The CEO did not acknowledge that the reason millennials might be interested in experiences—like the experience of renting things they could never own—was related to student loan debt, or the recession, or the plummeting market value of cultural products in an age of digital distribution. There were no crises in this vision of the future. There were only opportunities.
“She’s too interested in learning, not doing,” the CEO typed once into the company chat room. This was an accident—he meant it only for the other two cofounders. We huddled in the conference room and he apologized sincerely, while I looped the words over and over in my head. I had always been interested in learning, and I had always been rewarded for it; learning was what I did best. I wasn’t used to having the sort of professional license and latitude that the founders were given. I lacked their confidence, their entitlement. I did not know about startup maxims to experiment and “own” things. I had never heard the common tech incantation Ask forgiveness, not permission.
oof
In an effort to hype myself up, I developed the theory, however flimsy, that analytics was a natural extension of my liberal arts education. The e-book startup had used the analytics software to track our alpha users through the app, and I had enjoyed looking at some of the data: what our investors were reading, and abandoning; whether or not people read public-domain books with cover art designed by the CPO, which we had added to bolster the library. In a certain light, I tried to convince myself, business analytics could be seen as a form of applied sociology.
this is basically me with macro
Several months prior, a tech blog had published an article announcing the analytics startup’s first major fund-raising round of ten million dollars. When asked how he would spend the new funding, the CEO made his priorities clear: he would pay the first hundred employees far above market, he said, and spoil current employees to retain them. This was the language of customer acquisition, but I didn’t know. I didn’t think at all about the stratification, either; how the hundred-and-first employee might feel. I’d never worked anywhere with a hundred people—I’d never worked anywhere with twenty. I’d certainly never worked anywhere that wanted to spoil its employees and had the means to do it. Generous, I thought. I found the tenacity winning.
The solutions manager did not mention equity, and I didn’t ask. I did not know that early access to equity was a reason people joined private companies at the startup stage—that it was the only way anyone other than VCs and founders got rich. I did not even know that equity was an option. The company’s in-house recruiter would eventually intervene, to recommend that I negotiate to include even a small stake. His rationale was simple: all the other guys had some. No one told me how much it was worth, or how big the pool was, and I did not know to ask.
High on the feeling of being professionally desirable, I told the solutions manager I would sleep on it.
Not everyone knew what they needed from big data, but everyone knew that they needed it. Just the prospect incited lust in product managers, advertising executives, and stock-market speculators. Data collection and retention were unregulated. Investors salivated over predictive analytics, the lucrative potential of steroidal pattern-matching, and the prospect of bringing machine-learning algorithms to the masses—or, at least, to Fortune 500 companies. Transparency for the masses wasn’t ideal: better that the masses not see what companies in the data space had on them.