furtl Read online

  At 14, Manny launched a denial of service attack against Flower Power and a hacktivist was born. From his bedroom, surrounded by soda cans and empty bags of jerky, he created a program that overloaded Flower Power’s Minnesota site for a week, paralyzing their business in that state. After they got wise to his efforts, however, Flower Power came back stronger, undercutting Fertile Soil and paying more people to insult his parents’ flowers on the Internet (sample comment: “DEEEEEEEZ FLOWERRSS SMEEELLL LIKE TERRIBUL imho”).

  Manny’s intense tunnel vision tendencies had emerged. He realized he needed a more sustainable solution. And he thought about nothing else. His pasty skin grew pastier with each day that he didn’t leave his room. He hacked his way onto Flower Power’s server, adjusted their pricing bots to give Fertile Soil the pricing edge, and extracted a number of files that presented damning evidence of their negative comment strategy. He anonymously emailed said evidence to the Minnesota Better Business Bureau, and Flower Power received a financial penalty for its activities from the State. But they didn’t go out of business, and within a year, Fertile Soil was in trouble again. Undeterred, Manny set out to improve Fertile Soil’s online presence with a search engine optimization algorithm that would help increase the shop’s exposure and drive online sales via targeted search engine results. It took fourteen months of round-the-clock programming, but furtl, the algorithm he came up with, eventually solidified Fertile Soil’s place at the top of the greater Grand Rapids flower market. Flower Power’s pricing bots never stood a chance.

  A decade later, Manny took that optimization algorithm and built it into an entirely new search platform that revolutionized the way people used the Internet. His algorithm focused on mobile users, incorporating a complex array of geospatial information to drive results. Previous algorithms – designed during the primacy of the desktop computer – failed to incorporate and display this information in a timely, targeted, or visually appealing way on mobile devices. After this success, Manny transitioned to search algorithms fulltime. And his hacking suffered. As a result, he lacked confidence in his ability to crack the Holospace code. That nobody could hack this code was of only marginal consolation.

  Manny woke up at his computer. It was well past ten p.m. He wearily got up, put on his wrinkled corduroy blazer, and told his computer to shut down. In the early days of furtl, the halls would still be buzzing with activity: late night programming contests; teams of dedicated beta testers working around the clock to identify bugs; hackathons, etc. Now, employees took hour-long bathroom breaks where they played video games on their phones against people in the other stalls. The enterprising ones were learning Chinese. And the halls were empty by 6 p.m.

  2.3

  Manny’s car drove itself out of furtl’s northern Virginia campus and onto the street. Upon exiting the parking lot, his car lurched downward, falling into a gaping pothole. Tired and cranky, Manny clenched his fists around the steering wheel, disengaged the hands-free driving, and put the car in reverse. Since the Virginia municipality – Fern’s River – that he lived and worked in decided to address its budget shortfalls and bankruptcy fears with cuts in road repair, these types of incidents were becoming more frequent. Hands-free driving systems were seldom able to avoid these surprise ravines. Getting people to pay attention while using their hands-free systems was also difficult. The Fern’s River Traffic Safety Agency (FRTSA) attempted as such by placing signs along the road reminding people that: “hands-free driving doesn’t mean attention-free driving.”

  Manny, whose wealth gave him excellent access to local, state, and national politicians, grew more frustrated with each pothole incursion. He felt entitled to this frustration because of his frequent and public warnings to local politicians over the years that spending levels were unsustainable and these types of cuts would someday be necessary if Fern’s River wished to remain solvent. He wasn’t an economist per se, but he felt that his experience running furtl gave him some authority to weigh in on such issues. And so he did.

  Manny drove by Fern’s River State Park like he did every day. Like FRTSA, the park’s maintenance budget had recently been cut in half. Garbage obscured most of the trail paths and sections of the park now resembled a discarded furniture graveyard.

