Danny Slowe

I've been writing like a madman, I just haven't done much I'm ready to post on here. It's weird, because my I don't think I'm learning a ton in my writing class, but I'm struggling to generate output. Each week the writing assignment is to write a 1000-2500 word story based on some prompt (for reference' sake, Officer's Discretion is 2250 words). I didn't finish either of my last assignments, though I did have to turn in a similar-length workshop piece last Wednesday along with an assignment, and I finished that (more on that later). That's pretty absurd, because I'm putting in 20-30 hours writing each week (it was actually 45 last week). There are 8 others in my class, and I would doubt any of them have more than 10 free hours laying around each week, but they seem to get the work done.

Best I can tell, my process is hindered by my unwillingness to embrace "write what you know." Whenever I start a piece, I want to create characters and setting from scratch and figure out what happens as I go along. That requires a lot of prep work. The 25-year-old actress in my class wrote a workshop story about a 23-year-old dancer. The 26-year-old comic workshopped a piece about a... 26-year-old comic. I'm writing about forty-something police officers, Elvis Presley (of which I knew nothing about), and tech CEOs. I don't know what the lives of these people look like. I don't spend much time thinking about what they value, what they fear, or what they want. I have to write up long character sketches about them before I'm comfortable starting a story.

I could say a lot more about what makes me such a slow fiction writer, but it's unnecessary. Bottom line is it takes me 20000 words of output to write a 2000 word story. I don't mind that, since I enjoy the process, but it doesn't make me feel great to come up short on deadlines. That part is discouraging. It's also taken away from writing my blog, which I had been enjoying until writing started taking up more time than poker. I do think I produce better output with an external deadline bearing down on me

My workshop piece is the genesis chapter of my Radical Transparency book. I'm actually proud of this piece, although it doesn't accomplish everything I want to accomplish. I got out a lot of good info in 2300 words, and I think the chapter should naturally be about 4000 (If I keep this storyline for the book, I'll lengthen it, but 4000 words is too much for a workshop). It will get workshopped next Wednesday, and I'll try to write up something on the feedback.

 

The Legend of Danny Slowe

No one ever really understands the true purpose of a new technology when it launches, not even its own creator. The difference between Danny Slowe and everyone else is he never resisted this truth. For him, reasons were perfectly nice things to have, but they were superfluous to the creation process.

 

“I don’t think I’m proposing anything earth-shattering. I’m simply following the arc of reality TV to its logical conclusion.”

“Jesus Christ, Danny. That’s not the point. This project might be feasible. We could probably free up enough capital to get the lights turned on for this thing. It’s obviously really interesting and something worth thinking about, and it might turn a profit in the right hands, but this is not us. It’s not you.”

Danny went silent in thought and Carlos looked on as Chin blearily stumbled out of his tent. Austin was still sleeping as the Sunday morning sun climbed up over the Tetons and went to work burning off the fog hanging over the lake. The breakfast campfire was starting to die down and the pontoon plane would be at the island in a couple hours to take everyone back to civilization. Carlos had been searching for those words for a day and a half now, and he was surprised at how discreetly they crept up from of his subconscious and slipped out through his mouth. Win or lose, at least now he said what he needed to say.

 

When they wrote the profile for 24 year-old tech mogul and Kwyjibo CEO Danny Slowe in Forbes in May of 2018, all anyone could talk about was the cover. In person, he was rail-thin with disheveled short brown hair and a perpetual ghost-white programmer’s tan. He didn’t look like much until you got him talking. Once he started talking about something he was passionate about, his gray eyes would widen and start shooting green sparks, and the flat affect in his voice would give way to a deeper, more frantic cadence as he desperately tried to help his mouth catch up with his mind. Photographs rarely captured this magnetic energy that turned on and off like a switch, but the photographer managed to catch Danny in an action shot during the profile interview. Leaned forward in his chair with a plain white flat-brimmed baseball hat and thin, scraggly two-week old beard, Danny’s arms were fully extended in front of him, mimicking someone white-knuckling a steering wheel. His eyes were wide open and his mouth was in the middle of forming an “o”. If you squinted, it looked like he was about to choke someone.

They didn’t even bother with the photo shoot.

