*Track 9
Because the Night - 10th April 2018
The Fun Boy Three had it right all along, it’s not just what you do, but the way you go about it.
An unarguable truth Stuart had learned, while shinning his way up the greasy corporate pole, was that your obtainable height was often determined less by what you said, more how you said it, how convincing you could be. Just as Terry Hall suggested; that’s what gets results!
Recent events had, once again, presented some shining examples of how important it was to not just ‘know your stuff’, but to understand implicitly the need to present this to the world in the best possible light:
- “My top priority has always been our social mission of connecting people, building community, and bringing the world closer together,”
- “Advertisers and developers will never take priority over that as long as I am running Facebook,” and,
- “The average American uses eight different apps to communicate with their friends and stay in touch with people, ranging from texting to email. Doesn’t feel like a monopoly to me.”
All taken from Mark Zuckerberg’s measured testimony at yesterday’s Senate Committee, demanded in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, intended to shed more light on the responsibility (or lack of) shown in the social media giant’s handling of their customers’ personal data.
Conversely, the same hearing had witnessed some astoundingly clueless performances from its elected representatives, demonstrating an extraordinary willingness to nakedly reveal their failings:
- "Is Twitter the same as what you do?" enquired Lindsey Graham, Republican Senator for South Carolina, really taking things back to first principles,
- "If I'm emailing within WhatsApp, does that inform your advertisers?" asked Brian Schatz, Democratic Senator for Hawaii, laying bare his complete misunderstanding of even the simplest mechanics of the subject at hand,
- "My son Charlie, who’s thirteen, is dedicated to Instagram, he'd want to be sure I mentioned him while I was with you," observed Roy Blunt, Republican Senator for Missouri, at least being honest by opting to prioritise fandom over any pretence at examination, and, best of all,
- "How do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service?" challenged Orin Hatch, Republican Senator for Utah, clearly intent on rivalling Woodward and Bernstein for forensic enquiry!
After that last barnstormer of a question Zuckerberg had initially hesitated, perhaps unsure he could have heard it correctly, before calmly replying, "Senator, we run ads."
Hatch’s defeatist (and hopelessly defeated) response served as a final, fitting byword, quite possibly an epitaph, for this whole farrago. "I see,” Orin conceded, “that's great."
It had proven impossible all morning to escape the endless re-runs of this congressional hearing, the world’s media seemingly as star struck by Zuckerberg as Senator Blunt had been. There were obvious, legitimate concerns over how, and how transparently, Facebook collects and uses its customer data, and the fallout from Cambridge Analytica had worryingly revealed how little understanding the platform’s 1.5 billion active users (an astonishing twenty percent of the world’s population) had of what Facebook knew about them or, crucially, how this information could be used.
Zuckerberg was nobody’s fool though. He accepted this was an issue that needed addressing, and assuaging, before it started getting in the way of Facebook’s growing revenues. Consequently, he had arrived in front of the Committee fully prepared (he had even found a smart blue tie from somewhere), well briefed, and armed with pocketsful of contrition, ready to be scattered liberally, like confetti, as and when needed. It was clear from Mark’s demeanour that he had been expecting a hard time.
It was all the sadder therefore, Stuart observed, that these Senators had performed so poorly and presented such little threat. It seemed likely Facebook’s precious customer base was at greater risk of erosion through letter writing suddenly coming back into fashion than from any effective censure that was going to result from such a parlous quality of congressional scrutiny.
It was tempting to see the inherent humour, to enjoy the schadenfreude, of luddite legislators failing so miserably. As one commentator had noted, it looked like Zuckerberg was there to, “help his grandparents with their computers.” Yet it was this same committee that held the ultimate legislative responsibility for, “overseeing the web and ensuring all our data is safe,” and viewed through that lens it didn’t seem quite so funny. More a genuine example of the lunatics really having taken over the asylum.
