Enough with the I told you sos! Back to our doughty heroes and heroines!
The poet Charles Reznikoff walked about twenty miles a day through the streets of Manhattan.
One Thomas J. Kean, age sixty-five, walked every street, avenue, alley, square, and court on Manhattan Island. It took him four years, during which he traversed 502 miles, comprising 3,022 city blocks. He walked the streets first, then the avenues, lastly Broadway.
b) Mutt and Jeff
Did you ever read Waiting for Godot?”
“No.”
“Did you ever read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead?”
“No.”
“Did you ever read Kiss of the Spider Woman?”
“No.”
“Did you ever read—”
“Jeff, stop it. I’ve never read anything.”
“Some coders read.”
“Yeah that’s right. I’ve read The R Cookbook. Also, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about R. Also, R for Dummies.”
“I don’t like R.”
“That’s why I had to read so much about it.”
“I don’t see why. We don’t use R very much.”
“I use it to help figure out what we’re doing.”
“We know what we’re doing.”
“You know. Or you knew. I myself am not so sure. And here we are, so how much did you know, really?”
“I don’t know.”
“There you have it.”
“Look, R was never going to explain to me what I didn’t know that ended us up here. That I know.”
“You don’t know.”
Jeff shook his head. “I can’t believe you haven’t read Waiting for Godot.”
“Godot was a coder, I take it.”
“Yes, I think that’s right. They never really found out. People usually assume Godot was God. Like someone says, It’s God, and someone else says, Oh! and then you put that together and it’s God—Oh, and then you put a French accent on it.”
“I am not regretting not reading this book.”
“No. I mean, now that we’re living it, I don’t think the book is really necessary. It would be redundant. But at least it was short. This is long. How long have we been in here?”
“Twenty-nine days, I think.”
“Okay, that’s long.”
“Feels longer.”
“True, it does. But it’s only a month. It could go on longer.”
“Obviously.”
“But people must be looking for us, right?”
“I hope so.”
Jeff sighs. “I put some dead man’s switches in part of what I sent out, you know, and some of those are set to go off soon.”
“But people will already know we’re missing. What good is it going to do if your help calls go off? They’ll just confirm what people already know.”
“But they’ll know there’s a reason we’re missing.”
“Which is what?”
“Well, if I was right, it would be the information we sent to the people we tapped into.”
“That you sent out to the people you tapped into.”
“Right. People would learn that information and investigate the problem, and maybe that will lead them to us here.”
“Here on the river bottom.”
“Well, whoever put us here must have left some record of doing it.”
Mutt shakes his head. “This isn’t the kind of thing people write about or talk about.”
“What, they wink? They use sign language?”
“Something like that. A word to the wise. Unrecorded.”
“Well, we have to hope it isn’t like that. Also, I’ve got a chip injected in my skin, it’s got a GPS signal going out.”
“How far does it reach?”
“I don’t know.”
“How big is the chip?”
“Maybe half an inch? You can feel it, back of my neck here.”
“So, maybe a hundred feet? If you weren’t at the bottom of a river?”
“Does water slow down radio waves?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I did what I could.”
“You put out a call to the SEC without telling me, is what you did. To the SEC and to some dark pools, if I’m understanding you right.”
“It was just a test. I wasn’t stealing or anything. It was like whistle-blowing.”
“Good to know. But now it’s us who are in the dark pool.”
“I wanted to see if we could tap in. And we could, so that’s good. I’m not even sure that that’s what got us stuck here. We were the ones who wrote the security for that stack, and I wrote in a covert channel for us to use, and there was no way anyone could notice it.”
“But you still seem to think that’s what got us in here.”
“It’s just I can’t think of anything else that would have done it. I mean, it’s been a long time since I pissed off you know who. And no one heard that whistle blow. I meant to make it a foghorn and it came out a dog whistle.”
“What about those sixteen tweaks to the world system that you were talking about? What if the world system didn’t like that idea?”
“But how would it know?”
“I thought you said the system is self-aware.”
Jeff stares at Mutt for a while. “That was a metaphor. Hyperbole. Symbolism.”
“I thought it was programming. All the programs knitted together into one kind of mastermind program. That’s what you said.”
“Like Gaia, Mutt. It’s like Gaia is everything living on Earth influencing everything else and the rocks and air and such. Like the cloud, maybe. But they’re both metaphors. There’s no one actually home in either case.”
“If you say so. But look, you put your tap in, through your own covert channel no less, and next thing we know we’re trapped in a container decked out like some kind of limbo. Maybe the cloud killed us, and this is us dead.”
“No. That was Waiting for Godot. We’re just in a container somewhere. Somewhere with rushing water sounds outside the walls, locked in and so on. Bad food.”
“Limbo might have bad food.”
“Mutt, please. Why after fourteen years of brute literal-mindedness would you choose now to go metaphysical on me? I’m not sure I can stand it.”
