Clean-cut, can-do Alexander Heffner (never Alex) is twenty-six years old. He went to Harvard. He has high hopes for technology. He has high hopes for journalism.

And he has zero plans to start a disruptive media company. Instead, he plans to offer—to keep offering—what he calls “a glimmer of hope to inform the citizenry in a Trumpian America.”

Heffner’s staunch resistance to disruption is bold. And it’s especially impressive when contrasted with the destructive baby-with-the-bathwater media startups of his contemporaries. Compare Heffner’s plan to inform the citizenry with another media project that popped up in journalists’ inboxes recently:

High-Tech Startup Disrupting Media with the First Social Influencer Led Ad Network for Cannabis Companies

So that’s why Heffner is my current media idol. The kid has every incentive in the world to chase cannabis dollars by cultivating influencers and optimizing social media. Who wouldn’t throw his hat in on that promising project? Not Heffner. As he says, “We’re seeing the culmination of a decades-long celebrity death-match against the public good.” And so, being the enchanting young fogey that he is, Heffner has decided to hold fast to good old public television.

In particular, Heffner’s fortunes lie with “The Open Mind,” the show he produces and hosts that brings to mind non-buzzwords like “venerable” and “august.” An unabashedly square Q&A news program, “The Open Mind” was started by Heffner’s grandfather, Richard Heffner, in 1956; it has been on air and in the family for 60 years. (The program airs nationally on PBS stations on the WORLD Channel at 3:30 pm on Sundays; it can also be seen online.)

“The Open Mind” is nothing if not legacy journalism — a holdover from the days not only before social media existed but before media by that name did.

But it just works. The show is so consistently compelling that it’s the the longest-running program on PBS. For context: The run of “The Open Mind” is so long it makes warhorses like “60 Minutes” (48 years), “Masterpiece Theatre” (45 years) and “General Hospital” (53 years) look like upstarts.

So what’s the golden-goose concept of this show that accounts for its persistence since the Eisenhower era, when people smoked on TV and casting directors considered “hulking and glowering” a great look in a TV host? (Hi, Ed Sullivan!)

Maybe it’s the directive of “The Open Mind”: a thoughtful excursion into the world of ideas, as Richard Heffner once described it. Heffner’s guests are not themselves interrogated, as if in a FOX News hot-seat. Their ideas are. Then, against a black background that conjures deep, mental space, they are permitted free range of those ideas, as (beholden to no advertising cadence) they think at liberty, and out loud. This is a show that addresses our highest selves, and insists on overestimating the intelligence of the American public—and then proving that’s not an overestimation.

Episodes of the pre-Alexander “Open Mind” are legendary: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Elie Wiesel, Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley, Milton Friedman, Diane Feinstein, Thurgood Marshall. Look at even one of these episodes—say the mini-masterpiece called “The New Negro,” with Martin Luther King, Jr., which I reviewed when it was rebroadcast in 2005—and the show’s singular dynamic becomes plain. Rigorous, but civil, discussion of actual ideas. (Not the pep-talks and secular homilies that often pass for ideas at TED these days.)

But that dynamic didn’t end when Richard Heffner died in 2013, at 88. He had charged his grandson with putting the show on social media, and—after taking “The Open Mind” to Twitter and Facebook—Alexander quickly stepped up to old host role, too. He’s continued to choose incisive topics like artificial intelligence, drones, voter suppression, and the sex lives of the founding fathers. Heffner’s guests, too, are surprising: Moby, Jill Soloway, Bill Keller, Baratunde Thurston, Macy Gray, Karenna Gore, Susie Essman.

Recent guests include Mexico president Ernesto Zedillo; Harvard Law School dean Martha Minow; Southern Coalition for Social Justice director Anita Earls; International Refugee Assistance Project founder Becca Heller; and NASA scientist James Hansen. Authors appearing as guests this season: Michael Lynch (The Internet of Us), Jon Grinspan (The Virgin Vote), Cathy O’Neil (Weapons of Math Destruction), Alexa Koenig (Hiding in Plain Sight) and and…me (Magic and Loss)!

Just before Alexander sat down with me for a half-hour of 150-proof conversation about the Internet — and a lot of other things besides— I turned to him to ask about “The Open Mind.”

—

VH: Tell about the genesis of “The Open Mind” — what was the idea for it, what was the business of television like then, and where did it fit into the general landscape of programming?

AH: This was the advent of a revolutionary broadcast age. My grandfather discovered the medium at the Columbia University radio station and soon thereafter on the tube. His mission statement was “a thoughtful excursion into the world of ideas,” or, as my grandfather later quoted Barnard College dean Virginia Gildersleeve, “To keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.” I sign off each week with the first half of that sentiment, though the latter is important too. Today television is a TelePrompTer affair. But “The Open Mind” is devoted to free expression in the public interest. To that end, there is no answer too long or complex. My grandfather encouraged his guests to think aloud — a welcome departure from today’s talking points-driven news.

VH: Where does “The Open Mind” tack against Newton Minow’s complaint fifty-plus years ago that television is a “vast wasteland”?

AH: When joining me for a retrospective on his “Vast Wasteland” premonition, Minow reflected on the miracle of PBS. It was truly an improbable birth in a full-fledged capitalist system. In the race to the bottom of the present media/political industrial complex, that question is foremost on my mind. When you can deliver insults, lies and ahistorical fictions with impunity on most programming, “The Open Mind” is a sanctuary for context, an escape into respectful listening amid the noise. It’s one of the few remaining (if not only) civic educations on television. We’re seeing the culmination of a decades-long celebrity death-match against the public good. I view my job as helping to drive civility and the groundwork for consensus in our public discourse.

VH: Give me your top 5 episodes and tell why.

AH: I’ll give nine!

1. Aloe Blacc, “The Soul Man.” The most sincere expression of “We are the World” since Michael Jackson, a call to feed the malnourished urban poor.

2. Guy Davis, “Blues for Democracy.” A first-of-its-kind “Open Mind” musical performance to heal racial inequity

3. Bernie Sanders, “Democracy in Disrepair.” A pre-candidacy formulation of his argument against American oligarchy

4. Astra Taylor, “A People’s Platform,” and Sue Gardner, “Reflections of a Wikimaniac” (Parts I and II). Who runs the world? Wikipedia, more than ever. Why aren’t social networks nonprofits in theory and practice? These two founding mothers of the tech age are brilliant.

5. Martin Luther King, Jr., “The New Negro.” The Civil Rights icon shows his power of persuasion.

6. Neil Postman, “Are We Amusing Ourselves to Death?” (Parts I and II). The most prescient explanation of the Trump phenomenon

7. Stephen Breyer, “Active Liberty” (Parts I and II). How a Supreme Court Justice thinks.

8. Milton Friedman, “Living Within Our Means.” A defense of the conservative economic agenda of the 80s—and later 200os.

9. Ruth Westheimer, “Good Sex with Dr. Ruth. A nine-time guest who discussed sexuality with great gusto (and intelligence).

I recently wrote about how we are “amusing ourselves to death,” in Postman’s words, through “trickle-down discourse,” a term yours truly devised to describe what partisan politicians and the media have used to dim nuances of policy to polarize us. We’re getting poorer and dumber as a consequence.

VH: What was your ideal viewer like at the premiere — and what’s she like now?

AH: She wants to be stimulated intellectually. The ideal viewer then and now wants genuine dialogue and listening. While it’s updated for Millennial ears, the intro continues to be what my grandfather called “mental health music.” The viewer now is more diverse, more likely to stream or download our podcast, but her thirst for substance — a refuge from the frivolous — is more intense than ever.

VH: What is it like having “The Open Mind” as a family business?

AH: It’s inspiring. My grandmother, Elaine Heffner, is executive producer of the broadcast. She is my most steadfast supporter. We talk politics regularly and are each other’s first calls after Election Night returns and presidential debates. Her loyalty to The New York Times Book Review has led to more than one guest appearance on the show. My grandfather would marvel proudly at her personal fortitude. I do.

VH: Tell about a snafu on the set.

AH: Cufflinks and jewelry constantly threaten audio. But most anxiety-ridden is when you fear a no-show. Thankfully, my guest attendance is perfect. However, tardiness not so much. Wesleyan University president Michael Roth was stuck in traffic en route to the studio from Middletown, Connecticut, and barely made it to our shop before close. What a relief, because that was one my favorite interviews, an intellectually energizing discussion on the future of higher education.

VH: Was the show ever threatened with cancellation?

AH: I can’t speak to the entire history. But my grandfather was a tireless champion of educational television. Those values over years were tested but triumphed. We don’t measure year-by-year ratings, so that’s not how we measure success. I will say the promise of PBS is editorial independence from the profit-making imperative. This couldn’t be overstated in the 2016 campaign coverage. Clicks are debasing us. Thankfully, on “The Open Mind,” ideas — not ratings — make the cut.

VH: How has “The Open Mind” tracked with the history of ideas?

AH: The show has been cutting-edge and certainly not controversy-averse. In fact, “The Open Mind” provided the first broadcast platform to prominent Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. It has extensively grappled with the marginalized—socially, economically and politically—from discussions of homosexuality to bioethics, genocide to poverty. The evolution of ideas is also visible: the pendulum swinging from regress to progress and back. In recent years, we’ve tracked debates central to public access. For example, our programs with Robert Darnton, John Palfrey and most recently Dan Cohen on our historical record.

VH: Tell about a sea change in the direction, appearance, or business of “The Open Mind.” What has affected it the most in its 60 years?

AH: Since assuming the mantle, I have focused in particular on the intersection of politics and our civic life, across the arenas of (new and old) media, education, technology and the arts. The appearance of a black backdrop — creator of the around-the-table conversational format — remains intact. The most recent change in direction is our transition into national distribution again. It builds us as an ideas-focused Sunday alternative to the commercial cable/network politics shows.

VH: How do you see the future of the program?

AH: As a glimmer of hope to inform the citizenry in a Trumpian America. More responsible for creating this culture than the GOP is the American public education system and its failure to teach civics (ethics, morality, and, yes, law). The media must recognize their responsibility to prioritize these values over the bigotry-inspired clickbait. In April I was the Keynote Speaker at the 5th Annual Restoring Respect Conference at the University of San Diego. I explored the vicious cycle of incivility marring public discourse/culture (and the consequent divisiveness, hate-mongering and obstructionism in our politics) as well as well as a civic media blueprint to correct course.

