worth the effort. It might have been a new model of advertising on the net, one many more times effective than the existing model for the products to which it could be applied, but it would never take the place of the existing model because those products were so restricted. The really interesting questions were: what if it could not only complement the traditional model but displace it? And what would it take to do that?
Naturally, they saw the first question differently. For Chris, what they had achieved was proof of user acceptance for a radical new model of marketing – but the real prize would be a form of selling that could extend across all goods and services, no matter how low in value, from bubblegum to soda. For Andrei, what they had was a limited and inefficient form of connectedness between organizations and individuals – but potentially the harbinger of a radically new form of connectedness with a scale and reach never seen before. Where their interests converged was in the second question.
The answer to it was clear: what was required was the development of an automated program that produced and managed palotls indistinguishable from those of the manually operated palotls of the Fish Farm. A program that could scan the network, identify people who were potentially responsive to a particular message, create customized personas indistinguishable from real people to engage those individuals, develop connections, hold conversations, build relationships and deliver the message in the most effective way and at the optimal moment calculated to achieve a positive response. Set free in the Fishbowl environment, with a defined set of objectives, it would be independent, capable of learning by itself, adapting, developing. As Chris might have put it: create that program and you could sell anything, whatever its value. As Andrei might have put it: create that program, and you could create connectedness between an individual and any organization, whatever its size.
The common objective of developing an automated palotl program meant that they were never forced to confront each other’s divergent conceptualizations of what such a program would be for. In fact, each of them thought that they were in control of what they were about to do.
It was Chris who first broached the idea of trying to develop a palotl program during one of his fortnightly trips to Palo Alto, during the Farming experiment. Typically, he regarded the prospect as both unprecedentedly momentous and belly-achingly hilarious. The idea of a program that could rifle unseen through the electronic world, listening, morphing, talking, asking, answering and selling stuff as if it were a regular person was so abominably horrendous that it titillated the cynic in him like nothing else he had ever known. But if they could pull it off, it would also be the greatest technical advance in his adult lifetime, with the prospect of wealth on a scale almost unimaginable.
After two years of working with Andrei, Chris honestly didn’t know the extent to which Andrei really didn’t care about the money that Fishbowl was capable of earning, just as he still didn’t know if Andrei’s remarks sometimes betrayed a parchingly dry deadpan humour or utter, naive seriousness. All Andrei ever talked about was Deep Connectedness, and he professed indifference to Fishbowl’s commercial success as long as it generated enough cash to keep funding its development. Was that real or put on? Andrei would have been far from the first tech CEO to hide his true commercial aspirations behind such a pretence. Chris was sure that Deep Connectedness was the only thing that had mattered to the Andrei he had first met over dinner at Mang, but he found it hard to believe that nothing had changed as Fishbowl generated ever larger revenues and its valuation climbed. Yet even if Andrei was only affecting his dorm-boy altruism, Chris knew that, as a result, he couldn’t openly appeal to an interest in money – he would have to leave that to Andrei, who was smart enough to see the potential, and let him work it out for himself. So in proposing that they try to develop a palotl program, Chris emphasized what he knew Andrei would openly respond to: the size of the challenge, the magnitude of the technical advance, the gain in efficiency.
Andrei, for his part, thought that he had stepped out of Chris’s shadow. He rarely had moments now when he wondered if he was the right person to lead Fishbowl and, when he did, he