-THOUGHTS LIKE BUTTERFLIES-

July 24, 2009.

With only a few weeks left before the official end of their internships, the overwhelming majority of interns were getting increasingly anxious about their prospects of receiving a full-time offer. Every meeting an intern had with their sponsor came with anticipation and a hopeful but nervous stomach full of butterflies. Every meeting was a chance to hear good news. In reality, though, this almost never happened, notwithstanding the summer’s anomalies: Aarti, William, and Yuri.

Stephen was in a unique position among the crop of interns. He was the only one who had led a company from inception, through hiring and firing, through growth and decline, and had seen the cycle from every angle. Nevertheless, despite the advantage this gave him in recognizing the rat race with the other interns, Stephen was unabashedly caught up in it as well. His work had been solid this summer. He had mastered Jaan’s system. He had crunched numbers and scoured through petabytes of data looking for patterns in users, and in doing so had made many advertisers (and one non-profit organization) extremely happy. Nevertheless, as far as Atiq or Jaan was concerned, he had been doing exactly what he was hired to do. But who wasn’t doing that much? It was abundantly clear that only those who exceeded expectations had a chance of a job offer. That is what Yuri had done.

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When Aarti asked for Kohan and Stephen’s help on an urgent project, there were many reasons that they were willing to offer their services in any way required. The project, with the three of them focused on it, only took a day to finish—they started at 1:00 p.m. and by 12:30 a.m. Kohan’s part was completed. Aarti and Stephen finished an hour later. The day had been spent improving a light beer advertising campaign aimed explicitly at people earning less than $35,000 in both the Carolinas and Georgia. The experiments were set to run. In twenty-four hours, the results would be tabulated and the success or failure of their analyses and campaign refinements would be known. There was nothing more to be done for that project, and it was too late to start anything new.

“I was going to see if Kohan wants to get some coffee. You interested?” Stephen offered to Aarti.

She took a book out of her backpack and held it up, this time with her hand deliberately placed across any exposed skin on an otherwise hot pink and lavender book cover. “Not tonight. I’ve got some important reading to catch up on,” she smiled.

They started to walk out of Aarti’s office. Both stopped before making it past the threshold. It was the only appropriate reaction. The sight of a gyrating Kohan, in full regalia, would likely have made anyone stop in their tracks. The hat. The boots. The mustache. An enormous set of headphones covered his ears, and tethered him closely to his computer on his desk. Despite his bobbing backside, his head had to stay still and slightly bent to ensure the headphones didn’t come unplugged. Though no music could be heard to anyone but him, Kohan’s urgently whispered rendition of Kid Rock’s “I’m a Cowboy” was probably music enough for the audience—which, as they discovered from glancing around the room, also included Yuri, who had been helplessly trying his hardest to ignore the spectacle.

“Sure you don’t want to join us for coffee, Aarti?” Stephen asked again.

She shook her head no, and with that Aarti departed, on her way to finding a comfortable spot on Ubatoo’s grounds to read for a few hours, and try her hardest to remove that last image of Kohan from her mind before sleep came.

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At 2:15 a.m., instead of going home, as both of them should have, Kohan and Stephen walked to an all night café and ordered lattes from the single barista on duty in the nearly empty room. Stephen guided Kohan away from her, a precaution even Kohan found a bit odd. “I think I’ve come up with a project we can hang our hats on,” Stephen said.

“I’m in,” Kohan replied, without hesitating.

“Let me tell you what it is first, then you can decide.”

“Okay, but, really, I’m in. You know I don’t have a project of my own yet.”

“I’ve been working with this group, ACCL. Ever heard of them? Atiq introduced me to the head guy, Sebastin, at the first party we attended. They’re a non-profit that warns people when they are likely to be mistakenly flagged by the NSA/CIA/FBI/Homeland Security, or whatever government group is now doing all the wiretapping, tortures, and whatever else they do. You know, all your old bosses. Anyway, the ACCL tries to warn them, and the public, that this type of thing happens.”

“I’m not sure I believe that any group knows what the NSA, or any of those agencies you mentioned, looks for,” Kohan interjected.

“They obviously have some source I don’t know about. These guys are all well connected. Who knows who they talk to? They’ve certainly attracted the attention of Ubatoo and a bunch of the other big tech companies around here. I imagine they have the ear of plenty of people in Washington, too.”

“Okay, I’m skeptical, but go on. What’ve you been doing for them?”

