Games (They’ll Wonder What Happened to Us)

A tour of freshly half-baked ruins and the corrosive effects of real-time data.

I’m not a big numbers guy. I like stories. Sometimes numbers can illustrate a story. But they’re never the story, for me at least. Any story that ends with a number - by 2010, it was ten million - is probably not a great story.

But numbers found a way to get a grip on me. When I published my first novel in 2011, Amazon offered me real-time updates of how many copies it sold. It’s online, easy to access, and has to do with me. Very hard to resist. And over the last thirteen years, I am not proud to say I’ve peeked in an average of more than once a day, even when I knew the needle hadn’t moved.

That’s just book sales. There’s also Amazon ratings, Goodreads ratings and website visitors, social media likes or hearts, app store analytics on who’s downloaded Forget This Good Thing. Now there’s Substack, with its subscribers, paid and unpaid, its followers, 30-day open rate, 30-day views, green pluses and gray minuses.

Beyond that are other numbers I check to see how I’m doing. I check to see if they’re higher or lower than I remember them. Bank account, credit card balance, IRA account. More numbers on screens.

Empty doorways

I love ruins. Rome, Paris, Teotihuacan, certain blocks of the Lower East Side - I love an inscrutable carved face. And I love the question: What happened to these very smart people?

After some years climbing up and sliding down the greasy pyramid of our own civilization, I think the answer is in the question. Namely: They were very smart. And smart isn’t not the undiluted advantage that smart people like to make it out to be. Smart people make up systems. They get caught up in their own games.

Wampum

Growing up in the twentieth century, I often heard mention of wampum in old books, films and songs. The word meant money, but played like half a punchline, as if to say How absurd money is! How absurd what we do for money!

This is a jaundiced and wise sentiment that doesn’t get much air nowadays.

Wampum was a bead made from shells and used as a gift, as money, as a placeholder in trade, or as a dowry. It was hard to make and accepted widely, like bitcoin today. But now wampum is mostly known as a watchword when hard-bitten private investigators denigrate the motives of gun molls and would-be kidnappers.

Cost of living

Back in the old days, there was probably some chief who cornered the market on wampum. Everyone laughed at his jokes, until the tall ships landed.

Money is a set of agreements, and agreements change. The tall ships are one example. Lately the agreement has changed in the form of inflation. People grumble, but agree. There are glass buildings full of educated people involved in adjusting, triple-checking and paying lip service to those agreements.

Bless their hearts

The agreements occasionally fall out of whack with reality. One problem is the numbers themselves, and something called Goodhart’s Law (name checked in the recent “Goodbye Genius!”). It says that as soon as enough people agree on a system of success, they start to game the system.

Clicks are a measure of how much people like your website, and you can charge advertisers for that popularity. So you hire a click-farm in Moldova or Mumbai to deliver those clicks. The game within the game has made it so clicks no longer function as a measurement.

This manipulation can take the form of anything from Fendi purses to Harvard diplomas to zip codes. As soon as enough people game the system, it becomes a bad measurement for success. But it’s hard to adjust a system once everyone has agreed to it. Pretty soon, the whole operation starts heading for a whole new cliff.

Derivatives

In sports, this can happen with statistics. The miserable baseball fans of my youth in Massachusetts used to complain that Wade Boggs had recalculated his batting average by the time he reached first base. Cranky, but it spoke to the point that Boggs seemed to be playing a game within the game.

In football, you see it in a defensive end who runs himself out of the play 90% of the time but registers a dozen sacks and octuples his income, or a quarterback who never wins much, but posts an impressive quarterback rating by throwing four-yard outs on third and 12. Even in something as straightforward as football, the games within the game can be dizzying - and work against the supposed goal of winning the game.

Who’s fooling who?

The problem with deception it’s almost impossible to contain. Dishonesty is a set of alternate facts. And dishonesty is a habit, a reflex.

The preferred facts seep in and distort everything else. They’re just easier to live with, and everything else makes room. And habits take over. They’re what you do when you’re tired or not thinking. And nobody is vigilant all the time. There’s no safe way to insulate yourself from your own dishonesty.

Numbers game

I’m working this essay using the same machine that offers me all the data about my essays. The other day, an essay of mine came out. How did it do? The numbers say okay, but not great. The average number of people opened it. No one unsubscribed. But no one awarded it a heart or felt compelled to comment.

What if the essay had caused me to lose half my subscribers overnight? What if it went viral? I’d learn something from either experience. Going viral may mean that I hit a nerve. But would I know which nerve I’d hit? Going viral may also mean that my essay just fell into some fortunate slipstream in the digital current. I could waste a lot of time and effort trying to replicate a happy accident. I could denigrate and abandon work that’s closer to my heart and has more interesting possibilities in pursuit of continued relevance.

This is why, to the popular ear, sequel has come to mean worse, while prequel means way worse. The artist isn’t focused on the material, but on recreating the audience’s response. They’re playing a different, less exciting, game.

Intoxicating numbers

Sometimes, with colleagues and clients, after a few drinks, the conversation will wander to credit-card points.

This is a numbers game that people can’t seem to get enough of. One reason may be because credit card rewards are as ill-defined as the rewards of society itself.

I find it odd. Credit card companies charge the companies who sell goods and services each time someone uses the cards, driving up the prices for everyone. Credit card companies charge small companies more, contributing to a marketplace with fewer choices among an ever-smaller handful of depersonalized quasi-monopolies.

The conversation helps us feel like spending money is somehow beneficial to us. And so the conversation goes on and on, covering travel points, cash back, double points for online purchases, as if they’re not discussing which parasite is the nearest to being benign, based on their spending preferences.

This is a very strange game to play for fun. Maybe it drafts off the pleasure of spending money. Maybe it’s that engrossing in its vagaries. Or maybe it’s just a better game than the ones we’re forced to play to have money to spend.

Instant results

Creative work is often a blindfolded walk, where the slightest sound or softening of the ground may be important. And regular numerical feedback is constant false promise of reassurance. At the very least, it distracts.

In a larger context, the internet collapses the space between you and me. It standardizes the context into words and images on a screen. It makes us each less special, less mysterious, emptier of danger and potential.

Always stepping on toes, always shitting where you eat, part of what an artist has to do is create space. It could be as intimate and sensitive as a living room after a funeral. It could be as vast as a galaxy over a thousand human lifetimes.

But there needs to be space for the thing that can’t happen to happen.

Even avid sports fans can count on one hand the number of times they’ve seen such a space opens up inside of a game.

Not looking

The internet is in the air, vibrating down from satellites and towers, full of watching eyes and braying voices.

If I want to be a person who lives in the vast space where constant feedback and low-grade badgering are absent, then I need to be someone who doesn’t look. This is hard.

Bluebeard’s wives could have been happily married if they weren’t the type of lady who poked around in the forbidden room. They were, until they weren’t. Orpheus could’ve had his love back from the underworld if he could just be the kind of guy who didn’t look. And he was, up until that last second.

It’s a hard virtue upon which so much has seemingly come to depend.