  With the pothole incident behind him and the car back in hands-free mode, Manny rested his head on the steering wheel, letting it nudge his half asleep head slightly in each direction as it navigated its route to his home and his deluxe Sleepmax Gyroscopic Thermafoam 2000 (SGT2000) bed. But just as he turned the corner past the park he was delayed by a small protest underway in the middle of the street. The hands-free system slowed the car to a stop when it detected about ten people with protest signs that were gathered at the intersection.

  Demonstrations like these were uncommon but had been on the rise in the two years since Stan Corcoran, former actor turned pastor turned Republican governor of Alabama, became president. Corcoran easily defeated the unpopular Democratic incumbent DeChais, whose term only got worse after the Meatgurls and BULLY PULP IT scandals.

  Stan Corcoran’s “no spending increases, ever” platform was very popular with the American populace after the DeChais administration. His uncanny ability to rhyme “Stan” with “Corcoran,” using his drawn out ’bama accent (“Stan corkRAN”), also ingratiated him with Middle America in a way that his opponent, whose father was half-French Canadian, could not.

  Three different chants were underway at the intersection. Manny slowly raised his head from the steering wheel to see what the yelling was about.

  A young woman dressed in all black with short cropped hair and reading glasses knocked on Manny’s slightly open window. “Here! Take this literature!” she said, holding up a pamphlet.

  “No thanks,” Manny said.

  “Take it,” the protester said, shoving it into Manny’s car.

  Manny was too tired to resist and took the pamphlet. He also had a soft spot in his heart for these activists. While not as strong as it was in his youth, he still appreciated people who were willing to stand up for themselves like he did during his hacktivist days. Manny surveyed their picket signs:

  SAVE OUR BRIDGES

  BRING BACK THE POST OFFICE

  END INCOME INEQUALITY NOW

  FREE SOUTH KOREA

  BAN SPORKS FROM SCHOOLS

  MAKE ULTIMATE FRISBEE AN OLYMPIC SPORT

  WIKKAN RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS

  “Hey, Manny Kahn,” the young woman said, recognizing the tech mogul as she glared at him through his window. “What happened? Your chopper break down?”

  “What exactly you protesting here?” Manny responded.

  “This is an all-purpose protest. I’m trying to draw attention to infrastructure shortfalls and President Corcoran’s new spending cut proposals.”

  “Well, good luck.”

  Manny pulled into the Vault Residences. He drove up to the front gate and motioned to Rob the robot entrance guard. Rob shot a retinal scanner beam into his eyes, triggering the front gate to open while waving to Manny with his robot hand. Manny waved back out of habit. Rob replaced 45-year-old father-of-five Jensen Adams in 2024, the last in-the-flesh human to occupy that seat. Manny was, in fact, responsible for Jensen’s replacement, selling the community board on the benefits of furtl’s new full service security system – complete with fully networked and encrypted robots, scanners, and surveillance cameras.

  Manny’s BMW Soltranol glided on fresh paved asphalt past the A, B, C, and D model homes (five, seven, nine, and twelve bedrooms respectively). The sun had long past set. From the street, many of the houses looked like veritable entertainment light shows, as 200-inch home theater screens showered kids and parents with entertainment.

  Manny pulled into the driveway of his C model home (each C model home was a slightly different shade of maroon) got out of his car and let his door’s infrared scanner give his body a once over. Then he walked into his house, plunked down his tablet on the wireless charger
station on the kitchen table, and walked over to his wife Mindy. He pecked her on the cheek as she opened the refrigerator door. She barely looked up.

  “Another late one?” she asked, tapping instructions onto the large touchscreen of the Refridgermator 8.0. “Restock duck confit, almond milk, and cucumber infused water,” she told the refrigerator.

  “Sorry honey,” Manny said. “Is that salad?”

  “Yup. With tofu mustard sprouts. I printed the lettuce and the croutons three hours ago.”

  Three-dimensional food printer/processors had yet to progress to the point where animal proteins could be produced on site, but vegetables and starches like lettuce and croutons could now be made without leaving the house. Manny thought that was OK, but what he really yearned for was the candy bar printer. His health-conscious wife, however, was deaf to his pleas and forbade such a purchase.