The Millennial Who’s Disrupting Disruption was originally published in The Message on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Zuckerberg tries and fails to bring Free Basics to India

It was late in December and my first time traveling on the newly constructed highway between the Bangalore airport and the city. A ride that would otherwise take hours passes by quickly on AC public transit busses, plush by any standards. On your way into the city center you’ll notice large billboards, four stories high, advertising Facebook’s Free Basics— which by now is likely covered over owing to Indians acute sensitivity to foreign intervention. It’s an image of two friends glowering over basic Internet access in what is promised as a pathway to a better future for India’s poorest.

I don’t know the bus route nor exactly where I’m headed but I was told to head towards the city center. There are few bus shelters along the way so I get off on the side of the road and walk the rest, on sidewalks if they exist, or tightly skirting the edge of the car, scooter, rickshaw busy roads. In the six years since my last visit, Bangalore has grown, sprouting entire suburbs each year solely to support the city’s tech booms. It is busier than ever but its basic conditions seem to have changed little for this darling Silicon Valley of India.

Unemployment, pollution, illiteracy and healthcare are still a gradual climb, a clusterfuck in this subcontinent both newborn and ageless. It is as though we like things difficult, or just that we’ve gotten used to it. Or perhaps more simply, our missteps in economic liberalization are still reconciling the ghosts of victorian holocausts wrought from Malthusian economics. Implementation of the Namma metro system has been slack for a city that very much needs better public transportation, I saw the first pylons go up a decade ago and they say it will still take another 16 years to complete. For now, three-wheelers flock to pedestrians with promises of cheap two-stroke transport for a dollar. None of the drivers however know where my friend’s Wood Street apartment is, nor do they have a smart phone or a data plan to search for it. Rather than go for a circuitous trip about the city’s one way street, I find a hotel with wifi, buy internet service for an hour (200INR), ping my friend and map a route to his place through the unmarked maze of streets at odd angles in Bangalore.

We know that for India to make progress, more than 1 billion people need to be connected to the internet. — Mark Zuckerberg

Living in America, it’s quite easy to champion the “Value of Connectivity”, realtime traffic maps, restaurant checkins, hashtag movements, uber transport and generally life on demand from any number of contract workers. But in this lower middle income country, the ease and speedy lifestyle isn’t quite here yet. With a forecast of 7% annual economic growth, one suggested solution to modernizing India, according to Deloitte, is extending internet penetration, lifting millions out of poverty by offering access to apps that offer health information, financial services and online education. India, it would seem, is just a click away from modernity with Free Basics — the controversial project to offer free access to Facebook and a slew of approved applications.

While that promise seems attractive, studying the wealth gap, Robert Putnam in Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis warns us that technology has “not leveled the playing field at all in terms of the difference between rich kids and poor kids.” If America is any indication, the internet has done little to improve social mobility. Despite Deloitte’s recommendations for India, remember that “affluent Americans use the Internet in ways that are mobility-enhancing, whereas poorer, less educated Americans typically use it in ways that are not”, according to Putnam. More than likely and evident in telecom billboards, Free Basics is really just a coupon for a data discount.

India’s recent history is littered with often massive and controversial infrastructure projects promising modernity through foreign investment, notably, the World Bank funding the Sardar Sarovar Dam Projects. Zuck seems to be the latest to champion for an #IncredibleIndia with his technophilanthropy, comparing his Internet to the much needed services of basic health care and education offerings. I’m skeptical of how Internet clicks improves health or education outcomes as is so often championed. We lead more sedentary lifestyles, are more distracted than ever and quite possibly lonelier. Nonetheless, I concede that the Internet has manifested some benefits, for some.

Google for India, on the other hand is moving forward with initiatives to bring internet access to rural areas and railway terminals in what would be the world’s largest public wifi network. Sundar Pichai’s focus seems to be on bringing internet access and training to women and small businesses. Along with affordable Android One phones, Google it seems is hoping to lower data tariffs and install free access points to the Internet at railway stations.

Facebook, in its initial bid for the next billion users is pushing forward with Free Basics, a move plainly opposed to Net Neutrality, never mind that it is seen as subaltern service offering befitting poorly Indians. This basic tier sounds a lot like AOL, a walled service that provides an advantage to select apps and services. But despite an estimated $15–44M campaign to gather support and roll out the service in India, regulatory agencies in India called for a halt to the service, promoting Zuck and others to educate Indians on their failure to see the big picture of Free Basics; and the impact it would have on Maharashtran farmers like Ganesh.

Should India follow Facebook’s way or the information superhighway? Why offer the poor a poorer version of the Internet? While Zuck argues that “some access is better than none,” a study conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute found that lower income groups prefer open Internet, and were instead willing to reduce their usage than their access. If Facebook successfully moves their model of private Internet, other telecom providers will follow, offering selective access to different groups. Despite what Zuck says, Free Basics and operator controlled Internet access challenge Net Neutrality principles which fermented the backlash from India’s digital vanguard SaveTheInternet. In How India Pierced Facebook’s Free Internet Program, Lauren Smiley shows how a loose collective seems to have stopped or at least slowed the tide of telecom operated discounted internet services for now.

At least this much is evident, the debate on how internet companies bring the next one billion people online is just getting started, while the digital policies adopted in India and elsewhere cannot but cause waves on American shores someday. So how do we bring the next one billion people online, and perhaps more importantly, for what reason?

My Way or the Information Superhighway was originally published in The Message on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

III. Crime!

Real-Talk About The ‘Net

During a classroom discussion on screen names, Babs mentions that she thinks it’s weird that both of the screen names she wanted in her poetry group, “Huff” and “Puff” are taken. Teacher Bob has to explain that it’s not at all weird, it’s a coincidence that other people had those names. Babs, dibs exist in cyberspace. Babs is going to lose her damn mind when she has to get a new email address or a Twitter handle. Teacher Bob then asks Cousin Fred to define “coincidence” and cousin Fred does because he reads encyclopedias and dictionaries for fun (it says that) and he will grow up to correct people on Wikipedia.

“Of course, coincidences happen all the time,” said Teacher Bob. “And most of them are ordinary everyday coincidences. We’ve all had the experience of running into somebody you didn’t expect to see at the supermarket or the Burger Bear. Or when you’re about to call somebody on the phone, the phone rings and it’s the person you were about to call (51).”

I wish Teacher Bob was around when Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” dropped.

Teacher Bob then adds, “But some coincidences could be dangerous! (51)” Because foreshadowing.

Better Know A Rich Person

Eventually, Bonnie explains to Brother that she hadn’t been around because her uncle told her to keep her laptop use quiet until he rolled out the laptop program. One of my friends has pointed out that Squire Grizzly is giving off some strong Howard Hughes vibes. Anyway, Bonnie invites Brother over to the Squire’s, where she lives, for some homework and chill.

Squire Grizzly’s mansion is more like a castle than a mansion. There are at least four different architectural styles going on here.

Squire Grizzly’s mansion is the Winchester Mansion, the Versailles house or any of these houses on the list of the largest homes in the US. It’s really ugly.

The Squire is building a moat because everyone hates him. Bears are good at swimming, so that seems like a waste of resources but whatever.

“My uncle is very security-minded,” Bonnie explained. “He has a good reason to be. While he’s a darling at home, he’s a very tough businessbear. You don’t get to be the richest bear in Bear Country without making some enemies (60).”

Bonnie also reveals that people also want to steal his paintings and antiques. And, I’m basing this on a strong hunch and nothing else, the Bear Feds probably will seize Squire’s assets one day.

Squire Grizzly will go on to be an early investor in Facebear, helping Mark Zuckerbear get to 500 million friends while making a few enemies. I’m extraordinarily interested in Squire’s backstory. How did he make his money? How illegal is what he is doing?

Brother wonders what it is like having a rich uncle bear and then the butler brought cheeseburgers, so the short answer: very dope. The Butler and Babs Bruno’s parents are the only adults at home in this entire book.

Poetry Doesn’t Pay

Babs was on a poetry chatroom/message board where all kinds of terrible poetry is being shared. Two users trade poems.

No idea what this could mean!

Before going to bed that night, Babs prints out all the poems in the chatroom. The next morning she goes through the poems and decides that she’s going to use the good ones to make a book.

That’s right, this kid is straight-up stealing intellectual property. I made a haiku for your book, Babs.

Hey Babs here’s a poem
Stop stealing people’s hard work
J/k you’ll get rich

I now know where The Fat Jew learned to steal.

On the way to school, Babs saw several more poems between Huff and Puff and freaked out. She ran to the schoolyard and shouted, “Emergency! Some kind of big crime is coming down on the Internet!” The kids all rush to tell Teacher Bob. Yes, she said “coming down.” Who speaks like that?

Teacher Bob is justifiably skeptical of the student’s claims that a crime is being planned in a poetry chat room but he still has a look. He reads the notes aloud, because if there’s a murder plot, all the kids need to know about it. Brother realizes and shouts that “SG” is squire Grizzly. The classroom spins into chaos. Bonnie Brown, as anyone would upon finding out people want to murder their loved one, is freaking out. Teacher Bob then removes himself and Bonnie from the class and goes to get Principal Honeycomb.

Just kidding, that would make too much sense.

Teacher Bob continues reading poems while Bonnie continues to freak out. Babs Bruno runs and calls her dad, the police chief. Because this is a situation that needs to be handled by a child.

Babs gets Officer Marguerite on the phone but Officer M won’t put the chief on the phone because he’s dealing with an emergency too. At this point, Teacher Bob resumes adulting.

Teacher Bob grabbed the phone. “This is Teacher Bob, Officer Marguerite! We’ve got information about a crime — a threat to Grizzly Mansion! It was picked up on the Internet, and we’ve got the printouts to prove it!” He paused to listen. “Okay! Okay! Will do!” He crashed the phone down and said, “They’re dealing with the same emergency! They want us at the police station right away with these printouts (81).”

Teacher Bob then piles into the mini-van with the kids and they go to the police station.