Mutt shrugs. “It’s mysterious, that’s all. Highly mysterious.”
Jeff can only nod to this.
“Tell me again what your tap was going to do.”
Jeff dismisses it with the back of his hand: “I was gonna introduce a meta-tap, where every transaction made over the CME sent a point to the SEC’s operating fund.”
Mutt stares at him. “A point per transaction?”
“Did I say a point? Maybe it was a hundredth of a point.”
“Well, even so. Suddenly the SEC has a trillion dollars it can’t identify in its operating accounts?”
“It wasn’t that much. Only a few billion.”
“Per day?”
“Well, per hour.”
Mutt finds himself standing up, looking at Jeff, who is regarding the floor. “And you wonder why someone came after us?”
Jeff shrugged. “There were other tweaks I did that might have been, you know, even more of a freak-out.”
“More than stealing a few billion dollars an hour?”
“It wasn’t stealing, it was redirecting. To the SEC no less. I’m not sure that kind of thing isn’t happening all the time. If it was, who would know? Would the SEC know? These are fictional trillions, they’re derivatives and securities and the nth tranche of a jumble bond. If someone had a tap in, if there were taps all over, no one would be able to know. Some bank accounts in a tax haven would grow and no one would be the wiser.”
“Why did you do it, then?”
“To alert the SEC as to what can happen. Maybe also give them the funding to be able to deal with some of this shit. Hire some people away from the hedge funds, put some muscle into the laws. Create a fucking sheriff, for
God’s sake!”
“So you did want them to notice.”
“I guess so. Yeah, I did. The SEC I did. I did all sorts of stuff. That might not even be what got noticed.”
“No? What else did you do?”
“I killed all those tax havens.”
Mutt stares at him. “Killed them?”
“I tweaked the list of countries it’s illegal to send funds to. You know how there’s about ten terror sponsor countries that you can’t wire money to? I added all the tax havens to that list.”
“You mean like England?”
“All of them.”
“So how’s the world economy supposed to work? Money can’t move if it can’t move to tax havens.”
“It shouldn’t be that way. There shouldn’t be tax havens.”
Mutt throws up his hands. “What else did you do? If I may ask.”
“I pikettied the U.S. tax code.”
“Meaning?”
“Sharp progressive tax on capital assets. All capital assets in the United States, taxed at a progressive rate that goes to ninety percent of any holdings over one hundred million.”
Mutt goes and sits down on his bed. “So this would be, like …” He makes a cutting motion with his hand.
“It would be like what Keynes called the euthanasia of the rentier. Yes. He fully expected it to happen, and that was two centuries ago.”
“Didn’t he also say that most supposedly smart economists are idiots working from ideas that are centuries old?”
“He did say something like that, yes. And he was right.”
“So now you’re doing it too?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time. Keynes is timeless.”
Mutt shakes his head. “Decapitation of the oligarchy, isn’t that another term for it? Meaning the guillotine, right?”
“But just their money,” Jeff says. “We cut off their money. Their excess money. Everyone is left their last five million. Five million dollars, I mean that’s enough, right?”
“There’s never enough money.”
“That’s what people say, but it’s not true! After a while you’re buying marble toilet seats and flying your private plane to the moon trying to use your excess money, but really all it gets you is bodyguards and accountants and crazy children and sleepless nights and acid reflux! It’s too much, and too much is a curse! It’s a fucking Midas touch.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’d have to give it a try to see. I’d volunteer to try it and report back to you.”
“Everyone thinks that. But no one makes it work.”
“They do too. They give it away, do good works, eat well, exercise.”
“No way. They stress and go crazy. And their kids go even crazier. No, it’s doing them a favor!”
“Decapitation, the great favor! People lining up at the foot of that guillotine. Please, me first! Chop my neck right here!”
Jeff sighs. “I think after a while it would catch on. People would see the sense of it.”
“All these heads rolling on the ground, their faces looking at each other, Hey, this is great! What a good idea!”
“Food, water, shelter, clothing. It’s all you need.”
“We have those here,” Mutt points out.
Jeff heaves another sigh.
“It’s not all we need,” Mutt persists.
“All right already! It seemed like a good idea!”
“But you tipped your hand. And it was never going to hold. It was like spraying graffiti on the wall somewhere.”
Jeff nods. “Well … pretty scary graffiti, for whoever to do this to us.”
“I’ll grant you that. Actually I’m surprised we’re not dead.”
“No one killed Piketty. He had a very successful book tour if I’m not mistaken.”
“That’s because it was a hundred years ago, and it was a book. No one cares about books, that’s why you can write anything you want in them. It’s laws people care about. And you were tweaking the laws. You wrote your graffiti right into the laws.”
“I tried,” Jeff says. “By God, I tried. So I wonder who noticed first. And how word got to whoever rounded us up.”
