Memshr: a short story

At the Investors

I’m running out of time. Annapurna thought, while getting annoyed with another bout of investors asking the same irrelevant questions about her academics when with every passing second another memory was lost forever. Some loving parent forgetting how their daughter looked when she walked for the first time, some lover seeing off their army husband for the last, or another grandparent fading away.

“And what are your current users saying?”, asked a suit who was, so far, quiet. Annapurna was ready. “I’ve managed to get three of my roommates as alpha testers. I pay them by doing their coding assignments for them” — the room did its predictable nasal exhale and chuckle — “ and despite the low definition monochrome video, they’re beginning to use it more than email for sharing stories and jokes.” Annapurna would’ve preferred if her roommates used Memshr for thoughts deeper than Cars set to the tune of Lose Yourself, but chalked this up to a sampling bias.

“That’s lower than expected for this stage of the service”. The quiet suit again. She thought the suit’s name was Paula Bell or something. Could barely find anything about her besides a series of thoughtful (and very angry) blog posts. “Yes, but I’ve been talking to potential users and what’s stopping them, is that 78% feel there’s a lack of other people using it, and 54% dislike the DIY-ness of the earpiece right now”, consulting her notes to check that she got the percentages right.

“Where are you getting those numbers from?”

“A combination of emails, calls, and door-to-doors I’ve been doing around Waterloo”.

“And yet you’ve only gotten 3 convinced?”

She hated this question because it signaled the end every time. “Almost every single person I’ve talked to wants to use memshr. You spend 5 minutes with them and their eyes light up at the mention of them being able to share their memories. But they don’t want to jam a janky earpiece only to find that their nieces and nephews are not on it.” The chairs slowly creaked.

“This is going to change society as we know it. Everybody and their ma is going to be using it, but what I need right now is capital to improve the tech.” Despite all the rejections, she wasn’t sure why she didn’t change the scripted response. It felt wrong to not share the edge-of-a-cliff like feeling she had with memshr.

As always, the room went dead silent.

Except Bell was grinning. She stood up and the other suits followed suit. “We’ll definitely keep in touch. I speak for the rest of us when we say that we’re excited to see where this goes but we have to iron out the details first”. Annapurna wasn’t sure what was happening. It sounded good? She gave some reflexive response in a daze and walked out. She’d have to save and check out this memory as soon as she got to her flat and see why the hell it went well.

At the apartment

As she was tapping her snow-ridden boots on the mat and juggling 2 large pizza boxes, Annapurna belched “Honeys I’m home!” and her roommates responded somewhat muted. She walked in to the living space to see all three of them plugged in on Samira’s Xbox and very gently placed one of the pizza boxes on their existing pizza box coffee table. A monument that lived for 4–5 months before getting scrapped like clockwork. The real reason it existed was because they couldn’t be bothered to throw out their garbage but some of the more cultured students at UW did mention that it was a unique commentary on the consumption cycle. Memshr was barely working when the Pizza table was made for the first time, so Annapurna only had the voice recording. Might be worth checking out after she reruns today’s pitch.

“I got you guys a box because I felt good about today’s pitch”, she said standing akimbo looking at Samira craning her neck at the screen and Sidney barely acknowledging anything beyond the screen.

“That’s fantastic, Anna”, said Sidney still not taking her eyes off of her side of the split-screen. Samira in a similar fashion muttered “we’re glad you’re showing it to the Man”.

“Don’t forget to clean out the box before adding it to the table”, she reminded them before returning to her room. It was mostly bad timing, she reasoned. They usually care about her progress. And she did notice that both of them had their earpieces in.

“Now let’s see about today”. Annapurna took out her earpiece, which was the right-half of a cheap pair of headphones attached to her head using a strap from a now defunct backpack. It felt weird not having it there, like taking off a cycling helmet before going for a ride. She connected the piece to her desktop and waited a few seconds for a bash script to transfer all the waves to her local instance of Memshr. After a few minutes tweaking the input waves into a fuzzy video, she exported the files to her running database of memories. Adjusting the input waves felt like her grandparents adjusting the antenna of their television set, only now it was with a mouse and keyboard.

