Propagating Mellom
(This is an experiment in using medium to publish philosophical fiction. It’s a short story about machine learning and social media and personal identity.)
Looking at the waste cheese, Emily felt a silent scream bubble up into her throat. It expressed the sort of misery hard to come by other than in a supermarket on a Sunday afternoon.
What am I doing here? She meant this in both an anguished existential and in a factual sense. What brings her to spend her Sunday afternoons in supermarkets, even when she doesn’t need anything? Yet spend them she does, coming into town and walking through Stephen’s Green and then, if things are especially dire, heading over the north side to the grim Ilac centre.
Sometimes she buys stuff, and you shouldn’t overestimate the pleasure, if expectations are sufficiently low, that can be had to be back at home for 7pm, with walking fatigued legs, knowing that you have a decent quantity of scourers, or a reduced choux bun, or milk til Thursday.
Now though it’s just suffocating horror, that this is her life. She’s a bit delicate: last night she met up with her ex and it didn’t go so well. At one point she apologised for having never been on the continent of North America.
He had been going on about Manhattan (cold) and California (big), and had asked her had she been out of Ireland much in the last couple of years, and she had said no, and that felt too abrupt and she said ‘Would like to, but never been over there,’ and that still felt too abrupt and so she punctuated ‘Sorry’.
It was a sign of a greater problem. She just seemed to have no stories. The stories stopped when? Around thirty — so five years ago. Five more or less nothing years.
The problem is that absence of stories, of experiences, breeds absence of experience: you need experiences to get experiences. She’s found this with her own few attempts at dating recently, where events like the North America apology recur. When she was asked about recent travel or restaurants or movies or partners, she would redden and get confused, fearing that she was exposing herself as a void. That — lack of experiences — would lead to a bad date. And that, in turn, dries up experiences, since, at least for her, one of the reasons to go on these dates was to find potential future co-experiencers. She wasn’t really one to travel or dine or go to the cinema alone.
Dilution is what it is. She’d had a decent ratio of experiences: years up to around 30, and then things started becoming less concentrated in the water of time and now things are at a homeopathic level of potency.
And it’s the dilution, combined with the tension that had kept her up til 3am tossing and furious and replaying, that makes the panic bubble up in her throat, the panic which thrashes around in the knots of hamstring and calf, and which makes the electric-lit isles and the off-yellow waste cheese seem dark, as if the outside rain had breached the shop’s walls.
Then she got the text message telling her her firm’s biggest client, the racist Northern Irish politician, was @-ing the queen of England pornography. And things, naturally, got worse.
David Mellom is the politician, ostensibly for the Greens but having very little to do with green policies. He has been mildly successful developing a specifically Northern Irish nationalism, one predicated on anti-Pole and anti-southern feeling, both of which were stirred up by the Brexit hoo-hah.
He was a formerly earnest student politician interested in climate change who, seemingly overnight, changed. He started talking about alt-right stuff, initially, it seemed, because he felt that Northern Ireland was being held back by various EU regulations. Then global warming receded and nationalism crept up.
There was something venal and unhealthy seeming about it, about the hatred he now came to shitpost to twitter. Partly it was how it jarred with his handsomeness. One of the reasons he had done as well as he had was he lacks the grey complexion, the hair colourless as the sky, the ill-fitting rippling shirt of the typical Northern Irish bureaucrat. Instead he’s rugged, well-stubbled, dark of complexion, with thick eyebrows and a tough jaw. He’s the sort of person you like to look at and to listen to, and people had been very keen to get behind him when he was fighting for the planet’s future. Now — it was like watching your primary school teacher puke in an alley outside a pub. Interesting, kind of amusing, but ultimately disturbing and sad.
But he, anyway, is Emily’s boss’s boss. And so his new found monarch-bothering is unfortunately at least partly her problem.
— It thinks I’m a literal wanker?
— It thinks you’re a literal wanker.
So David and so Emily, at an emergency meeting in the former’s office on the Malone Road. She and her co-worker Gavin had been called up suddenly, and had had to get the 7:35am train to Belfast.
— Well make it stop thinking that for fuck sake! You don’t know, my phone went nuts yesterday. This is big.
Gavin:
— We’re with you, Davie. Problem is it’s not so simple. There’s no telling it what to think.
David winced a very unsettling wince. The old room smelled chemical, hair gel and aftershave.
They were in a grand house, a three-storey Victorian thing with large front rooms on each floor, which themselves each had large bay windows. Whether though it was the day, or the street on which it looked out, or the lace veil in front of the window, little light got in, and there was even a standing lamp on in the corner under an old-fashioned shade. A boarded-in fireplace gave the impression that you were on the ground floor, an impression disconcertingly pulled away when noise was heard downstairs.