At the moment the picture was snapped, he was talking about how these camping trips were essential to reconnect with who he was and critical to the health of Kwyjibo as a whole. The trips returned him to his roots, exploring the woods of Bend, Oregon as a kid along with his best friend and future right hand man, Carlos Castillo, and solving coding problems in the dirt. Later on, these camping trips would also be the crucibles Danny used to initiate people into his inner circle (the first eight Kwyjibo employees all had to interview around the campfire). Going into the woods and electronically off the grid, he said, was the only time he felt safe to let his mind wander. He would often (only half-jokingly) say that if the world knew all the goofy unrealistic ideas he came up with in the woods, he’d be locked up. The legend of Danny Slowe began as soon as the world found out that that picture came when he was relating that story.

 

Danny pulled the pot of coffee out of the campfire and poured a mug for Chin. “I’m not actually saying we should get in to the entertainment business. We’re not creating anything except a framework. It’s not our job to figure out what content is going to come out of this.”

Now that Carlos finally figured out what he wanted to say, he could barely let Danny finish. “That’s not what I was getting at either. Look, doesn’t it seem odd to you that you’re dreamed up this completely invasive environment while you’re out here in the middle of nowhere? It isn’t strange that you had to escape from the real world to imagine a world with no escape valve?”

Carlos was on a roll so he kept going. “When you first started Kwyjibo, you were trying to fix an education system that let you down. When we built Circles of Influence algorithm, it was driven by your passion for understanding how you yourself made decisions. When we were kids, we wrote apps for games that we wanted to play. But that’s not what’s going on here. You don’t want this for yourself. You already said you could never actually live in this world you want to create. It’s not who you are and it’s not what you value.”

Chin had sat down and joined them around the fire. “Maybe this isn’t as much about who he is as much as it’s about who he wants to be.”

“Well maybe he ought to do that his own time and not use a Fortune 500 company as his own personal art therapy.”

 

That’s why Carlos has always been Danny’s right hand man. Danny was a creator, but he created indiscriminately and he didn’t dream small. Carlos was the hatchet man. Carlos reined in Danny’s energy. He challenged him, buying Danny time to let his dreams battle each other in the dense unforgiving jungle of his mind. No one acted on any idea of Danny’s, not even Danny himself, until it spent 3 months at the top of Danny’s cerebral food chain. Together, he and Carlos built Kwyjibo on the backs of a handful of ideas that thrived in the jungle, which in turn stood on the corpses of thousands of dreams slain by Carlos. It’s been this way since they were little kids. Danny provided endless lightning bolts of creative insight and Carlos was the jar that picked which ones to catch.

Carlos had a suspicion that, unlike most of these expeditions, Danny planned this trip with an agenda in mind. Usually Danny would include at least one “grown-up” – a top-level guy from the Finance, Operations, or Legal departments - to help keep Danny’s energy focused. On this trip he brought two other creatives and zero people over the age of 30. Chin Yu, like Carlos, was a childhood friend of Danny’s, though unlike Carlos he didn’t actually work at Kwyjibo. He did freelance work as an industrial artist, however, and was commissioned by Kwyjibo whenever a new building was added to the campus. Austin Behar rounded out the group. Danny hired him a year earlier after striking up a conversation about Sartre with him after a Flaming Lips concert. Danny’s impulse hires typically subscribed to the philosophy of “accumulate talent and figure out what to do with it later”. With no apparent holes to fill, Austin made $150k in his first year to play philosopher and ask questions about projects, organizational structure, or whatever else came to mind. A quintessential misfit outsider with no real-world experience in the tech industry, Austin’s knack for asking egoless, naïve questions about new features and products led to several performance-enhancing tweaks, and earned him the unofficial title of VP of Antagonism.

Carlos was the only one in the group who could wear a collared shirt without squirming like a three-year-old in church. And even he only did so under duress.

They landed on Jackson Lake in Western Wyoming early Friday afternoon, and the pontoon plane hadn’t even disappeared into the sky before Carlos’s suspicions were confirmed… Danny just thought of something big, and he needed creative inspiration to flesh things out. Just that week, Kwyjibo had completed the acquisition of a company that had developed “rubbing”, a digital motion-analysis process that can identify and tag specific actions and differentiate different people in video, paving the way for sophisticated in-video searching. Danny didn’t waste any time, as he laid out his vision for implementing this new technology as they set up camp.