Scrolling down her database, she felt a pull every single time to click through some of them, to see just the first few seconds. But she knew that’s how you lost hours and forced herself to sort the memories by newest first. Even the adjusted video looked like a censored Cronenberg movie, but it was leaps ahead of even last week’s best memory. She could make out most audio, text — if it was large enough against a contrasting colour — and people’s outlines.

“As you can see, the definition has been improving drastically since then thanks to this Open Source rasterization toolkit I contributed to — “

“And what are your current users saying?”

There. That was the point Bell started talking. Rewinding the memory back a bit, she could see that her head was down the entire time reading her submitted summary. Annapurna then looked out for any hint that explained Paula Bell’s interest.

“A month ago, you can make out basic shapes and text against bright backgrounds even if you don’t remember paying attention to it at the time. For example, this is a McDonald’s billboard I must’ve seen as I was taking the bus but I didn’t register it at the time. As you can see…”

Her head perked up at that bit about attention and stayed there. What was it about billboards and attention that piqued her interest? Annapurna made her notes and moved on to improving the rasterization. But not before rewarding herself by experiencing some of her memories with the Pizza Table.

10 years later: In the future now

The lone alarm in Annapurna’s house started playing today’s productivity playlist. She got up from her Japanese floor mat and went to the next room to shut it off. In this small room, she began her morning stretches and then moved onto a run on her manual treadmill. She was done in 30 minutes and her playlist automatically stopped. After taking care of other bodily needs, she stepped into her hatchback, tapped her earpiece twice to start recording while driving, and drove in silence to work.

It was a beautiful building that she found excessive. A 15-story building with custom-made blue glass walls spanning an entire city block in downtown Waterloo. It was empty right now, but when it would be full later today, you could see everyone buzzing about for as long as the sun shone. If you looked closer at the windows, you’d see small white polka dots uniformly arranged in a grid all over them. When this building first stood, the clean glass windows fooled birds into crashing and occasionally dying. Being the first one in on most days, seeing dead or dying birds and spending time to take care of them was too much of an emotional toll. So she personally lobbied for those expensive filtered windows to save the local birds. It was an uphill battle because of the exorbitant cost, but her being the CEO of the world’s most popular social network helped.

Annapurna scanned in and walked to her office on the ground floor. The only office in the entire building with the back wall made of brick and a dimmable glass front. She started her day with checking her notes for any to-dos and then reading through a curated list of user feedback from around the world, along with an executive summary.

A/B Testing in North America showed that retention increased by 6% with the new notification system that cycled through a pseudo-random selection of updates every day. This system retained youth and the elderly by 14% and 11% — the demographics that mattered the most. An increasing number of users in India were trying more creative methods to get around the government ban on pornography and Memshr’s content policy. The machine learning algorithm was getting better, but the workload for the content moderation team in India was not enviable. A final update from Eastern Europe where families who were sharing memories to try and locate missing persons consistently succeeded. These Memorys were saved to be used for building up the legal case for use in policing.

She made note of all of this and skimmed through the Memorys of Eastern European families finding people they believed to be lost forever. “That doesn’t look like we’re breaking the fabric of society”, she couldn’t help saying to an empty, quiet room. Annapurna then checked her schedule for the rest of day. Internal meetings for the whole day and a press meeting with … a UW newspaper? She noted to make sure that this was actually on her agenda. She had presented in front of thousands of UW students before, but never had a ‘press’ meeting with someone from MathNEWS, Waterloo’s Bastion of Erudite Thought, before.

An interview with MathNEWS

She was shocked and confused. This ‘reporter’ — that was too strong of a word for a student volunteer at a newsletter — had been at Memshr’s heels for at least a year. Knocked on the doorstep every month, without fail. They sent tailored emails to every single person in the Marketing team across the world. Hounded team members on LinkedIn. Called any support line they could find. Sent physical mail repeatedly. And even sent a telegram to this office a month back. This person used every avenue available to them except training pigeons or contacting the team on Memshr. In every failed interaction, their message was clear. They wanted to meet Annapurna for 15 minutes.