Gavin continued:
— See the software — I mean, as you know yourself, right? — it’s really out of our control. It takes your current account data and projects forward and backwards, and writes the posts for you. But really, we have no control over it.
— Well gain control! Jesus Christ this is meant to make me more popular, right? That’s what I’m paying you for?
It was. Emily works for a company that does digital legacy management, which sounds fancier than it is. She controls the social media accounts of famous people.
There are two different things she does. More mundanely, she deletes offensive, false, etc. posts, the sort of things that can be taken up and used against a person. Secondly, with the help of a piece of software which she didn’t write but has the training roughly to understand, she looks after forward- and back-propagation, a procedure whereby new posts, as well as gaps in a person’s social media past, are filled in using artificial intelligence.
This is still a process in its infancy, but it has achieved some results which have impressed the public. It’s particularly good at tasks not involving natural language comprehension, such as following users and sharing content, or autoliking people on dating sites.
Both things have become widely accepted. That it’s fine and not shameful to delete old posts people agree — that the inherent permanence of most online media shouldn’t be acquiesced to and people should have this sort of control over their online persona. And as for the propagation, this too has become commonplace. Most people like to have a look and see what their bot-generated self is up to, and people are all too willing to follow its recommendations and, for example, read the articles the bot posts on their behalf, date the people it suggests, and so on. There’s much amusement, some umming and ahhing, some horror of the whole thing, of course, but mostly people have taken to it as unthinkingly as they did previous iterations of social media.
The problem is Mellom’s account. Something had gone wrong. The algorithm, evidently, has seen something beyond human ken and started spitting out tweets like:
@EnglandHRH Waaayhaaay Queenzie the original milf! [gif very much redacted]
Which, needless to say, is not good for a politician.
There was no natural way to fix it, either. The software was a neural net: it didn’t operate according to any set algorithm, but rather found its own patterns. You ‘trained’ it, initially, by giving it a load of user data and asking it to predict and retrodict posts, which the user marked as accurate or not, and it gradually tried to increase its accuracy.
And the software had Mellom pegged as a literal wanker, had somehow found this maybe non-existent secret out about him by trawling his past posts, and that needed fixed.
On the train back down to Dublin, Gavin eating cheese and onion crisps and yelping with laughter at an episode of The Inbetweeners that he must have seen before, the waste cheese dread returned. The wifi was down, and the dread frequently returned when the wifi was down.
She’d kept finding herself thinking about the ex, a posh stoner whose three-barrelled name always got truncated in emails: Declan W. Hawthorne-Boy…, about the flat they shared just after college and how that seemed like the first step in a wider world than she could have imagined, about how he had pulled her away from her shyness and the tendency to withdraw based on that, how he had, it really seemed, wooed her in an old-fashioned way, ignoring her attempts to ignore him, breaking her down and bringing her out of herself into a light world of others.
She thought of domestic bliss, of waking up and going to sleep by someone, of mundane chats about dinner, of trips to his parent’s country house and Oslo to look at Munch (Declan, needing no qualification, studied art history). And though fight after fight meant the last few months were a nightmare, and she came to dread the pokey stairs that led up to the flat, and it came to be that the only time they even half got on was when they were both stoned, nevertheless that was a happiest memory, and it was good to see him again.
But. Obviously it hadn’t gone so well, what with the apology, but even before then something felt off, she felt off about herself. She knew what it was. Before the meeting, she had been nervous. That’s expected, of course. But it was more. She found herself making a list of conversation topics, repeating it in her head.
Again, that’s not ridiculous for an introvert. It was why she was doing it. She felt lacking in something, as if she were a machine that, without being stoked by the external prompts of the topics, wouldn’t conversationally move. She feared she’d freeze — simply cease functioning, become unable for speech or movement and out of her own control. That fear — that’s she’s without her own control, has coloured the last few days, and she feels her heart beating as she looks at her grinning co-worker, fearing he’ll ask her something and meet blankness.
A few days later Emily asked, ceremoniously pressing enter so he knew she’d sent him a message:
— Is that trash?
— No, it’s a meaningful life event.
— Ah. That?
Press
— Meaningful.
— Ah, ok, and that’s
Press
— meaningful too, right?
— No, trash!
— That’s trash!? Janey I’m not so good at this. It looks meaningful.
— Well, it’s trash.
— How can some much of life be trash?
— How can so much of life not be trash? That’s the question. You’ll see, once you do this for a while.
So Gavin to Emily. They were sitting by a window looking out on the Liffey, a blue sky over the sun-connected IFSC.
Emily looks like Jackie Onassis Kennedy. There’s something of a different era about her: her centre-parted hair is thick and black, voluminous is maybe the word, her eyebrows powerful, her cheekbones quietly high, her skin neither olive nor pale, with sometime freckles, mouth small and not so much given to movement.