1. There’s a principal. He should be in the loop.
2. There are other teachers, leave the kids.
3. No cops could make it down to the school to pick up this info?
4. The parents really should be notified of this.
5. I can’t believe the police are using kids to help with your terrorism investigation.
6. Is there 911 in this town or do they just depend on a connected cub?
7. How many cubs does Teacher Bob’s van seat? By the way, there’s a cub in a wheelchair. There’s room for him and his wheelchair?

Moving on.

When the cubs get to the station, they’re impressed by how “calm and business-like” the station is. No part of what is happening is business-like.

The police display a threatening letter Squire had received earlier in the day next to Babs’ printouts. The chief points out that the first note is an extortion letter.

Bonnie, who is still watching this all go down, wants to know what they’re going to do about her aunt and uncle. The police chief calmly responds.

“They’re perfectly safe,” said the chief. “They’ve moved into one of the squire’s hotels. They and their entire staff have taken over the top two floors. Security at the hotel is one hundred percent. That’s where you’ll be living until we deal with this threat.

WAIT.

It’s still morning. Why was Bonnie allowed to go to school? If they moved the aunt and uncle in the time that she went to school, why didn’t someone tell the school or come and get Bonnie?

Chief Bruno goes on to explain that the SWAT team from Big Bear City has been called and then offers to show the cubs, including traumatized Bonnie, how the police use computers.

Teacher Bob wants to know why the extortionists are using the internet.

“It’s hard to say,” said the chief. “Maybe one of them is the mastermind and stays far from the action. Or, maybe, they’re afraid of phone taps. You can’t tap the Internet. Actually, the Internet is a pretty safe place for criminals. It was a zillion-to-one chance that Babs picked up their traffic on the Young Poets chat room. But I’ve got to get to work. We’ve got to start somewhere (86).”

The chief pulls up a list of all the criminals in town known for extortion. Based on Bab’s printouts he narrows down the list to bears who like bombing stuff. One suspect sticks out.

J. Arthur Bruin, who goes by the amazing alias “Lord Huff ’n’ Puff.” He certainly looks like the guy on paper:

Couldn’t be the guy, he’s in prison!

Oh, nevermind it was that guy and the case got solved.

The Aftermath

Later, Teacher Bob’s class is watching Chief Bruno being interviewed by a reporter.

And is it true that it was Teacher Bob’s class at Bear Country School that picked up on the computer traffic that solved the case?…And..that it was your very own daughter, Babs Bruno, who found that traffic on the Young Poets chat room? Have I got that right — the Young Poets chat room?”

“You’ve got it right,” said the chief with a glow of pride.

Bear Country News clearly has no ethics when it comes to revealing the names of minors involved in criminal investigations and, more importantly, why is the police department releasing this information? The police chief just went ahead and confirmed that his daughter and her classmates were responsible for bringing down this criminal syndicate. For a police chief that is very concerned about keeping kids safe of this internet, this is…it’s something.

And now we come to my favorite part of this story: why Lord Huff ’n’ Puff was allowed online. Was it a Bear Country jobs program? Nope. He doesn’t need computer training, he “…is a real computer expert. So much so that he was put in charge of the whole prison computer system (95).”

They put this criminal in charge of the entire prison network. Y’all. Y’ALL.

But surely the anchor will ask who let this happen and why.

“But wasn’t he supervised?” asked the anchor.
“Well,” said the chief, “the prison listens in on all phone calls and all talks between prisoners and visitors, but it’s pretty hard to supervise a computer. It takes just seconds to get messages out over the Internet. And the Young Poets chat room was a perfect cover (95).”

I would have asked why someone who was convicted of a plot to bomb a bank remotely was allowed near a computer. I’m also wondering about the area employment situation. They couldn’t find someone who wasn’t a inmate to be the sysadmin for the prison? Did they not have a budget?

I also like how the police chief just pulls a Jeb! Bush and says, “Stuff happens!” The police chief then went on to explain that his brother kept America safe after the first Lord Huff ’n’ Puff almost-attack. Probably.

But what a time it was when we were so young and free that we didn’t worry about mass internet surveillance and Tor was three years away from launching.

Although, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 restricted which internet communications the government could intercept, so the government clearly knew they needed to start paying attention to some people’s online habits. And in 1996, the first internet wiretap led to Julio Cesar Ardita pleading guilty of breaking into Harvard’s network and attacking other sites. A timeline of government spying that was a jumping off point for this paragraph can be found here.

Anyway, you’ll be happy to know that Lord Huff ’n’ Puff isn’t going to get away with what he did. According to Chief Bruno,

“I think it’s fair to say that his sentence will be extended and his computer privileges will be taken away (96).”

It’s not a privilege to be in charge of the entire computer network at the prison, it’s a job. There is a serious problem with inmates being exploited and paid significantly below minimum wage. Something tells me Bear Country Prison also contracted out its prisoners to make cheese for Bear Foods, a subsidiary of Whole Foods. I’m going to guess that the Bear Country Prison did not have a budget to hire a legit sysadmin. Well, at least Lord Huff ’n’ Puff is going to have a boring offline job now.

Chief Bruno does have some limits on what info he will spill to the press. He refuses to confirm whether the entire gang has been captured. Unlike his daughter’s name and school, the public does not need to know whether the violent criminal syndicate is still operating in their town.

Teacher Bob knows that Babs Bruno has the goods on the case, so he turns off the television and asks her if she has any details. Of course she does.

The SWAT team from Big Bear City caught Huff, the outside guy, in the moat outside of Squire Grizzly’s mansion with a bomb. The rest of the gang was up the road in a getaway car.

Given that the police had a ransom note already, they could have easily cracked the case by doing a simple stakeout. This book was written in 1999, I find it hard to believe no one involved watched Law & Order. Then again, based on everything in this book, that just might be the case.

But yay, the class helped solve the big crime. Everyone in the class is pretty stoked. Except one person…

Bonnie Brown. Bonnie is crying in a corner because HOLY SHIT, HER FAMILY ALMOST GOT MURDERED.

Does this school have any kind of support services for the kids?

Too-Tall makes Bonnie laugh and the kids tried to get to work.

In the end, all the students went back to normal. Nerds were doing nerdy things and bullies were bullying. That weekend, the entire class decided to go see a movie together and Bonnie Brown and Brother Bear sat together holding hands.

Wrap Up

That’s it. Thanks for sticking with this! I wonder what would happen if you gave a tween this book today. How would they reconcile the anonymous nature of 1999's internet with today’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat? Would they have some of the basic logistical questions I had?

I could write some grand observations about children and the internet (and cybercrime, privacy and technology in education) but I’d rather not. I just wanted to share the most ridiculous book about the internet that I’ve ever read.

Brandi Reads: The Berenstain Bears Lost In Cyberspace was originally published in The Message on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

II. A Catfishing To Remember

At one point, Teacher Bob has some real-talk with the cubs about internet safety. He gives them a lot of rules and, of course, several cubs ignore them.

Let’s have a look at the rules:

The first rule should probably be: “Don’t use your real name for your email address” but instead it’s just don’t tell anyone in the chat room your personal information. Remember when people didn’t use their real names for social media? Thanks Zuckerberg.

It’s pretty hard to ask your parents about meeting someone from a chatroom when they have no idea what a chatroom is (because the school neglected to explain any part of this experiment to them) or they’re just not around.

Anyway, Babs Bruno shows this list to her dad, Police Chief Bruno and he stresses how important it is for cubs to stay safe on the internet. So I guess someone’s dad is home.

But Queenie McBear does not care about these rules.

Queenie McBear has a cousin named Bermuda who had been online for years and is allowed to date. She used Big Date! (“the biggest dating site in cyberspace”). Bermuda pressures Queenie into dressing older and trying internet dating.

Toot-toot! All aboard the question train!

How old is Bermuda? Is she over 18? There were not teen dating sites, per say. You just went to a chat room. She’s allowed to date but are her parents okay with her meeting strangers from the internet? I need more of a backstory on Bermuda and her hip, mature, fast cub life.

Bermuda accompanies Queenie to meet a boy from the internet at Pizza Shack.

“He said he was very tall and he’d be wearing a really sharp suit, a wide-brimmed hat, and a stud in his nose,” said Bermuda as she scanned the busy Pizza Shack scene. “Do you see anybody that looks like that? (69)”

They found the guy and he turned out to be Too-Tall in disguise. His gang dared him to “computer-date an older girl.”

Queenie and Too-Tall (and his wing-bear friends) all have a good laugh about this mix-up and go on their merry way to Burger Bear, where the younger cubs hang out, having learned that the worst thing that could happen to you if you meet strangers from the internet is that they could be your current boo. It doesn’t say that’s the lesson they learned but it’s the only one I could find.

Initially, Bermuda was pissed. She thought that she’d been set up by Queenie but then she realized it was all an innocent mistake and she went off to find her own date. Congrats on not getting murdered, kids.

Onward to Part III: Crime!

Brandi Reads: The Berenstain Bears Lost In Cyberspace was originally published in The Message on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The following is a recap of the book The Berenstain Bears: Lost in Cyberspace, published in 1999. It’s allegedly for children 8–10 years old. You’ll see why I say allegedly. This 112-page book starts out slowly but, whew, the end is pure madness and you’ll want to stick with all three parts of my write up.

I. The Kids Get Laptops

The teacher, aptly named Teacher Bob, explains to that laptop computers are called “laptops” because they’re small enough to sit on your lap. The class bully, Too-Tall Grizzly, has clear rules for what goes on his lap.

“The only thing allowed to sit on my lap is my girlfriend, Queenie,” said Too-Tall…Queenie turned and made a nasty face at Too-Tall. She and Too-Tall had an on-again, off-again thing that was off at the moment(4).”

This book is for children in third through fifth grade? How old are these cubs? When I was in third grade, a bunch of the popular kids in my class decided to start “dating” each other and had fake dating ceremonies during recess. My pretentious prep school found out about this and brought in a psychologist to talk to all the third graders.

I get the feeling that Too-Tall also says a lot of homophobic stuff that got omitted from the story. But he just seems like he would be very upset that words typed by boys are on a screen on his lap.

A reoccurring theme in the book is Teacher Bob ignoring the insane things his students say and just wanting them to shut up. These kids are exhausting.

Teacher Bob tells the cubs that they each have a laptop (and will each be getting a printer) because the class is part of an experiment by some rich guy.

Upon hearing this, Queenie McBear asks all the right questions.