Annapurna climbed to the press room on the fifteenth floor. The flipped structure of the building ( executives on ground and public-facing on the top) was the architect’s idea of subverting corporate hierarchy but was a pain to actually deal with. The press room was one entire glass box that sometimes needed cooling even in the winter because of all the trapped heat. The metal chairs facing the podium reflected the sunlight and the noise of the busy street below was a faint buzz.

There were two people in the room talking as if they were old friends. One was Fang, from marketing, who Annapurna noticed was not wearing her earpiece. This went against the unspoken rule at work and especially against the actual rule at Marketing. Annapurna would have to bring it up to her superior. The other person was a whole other story.

They wore a white baseball cap with no logo but had dirt in some places. Instead of regular glasses, they had on something that looked like Safety glasses with a green tint. Their last accessory was a black and white Rorschach mask that looked like it was smirking. They sat with their elbows on both knees, completely absorbed in what Fang was saying as she was drying up tears of laughter from the corner of her eyes.

As soon as Fang saw that Annapurna was in the room, she stood up and waved. The other person was slower to act and despite the eye wear, Annapurna felt she was being scanned. “This is TC from MathNEWS” Fang said, putting her hand on TC’s shoulder.

“TC?”

“Well, before we get into that, I had two quick questions. Firstly, would you kindly please remove your earpiece for this conversation? Secondly, do you believe that Memorys could be used as evidence in courts right now, with an assumption that they are stronger than witness testimony and closer to a recording? Just a yes or no.”

This person does not screw around with niceties for me, Annapurna thought. If she answered no to the second, then that could be used as evidence against using Memshr in the courts. If she answered yes, then by section 184 of the Criminal Code, TC just revoked consent. Smart.

Annapurna tapped her earpiece twice to stop recording and after years of keeping the piece in, she removed it. It felt like watching your phone break and the internet going off at the same time before driving to a place you’ve never been to. The immediate fear that these memories would be lost forever almost forced her to put it back. She was done being nice. “I also revoke my consent to any recordings and anything you quote has to get vetted by us or we sue.” TC reached into their pocket and pulled out an ancient digital recorder that was recording so far, pressed the red square stop button and nodded like one old chess player to another.

Annapurna wasn’t fuming, but wasn’t cool either: “How about you tell me why I shouldn’t walk away right now and block you on everything?”

“I’m sorry I was being a hard ass earlier. It’s just the approach that works for smart, rational people who I don’t know well personally. You can walk away at any point you want but I guarantee you I’ll be asking some questions you’ve never gotten before. I know that because I checked.”

“Checked what?” Annapurna noted that her tone was cooler now and she felt, somehow, more comfortable after hearing their voice.

“I’m confident that I checked everything that was publicly available.” TC answered, like it was nothing. “For example, many people know that Memshr aggressively acquired companies starting in 2006. Some people know the big names. Fewer know that you purchased a tiny company, I’m talking 2 founders and 3 interns, by the name of “The Facebook” in 2006 for around half a million. Chump change, really. What very little people know, is that one of the founders, Mike Zuckerdog, was the only holdout. I emailed Zuckerdog a couple times and he told me that he was convinced after this one closed door meeting with you. He declined to say anything else. My first question is then how did you convince as far as I can tell, a stubborn S.O.B. to part with his ‘reason to live’?”

Annapurna wasn’t impressed with the depth here. It wasn’t impossible to find this information, but the hardest part would’ve been having a conversation with Mike. Maybe mildly impressed. Annapurna had the Memory of it, of course but she wasn’t going to show it to TC. “Before I answer that, what’s with the name and getup?”