Mutt shakes his head. “We might have been rendered. I feel kind of chopped up, now that you mention it. We could be in Uruguay. At the bottom of the Plata or whatnot.”
Jeff frowns. “It doesn’t feel like government,” he says. “This room’s too nice.”
“You think? Nice?”
“Effective. Kind of plushly hermetic. Good tight seals. Waterproof, that’s not so easy. Food slot also waterproofed, food twice a day, it’s weird.”
“Navy does it all the time. We could be in a nuclear sub, stay underwater five years.”
“They stay under that long?”
“Five years and a day.”
“Nah,” Jeff says after a while. “I don’t think we’re moving.”
“No shit.”
We need not trouble ourselves to speculate how the human race on this globe will be destroyed at last, whether by fire or otherwise. It would be so easy to cut their threads any time with a little sharper blast from the north.
—Thoreau
A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe.
—Le Corbusier
Leaving fifty times not so beautiful.
c) Charlotte
Charlotte looked carefully at the woman Jojo as they sat across from each other at the long dining hall table. Tall, stylish, athletic, smart. Going out with Franklin Garr, and like him working in finance, meaning Charlotte didn’t exactly know what. But in general she knew. Making money from manipulating money. Early thirties. Charlotte didn’t like her.
But she suppressed this dislike, even internally, as people were always quick to sense such feelings. Keep an open mind, et cetera. Part of her job, and something she always wanted to do anyway, as personal improvement. She had a long way to go there, as she had a tendency to hate people on sight. Especially people in finance. But she liked Franklin Garr, strange but true, so maybe that would extend to this woman.
“So,” she said, “someone or some company has offered to buy this whole building. Do you know anything about that?”
“No, why should I. You don’t know who it is?”
“It’s coming through a broker, so no. But why would anyone want to do that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t do real estate myself.”
“Isn’t that investment in Soho about real estate? Or when you do like mortgage bonds?”
“Yes, I suppose. But bonds are derivatives. They’re like trading in risk itself, rather than any particular commodity.”
“Buildings are commodities?”
“Everything that can be traded is a commodity.”
“Including risk.”
“Sure. Futures markets are all about risk.”
“So this offer on our building. Is there any way we can find out who’s making it?”
“I think their broker has to file with the city, right?”
“No. They can make the offer themselves, in effect. What about fighting it? What if we don’t want to sell?”
“Don’t sell. But this is a co-op, right? Are you sure people don’t want to sell?”
“It’s in their buy-in contract that they can’t sell their apartments.”
“Sure, but the building entire? Are they forbidden to want that?”
Charlotte stared at the woman. She had been right to hate her.
“Would you want to sell, if you lived here?” she finally asked.
“I don’t know. Depends on the price, I guess. And whether I could stay or not. That kind of thing.”
“Is this kind of offer what you call aerating?”
“I thought that meant pumping out submarine spaces and sealing them so they stay dry.”
“Yes, but I heard the term is also being used to describe the recapture of the intertidal by global capital. You aerate a pl
ace and suddenly it’s back in the system. It’s undrowned, I think they mean to suggest.”
“I haven’t heard that.”
Aeration was a term used all the time on the left side of the cloud where Charlotte tended to read commentary, but obviously this woman didn’t read there. “Even though you invest in the intertidal?”
“Right. What I do is usually called bailing out, or rehabilitation.”
“I see. But what if we do vote to fight against this offer to buy the building? Do you have any suggestions?”
“I think you just have to say no to them, and that would be it.”
Charlotte stared at her. “You really think that’s all it takes?”
Jojo shrugged gracefully, and seeing that Charlotte began to hate her in earnest. Either she was pretending to be ignorant or she was a fool, and she didn’t seem like a fool, so there it was: pretense. Charlotte didn’t like it when people pretended to believe things you knew they couldn’t really believe; it was just a brush-off, an arrogance shading toward contempt. By this gesture she was saying Charlotte wasn’t worth talking to.
Charlotte shrugged back, a crude mirroring. “You’ve never heard of the offer too good to refuse? You’ve never heard of a hostile takeover succeeding?”
Jojo’s eyes went a little round. “I have heard of them, of course. I don’t think an offer like this reaches that level. If you say no and they don’t go away, that’s when you should start worrying.”
Charlotte shook her head. “They’re interested, okay? That’s enough to worry about, you ask me.”
“I save my worrying for things farther along the worry pipeline. It’s the only way to keep from going crazy.”
“They’ve made an offer, I said. We have to reply.”
“You can’t just ignore it?”
“No. We have to reply. So the time is here. We have a situation.”
“Well, good luck with it,” Jojo said.
Charlotte was about to say something sharp when her pad played the first bars of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. Charlotte tapped the pad.
“Excuse me Miz Armstrong, it’s Amelia Black, I live in the Met when I’m in New York? I was trying to reach Vlade but I couldn’t get him. Are you by any chance with him?”