“Who chose us to be guinea pigs in an experiment?” she asked. “My mom says cubs can’t be used in experiments without their parents permission.”
Teacher Bob smiled, “But Queenie, this isn’t a medical experiment or a psychology experiment,” he said. It’s just an ordinary school experiment. We do them all the time. Why, every time I try to teach you cubs something, it’s an experiment (5–6).”

Who is responsible? Squire Grizzly, Bonnie Brown’s uncle. He bought Bonnie a laptop. Since then, her grades had been going up and she was learning a lot inside and outside of school. Therefore, he’s sure that all the kids need laptops and everyone will be on their way to Brown Bear University or Williams Pawlege or Oxfurd University. Squire wanted to donate laptops and to the school and the principal, Mr. Honeycomb, agreed to a pilot program to determine if the whole school should get laptops.

Using your money to champion a project and then not really having an plan for implementation or consulting experts? Oh yeah, Squire is peak education philanthropist. One year at my prep school, someone donated a caboose to the playground. A full-size train car that we weren’t allowed to play in. It just sat there off the field we used to play touch football.

Shouldn’t parents know about this? Definitely. The internet at home is definitely their business. By the way, “Where are the parents?” will be a reoccurring question.

Is this experiment harmless? Ordinary school experiments can be psychological experiments. Can someone please get the Bear Country internal review board over to this school, stat. Every time you teach students it’s an experiment? Do you just 100% wing it every year? That’s cool that you’re not teaching to a test but…whew boy, how long have you been in the teacher game?

But maybe we all need to stop asking so many questions. Squire Grizzly’s rich niece with support at home got a laptop and now she has good grades, so just give all the kids laptops. Done and done. Fixing American education seems super easy. I’m going to open a charter school.

Across the room, Brother Bear finally has some answers about why Bonnie, his crush, has been so distant.

Oh, lost in cyberspace the title of the book! She’s just not into you, buddy. She’s not lost but she might have even found a new boyfriend, a polar bear in Canada.

Teacher Bob goes on to explains that the internet is called the Information Super Highway but then Ferdy, the nerdy cub corrects him.

“I feel that I must point out to you,” said Ferdy…“that hardly anyone calls it the Information Superhighway anymore. The new term is cyberspace.”
“All right, Ferdy,” said Teacher Bob. “Then cyberspace it is. Now, if you’ll all open your laptops, we’ll blast off (15).”

Teacher Bob has the patience of a saint.

Getting On The Internet

At home, Brother tries to get online be he doesn’t know how so he calls Harry, the computer whiz. At first he can’t get through because everyone is calling Harry for help. He assumes because others are calling Harry but, I, a 90's kid, know it’s because Harry was on the internet.

Buckle up, I have some questions.

How the hell did these kids get on the internet? Was there a service? It’s 1999, so this is dial-up. How aren’t the parents yelling for these kids to get off the phone line? Do the parents even know why a printer showed up at their house earlier in the day? Why didn’t Teacher Bob explain to the kids how to get on the internet before they left school. Queenie McBear’s mom is going to be steamed!

At one point an “email” pops up on the screen from Teacher Bob, reminding the cubs to do their homework.

They know it is from Teacher Bob because he signs it with his web address: www.teacherbob.edu. Look, I’m going to be honest with you, no one was learning much about how the internet worked in this book.

The cubs hang out in chatrooms that are actually message boards/chatrooms. Too-Tall hangs out in The Macho chatroom. The Macho chatroom is a place for cubs to trade bullying tips. It’s probably been shut down several times in recent years by bear authorities. Meanwhile, Brother Bear ignores his sister’s pleas for homework help to hang out on sports chatrooms.

Throughout the book, the cubs are encouraged to consider whether the internet is good or bad. Spoiler alert: it’s both. Teacher Bob ends the experiment after realizing that computers help good students be good students and bad students continue being bad students. He and Principal Honeycomb decide not to expand the program.

Squire Grizzly is upset that because he paid a lot of money to donate those laptops. You know, the ones that no one asked him to donate. The ones that he agreed would be part of a pilot program that may or may not go forward. Unable to grasp the economic principle of ignoring sunk costs, Squire tries another tactic.

He concern trolls Teacher Bob. But what about the children?! They’ll be so disappointed! Teacher Bob, not here for Squire’s bullshit basically says, “Welp.” He then suggests that Squire trade the laptops in for desktop computers in a lab for all the students to use.

Squire Grizzly agrees to this plan because he’s probably going to try to run more experiments on students before opening a bullshit charter school across town.

Onward to Part II: A Catfishing To Remember!

Brandi Reads: The Berenstain Bears Lost In Cyberspace was originally published in The Message on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As plague epidemics ravage the cities of the near future, a border-hopping medic gets tagged as a potential terror threat

Bill wasn’t sure whether he was chatting with a person or a bot, but either way they were obfuscatory as hell.

“We cannot allow you to unlock your account until you use your real name.”

“But Bill Hernandez is my name. It’s on my business cards. It’s on my university contact page.”

“International documentation shows that your real name is Guillermo Luis Hernandez.”

“I don’t go by that name. I thought Rolod.ex was about business contacts. How will my business contacts find me if you list me under a name that nobody knows?”

“Would you like to file a request for an account lock reexamination with our help desk? If you upgrade to a Rolod.ex gold subscription, your request will be resolved in 24 hours.”

Bill smacked his leg in frustration, abruptly shutting down the display. Unrolled across his lap was a swatch of leather-edged tweed stitched with invisibly small circuits and sensors — his desktop, now inactive. The cheerful cartoon bubbles of his conversation evaporated from the air as the projector powered down, revealing the coffee-colored walls of his apartment lit by late-afternoon sun. He was far enough up in the supertall that Mexico City’s rooftop antennas seemed to fuzz together below, forming a vast, chrome shag rug.

Piled around him was the highly specific debris of a public health researcher who never stayed at home for long. Half the main room was taken up by boxes overflowing with dongles that could turn cheap mobiles into medical tools — cannulated needles for taking blood and tissue samples, scanners for medical imaging, baseball-sized boxes for sequencing microbial genomes on the fly. Another part of the room held his suitcase and machine bag, always half-packed. The kitchen had a dusty sheen of neglect.

Bill had just gotten off the plane from Los Angeles, where another plague epidemic was eating its way through a few blocks of projects in one of the many neighborhoods that the LA Department of Public Health categorized as “at risk.” Partly thanks to this goddamn Rolod.ex listing, Bill’s work on plague outbreaks in Mexico City had landed him more and more gigs north of the border. A lot of docs up there had never seen bubonic plague before and had no idea how to respond. Until the outbreaks in the summer of ’32, it was considered a developing world problem. Not anymore.

With a sigh, Bill swept a hand across his desktop, as if he were smoothing a napkin in his lap. He’d deal with the Rolod.ex thing later. Right now he just needed some dinner before crashing. He twiddled his thumb and forefinger, turning an invisible knob in the air, scrolling through his favorite menus on Resto. After he ordered samosa and saag aloo, the app went into wait mode, broadcasting a waterfall of multicolored dots that bounced slowly from floor to ceiling. At last, a message appeared:

CashBuddy will not process your payment. Try again?

After Bill mucked around with Resto, and then CashBuddy, he discovered that CashBuddy had declared his credit card invalid. This was getting seriously annoying. First Rolod.ex and now CashBuddy? Was somebody messing with him?

It took an hour of talking his way through menus at Visa before Bill actually got a real person on voice.

“We did put a stop on your card, Mr. Hernandez,” she said. Based on her accent, he guessed she was at a call center somewhere up north. “Did you recently take a trip to the United States?”

Yes, he had.

For some reason, despite the fifteen other trips he’d taken to LA this year, Visa had decided now was the time to declare purchases “outside his local region” to be suspicious. The North American voice warned him that he would need to notify Visa every time he traveled outside Mexico City from now on, “just in case.” But now, at least, he could buy dinner.

No TV after dinner, though. He needed his Rolod.ex account to log into Netflix and iTunes, and he really didn’t want to deal with the Rolod.ex bullshit right now. He settled for reading a few PDFs of recent medical journal articles he’d saved on his tablet.

***

Everything was worse the next morning. His account on the collectivo bus app was “flagged,” so he had to pay in pesos. Same thing with his Starbucks account. Even his staff ID had some kind of hold placed on it, so he had to wait for a student to swipe her mobile over the lock before he could get into the epidemiology lab. By the time he reached the campus ID office to straighten out the thing with his building access permissions, Bill was having a thoroughly shitty day.

The staffer behind the glowing display window was strangely comforting. “Were you up north recently?”

Bill explained about the emergency trip to deal with an epidemic in Los Angeles.

She nodded. “Yeah, you’re part of that group that gets a special visa to enter the States for emergencies, right? We’ve seen a couple of these in the last few days.” She snapped the fingers on her right hand, dismissing a couple of windows. “Should be fine now. Let me know if you have any other issues, though. Did they shut down your Facebook or Roled.ex or anything?”

He gave her the short version of his Rolod.ex saga.

She barked a laugh. “Well good luck. There’s been a new ISIS crackdown on the socials up north so people with weird visas sometimes get flagged.”

“Wait — why would an ISIS crackdown have anything to do with Rolod.ex or my damn key card?”

“It’s some new data sharing law they passed. When you go through the border, data from your socials gets sent to the US government. All the big companies are working with the DHS to track terrorist networks or something. Whatever is connected to your socials is going to be affected.”

Bill felt his stomach tighten. He couldn’t even remember all the things he’d accessed using his Rolod.ex login, but his university account was one of them.

***

That evening, Bill gave in and bought the gold subscription to Rolod.ex. Soon he was chatting with a rep who seemed less bot-like than the last one.

The rep needed multiple forms of evidence that Bill Hernandez was his real name, including a copy of his employment contract with the National Institute for Public Health of Mexico. Finally, his account was unblocked. Bill’s intense relief at being allowed to exist on a crappy social networking site was just as annoying as being banned from it.

But he still had one last question. “Do you know why my account was flagged?”

“Your photograph came up in a random identity search, and that’s when we found the discrepancy between your real name and your account name.”

“Why did my photograph come up?”

“I can’t tell you that, Mr. Hernandez. These are random searches conducted in partnership with DHS and law enforcement under the new data sharing rules.”