“I don’t consent to having my face stored in millions of databases where they could be used to identify me when I don’t want to, or for them to make money. To me, it feels unnatural that giving up your likeness is the norm and wearing masks isn’t. I’m sure some years from now, we’ll all be wearing masks unless legislation changes … I could also be horribly scarred from an accident involving acid and lightning.” TC laughed and Annapurna chuckled despite herself.

“The name is something I use in work correspondence. The people I know and love, and only they, know my real one.” TC answered with no inclination towards sharing it and waited for her response. In spite of the flagrant eccentricities, she’s heard of people with views similar to theirs but never met a person who went all the way.

“I can tell you what I remember. Mike struck me as someone who wanted to express himself through his work and was convinced Facebook would do the world good. So I told him what I thought would convince me. That if he cared about that, no one would be using a service that shared photos and relationship statuses when you could share honest-to-God memories from your brain. And that he was receiving a pretty penny to express himself in other ways.” Annapurna said, trying to look as if she was recalling a memory.

All of this was a complete lie. What happened was a brutal, long, and loud match where Mike threatened to “destroy” Memshr and proceeded to lose his shit. Screaming death threats and vile abuses like a child. Mike didn’t know that the room was bugged. So it was either signing or seeing that information go public. She was sure that The Facebook wouldn’t have been a threat in the long run, but having a similar competitor that early in the game could’ve been unpredictable. She thought, but decided not to say to ‘TC’.

“Huh, I’m surprised Mike was so civil about it.” TC answered, their arms now crossed and leaning back. Annapurna had an inkling that TC knew the answer before they asked it. She was now more impressed.

Annapurna laughed as well as she could. “Yeah, I can see Mike giving off those vibes. But once you get to know him, you realize he’s a calm person with child-like curiosity who cared deeply about his image”, she said and gauged whether TC got the hint.

“I see. It looks like you understood Mike well and showed him sides of himself he didn’t know was being … noticed”. That pause was not subtle but TC did lean in closer and uncross their elbows. “Since we’ve both established we’re not idiots, I’m not going to ask you any more questions about your past. My next, and last, question is this: when will it be enough for Memshr? You’re already the most used social media network in the world, you’re pining for introduction into governmental and medical use, and your next closest competitor is banned in the U.S. When will you say ‘it’s been a good run’?” TC asked, less calm than they’ve ever been today.

Annapurna hated this line of questioning. Hearing this after years’ worth of opinions about their net negative effect on humankind was reaching a limit. She had enough.

“Listen. I don’t understand why you and so, so many others frame us this way. This framing that Memshr ought to stop because it’s growing too fast. Because what’s happening is unprecedented. Do you have any idea how much good we do? We’re the closest shot people have at immortality unless Musk and Walt Disney have a weird robot baby. Not even counting the ability to save the memories of your loved ones forever, through sickness, old-age, and death; we’re saving actual fucking lives. More people are being found after going missing, people with memory disorders use Memshr as a doctor-recommended recovery tool, and probably a dozen other ways we don’t even know about. If people feel violated or oppressed or whatever, they can just stop using Memshr. That’s another thing I want to remind these people about. Just stop using it. If you have some inability to not use our service then it’s either that you’re not being sincere about the value we bring, or you have a problem. So my answer to your loaded-as-heck question is never. We’re not going to stop until we have a definitive market-based reason for stopping. If people have some newly discovered moral issue with us, that’s what legislation is for, which we will — and have, mind you — gladly comply with. Until then, we’re going to be providing the best service we can.” She wasn’t sure why she went on for so long. Maybe knowing how illegitimate MathNEWS is. Or that she was just tired.

TC was quiet and observing throughout the whole response and it looked like nothing changed once she was done.

“Thank you. I have no more further questions. I’ll be sending a rough draft of what I’ll be writing sometime soon. Thank you for your time”, TC reached out their hand and Annapurna shook it. Funny, she thought, she didn’t know TC had their gloves on this entire time.

With that, TC left the room as quietly as they must have come in and the room was silent. The sun was setting and its gleam shone off the metal chairs in the room like so many mirrors. In all of the chairs except Annapurna’s where she sat a bit longer and reflected on what she had done.