In
the summer of 2007, I was freshly out of college and searching for jobs
with increasing desperation. I had worked unpaid internships at a
newspaper and a literary journal; I’d written music reviews. None of
this, it was becoming apparent, screamed “employable.” Who would pay me
to do what I wanted to do, which was write? When I happened across a
Craigslist ad that said, “Creative writer wanted,” I responded. My
recent job inquiries had been as effective as dropping bottled messages
into the Pacific. When a response came—“Can you come into our Menlo Park
offices this week for an interview?”—I replied immediately. Yes, I
could.
Did
I wear a blazer? Did I take Caltrain? How did I get around before Uber
or GPS? I remember being nervous, and I remember wanting to be liked. I
don’t remember what was asked of me, or how the job was described. The
man interviewing me was older than I was then, younger than I am now.
The job was “a lot like working for the CIA,” he told me. “Your best
work, you can’t show anyone.”
These
were the early years of Facebook, of shareable iTunes libraries—of
downloading music illegally (or legally, but let’s be real). I had a
phone that flipped open and didn’t take pictures. Menlo Park wasn’t on
the map. It would be years before Mark Zuckerberg was named Time’s person of the year, and even more years before he came to be viewed as a creepy robot. Silicon Valley
had not yet accrued its sinister air. Twitter had been founded
recently, in March 2006, but it had not yet attracted media
personalities; it wasn’t where anyone went for news. It hadn’t yet been
renamed X by a billionaire, who wasn’t yet a billionaire. There were
fewer billionaires back then. But Google existed, and so did its pages
of search results. A search for a semi-prominent individual yielded
information about them.
These search results would be the main focus of my new job. I was to be a protector of online reputations.
None
of our clients had been convicted of any crimes, our higher-ups assured
us. If ever they were, they would be dropped as clients. But everyone
deserved to put their best foot forward—didn’t they? We would be helping
them to do so. Each of our clients had hired us because they disliked
their search results. For one client, the problem was that a New York Times
Vows article about his marriage to his ex-wife was the very first link
you saw when you searched his name. We couldn’t eliminate these
offending items from the Internet. But we could try to bump
them off Google’s top spot—or, even better, off the first page entirely,
into the realm of the never-seen. All we had to do was create new
material—what we called “pink sites.” This was what put the “creative”
in “creative writer.”
For
each client, we’d receive lists of their hobbies, interests, and
positive attributes. These were the qualities we’d highlight. One
client, a businessman, was an avid sailor in addition to a cheating
spouse. We chose to emphasize the former. I created several websites
about boating, mentioning his name on each. Then I would go about trying
to promote each website using early social-media platforms: Reddit,
Maple, StumbleUpon, Xing. “Check out this website on boating!” I might
have posted on Twitter, from one of my dozens of made-up profiles. I
didn’t bother to make my alter egos particularly realistic (one was
“Salvador Whippet”). We were urged to make our websites as believable as
we could, so they’d gain organic traffic and appear higher in search
results—edging out less desirable sites.
Another
method of reputation management was putting up websites about fictional
people who happened to share our clients’ names. One of my coworkers
maintained a stream-of-consciousness skateboarding blog, ostensibly
penned by someone with the same name as a client but with a different
age and a different personality. (“That ramp was hella sick but I was
ready for it.”) We maintained spreadsheets of our pink sites, called
pink profiles. I generated long lists of negative domain names that our
company would purchase, so that our clients’ detractors wouldn’t be able
to snap up the most desirable ones (soandsosucks.com, soandsoistheworst.com, ihatesoandso.com).
These methods, combined, were called the “secret sauce.” The “secret”
was heavily stressed. We called each client by a code name corresponding
to their initials: Jennifer Aniston, Mark Wahlberg, Spider Man.
I
was paid eight cents per word, so writing that didn’t require heavy
research was ideal. For one site, I wrote short stories and poems from
the perspectives of twelve-year-old girls. I mentioned the client’s name
on one of the site’s pages, but beyond that, the site needed content.
What was easiest for me to generate was subpar fiction and poetry. In
one story, a girl living on Jupiter wakes up to find that her parents
have disappeared. Plaintively, she wonders: “WHERE ARE MY PARENTS/ALL OF
JUPITER?” My boss encouraged experimentation because we never knew what
sites would catch on. If I succeeded in attracting real preteen girls
to my invented site, their traffic might cause Google to rank the site
more highly, deposing our client’s negative search results.
The
office building was small and nondescript. I remember gray, even as I
can’t picture the space anymore. We brought our own laptops to work. We
chatted all day long on Instant Messenger—trying to make one another
laugh, often succeeding. My coworkers were a ragtag group ranging in age
and racial background. If not for the job, I might have never met them.
They were excellent writers—strange and funny, united in our bizarre
labor. It occurs to me now that we were bots before bots were bots. Did
we call it “content” back then? I don’t think the noun had yet acquired
its negative connotation, to mean meaninglessness. But none of us were
under the illusion that what we were creating was lasting. It wasn’t the
ideal job for any of us. It was just the job we had.