Stuart doubted that Facebook’s corporate motto, which their CEO had carefully shoehorned into the hearing, “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together,” held any more honest substance than Google’s more famous (and significantly more succinct), “don’t be evil.” Any attempt to expose this contradiction though, to hold these virtual behemoths to account, was going to require much better, far more informed regulation (and regulators) than we had witnessed yesterday.
There was a certain irony, Stuart accepted, in making these observations while sitting in a mid-19th Century weaver’s cottage, their holiday home in Saltaire, overlooking the magnificent Italianate architecture of Salt’s Mill, once the world’s largest industrial building.
In the mid-19th Century Titus Salt’s empire had led a British cotton trade that accounted for more than forty percent of the country’s exports, and half the world’s cotton clothing. All without growing a scrap of raw material. Yet today, and herein lay that irony, Salt’s Mill had a miniscule global footprint, simply housing an art gallery, shopping centre and restaurant. Perhaps this history lesson, demonstrating how much ‘world domination’ is by necessity a fleeting concept, might give Facebook (and their ilk) more to fear than the apparently toothless threat of regulation.
The compelling, looping footage of Mark Zuckerberg appearing before Congress, like a car crash you couldn’t look away from, had also ended up reminding Stuart of his own, admittedly far less exalted, corporate career. He had been happy with what he achieved which, despite his earlier, cynical summation, had always been based on more than simply saying the right things (to the right people, at the right time), and was proud of the compensatory return it had delivered on his parents’ selfless investment.
Equally though, Stuart would have to acknowledge that he had eventually come to a point in business life, long before retirement, where he had concluded, “enough is enough.” He had not so much bumped his head against any ceiling imposed from above (glass or otherwise), but simply stopped climbing after reaching a limit he had constructed himself, from more moral materials. Stuart had understood that to rise further would have required a degree of compromise, dishonesty even, that he had never felt prepared to condone. Having reached a level where he could operate within the parameters of his own, “don’t be evil,” code, he had satisfied himself there, happy to continue motivating his teams and achieving results.
Deliberately shunning further ambition in this way, consciously sawing through the higher rungs of the corporate ladder, had however required Stuart to develop some fresh tactics to allow him to endure the otherwise debilitating effect of all those absurd meetings and committees. He had needed to find new ways to step outside this mundanity, to create surreptitious sources of enjoyment.
‘Bullshit Bingo’ had been a good starting point, a launch pad, but on its own was never going to prove enough. It had always been far too easy to find colleagues who would claim to be thinking out of the box, while looking for a win-win situation, before circling back to find a level playing field (Bingo, in one sentence!) Instead, Stuart had came up with his own way to switch the game around, finding that he could amuse himself, almost endlessly, by sneaking some of his favourite lyrics unnoticed into inappropriate business settings.
Some were easier to pull off than others. For example, while it wasn’t difficult to shoehorn Weller’s concept of the world being your oyster (from ‘When You’re Young’) into a meeting, he could simply use it as a metaphor to emphasise the breadth of ambition a product launch required, finding a place for its cleverer follow-up line, about the future being a clam, had required a whole degree more ingenuity.
The inevitable consequence of such a game though was the constant need to challenge yourself further, to up the ante. The game could only remain distracting by becoming ever more difficult to pull off. This spiralling effect eventually led Stuart to the ultimate challenge; how, undetected, could he incorporate the words of Nick Cave, surely the least corporate of lyricists?
He had started softly, using ‘The Ship Song’ to challenge his people, through their improved results, to ‘make a little history’, and gradually raised the difficulty bar until recording a personal best, smuggling ‘The Mercy Seat’ into a full Board presentation on compliance. “Given today’s enhanced regulatory scrutiny,” he still remembered postulating, the Company, “must be done with any twisting of the truth!”
It was essential though to know, and accept, when you were beaten, and retirement had come and gone before Stuart ever managed to find a way to legitimately sneak his (and Nick’s) lack of belief in an interventionist God into a business context.