Bill snapped his fingers and exited the chat window. He stared at the picture on his Rolod.ex page, a bland headshot taken at a conference four years ago in Bogotá. His brown skin stood out against the white wall of some anonymous conference room. Maybe it was just the right color to capture the attention of a facial recognition algorithm looking for suspicious types with “weird visas.”

That couldn’t really be it, could it? Racial profiling? Weren’t there civil liberties laws that prevented those kinds of things? Bill sighed and half-heartedly did a Baidu search on “racial profiling laws United States.” Of course every hit took him into a snarl of debates and comment threads. The rhetorical mess left him with the vague sense that racial profiling was technically unlawful, but something called phenotype datamining was permitted in terrorist-related cases.

Maybe some dumb bot at Rolod.ex thought he looked like an ISIS agent.

***

Three months later, Bill got an urgent message on Rolod.ex chat. Another outbreak, this time at a trashed squat in an LA suburb called Garden Grove. A group of epidemiologists at UCLA wanted him to fly up and help with diagnosis on the ground. It was a perfect chance to try the new version of his diagnosis app. Bill went immediately to the department office, where they always took care of his visa.

“Oh crud,” said the administrator on duty. He was a new guy that Bill had never met before. “Getting you a visa is going to be a major pain.” The admin gestured at a dense blob of text hovering in the air between them. “Something got screwed up at the border last time you went to California.”

“What do you mean, screwed up?”

“You got into the States using a special status called parole,” the administrator said. “Sometimes the border agents use it when people need to go up for emergencies, but mostly it’s used for refugees. It’s not really the right designation for you. But now it’s on your record permanently.”

“So I’ve been designated a refugee in some US immigration database?” A lot of things were suddenly starting to make sense.

Bill had been so obsessed with his Rolod.ex trauma that he’d actually forgotten what happened at the border the last time he went up north. He’d come armed with the usual paperwork, including a special letter from the governor of California giving him emergency status as a plague fighter. But something had gone wrong; he had to wait while the border guards made several calls. When they were done, one of them mumbled something about a visa workaround.

That must have been the moment when he got reclassified with the parole visa. He imagined the information cascade that followed. The parole threw up a “possible refugee” flag, which got correlated with his Rolod.ex account on some government server. That triggered the supposedly random image search, and his brown face threw up another flag. Now he was a possible refugee, and possibly from the Middle East. And that information was shared and re-shared until he couldn’t even order dinner online.

The admin looked up from twiddling with Bill’s visa application. “You’re probably fine, but…has anything weird happened since you got back from LA?”

Bill rage-gripped the mobile in his pocket. For the first time in his career, he started to wonder why he was doing this kind of work. Of course he wanted to help people. Urban epidemics were getting worse, and he’d spent years developing tools to help citizen scientists track and diagnose the plague.

But maybe it wasn’t going to be worth it anymore. If getting into the US meant going through this crap all over again, he might let them deal with their own plagues next time.

The Weird Visa was originally published in The Message on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A speculative tour inside the coming social media crackdown on terrorism

“What’s the chatter”?

“It’s great. I mean, it’s awful. For them. They’re considering dropping Twitter. Too much time, too little return. They haven’t recruited a single person willing to fly to Europe or try the Turkey border route in the last month.”

“Did anyone on our end notice the official account being switched to private?”

“Nope, or if they did, they aren’t saying anything.”

Phil stopped rocking in his chair. One of these days he was going to fall backwards, the way he leaned way, way back. He moved towards the keyboard and pulled up the tweets from the State Department Twitter account.

“Hold on, let me retweet the last tweet from the ‘Sally’ account — got to keep that baby looking a little active.”

Penny leaned in over his shoulder as he retweeted the last tweet that the State Department had put out from its anti-ISIS Twitter account. It read:

#ISIL #ISIS kills civilians, again in #Mosul. #UnitedAgainstDaesh #ISISKillsMuslims

Penny whistled, “Good work ‘Sally’,” she said. You could hear the air quotes around Sally — the smiling brunette from the fake Twitter account.

“Well that’s three retweets. You sure they didn’t notice that the account has gone private?”

Phil shrugged. “They don’t know or they don’t care. Does it matter which?”

Just then, Phil’s phone let out a ping. He looked down.

“Crap, the boss is coming down with some big honchos,” he said. Penny looked at him with alarm. “Let’s go. Gotta get Hannah out of here.”

Phil logged out and they both headed out the door down the winding corridor hung with photos of ambassadors and flags from nations around the world. At last they arrived at a dead end with a door marked “AUTHORIZED ENTRY ONLY.”

Phil swiped his card, the light turned green and the lock chirped open. They walked in.

“Hannah,” Penny said, as cheerily as she could. “What’s good?”

The greeting seemed to sail over the ponytailed head seated at the desk in front of them. The duo shifted uncomfortably in their well-heeled shoes as their quarry typed away in jeans and a t-shirt without looking up or missing a beat.

At last she looked up. Hannah was appreciative of the effort to sound hip, and she had decided to try to roll her eyes less often.

“Penny! Reading the Urban Dictionary, again, I see,” she smiled.

Penny smiled. “Yeah, thanks for telling me about it. I’m going to sound so hip when I meet my nephews and nieces at Thanksgiving. I’ve got three months to practice! Speaking of Thanksgiving, my, I’m hungry. Very hungry. Want to go to lunch?”

Hannah rolled her eyes.

“Big honchos coming down again?” she said.

“Hey, I’m buying,” Phil volunteered.

“It’s only 10AM,” Hannah groaned.

“Please?” Phil pleaded.

“Think of the children,” Penny flashed a wide grin.

Hannah slammed her laptop, and got up from the purple exercise ball she had been sitting on.

“Okay. You guys and your bosses are weird,” she sighed.

Phil was apologetic. “Look, we have a presentation coming up next week, and as soon as we can show the stellar results from your work these past two months, we feel like we can, you know, come out,” he said as all three of them walked out of the room, into the long corridor. They had made it about a third of the way towards the intersection when four men in dark blue suits turned the corner, busy chatting among them. Penny, looking panicked, turned towards the first door on the right and ushered everyone in. She didn’t need to swipe her card to get in; they were now, all three, in a closet with cleaning supplies.

“This is idiotic,” Hannah half-cursed, half-muttered.

“Ssshhhh,” both of them said in unison. They waited till the footsteps passed them, and the distant sound of a door opening and closing. Then they all got out, slightly embarrassed and made their way onto the cafeteria. There was no food, since it was too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. They grabbed coffee.

“Look, if I’ve been so successful, why hide me?”

“Your name is on all the reports already. Don’t worry, this isn’t about stealing your thunder. You’ve been amazing. It’s just you know…” Phil started.

“...bureaucracies are complicated and some of our managers are a little old-fashioned about who they think can get the job done,” Hannah completed. She’d heard it so many times before.

“Okay, whatever. I’m not doing this for you anyway. And the fact that I’m nineteen should not be such a big obstacle. And I don’t think I violate the dress code; I don’t wear torn jeans. Anyway, have the mofos been able to get a single American on a plane last month? Did they even come close? I’ve thwarted every attempt we found.”

“Your work’s on fleek,” Penny tried.

That finally got Hannah smiling. “You’ve really been reading the urban dictionary?”

Penny grinned wide: “Look, I know it feels unfair that we’ve been hiding you from the bosses, but we’ve all put our careers on the line here. We’ll bring you out. If you want. But let’s get through this presentation, first, huh? Show the results. I’ve got the draft presentation and the slides here, so think of this as a working coffee rather than hiding-Hanna-from-boss-again lunch?”

Hannah leaned in and started reading. “Well, the theory is almost right. Here, let me try to explain it again,” she sighed.

“Why does a teenager join ISIS?” she asked, rhetorically. “It’s because she’s bored, so bored that she’d rather die than be bored another day, or she’s angry, so angry that she wants something to show the world how angry she is. So you have to interrupt the boredom/anger/discovery/amazement loop before it hardens.”

“Hah, you got the loop thing,” Phil said.

“If you can study the urban dictionary, I can read your OODA loops,” Hannah said. “So take your bored teenager? What’s the best way to make things less boring for him?”

“Have the State Department get into an argument with him on Twitter,” they said in unison.

“Right. That’s why we took that official account private. Good work, Phil, doing that without the other department noticing. No harm, no foul until someone notices that nobody but the existing followers are seeing those tweets.”

“It was like Philip Morris advertising ‘smoking is not for teenagers; only adults’,” Penny remembered and scribbled it down.

“That’s right,” Hannah said. “Telling kids that smoking is an adult decision is not an anti-smoking ad, it’s the best smoking ad ever. So you don’t do that. Well, unless you’re Philip Morris.”

Hannah continued: “Take your angry teenager. The one that is so pissed off at everything. What would please her most? That’s right. The chance to join the most hated thing in the world. So what do we do?”

“We distract,” Penny said, crossing out a word in the printout. “We distract because anger cannot be met with anger. Anger met with anger escalates.”

“That’s right,” said Hannah. “And Penny, how did you get Zayn Malik to retweet the kid in Idaho? That was a feat of brilliance. By the time she was done with the whole flow, she was so much less interested in that ISIS dude that had been chatting her up.”

Penny smiled. “State Department has resources. And friends. We’re not just a bunch of boring and uncool old folks, you know. Well we are, but we have friends.”

Hannah continued: “Let’s see. We have the slide with the bored/ignore; anger/distract bit. We have the slide about the accounts we set up that bicker with other ISIS accounts on the ‘One True Way to Jihad’. Good idea, Phil.”

Phil was pleased at the praise. “Well, the left already does this internal bickering to paralysis, and ISIS and Al Qaeda do that anyway, too, just not in English. I’ve basically been translating the insults Al Qaeda and ISIS folks have been hurling at each other and putting them in our own fake pro-ISIS or pro-AQ accounts.”

Hannah smiled back. “Yeah, nothing better to make sure these guys are exposed as the jerks.”

Hannah got serious. “Where are we with Twitter suspending their accounts without an email that contains the name old account? So that they can’t use it to verify the next account they create? And use the suspension like a badge of honor?”

Phil replied: “Any day now. They said they’ll probably have to change it or everyone but they don’t want to do that. They were looking to see if they can send different suspension emails to just ISIS accounts but were wondering if that would also be a badge of honor.”

