A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [97]
Alex leaned against his cushion and lit up a joint. He’d spent the afternoon trying—and failing—to tell Rebecca what he’d agreed to do for Bennie Salazar. Bennie had never used the word “parrot;” since the Bloggescandals, the term had become an obscenity. Even the financial disclosure statements that political bloggers were required to post hadn’t stemmed the suspicion that people’s opinions weren’t really their own. “Who’s paying you?” was a retort that might follow any bout of enthusiasm, along with laughter—who would let themselves be bought? But Alex had promised Bennie fifty parrots to create “authentic” word of mouth for Scotty Hausmann’s first live concert, to be held in Lower Manhattan next month.
Using his handset, he began devising a system for selecting potential parrots from among his 15,896 friends. He used three variables: how much they needed money (“Need”), how connected and respected they were (“Reach”), and how open they might be to selling that influence (“Corruptibility”). He chose a few people at random and ranked them in each category on a scale from 10 to 0, then graphed the results on his handset in three dimensions, looking for a cluster of dots where the three lines intersected. But in every case, scoring well in two categories meant a terrible score in the third: poor and highly corruptible people—his friend Finn, for example, a failed actor and quasi–drug addict who’d posted a recipe for speedballs on his page and lived mostly off the goodwill of his former Wesleyan classmates (Need: 9; Corruptibility: 10) had no reach (1). Poor, influential people like Rose, a stripper/cellist whose hairstyle changes were instantly copied in certain parts of the East Village (Need: 9; Reach: 10) were incorruptible (0)—in fact, Rose kept a rumor sheet on her page that functioned as an informal police blotter, recording which friend’s boyfriend had given her a black eye, who had borrowed and trashed a drum set, whose dog had been left tied to a parking meter for hours in the rain. There were influential and corruptible people like his friend Max, onetime singer for the Pink Buttons, now a wind-power potentate who owned a Soho triplex and threw a caviar-strewn Christmas party each year that had people kissing his ass from August onward in hopes of being invited (Reach: 10; Corruptibility: 8). But Max was popular because he was rich (Need: 0) and had no incentive to sell.
Alex stared goggle-eyed at his handset screen. Would anyone agree to do this? And then it came to him that someone already had: himself. Alex graphed himself as he might appear to Rebecca: Need: 9; Reach: 6; Corruptibility: 0. Alex was a purist, like Bennie had said; he’d walked away from sleazy bosses (in the music business) just as he now routinely walked away from women who were drawn to the sight of a man caring for his baby daughter during business hours. Hell, he’d met Rebecca after trying to chase down a guy in a wolf mask who’d snatched her purse the day before Halloween. But Alex had caved to Bennie Salazar without a fight. Why? Because his apartment would soon be dark and airless? Because being with Cara-Ann while Rebecca worked full-time teaching and writing had made him restless? Because he never could quite forget that every byte of information he’d posted online (favorite color, vegetable, sexual position) was stored in the databases of multinationals who swore they would never, ever use it—that he was owned, in other words, having sold himself unthinkingly at the very point in his life when he’d felt most subversive? Or was it the