He called his thought experiment Radical Transparency.

A world with no privacy.

A fully functioning American town of 10,000 people and 100,000 ultra-res cameras plus reflective spatial re-imaging implants for every citizen, all with feeds to Kwyjibo servers to be “rubbed” and uploaded to Kwyjibo’s Mulch search engine to be accessed by the rest of the online world. Literally everything said and done and electronically sent into and out of this town would be captured and documented and shared with the world.

Ad revenue from the search engine and live feeds would be the first piece of the revenue pie, but Danny anticipated the largest piece coming from production rights. Professional and amateur producers alike could pay for higher-tier access to the Mulch engine and play Build-Your-Own-Reality-Show. The higher-tier material could also be a treasure trove of information for academic research and software developers would have opportunities to develop apps to mine, manipulate and report data and to enhance Mulch.

Chin and Austin immediately ran with the idea. Before they could get down to discussing the practical merits of the concept, Austin dragged the group into a moralistic debate about privacy more befitting of a college beatnik coffee shop than a high-powered meeting at a Fortune 500 company. Privacy had been a hot button topic since the rise of Facebook, and Austin had friends in ivory towers who were trying to persuade private citizens to shift the privacy battleground away from the losing battle of limiting government and corporate access to and sharing of personal data and shift it toward demanding increased transparency of the hows and the whys of institutional use of private data. He fell in love with Danny’s idea and spent much of the evening on his soapbox, predicting the positive developments in politics and business that could come from Radical Transparency.

To be fair, Carlos was transfixed with Radical Transparency as well, but he knew enough to hold back. It was Carlos’s job to play devil’s advocate and think of reasons why this experiment might not work. He’s supposed to provide a dry run for the gauntlet of protests sure to come from the grown-ups back at HQ in Silicon Valley.

The practical ideas didn’t start flowing until the Saturday morning hike, but they made headway.

They could lay out and build the town from scratch to minimize technical snafus and ensure complete control over the “set”, and the Radical Transparency division of Kwyjibo would be run from inside the town as a show of Kwyjibo’s commitment to being, well, Radically Transparent.

Aside from Kwyjibo employees, Kwyjibo should have minimal say about the makeup of the remainder of the citizenship. If demand outstripped supply, citizens should be chosen by lottery or online vote, not by an application process.

No minors and no convicted felons.

Honoring a five-year commitment to the project would be necessary from the citizens for them to earn royalties on the content beyond the yearly stipends.

To avoid incentivizing outlandish camera-hogging behavior, royalties would be distributed evenly to all citizens (not that they thought anyone could mug for the camera for five straight years without having a break down).

There were still plenty of details to work out, but it was a starting point.

Everyone split off on Saturday afternoon and Danny and Carlos spoke on their own as they wandered around the island. At this point, Carlos hadn’t found his own words yet, so he discussed the astronomical liability involved with exposing 10,000 people to the mindfuck of a life with no privacy. It was clearly both chilling and financially risky to potentially play a role in the damaging of the psyches of so many people, but it was debatably criminal behavior as well. Because Danny didn’t allow phones or computers on these trips, it was impossible to talk to one of the grown-ups and figure out exactly how big of a hurdle this was, but Carlos thought there was no way it was just a bump in the road.

Aside from the legal exposure, they were looking at several billions in startup costs and at least a few years of lead time before they could earn dollar one. Other projects would have to be delayed or scrapped entirely to free up capital. It would change the face of Kwyjibo completely.

That said, by Saturday night, Carlos had to admit Radical Transparency intellectually made sense from an implementation standpoint. It was a bold move, of course, but Kwyjibo shareholders were of a different breed and they were desensitized to bold moves. The cult of personality surrounding their Dear Leader Danny Slowe insulated them from shareholder revolt. No one was willing to stand in the way of the guy on the Forbes cover.

 

As the fire died down and the camp was packed up, Carlos wondered if he got through to Danny. This Radical Transparency didn’t fit in to the jungle of Danny’s mind. It wasn’t an animal at all, it was an alien that was eating everything in sight and growing stronger by the minute. It was something that Danny wanted, and Carlos could never remember Danny ever truly wanting anything. But with the soft whine of the pontoon plane in the distance, he knew his time was up.

 

Posted with Blogsy