  “I thought you were going to be home by seven?” Mindy asked. She was obsessed with printer fresh. She was convinced she could taste the printer freshness difference down to the hour. This salad was therefore sub-optimal. She knew it. Manny pretended to know it.

  “I’m sorry,” Manny said. “Is the printer still warm?

  Manny hunched over his salad, half-asleep, accentuating the size of their 16-person mirrored glass dining room table. The furtl entertainment network (fEN) projected into the table. Manny ate and stared at the table’s screen. The headline read: “Sixty-year old woman gives birth to 22nd child. Record of 24 in her sights.”

  Mindy came and sat next to him, holding a glass of wine with her triathlon-toned arm. Her dark, shoulder-length hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail.

  “They offered me the buyout. Came in at about what we suspected,” Manny said as he chewed his mustard sprouts, rubbed his eyes, and yawned all at the same time.

  Mindy’s attention was piqued. “And?”

  “I said no.” Manny thought that would be the end of that conversation.

  “It’s a lot of money. We could finally escape.”

  “Escape isn’t the answer, Mindles.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “What would we do? Have 25 kids?” Manny asked as he watched Mindy look at the image of the pregnant sixty-year-old next to Manny’s salad.

  “Yeah, right. We couldn’t even make one,” Mindy said, referencing their miscarriage fifteen years prior.

  “I can win this fight.” Manny yawned again.

  “All you have?” Mindy asked with derision.

  “Except for you, of course,” Manny said.

  Mindy sighed. “It sucks here.”

  After furtl merged with telecomm giant Versotel, the headquarters was moved from Grand Rapids to Washington, DC, the argument being that this would help the company focus on its new government contracting business. Government contracting was lucrative for tech companies, and many in the firm were convinced that the majority of furtl’s growth was going to come from that sector in the coming years. Manny grudgingly agreed to the move. The government contracting business turned out to be quite profitable, but as Manny later realized, another important reason for the move was improved access to government policymakers for furtl’s lobbyists and political action committee staff.

  “If I leave, everything this company stood for is gone,” Manny said.

  “Yes, can’t defy the core principles,” Mindy said.

  “They’re the cornerstone of—”

  “Tell that to Jensen.”

  “Not fair. It was for the greater good of the community. His job was obsolete. Furtl could do security better. Hiring and firing capability is the cornerstone of a well-functioning capitalist society.”

  “There’s that convenient free market libertarian we all know and love,” Mindy said. “Anyway, you think you can win this one?”

  “I still have enough support within the firm.”

  Mindy shook her head. “Take the money.”

  “What happened to the Mindy Epstein I met twenty years ago? Remember when we organized those online protests and hackathons?”

  Manny moved food around his plate with his fork. “I saw some protesters today. All fire and no focus,” he said. “What they don’t realize is that this country’s reckless spending is what got us into the trouble we’re in today.”

  “Those kids,” Mindy said in her craggy old lady voice, “with their baggy slacks and soda pop.” Mindy was now picking at Manny’s salad. “You talk about the young version of me? What about you? Radical Manny of yesteryear wouldn’t even recognize you right now.”

  “If younger-me saw what this country had become, he would agree with older-me. Now even my company has been taken down by these twisted spending traps. The Soash was a sinking ship and sold user information to anybody and everybody in a pathetic effort to stay afloat. We should’ve let it sink.”

  The Soash’s demise was, in fact, well underway when furtl bought it, which was the reason it sold at the fire sale price of $190 billion. Five years earlier, it had been valued at three times that. Then, like so many companies before them, the Soash lost its cache, its reputation as an arbiter of cool, and the confidence of its users. Over time, everything entered into the Soash site was made available to advertisers, even information that users thought was deleted or had entered with the “Do Not Track” box checked.

  But it wasn’t as if there weren’t warning signs. Metadatagate was one of those warning signs. But IPACT only sought to protect private user data from government agencies. After intense lobbying from the advertising industry, oversight of user information sales between private sector companies was removed from the bill. As such, this activity continued to expand and became more entrenched and sophisticated in the post-IPACT world. The Soash’s 586-page terms and conditions document (8 point font) was a testament to this expansion in scope, sophistication, and obfuscation. Within the pages of this document were sub-clauses. These sub-clause explanations were to be found on an entirely different website, after one clicked on the privacy tab and held down the control, function, and # sign on their keyboard. The sub-clauses granted the Soash complete control over a user’s personal data such as contact information, medical history, and all photo and video content that ever appeared on the site.