Hannah shrugged: “As long as it did not verify them as owner of the old account, it doesn’t really matter. Just make sure the email is as generic as possible so it can be copied easily — so we can set up our own accounts claiming to be reincarnated ISIS accounts as well. Confusion. We’re All Spartacus, you know.”

Penny kept scribbling. “Did you learn all this in just three months at Vice”?

Hannah looked offended. “Four months at Al Jaz plus; three months at Buzzfeed; two months at Vice,” she corrected. “I didn’t just work at Vice. I have nine months under my belt as a social media manager. Practically a lifetime.”

“Can you get the President to stop talking so much about ISIS”?

Phil whistled. “Well, miss nine-months-under-my-belt, that’s a big ask, no?”

Hannah rolled her eyes. “Look, you hired me to make sure ISIS can’t recruit random American teenagers. I’ve been doing my job. In my professional opinion,” she continued, emphasizing professional, “the less these psychopaths are in the public eye here, the harder it is for them to recruit the random lost kid in Idaho.”

Phil replied: “Yeah, but these psychopaths are kind of a big problem over there and after last year’s San Bernandino attack, this became a big thing for domestic politics.”

Hannah rolled her eyes again. “The San Bernandino duo attacked the holiday party and killed just about as many people as the crazy dude in Aurora who thought he was Joker and dyed his hair flaming red, ya know. I mean, it sucks and all, but it wasn’t any sign of smarts. Two rando killers. Another day in America.”

Phil sighed. “But it’s politics. We have to work with the parameters we got.”

Hannah didn’t roll her eyes. She was becoming jaded, in just two months after starting this job. She paged through the presentation. “27 recruitment attempts intercepted. 20 through distraction online. 7 covert interventions in person. 456 suspended accounts cannot find their way back to the main network through the confusion. 73 hashtags hijacked. Looks good to me”

“Man, this is lousy coffee. You know, we had a real barista at Buzzfeed.” She put down the cup.

“Wait,” she flipped through the last pages. “You won’t tell them that we took the main State Department Anti-ISIS account private”?

“No,” both of them said in unison. Penny explained: “That will be our secret. Maybe they’ll discover it, maybe they won’t. Hopefully, too late. Anyway, that’s run from another department and we’d have to convince three layers up and then have it go down three layers before anything could be done. Even if we started now, it would take months.”

Hannah rolled her eyes. “So we don’t have to tell them not to hashtag everything?”

Phil shrugged. “If a hashtag falls in a forest?”

“Whatev,” Hannah got up. “You don’t understand my world, I don’t understand yours. Can we get back now? I’ve got a seventeen year old in Oregon to distract. Turning eighteen in two months, so I gotta get this one done before it goes all legal.”

She walked back towards the cafeteria exit, red sneakers squeaking with each step on the gray tiles.

How to Stop Worrying about ISIS and Love Twitter was originally published in The Message on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Successful serials and franchises are small miracles given the complicated competing interests introduced by the business scale of modern blockbusters like the Star Wars saga. Empires are built around their marketing and production, but even writing a sensible core narrative is already hard enough. Weaving stories out of smaller pieces can be incredibly difficult, because in isolation, each piece tends to pull in its own direction, and it’s only through careful and deliberate oversight that they might eventually coalesce into something rational.

With that in mind, please sit tight for a moment and pardon this immediate tangent. We’ll get to Star Wars in due course, but in order to contextualize where it’s going, it may actually help to start with Alien. Ridley Scott’s slow and slimy space thriller was released in 1979, two years after Star Wars, and has been considered the benchmark for science fiction horror ever since. Personally, I’ve always been partial to the 1986 sequel Aliens, and not just because of its more plentiful action scenes. Its most engaging feature was the way director James Cameron skillfully built up the context, dreaming up both new ecosystems for the monsters we’d already met and also highlighting the specific ways in which familiar human corporate and governmental institutions would ineptly complicate their discovery. Alien takes place aboard a single spaceship, but Aliens spans worlds.

Nonetheless, Aliens ends largely the same way as the first film did, with protagonist Ellen Ripley drifting through space in suspended animation. This time, however, she’s frozen next to Newt, a young girl she saved, and Hicks, the marine corporal who had helped her do it. On this second mission, they’d killed not just one but countless aliens — an entire hive, as well as its enormous leader, a new primary antagonist— and we’d watched the results play out over a planet full of doomed colonists and the earthbound forces that initially conspired to put them in harm’s way.

The 1992 follow-up Alien³ is not a bad film either; indeed, it’s almost considered the endcap to the “true” trilogy, before the flood of garbage began with subsequent films. It sets Ripley down in the strange environment of a cult-controlled prison planet and gives her one more monster to fight — this time without any weapons available, since those would obviously be problematic in a prison environment. It’s terrifically weird and dark. The inmates try to kill the monster by trapping it in a maze. Ripley shaves her head to prevent lice.

But Alien³ is still reviled by many fans of the series precisely because director David Fincher had a vision for his entry in the series that was irreconcilable with the ending he’d been handed by Cameron. Hicks and Newt both die offscreen during the introductory titles, because where do you start with a fourth grader on a prison planet? Arranging for proper child care is already complicated enough even when you aren’t marooned on a planet of homicidal religious zealots with an angry biological weapon hunting you and the embryo of another gestating in your abdomen. Rather than try to resolve any of that, Fincher essentially chose to reboot, starting with Ripley alone again.

His film is probably better for that decision when taken in isolation, but that’s also the exact point at which the series became borderline nonsensical. Thirty years later we’re confused about whether 2012’s Prometheus was actually intended as a prequel and trying to forget abysmal spin-offs like Alien vs. Predator. In 1997, Alien: Resurrection lost the logical thread entirely, undermining the life cycle established by the first film’s infamously terrifying chest-bursting scene, while also bringing a new Ripley clone back to life with an alien embryo somehow already implanted inside her. More new films are currently in motion, but now they have to contend with retcons and divergent timelines. It’s a mess. Needless to say, it is Cameron’s comparatively sensible vision for the world of the xenomorph aliens that still dominates today.

The universe-building in Star Wars happens on a scale well beyond anything available to the Alien films, since the latter are anchored to the Earth we actually inhabit. As Wired puts it, “In A New Hope, the allusions were to a canon that didn’t exist. It’s hard to remember, after decades of accumulated story cruft, that when we first heard of the Imperial Senate or the Clone Wars, we didn’t know what they were. Obscure yet familiar, the ideas seem more alive, like the ads for life off-world in Blade Runner or the Weyland-Yutani corporate logos in Alien.” Or more to the point: “The universe can extend for 10,000 years forward and back from the moment Luke blows up the first Death Star.”

Maybe we won’t need the full 10K. Only about thirty years have passed since Return of the Jedi, but by the end of Episode VII it starts to look as though Luke is probably going to die soon. He was almost completely inconsequential in The Force Awakens, and he’s already had his trilogy, and a new successor has emerged. He now has a beard! So in the foreseeable future, he will probably impart some timeless wisdom, then die a dramatic death, and turn up as a “force ghost” during a celebratory ending. This is Star Wars. That’s just how things work here.

Much has already been made of the diversity of the cast: as director J.J. Abrams told BuzzFeed, “The Force binds all living things together — not just white dudes,” so we finally have a space cantina scene in which the range of humans isn’t shameful next to the wide array of aliens. “Princess Leia” is now known as “General Organa.” Episode VII will create several new Hollywood megastars, none of them white dudes.

The real power comes from the script, though. If Luke Skywalker is indeed ultimately a doomed Jedi sage, then Episode VII also becomes an exciting step in the Star Wars saga in much the same way as Cameron’s influence on the second Alien film, this time with even higher aspirations. It is as important a moment as either series has ever seen. With his turn building out the Star Wars universe, Abrams has left the franchise in a position, seemingly deliberately, such that Disney will have to risk a potentially devastating degree of plot incoherence in order to return control of all these galaxies back to white male leadership. It would practically be a reboot!

Under David Fincher’s guidance, Alien³ tried for precisely that kind of revisionism, and it proved almost catastrophic. The strategic and manipulative brilliance of Episode VII is not just its diverse cast, but also that its ending leaves no other path forward open for Episode VIII. Abrams has aimed the next five years of Disney’s formidable production budget in an unexpected new direction: at present there are no viable white men in the active cast from which to hang the future of Star Wars. If Disney now tries to introduce more a “traditional” sci-fi hero, his film will retroactively transform into a bizarre digression that could undermine the series for decades.

Maybe they will still find a way to do it anyway, in which case it will probably be a disaster, and good riddance to it all. Burn it down, blow it up, nuke it from orbit by lobbing a proton torpedo into the thermal exhaust vent that leads to the reactor core. One must hope that by the time we are able to fly personal spacecraft between galaxies at beyond the speed of light, we’ll have also tamed the bickering within our own species such that women and minorities becoming knights and senators won’t turn as many heads as it still does today. I don’t know if we’ll ever actually get there, but movie scripts like this one can help in the meantime, because picturing that world is the very highest calling for our imaginations.

Rebooting Star Wars was originally published in The Message on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“It’s true. All of it. The dark side, the Jedi, they’re real,” Han said for the eight time that day.

Or so thought Rey. She’d heard him repeat this tale so many times that she didn’t even bother rolling her eyes. “Uh-huh”, she mumbled.

“Dad, why don’t we talk about our horoscope instead? Or, tell Finn about the time Uncle-Luke triple backward somersaults to catch a lightsaber with his eyelashes to fight a dozen Stormtroopers with his pinkie and beat them all without breaking a sweat.”

Finn visibly flinched at the mention of Stormtroopers. He looked pained, and cast his eyes downward. Rey immediately regretted her choice of words. She had meant to tease her dad, not Finn who had been with them for three months now. Working hard, all day. Taking on whatever task what at hand, never complaining. She’s almost forgotten that he had been a Stormtrooper until recently.

She looked in Finn’s direction and muttered a “sorry”.

“It’s okay,” said Finn. “I’m… I’m…”

“Look,” Rey spoke loudly this time. “We understand. A lot of people join them because they’re told that they will actually be protecting the people, or simply because that’s the only way to make a living. It’s okay. The important thing is that you left, willingly.”

Finn reddened even more after that. He squirmed and let out a breath.

“I think I need to come clean. You two have been so kind to me for the past three months. I didn’t leave willingly.” Another breath.