“The same things we do for any advertiser who comes to us: sift through all of our logs and data, the usual. I just hand them a list of people who match the criteria they think are being targeted. Then, it’s up to them to contact the people. I think they’re setting up some lawsuits, too. But you didn’t hear that from me.”

“And Atiq is okay with you doing this? We don’t usually hand out specific people’s names to advertisers. We just usually use that information ourselves, right?”

“Well, it was Atiq who introduced us, and he asked me to do whatever they needed. They’re not an advertiser. It’s for a good cause. Besides, in the end, it’s going to save these people from a ton of trouble.”

“I suppose it will, if ACCL is right. So, what’s your idea?”

Truth be told, after hours of tortuous thought, Stephen hadn’t yet thought about a concrete project. He had wanted to brainstorm something with Kohan, but the unfortunate decision to start talking about this after 2:00 a.m., coupled with Kohan’s already clear skepticism, wasn’t boding well for a productive brainstorming session. But now he needed to continue with it anyway.

Stephen turned to the usual standby that is inevitably applied to anything done manually at Ubatoo—make it automatic. “Maybe we could automate the work I did for ACCL? Wouldn’t it be useful for anyone to be able to log on to Ubatoo and get a ‘How likely am I to be monitored score?’ We would look at what books you’ve bought, what products, medicines, lawn chemicals you’ve purchased, what web pages you’ve visited online, what queries you’ve sent us, where you’ve traveled, who you’ve communicated with, and everything else we can get our hands on. We’d just crunch all that information and give you a single score, 1–100 of how likely you are to make it onto some watch list. It would be like a credit score, except rather than looking to see if you pay off your bills on time, we would look at a bunch of warning signals, telling you that you should be careful.”

Kohan’s expression portended his sarcasm. “If I get a score of 1, I’m basically Mother Teresa, and if I get 100, I’m Osama Bin Laden? Got to admit, Stephen, didn’t see this coming.”

“Something like that. If you’ve really got nothing to hide, and your score is high, you might want to know that. I’d certainly want to know, wouldn’t you?”

“You definitely think differently than most interns here. I could have easily imagined that you would come up with a self-serve product where advertisers can explore their own data and reconfigure their advertising spending. You know, automate the other 99 percent of the work that you and I do. But, instead, you come up with the Terrorist-O-Meter.

“You’re still in, right?” Stephen said, trying his hardest to grin along with Kohan.

“First things first, Stephen. Where does this ACCL actually get their information? How do they know what books terrorists read or what web sites they visit? I didn’t know they had an official reading list.”

“Oh, come on, Kohan, you and I both know that once we have a few known terrorist support sites, we can infer dozens of others. We can watch who visits them and what other sites they visit, and what products and books they eventually buy, who they send e-mail to. For that matter, we could look at what soft drink they buy most or what car they drive most. You know this.”

“I do. We would have killed for that information at the NSA,” Kohan said, serious for the first time in this conversation.

“We have it all here, available to us. We have the opportunity to finally do something good with it, and get the full-time offers we want,” Stephen said, getting himself more excited about the project.

“Okay, it’s interesting. But I just can’t see it having the same impact that Yuri’s project did . . . Let me play devil’s advocate here. First, why would Ubatoo really care about the Terrorist-O-Meter? It doesn’t make them money and puts them in the spotlight for having this data. Second, technologically, it’s a nice, maybe even really nice, use of Jaan’s system. On the other hand, it’s just applying some new rules to the same type of data crunching we do every day, like you said. Third, who in the world is going to champion this inside Ubatoo? Who’s going to stick their neck out for this? I don’t know, Stephen.”

“Kohan, this is the right thing to do. Look at what we just did. We just finished using the world’s largest computation machine for micro-targeting crappy beer to destitute people in three Southern states so they can get drunk faster. Don’t you want to do something more meaningful?”

Kohan didn’t respond.

Stephen tried again. “If nothing else, it’s better than any other plan we have right now. Together we have a much better chance for success and I could use your help.”

Maybe he would say yes. Maybe Stephen had finally broken through.

But it was not to be.

“I think this one is going to be all you, Stephen. Having done an internship at the NSA, it might be a mistake for me to be too closely involved. You might want to think about it too, you know?”

In fact, Stephen did know. Despite trying to sound convinced in his ramblings, he was far from it. Kohan’s hesitation and reluctance derailed Stephen for days. Thoughts and ideas fluttered in and out of his mind like butterflies. They had no rhyme or reason, and each fleeting flash of brilliance held his undivided attention—but only until the next moment, when it was lost and forgotten.