Every
month, I aimed to write 40,000 words. It was a novel every one and a
half months, though that meant I wasn’t working on my own hypothetical
novel. My wrists hurt; I got carpal tunnel. What I wrote was fictional,
but it wasn’t the fiction that I hoped to write. Within two months, I
was desperately applying to MFA programs.
On
weekends, I took my laptop to coffee shops. In those days, San
Francisco cafés weren’t white-walled or third-wave. They served dark
roasts and had sticky floors and faux-leather chairs that hissed. What I
hoped to write was something of my own, something meaningful to me. But
I never wrote anything good. It would take time to become a better
writer—time I hadn’t lived yet.
My
job was online, but my real life was lived in person. We didn’t need
the acronym IRL back then. It was a given. Life was lived in real
life—where else would it be lived? Facebook wasn’t widespread; Instagram
didn’t exist.
I
was living in a Victorian flat in San Francisco’s Lower Haight. The
rent was $3,280 split four ways. My roommates were also new college
graduates. We hosted dinners and parties—homemade pasta and pickles—and
pooled our money for communal bourbon. The frequency of our gatherings
feels like a relic of the past, too, though it’s hard to say if it’s
that times changed or we did, settling into families of our own. When I
told new friends what my job was, their eyes widened. You should write about that, they always said.
I
remember one visitor, a friend of a friend. She was slightly older than
we were—more cultured. She was a chef at a prestigious restaurant where
I could not afford to eat. When I told her about my job, she could not
conceal her disgust. She asked, “How do you sleep at night?” I remember
being speechless at her judgment. I slept at night because I was tired,
and this was the only job I had gotten.
Seventeen
years later, my experience has been reduced into a tellable anecdote.
Most of my memories have fallen away, but I remember that moment,
feeling judged by her. From her privileged position, she could judge me
for my job. I can judge myself for it, now. My coworkers and I were
doing what the Russian and Chinese hackers did to the American people
before the 2016 election, albeit less effectively. None of our clients have been convicted of crimes or accused of sexual assault went my superiors’ constant refrain. But they weren’t exactly upstanding people.
In
the years after writing content for the client we called Ed Bradley, I
would happen across his name in the news: corruption, bribery, a sex
scandal. His current Wikipedia page, which calls him a “disgraced former
American lobbyist and businessman,” doesn’t even mention whatever he
was up to in the years that I was generating websites on his behalf.
Those particular misdemeanors seem to have vanished with time, replaced
by more up-to-date offenses. It doesn’t appear that he changed his ways.
He seems to be doing fine—still wealthy, largely unscathed. He pled
guilty to a felony that carried a prison sentence of up to five years
but was pardoned by Donald Trump.
I
did become a writer. I write novels now, as I hoped to then. I have
privilege enough not to have to work for eight cents a word. My writing
can take more time. I changed, and the world did, too.
The
Internet has become less personal. It feels endless—and not in a good
way. Our online experiences have become angrier, more algorithm driven.
In 2007, our lives were only beginning to have an online footprint.
Since then, our existences have steadily moved in the virtual direction:
Thanks to social media, smartphones, and omnipresent cameras, our
online identities have become nearly synonymous with our identities
themselves. The divide between public and private has eroded. Online
reputations matter more than they ever have, and the methods for
controlling narratives have become more powerful, too.
I’m
not proud that I contributed to the Internet’s general bullshit
quotient. But my coworkers and I were a dozen writers in a gray room in
Menlo Park, and there was a limit to how much damage we could cause.
With AI now available to generate writing,
we are on the verge of infinite damage. In a John Henry-style contest
to see who can write more preteen stories about Jupiter, AI would leave
me dead at my keyboard. And AI can do much more than write stories about
Jupiter: it can bend reality entirely. What I did back then makes for a
funny anecdote, but there’s nothing funny about what’s happening now.
Disinformation and conspiracy theories run rampant; attempts to call out
fake news are decried by a major party’s presidential candidate as
censorship. Knowing who to believe is trickier than ever. And more
confusion is on the horizon. What will happen when fake news is
accompanied by deepfaked video or counterfeit audio? What will
“reputation” mean then? I have no doubt that in seventeen years, this
reflection will seem quaint.
The
websites I created are long gone, and thankfully so. What I wrote
wasn’t meant to endure. I remember resenting that I had to write novels’
worth of text for clients instead of the novels I wished to be writing.
But writing nonsense was writing, too. It was practice. Despite
everything, the job oriented me toward the writing that I do believe
is worth my time: writing that is crafted from contemplation and
introspection, that hopes to connect deeply with its reader, that is
meaningful to me, as a writer. Lately, this kind of writing feels
doomed, too. ChatGPT threatens to take my job—not just my old one, but the one I care about.
Times
change—technology arrives—and we change along with it. We can only
comprehend those changes with perspective. From here, in the present, I
can only wonder what’s to come—how our lives will be transformed. For
now, I can do my best to write something true."
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