The Last Network - Chapter 17
Matchmakers
Paolo stood in his office and watched his team hard at work. He saw Carlos the receptionist bent over chatting with Diana, their AI lead. One had an EQ off the charts, the other a genius IQ. Between them was a split screen monitor. They were eavesdropping on a Peared session. The rest of the group were in various stages of spying. Some were plotting to pair people together based on a combination of data and intuition. Others were testing subtle pushes into missions to keep pairs working together. The final group were performing session replays, searching for clues to what made good matches.
While an AI would ultimately perform all of these jobs, they had a long way to go before getting there. So much of what they were trying to manufacture was in the soft skills. Verbal cues, body language, and pacing. Machines could be taught what those meant, but they couldn’t identify them on their own. That was still a job for people.
None of this would be possible if they followed the Silicon Valley Code, but FriendZone rules allowed it. The terms and conditions were designed so that Peared and its associated vendors had the right to monitor active sessions in order to improve the overall quality of the service. The phrase “overall quality of the service” was vague enough that it could mean anything, and so was “monitoring active sessions.”
Rabbit’s rules of engagement were to simply not break any local laws. Most of the world did not have the protections that Europe and the US had, so Paolo was free to snoop and manipulate as he saw fit. The launch of missions had given them some traction. After experimenting with prizes, they discovered that topping up cellphones played big overseas. He found the poorest countries where unemployment was high, technology was cheap, and people had time to kill. He flooded those markets with missions to earn free airtime, timing marketing to days where carriers launched bonus promotions like double data.
Peared started shooting up the international app charts. More importantly, it was accumulating the data needed to refine the service into a success.
Paolo knew that many people had ethical problems with his approach. He simply did not care. All of humanity was some form of manipulation from time immemorial. The strongest hunter manipulated the tribe. Whomever claimed to speak for God manipulated the nation. Now manipulation was digital. The methods had changed, but the relationship had not. People needed to be led.
Strength no longer ruled people, nor did belief in God. Attention now ruled people.
Paolo had the ability to capture people’s attention because he could think deeply about systems. He understood machines, he understood people, and he had an intimate understanding of the relationship between people and their machines. Most importantly, Paolo was an obsessive thinker. His self-worth was tied to the difficulty of the problem that he was working on. Money mattered, and power did too, but it was critical that he fed his brain with something so demanding that it consumed the entirety of him. If he didn’t have that, the doubts and boredom of everyday life ate him from the inside out. Peared was now his only waking thought.
He didn’t care what he was doing to others because it was the only way to protect him from himself.