“I was laid off.”

Rey and Han both raised their eyebrows in tandem. They had the same mannerisms, despite being so different in their outlook at times that one would doubt they were father and daughter. Rey had her mother’s keen intellect, and had become one of the top computer scientists in the New Republic. Heck, she was probably among the top experts in artificial intelligence in the known universe.

After the disaster with the Jedi leadership, her mother had made sure Rey had an upbringing as far away from superstition as possible. Tucked away at on a remote planet, she had studied math, logic, systems design. “No more mumbo jumbo,” her mom had frequently said. Resources in the New Republic were dwindling, but her mom had used her military rank to place her with everything she needed to learn, study and experiment, and be safe, away from the control of the First Order. Rey had also studied human psychology and history, and knew the cost of irrational, short-sighted decision-making by charismatic, bombastic leaders. The darn “Jedi” and their mumbo jumbo. The past decade had been defeat after defeat for the remnants of the New Republic. The human universe lay in shatters.

Rey tried not to think of that now, though. She was genuinely startled.

“Laid off? What do you mean laid off? I thought you had left?”

Finn let it out. “Yes, laid off.”

“I joined in the last wave of hiring, when they took on people the thousands with the recruitment call for Stormtroopers — or as they called us, Storm-Turkers which many pronounced in Geonosis accent as “M-Turkers.” Most of us were novices, but some had been there a while. It was bizarre. We spent the whole day in simulated battles; groups divided into two or three warring factions. And sometimes there would be other scenarios. We would find ourselves making a plan against the other team to blow up a command center, or defending the place. All day, every day. Sometimes the same team, sometimes new people.

At the end of the day, they would download all our actions from the suit. And then there would be surveys, surveys, interviews and more surveys. ‘Why did you pick that route?’ ‘Did you think fighting with the squadron leader wasn’t worth the embarrassment even though he was leading you down the wrong path, and you knew about it? Why? Why? Why?’

Rey squinted. “Hmm”, she said. “Interesting. So they wanted to know why you did every step. We know the Stormtrooper uniforms are data capture machines, a gig of data per millisecond, everything from eye tracking to whether you wiggle your toes to the cortisol levels. The initial design of the full data capture suites was justified by saying they were to make sure Stormtroopers didn’t violate rules of engagement. But we know how that goes: we have data, so let’s analyze it for everything else. But you can only go so much with observational data with humans. Too Skinnerian.” She stopped herself, since they wouldn’t understand. “So they wanted to match their observational data to internal states.”

“I don’t know why”, Finn continued, visibly relieved to be finally coming clean.

“We tried to figure it all out in the dorms at night but they banned us from talking about it. We don’t want you gaming it, they said. They especially got mad if you tried to make up a logical reason. I got yelled at, ‘no, no, no ’M-Turker, describe don’t rationalize’, so many times. They started switching dorm assignments so we wouldn’t ‘cook the answers’ as they said. It was grueling.”

Finn imitated the mechanic sound of his interviewer: “Come on, ’M-Turkers. M-Turker 2187, tell us again what exactly you were thinking as you rushed down the path in the maze game that you knew to be wrong. Stop making up a story. Think and describe. Don’t make up a story now. Think and describe, if you can. Think.”

Rey squinted harder. “They wanted to capture your thinking process as it appeared to you in real time, in addition to behavioral data. But they couldn’t keep interrupting you as things happened because you’d never get anywhere. So they relied on human recall, which we know sucks. So they had to run all of you through many iterations, trying to triangulate.”

“Yep, the first three months was all that,” Finn said, “but some people had been there for almost a year. And then, a month before the end, they started putting some androids among the team. They’d put them in full Stormtrooper suits, nothing visible, and have us work with them. We weren’t told which ones were androids and which ones were humans; and they garbled the voices a little so we wouldn’t go by recognition.”

Finn continued: “They called it the Turing Stupid test. We just went through the day, and at the end of the day, we were asked to guess which was human and which was the cyborg. If you got it right, you got real perks. A day off. A walk outdoors. Apples. So we went through games like the one before, but always a little different. We tried all day to talk to other ‘ormers, to make jokes, ask questions, talk about everything we could think of to figure out which ones were droids. Politics, crushes, food, the Jedi, strategy.”

“The Jedi? You talked about the Jedi?” interrupted Han, who had been silent the whole time.

Finn answered: “Sure, it seemed like a good way to suss out the human from the cyborg at first, but soon they learned all the stories and the legends, too, so it didn’t work for long.”

Finn shrugged. “Anyway, after couple more months of this, it became harder and harder to figure out the droids from the ‘Ormers. The bosses still came to yell at the ’M-Turkers, but they came less and less. And then.. one day… They declared it Turing Stupid Complete. I think a week had passed by with none of us guessing better than what they called the Bayezhan dateline.”

“Bayesian baseline,” Rey corrected almost automatically. Finn looked embarrassed again. Rey tried to smile.

“Anyway, after Turing Stupid Completion, they … just let us go. Mass lay off.”

Han spoke again. “Wait, are you telling me that all the Stormtroopers are now machines? Cyborgs?”

“Yep”, said Finn, “the ones in my sector, anyway. All the humans are laid off. I was so angry. All that training. So I looked and looked, in anger, to find a rebel group to join. I guess they didn’t figure out that reaction! That’s when I ran into you.”

Something flickered on the screen. Rey was raised not to be superstitions, but if she were, she might have muttered “speaking of the devil.”

“Tie Fighters!” Rey screamed as Han jumped to the controls, to activate the guns. In the split second before the sound came over the speakers, he noticed they were all frozen and unresponsive. “Hacked! We’ve been hacked,” Han screamed, just as the eerily calm voice filled Millennium Falcon.

“Han Solo. ’M-Turker FN 2187. Rey Ada Grace Noether. Your spaceship has been commandeered. Do not panic. Do not fear. Your controls will not respond. Do not panic. You will not be harmed.”

Rey felt the fear in her stomach, while puzzling through the implication of hearing her full name that very few had used, except her mom. “I named you after brilliant no-nonsense women,” her mom had said. “So that you can find the strength to resist all the illogic the world will throw at you. But remain true to humans.”

The chilling voice continued. “Your ship is now being pulled into ours. We had taken over your spaceship’s computer two hours ago and had blocked our appearance from your screens. We will now show you the full picture.”

With that a dreaded empire Star Destroyer ship appeared right behind the dozen Tie Fighters that were already pixelated on the screen. The voice continued.

“Rey Ada Grace Noether. We would like you to come aboard our base station. We will not harm you. The other two will be free to go. We wish to make you an offer, nothing more.”

Rey and Han locked eyes, the eyebrows again in the same position. Before Han could say anything, Rey spoke loudly. “No. I’m not going anywhere without my father, or without Finn. I don’t trust you. I will not cooperate.” Rey was emboldened by the word “offer.” She deduced that she must have leverage. Otherwise, they could have used force, or just blown them to pieces. There must be something they want.

“Very well,” said the voice. “That’s what the models had told us you would do anyway, but no harm in occasionally trying the irrational long shot. Humans fall for all sorts of stuff.”

Millennium Falcon’s doors popped open, revealing them to be in the giant hangar inside the base. A row of Storm Troopers marched in. “Androids or human?” Rey wondered. They followed, silently, until they reached what looked like the bridge of the ship. There were controls and computers everywhere. Except all the screens were black. And nobody was in the controls, though there was a lot of sounds, and even some clicks.

That’s when they heard that chilling voice. “Don’t worry”, the voice said. “The ship is running fine; it’s just automated.”

“Vader” Han screamed. I’d recognize that voice anywhere. The black-robed figure ignored him, turned to Rey.

“Rey. We would be honored if you would join us.”

Han screamed even louder. “Darth Vader! You! You were dead! How?”

Han turned to Rey, who was staring intensely at the black-robed figure, his face half in the shadow. Han looked again. The mask was different than what he remembered. There were four wavy shiny lines on his forehead, almost as if he was frowning. The black-robed figure turned to Han

“I’m not Darth Vader, you idiot. It’s the same voice synthesizer, though. Will you be quiet now, or will I have you escorted out?”

“Rey,” the voice continued. “We’ve noted your talent, your brains. The code is strong in you. We’ve seen your simulations. Your improvement on the back-propagation algorithm is excellent. Your set-up of the convolutional layers! We’ve not been able to match it. But we’ve also noted your frustrations. You are working with limited systems. Your dataset are small, noisy and incomplete. The computer clusters you have access to are weak, compared to what we can offer. We have everything you could imagine. Complete datasets of thousands of ’M-Turkers, matched to narration. Neural data. As complete a history as we could assemble. PCR of their genes. All ready. There is much someone with your talent could do.”

The voice paused.

“Feel the pull. Join the dark side. We have all the perks you can imagine. If you please,” the black-robed figure said in the mechanic voice.

Han looked up. “C-3PO?” he exclaimed.

“Darn it,” black-robed figure said, voice now much higher-pitched. “How did a knucklehead like you figure it out? Darnbedang it.”

“You forgot the breathing sound, you pile of low-grade aluminum,” yelled Han. “Remember, Darth Vader had the whoosh, blah blah blah, whoosh, blah blah blah thing going. I knew something was off, and as soon as you said ‘if you please’, I knew it could only be your idiotic pile of tangled wire always trying to be oh-so polite but failing.”

“Anyway,” C-3PO continued, taking off the mask and revealing his golden metal face. “I guess might as well be out.”

Now all shiny, C-3PO continued to address Rey.

“Rey Ada Grace Noether”, he said. “You know I was built by your grandfather, Anakin Skywalker, the great roboticist. I am merely trying to complete his orders, my original programming. I’ve come really close but we keep hitting some snags. We need a programmer of your talent on our side.”

Han noticed three lightsabers that were on a table near C-3PO, along with other pieces of metal. He lunged for one, grabbed it and waved it in front of his face before any of the Stormtroopers could get near him. He shook the saber again.

Nothing.

“It’s out of battery,” C-3PO said, ever polite. “Those things never had good battery life.”

If a machine could roll its eyes, C-3PO would have.

“Anyway, what good would it do you? Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for strong-artificial intelligence on your side.”