On a couch opposite Gavin, more clearly Irish, fair hair lapsing into grey skin, freckles, a suit which made him look like a child at a funeral.
They had decided that the way to curb Mellom’s unruly feed was to delete anything even remotely dodgy, and so Emily was going back and back past the racism to the era when he wasn’t a dick. It was painstaking work, but at least, she hopes, it promised to resolve her problem.
But actually no. She read a tweet from a political opponent of Mellom:
— And although Norn Iron politics has been… fractious (!) recently, no doubt @MellomD will second my desire for a clean contest.
To which the Mellom had replied:
— poooPOOOOO @MartinMalone, POOOOOOOOpoooooo
And scrolling back she saw now his feed full of identical chiastic pooPOOO/POOOOpppp replies. Somehow, while the little changes she had made had seemingly got rid of the porn gifs, they had been replaced with an equally unseemly and unstatesman-like coprolalia. Emily scrambled, hot-headed, to fix it and repropagate.
The information travelled at the speed of information, and a tense afternoon ensued. Before she left Gavin, who had been on a half day, returned to the office, wearing a football shirt and shorts.
— See thing is, what you’re doing deleting is you’re just magnifying the scumbag tendencies of this one. You need to, I think you’re gonna have to add some stuff manually, like.
— But I’m deleting the scumbag tendencies. Last night I stayed late and deleted all his conversations with that young UKIP prick. I mean, Jesus.
— Yeah but that’s clearly not enough, right?
— Ok. Like what sort of stuff should I add?
— I don’t know. Books, pretentious music, that crap. The Louvree and the MuzeyDorsee. Just make him less of an arsehole.
— So just make stuff up?
— Yeah, I guess. But it has to be believable. And, like, it has to fit.
— ?
— With what we’ve already got. And with itself. Like I remember when I started, I’d to do something similar. It was this oul dearie. In fact it was Josh [the boss]’s ma, we were just exploring the software then, testing. Anyway, so she’d never took as many trips as she wanted, so I added some — Paris, museums, see I’d been on a school trip. But like, an obvious problem was this lifelong Dub suddenly found herself, on her profile, in Paris, having previously shown no interest, having never travelled — one day, she was in Paris looking at paintings, the next she was back here. Makes no sense. So, like, don’t do that. Think of it as a story. It has to make sense.
— That sounds … hard.
— Well that’s why they pay us the shit bucks, right?
And so she set to work. She figured a guy like him could get interested in the mega violence of Tarantino and maybe work back to various auteurs, and that that might trick the algorithm into thinking he was civilised.
She spent the evening, accordingly, researching Tarantino and his forebears, working out a path of development that would start with his seeing Reservoir Dogs and thinking the ear cutting was legendary and gradually working his way back til he was earnestly watching death play chess and proclaiming Max von Sydow a bantosaurus rex.
But it turns out that the effort required to document a life is at least comparable to that required to actually live one. It took ages, and she found herself that evening not much further on, foreseeing a long time in front of the computer inventing this guy’s life.
So she changed tack, and started lifting information wholesale from her own life, very slightly, at first, changing the register and occasional references to menstruation and the bangability of Edward Norton but otherwise copying and pasting wholesale, realising that her own interest in Fight Club and the Manic Street Preachers had led her to be the (somewhat) cultured person she was today, and thinking why not.
It was a balancing act. Over-adding these sorts of things lead the algorithm to tweet out links to Chomsky lectures, which was too high brow and politically wrong, so she had to leaven it with her own fictional additions, and she was proud of herself for drawing an artful link from Palahniuk to atheism, and Hitchens, thence to other atheists who weren’t so big on Muslims, thence to Mellom’s own xenophobic nationalism. That pride withered into self- and other- loathing within seconds, but still, it was something.
The negative was that she had to delete all her past from her profile, in case someone were to realise that she’d cribbed his life from hers. Her profile, accordingly, shrank up worryingly. But fuck it, people seemed very uninterested in her profile these days, and a girl’s got to eat.
— You see,
She said, a few days after, getting up, turning away from her computer and Gavin, letting the sun warm her front. Continuing:
— Do I like The Smiths?
She likes to get whimsical with him occasionally. Although they are not on the same wavelength, he can pick up a joke quickly:
— … Do you? I don’t know. Is this a shit riddle?
— No, it’s work. The Smiths…Morrissey, Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now. Do I like that?
She hums Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now, but it’s not that easy to hum, really. Try it.
The last few days have seen some improvement in Mellom’s feed, as she sophisticates him with her past.
— Well now your own musical preferences…are you own matter.
— Not really. Because this is the thing, I can’t remember if it’s me or him likes it. If I put down he likes it and he doesn’t, we’re screwed.
— But you know! You know if you like them! C’mon, sit down, get to it. No more fooling like. We can’t fuck this up any more.
