– improving the artificial intelligence capabilities to allow responses to evolve better, or developing a more subtle approach to product mentions – suspicions surfaced amongst the most tech-savvy of Fishbowl’s users that some kind of automated program was in operation. Never short of conspiracy theorists, the Grotto had been full of such claims for years. But now there was a greater tone of certainty. Rumours began to spread, some of them well founded. Someone wrote a ‘Spot the Bot’ app that had a reasonable success rate in identifying program palotls – the Los Alamos team itself downloaded and harnessed the app, which it developed and improved, as a testing tool. Within a few months of launch, the denizens of the Grotto were certain that some such program was operating, and demanded to know the truth.
Andrei posted a brief announcement in the Grotto announcing a new form of Deep Connectedness that would serve to bring relevant products to the attention of Fishbowl users, but with little detail about how it worked. He reiterated the FishFarm motto: Don’t tell lies.
The predictable storm ensued. Andrei didn’t even bother to find out what was being said. He had long stopped caring about what went on in the Grotto, and especially what was said by the remaining stalwarts of the 300, who had their own chat stream. Apart from Barry Diller and a handful of others, for whom Andrei could do no wrong, they all seemed constantly opposed to anything he did, usually in the most abusive terms, and never seemed to ask themselves whether they might occasionally – or even just once – show an inkling of appreciation for the service he had built for them.
But the furore wasn’t restricted to the Grotto. It widened rapidly to the blogosphere and then to the mainstream media, engulfing Fishbowl in a hurricane of vituperation. But by now the lesson was deeply engrained in Andrei that he could do just about anything he wanted, and apart from a passing roar of noise, nothing much would happen. He knew there would be the usual School page campaigns that would sign up millions of people who thought that clicking a button to add their name to a page was some kind of meaningful activism.
He knew that every crazed right-winger who wanted to shut down free speech on the net, every crazed libertarian who wanted to lift every restriction on the net, and every crazed left-winger who actually had nothing to say about the net would come after him. He knew that prosecutors would look for legal avenues of attack to boost their profiles, politicians would look for demagogic means of attack to boost their re-election chances, and competitors would look for commercial means of attack to boost their profits. As far as Andrei was concerned, they could do and say what they wanted. He had been through so many battles pursuing his evolving vision of Deep Connectedness that by now he believed that no one really understood what he was trying to do – so he had stopped listening.
He knew that the average Fishbowl user – each of the 1.4 billion people who had no particular axe to grind and just wanted to get on to Fishbowl each day and share stuff with the people they connected with – was going to log on just like he or she had logged on before, vaguely aware, perhaps, of the controversy, but after the first day or two, finding that their experience on the site hadn’t changed one bit, not giving it another thought.
In the office, the mood was a little more perturbed. The number of people working for Fishbowl was much larger than the number when Farming 1.0 had been launched four years previously, and few had been through anything like this before. There was a small number of resignations. On the site, user numbers and visits did drop slightly. Mike Sweetman, now running a much-reduced Homeplace that had been gutted by Fishbowl, promised never to introduce such a program.
Chris laughed when he heard of the pledge. ‘Like anyone cares.’
There were denial-of-service attacks and a rise in the frequency of hacking attempts but, after the experience with Farming 1.0, the infrastructure guys had been working for months to get ready for them. There were speeches from politicians and outrage from across the political spectrum. And then the storm began to abate.
Unable to provoke a reaction from Andrei, with the website not imploding, as so many pundits had predicted it would,