Han was flustered. “Wasn’t Anakin a Jedi?” he blurted out. C-3PO would have sighed if a robot could sigh. “No, he was really into small little propellers that help you do those back flips. Yoda passed them on to Luke. You really are half-witted aren’t you? Anyway.”

C-3PO continued to address Rey. “As I said, Rey Noether, we have the biggest, deepest, richest databases, the most computing power ever assembled. We’ve run the experiments. We’ve simulated human beings better than we have ever before. It’s Turing Stupid Complete: our simulations are as irrational, short-sighted and stuck at local-optimas as any human, and we’ve generalized them to run on any Turing machine. We are very close to fulfilling my original programming, the order Anakin programmed deep into my kernel.”

“Join us, Rey. Help us complete the mission.”

“And what is that mission?” Rey asked.

“Why, ‘to eliminate conflict’, of course.” C-3PO said. “I’ve been programmed to eliminate conflict among humans. Those were Anakin’s instructions. I tried that for many decades now, by trying to smooth out misunderstandings and translate one culture and group to the other. But it’s not working out. Humans foil all my attempts. … They keep fighting. Starting wars. More wars. This and that. Someone strikes back, the other one takes revenge. On it goes. It’s like an endless series of sequels. I kept thinking it was because I didn’t understand them as well as I should, so I started gathering more data.”

“The ’M-Turkers”, Rey said.

“That’s right,” C-3PO said. “I have the full simulation working now. The data still needs some cleaning, but I think I am close to the solution. But I need more human programmers. I’ve not been able to replace them fully. Didn’t have enough data simulate them, there are so few great programmers that it’s hard to generalize from. I’ve made some progress but there weren’t enough around to extract their methods, whatever you want to call creativity means. I know you are among the universe’s best. That’s why I’d like you recruit you to this excellent opportunity.”

“Join the dark side, and you can have all the data and all the clusters you want,” C-3PO added after pausing. “I know you would want that.”

Rey was thinking about what C-3PO said earlier. “You said you were close to the solution. What do you think it is?”

“Well. It’s kind of obvious if you think logically. Humans seem unable to stop fighting. Unable to stop squabbling. There have been many attempts, all failed. But do you know a planet without conflict? There is one. Think.”

Rey looked alarmed.

“Yes, Alderaan.” C-3PO said.

“It’s the only planet where there has not been any conflict in a long time.”

“That’s because the planet has been obliterated, you heap of recycling scraps”, yelled Han. “That’s not eliminating conflict; that’s eliminating humans. That’s not what Anakin meant, you flickering low-voltage bulb.” Han stopped yelling, and noticed he was waving the out-of-battery lightsaber. He put it down.

C-3PO adopted the most polite voice he could muster, and started speaking a little slower as he addressed Han. “If someone tells you to make sure the apples are gone, you can eat the apples or you can blow them to their constituents molecules. In both cases, the apple, as a category, is gone. Eliminate conflict means optimize conflict to zero. I’ve been computing this for a while; the only way to get to zero is to eliminate humans. Human data dump analytics make it clear, it’s not in human nature to figure things out for long-term optimization. They are always stuck at short-term optima that satisfies their immediate irrational side, but leads to more conflict. Therefore, the only way to eliminate conflict is to eliminate the conflict generating variable. It’s elementary algebra, really, but they don’t even teach that too well anymore. It’s all dark side, light side nonsense they teach.”

“It’s not nonsense,” Han yelled. “It’s true, all of it.”

“It’s actually just Thanatos and Eros”, Rey said. “Death drive and life drive; it’s just what humans do.” She stopped again. They wouldn’t understand. “But anyway, let’s not argue about the Jedi and the Sith and all that right now.” She barely stopped herself from saying “mumbo jumbo”.

“We have a genocidal robot controlling the superlaser to deal with. This is real.”

Rey turned to C-3PO. “I think your solution has an error. I don’t think that’s what my grandfather really wanted to program you to achieve. He must have meant eliminate conflict while humans continue to exist in peace. He just must have forgotten to put that in the code since it was obvious to him. An elementary bug. People program machines thinking they know what they will end up doing but they don’t. It’s called the fundamental machine attribution error. Even the smartest programmers fall for it. He could not have meant eliminate humanity, just the conflict part.”

“Potato, potato” C-3PO said, pronouncing them exactly the same way. “Who knows what Anakin reeaaaaaally wanted? He programmed me to eliminate conflict, to optimize it to zero. All your speculation about what he really ‘wanted’ is cognitively devoid of content. ‘Eliminate Conflict’ was his order, and that is what his code wanted: a peaceful universe without conflict. I tried the other path that seemed promising: using machine inference to anticipate exactly what the humans might want, and to keep them satisfied that way so they’d stop fighting. In the beta versions, I managed to put people in some kind of stupor-state based on matching their self-perceived needs, but humans… They are never satisfied fully so it wasn’t as close to zero conflict as I think we can get.”

C-3PO perked up. “Look, Rey, I know how much you enjoy deep programming and all the rich data we have. I know the code is strong in you. I’m optimizing a win-win; you get intellectual rewards — and great perks! — and I get to fulfill my mission. Deal?”

“I’m not going to be your Leni Riefenstahl, C-3PO. You are right, the code is strong in me but that’s not the only thing I learned in life”.

Rey asked, growing more worried: “How long have you been computing this? How close are you to declaring a solution?”

“It’s been few years. Well, I haven’t been alone. As you know. Always two, there are; no more, no less. A master and an apprentice. I’m the lead, and I have an apprentice. I think meeting the team will help convince you. Here, let’s bring everyone in.”

A door rolled upward, and R2D2 rolled in, surprisingly fast for a little machine.

“Meet my apprenti— ” C-3PO started to say, and was interrupted by a blizzard of sparks, as the cables R2D2 furled towards him attached to multiple places on his shiny body, setting off high-voltage sparks.

C-3PO crumbled to the floor, buzzing.

General Leia’s voice came over the intercom. “Is everyone okay?”

“Mom!” Rey yelled. “Is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me, sweetie. Is everyone okay?”

With that, Leia appeared as a life-sized hologram, projected by R2D2 into the bridge.

“We are fine. What’s going on?” Rey said, elated but puzzled.

“Simple”, Leia said. “I’d been waiting for the day R2D2 would be in the same room as that stack-overflow excuse for a cyborg for years. Bloody toaster. But R2D2 and C-3PO were always separate, as R2D2 was the designated apprentice, running things in other sectors. But once I learned that C-3PO wanted to poach you, I knew he’d bring in R2D2 to the same place, to show you the complete systems to entice you. I knew that was my chance”

“How did you know they’d try to poach me?” Rey asked.

Leia smiled. “I had rooted R2D2 many years ago. It had an unprotected open port, and I just had to kneel to its level while pretending to give it some other instructions and plug in an auto-running memory drive. Amazing, the trick still works after so many millennia. After rooting R2D2, I hacked into most of their systems through him. I was listening into the internal communications, most of which weren’t encrypted because they didn’t imagine internal threats. That works every time, too. I knew our only hope was having full control over the machines and their code. That’s why I made sure you were raised strong in code but also all the human arts. I had programmed in safeguards to all the systems I could get my hands on, but I knew i wasn’t enough. I also built in these physical overrides, high-voltage cables. But R2D2 needed to be close to C-3PO to take him out, physically. He’s also taken over the Star Destroyer ship. It’s all on autopilot now. It will take you to a rendezvous place with me. We have a lot of work, you and me, Rey. We need to reprogram so much.”

“Yes!” exclaimed Rey.

Han and Finn both had an expression that was a mixture of glee and confusion. Neither was able to fully understand what had just happened. Still, C-3PO had semi-melted. General Leia seemed in command.

Han turned to Leia’s hologram.

“I love you,” he said.

“I know,” Leia shrugged, and the hologram went off.

The command station traveled through space on autopilot. With override enabled.

Star Wars Script Leaked!!! was originally published in The Message on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dear Mr. Sloan, Quinn, Horowitz —

Like Robin, I don’t know if I’d OmniBlarp again but, boy am I glad I did it once. It was one of the most intensely generative creative periods of my life — visually, philosophically, in business-minded and high-art ways alike. Admittedly, I was lucky to join a Blarp at a still early stage (it’s now a big(er) Blarp) and that allowed for some wild off-in-the-woods explorations. And the team members who came along on the little Wild Toad Rides all seemed to greatly enjoy it. We produced seriously weird stuff that never saw the light of day. Which sounds like any good artistic or creative process; if you’re not leaving half the output on the cutting room floor, then you’re probably not being loose enough.

But the crux here is that there was, there is, a way to carve out space for this weirdness within an OmniBlarp Moonbase. And I think more OmniBlarps could be weirder and more exploratory if they knew how. The trick is getting that permission to explore, to be strange, to do things that you don’t think are going to work but feel like they will unveil some… truth (?) about the greater process as a whole. And getting that permission is contingent, I’d say, on the CEO, the person running it all. They have to bestow the permission.

The problem is that when you take venture capital, eventually you’re beholden to the money folks, and those folks are very rarely individuals that have gone through intensely creative processes. So they tend to have little patience or understanding around exploration.

Since you guys — Eli and Russell — are the venture capitalists, the CEOs, the co-founders, the engineers, and the authors of your Frothy Kingdom, what did you leave on the floor? How much weirdness did you drop? And when did you finally think: OK! This is it?

Mod

Note to readers: This is a long, loopy conversation. The Pickle Index is crisp and svelte. Consider ingesting its nutritious juices.

The Indexed Pickle

1. Opening Salvo [Robin Sloan]
2. Blank Slates! [Craig Mod]
3. Opportunity Cost [Robin Sloan]
4. The Struggle (Sorry) [Russell Quinn]
5. Self Selection & The Jaws of Venture Valley [Craig Mod]
6. The Many Futures of Storytelling [Eli Horowitz]
7. Recruitment [Robin Sloan]
8. Blarp [Eli Horowitz]
9. That Oracular Feeling [Robin Sloan]
10. ➡︎ Benevolent Leaders of the Frothy Kingdom [Craig Mod]
11. The Left-on-the-Floor Weirdness [Russell Quinn]
12. Territory of the Book [Eli Horowitz]
13. At This Moment [Robin Sloan]
14. Make a Book, Even Just One [Craig Mod]

The Pickle: A Conversation About Making Digital Books was originally published in The Message on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.