  But people loved letting other people see them doing cartwheels at a drinking establishment the evening prior, and the liquor companies liked it as well. Targeted branding ads overlaid on photos people posted on the site soon became a normal part of the user experience. And these companies used user photos for their own television and Internet ads, presenting endless collages of Soash users enjoying their product. These ads synced to the Soash’s GPS tracking system, which would, for instance, suggest brands of alcohol for them to buy at the exact moment they arrived at a liquor store. The Soash also aggressively pushed products based on its calculation of a user’s daily activity. If it was 3 p.m. and the Soash knew that a user enjoyed a candy bar at their desk in their office at 3 p.m. – either because the Soash had access to their purchase history or the user in question posted one or more status updates in the past portraying mid-afternoon candy bar enjoyment – then the Soash filled the user’s news feed with pictures of sponsored candy bars. With one click, a user could order a sponsored candy bar and print it out on their office 3-D candy bar printer.

  These sponsored ads were like a drug for the Soash. Once advertisers got a taste, they wanted more, and the Soash needed these ads to grow. Their shareholders demanded it. And so, the Soash sold increasing amounts of info to more companies. When Russian mail-order brides started showing up unsolicited at the doorstep of people who visited a Soash page on the topic, the business model reached terminal velocity. The stock price went into free-fall after a scandal/user exodus that was spawned by pharmaceutical companies’ targeted ads for specific sexually transmitted diseases to people the Soash identified as potential sufferers of these ailments. That’s when furtl stepped in.

  Mindy got up from the table.

  “Are you coming
to the fundraiser tomorrow night?” Manny asked as Mindy departed the dining room. “I want to see what’s happened to our congressman. I had high hopes for that guy.”

  Mindy stopped at the dining room entranceway. “Great, more politics. I’m going kite kayaking early the next morning and then heligliding, so I may sit this one out.”

  “Kite kayaking?”

  “Yeah, kitaking, huge rush,” Mindy said. “You should furtl it. Just don’t furtl ‘kitaking accident.’ Or ‘kitten dies while kitaking.’ But yeah, you should come. Remember when you used to exercise?”

  “Remember when you used to work?”

  Manny’s formally wiry frame was getting softer by the day. His hamstrings and calves often cramped up from sitting at his desk too long. Shooting pain up his arms was not uncommon, and the stiffness in his neck was pretty much a constant source of discomfort. Furtl created a number of products intended to address growing complaints of discomfort associated with prolonged computer usage, but to date none of them – not even the Suspendo Standing Sit Chair, the Gravitron Furtl Stool, or the Massage Mouse (the Massouse) – had been successful in alleviating Manny’s chronic aches and pains.

  Mindy put her hands on Manny’s wilted shoulders as he stared at his food. “Look at you, stressed and out-of-shape. This job’s destroying you,” she said, giving him a massage.

  “I know.”

  “There’s an extra spot in my tai kwan yoga class tomorrow. You want me to save you a spot?”

  “Sure, I’ll try to make it,” Manny said mid-yawn. They both knew he wasn’t going to make it.

  2.4

  Manny walked into a large banquet hall that looked like a political rally had thrown up on a bar mitzvah. Campaign banners draped over bedazzled bronze light fixtures, and a podium and a large screen set up on a stage along with drums, keyboards, and guitar amps crammed into the back. Manny was dressed in his typical uniform: jeans, corduroy blazer, and gray cotton T-shirt. Steve Dansiger, insincere smile on his face, approached Manny. Their interactions were the same each time: Steve asked Manny for money and appearances, and Manny stalled and evaded until Steve gave up. Manny only came to this event to confirm what he already suspected: Congressman Lester Aimes had abandoned Manny’s beloved political cause: tax code reform.