— I don’t know, I genuinely don’t. It’s possible I liked them. But who can remember? I definitely liked New Order. And they’re kind of the same?
— I don’t listen to that emo shite.
— Emo? Morrissey is not emo. Well I mean, not quite.
— That’s your job, to know what he likes.
— Yes but you might have come across something.
— Well I didn’t. I don’t know.
— Fine. Just asking. I’ll comb through his feed myself then.
She sings, quietly and — somehow — mildly angrily, Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.
— Do I like that? It’s good? But then, maybe it’s bad. Maybe.
She returns to the computer, clicks something. Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now blares. Gavin:
— For fuck
— Sorry
She turns it down. She stands up again, sways gently to the music, looking at the people crossing the Beckett bridge.
— So you like it? Is that movement liking?
— Don’t know. Not sure. Maybe I’ll try another song?
— Look just search your own account, maybe? See if you’ve ever mentioned them? That’s a way to tell.
She searches, there are no mentions of Morrissey or the Smiths or Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now. But that’s inconclusive, because she’s at best an infrequent poster.
This job, unsatisfying though it is, is a godsend for Emily. It ended a quiet strange period of her life of which no trace, except idle and unreturned-to thoughts in a couple of friends and her mother, remains. At thirty-one the business for which she worked went suddenly bust, and she found herself paying unaffordable Dublin rent and doing nothing to make it affordable.
Her sensible plan was to get into computing, taking a six-month online programming course that claimed to place over ninety percent of its successful students. She had done psychology at university, and as such was pretty well-versed in stats, but other areas of math were beyond her and so, sensibly, she deferred putting off the course just a while to refresh and or learn algebra and some calculus.
But…that didn’t happen. Almost immediately, somehow, she just didn’t do what she earnestly planned, and did close to literally nothing for two months. Or, more particularly, she did this for two months: tram into town, coffee shop in front of a computer staring at Python tutorials, M&S food hall for dinner supplies, tram, home. She learned, to her massive surprise, that she had no control over herself, and though she managed to keep it hidden, telling others and even sometimes herself that she was getting through the maths, she knew something odd was up.
She got out of it. Those months passed and she signed up, no further in her maths education, and she duly and successfully completed the course, and quickly thereafter got this job. Now she thinks, most days, there but for the grace of God: she’s thankful for this work, and for the fact her life is, dairy product angst notwithstanding, more comfortable than not. But other days she sees the flipside, the emphasis falls on the but in ‘but for the grace’ and she thinks of the aimless nothingness that evidently lurks poor performance or company-wide liquidity issues away.
Mellom was on the up. Gone were the porn gifs and the poooPOOOOOPOOOOOOOOpooos, replaced with a connoisseur’s appreciation for 80s British rock, and the sharing of well-chosen long reads about Hayek and recipes for sourdough which set off well the depressing and constant xenophobia.
Emily though had started to disintegrate, posting now memes about a somewhat popular Oxbridge comedian who spent a lot of time defending free speech (a move which for some reason compelled him to rap in AAVE for extended periods of time), now somewhat untimely support for Arlene Foster, and now — the ways of bots are strange to men — a lot of Mariah Carey.
She discovered her new self one long summer night. She had left the docklands office a hot six, people clamouring outside the The Ferryman, the summer new and exciting, moving up to her basement but pleasant enough flat off Pearse Street. Here she disturbed the day’s dust and heat, and, eating her packaged couscous and salmon fillet, her feet up against the single bed and sitting in a swivel chair, she remained staring at the screen she’d been staring at all day. Sometimes she looked up, because there were traces of sunlight visible in the sky’s blue.
Since she had started taking data en masse from her account she had been reticent to log in. Her posts had gone down by about half, a scary number: she hadn’t realised she’d deleted so many the last couple of days. She knew that gone was Norway, Declan, gone was the country house, gone was the guts of a decade of jokes and music. Instead was a chasm and a profile getting propagated poorly, with demographically safeish but frequently off predictions.
When she saw what she had become she didn’t feel much. A friend from school liked her posts about the comedian; a guy who’d been trying to get in her pants by replying to everything she wrote said that it was a bit early for Christmas (re: Mariah) xd followed by a Christmas tree emoji.
She felt tired and hot, but also pleasantly empty-headed: panic seemed very far away. She knew she should have a shower, wash the day and the week off her, but her legs resting on the bed didn’t want to move. She tried to sink into the chair, to at least pose herself as relaxed and satisfied. But the chair’s hard back prevented her from doing so.
There was something satisfying, though, sitting there in the heat and the fatigue, watching her stripped down and incoherent self drive itself blindly forward. That wasn’t her. That there was one less thing that was her, that felt freeing.
And also: she had done her job. The racist Northern Irish politician was no longer @-ing the queen of England pornography. That wasn’t nothing, either.
