“My kid is two years old, but she refuses to drink any other kind of milk.”
I nod, fascinated by the engineering of her bra, which appears to be holding the entire contraption upright.
“We’ve tried cow, goat, almond, oat, soy, and hemp. Everything except rice. You’re not allowed to give them rice.”
“Because of the arsenic?”
“Do you have kids?”
“No, I’m just a nerd.”
“I used to be a nerd,” she says. “Now I’m producing the milk of human guilt.”
“And there’s nowhere else in this fancy office where you can do it?”
“It’s all open plan,” she says. “It’s more democratic that way.”
“I’m Asha Ray,” I say.
“Amanda Wakefield,” she replies, shaking my hand. “So what were you crying about?”
“I built this thing, and I was suddenly realizing how amazing it is, and it made me cry,” I say.
“That’s great,” she says. “I’m really happy for you.” She looks like she’s about to impart some wisdom, but instead she throws her hands up. “I’d better go, my cups runneth over.”
I stumble back into the boardroom, where Larry is grilling Jules on the MAU-WAU-DAU of the platform.
“Ah, Asha,” Jules says. “Gerard was just asking how you set up the framework for the community side.”
I run through the technical points with Gerard, who is at pains to inform me that he started his career as a programmer. “I was employee number eighteen at DeepMind,” he says.
I talk about how Ren and I have instrumented the platform so that you can see exactly what people are doing, how long they’re spending with us, how many posts and photos they’re sharing. “Our minutes per session are going up every month.”
“How do you deal with people who break the rules?” Hans asks.
It’s a good question. “The algorithm will not provide a ritual that goes against the values of the platform,” I say. “It’s programmed to send a red flag, and then we reach out to the user and let them know we are suspending their account.” It was one of the things Cyrus, Jules, and I had agreed to from the start—we wouldn’t tolerate any bullshit, we would just turn peoples’ accounts off if they behaved badly. There would be no bullying, no trolling, no lying, no conspiracy theories, no anti-vaxxers, no neo-Nazis or All Lives Matter activists.
“We’ve only had to do it a handful of times,” Jules says. “The community is pretty self-selecting.”
Gerard, Hans, and Larry put their heads together on the other side of the table. Cyrus, Jules, and I pretend we are busy doing other things, fiddling with our laptops, unplugging, rearranging the printed-out presentations in front of us.
Finally, Larry speaks. “We like it,” he says. “We like the growth, we like the ambition. No one’s really come up with an alternative social media platform in a decade, and we see this as a contender.” I’m waiting for the but, and then it arrives: “But we see some major risk factors here.”
“It’s about the burn,” Gerard says. “Five years ago, if you told me you needed a million a month just to police these people and make sure you head off a shitstorm, I would’ve said sure, as long as you have that kind of engagement, it’s worth it.”
“But you’re going to have to front all that without knowing where the monetization of the platform is really headed, and digital ad spend has already peaked,” Hans adds.
“And,” Larry says, “We’re concerned it’s too… political.”
“Political?” I ask.
Larry glances at the other two. “Yeah. Like only for certain kinds of people. A liberal echo chamber. Don’t get me wrong, we’re all on the same page here. But it might be off-putting to some.”
“We don’t ask people to declare their political affiliations,” Jules says.
“But you said so yourself, it’s a self-selecting group, isn’t it?” Gerard asks.
“Happy to take a deep dive into the numbers and give you a solid answer, but just to be transparent, those are our concerns,” Larry concludes.
They stand up. We stand up.
As I’m leaving the room, I figure I have nothing to lose, so I turn to Jules and say, “I think there’s a law, isn’t there, about women having the right to express breast milk in a private room?”
Jules looks at me like I just belched in front of everyone. “Um, I don’t know, I guess.”