Such games were, thankfully, no longer required. Stuart’s career was now just something to reflect back on occasionally, as he had been doing this morning, even if its fruits were still helping to fund plenty of trips away. Hence Saltaire.
When they were planning this latest excursion Anne had unilaterally declared, especially with her Dad Chris joining them, that West Yorkshire should be a music free zone, fairly arguing, “I put up with it all the time at home. We should be out and about doing things, it’s bad enough we need to build in ‘Challenge’ time on the Tuesday.”
Stuart had spotted (and exploited) a loophole though, Anne’s ruling hadn’t excluded books about music, and he was currently working his way through Patti Smith’s ‘M Train’, an engaging anthology of coffee fuelled, meditative vignettes. Not as achingly soul-searching a book as her sublime ‘Just Kids’, but still enough to prove Patti was more than ‘a great writer for a musician’. Simply a great writer, full stop.
Under her musical guise Smith already comfortably qualified on many of Stuart’s ‘maverick’ measures; a CBGB’s alumnus, a singer with her own distinctive style, the maker of a truly great pop single (‘Because the Night’), a mesmerising stage presence, and a recording artist with a clutch of great albums (‘Horses’, ‘Radio Ethiopia’, and ‘Easter’). But the obvious stand-out, towering over any of these, would always be the quality of Patti’s writing. Song, poetry, or prose.
There were precious few other musicians Stuart deemed capable of matching lyrical eloquence with the written word. David Byrne and Mark Everett perhaps, and Stuart was convinced Nick Cave ought to join the party, even if neither of his novels had yet wholly delivered. The eloquence, exquisite phrasing, and sheer humanity shown in his audience engagement forum ‘The Red Hand Files’ spoke of more to come.
In one of his recent postings Nick had beautifully portrayed his favourite artists as “outliers, abyss-gazers, and misfits”, providing Stuart with some welcome new additions to his maverick lexicon, and it had been Patti Smith that came to mind as Stuart read this. Surely the archetypal abyss-gazer.
Starved of his usual musical stimuli, (“it’s little use coming up with a list of songs you can’t listen to,”), Stuart had to settle instead for compiling his top five musical manuscripts:
5) ‘The Bad Book’ by Stephen Jones – even weirder than Babybird’s musical outpourings. An astute review called it, “as warped as a piece of wood left out in the rain,” thus making it sound more engorged than gorgeous.
4) ‘Things the Grandchildren Should Know’ by E – Not the first time this book had earned a mention, but (if betting without Patti) Stuart couldn’t think of a better written, or more affecting, musical memoir.
3) ‘The Death of Bunny Munroe’ by Nick Cave – Undoubtedly flawed, but as weird, and oddly compelling, a tale as Irvine Welsh’s review makes it sound, “like putting Cormac McCarthy, Kafka, and Benny Hill together in a Brighton guesthouse.”
2) ‘Bicycle Diaries’ by David Byrne – finding the warped mind behind ‘Psycho Killer’ cycling around Istanbul (amongst other cities), while observing life’s oddities, is as offbeat and engaging as that synopsis suggests.
1) ‘Just Kids’ by Patti Smith – A heartachingly beautiful early years memoir, poetically capturing both her love for Robert Mapplethorpe and the life altering inspiration she drew from it. Unsurpassable.
(Footnote: Anne already complained their house was full of books, so he would stay quiet on this list having prompted a thought that he had always meant to read Dylan’s ‘Chronicles’ and Cohen’s novels.)
Stuart’s earlier analogous notion of feeling ‘starved’ now became strangely externalised, as a shout of, “your eggs are ready,” emanated from the cottage’s kitchen.
Anne’s pursuit of parental approval, undiminished by time (and another manifestation of her kind-heartedness), came with a fringe benefit on such excursions. The quality of breakfast rose a notch or two whenever her dad was an added diner. There was also plenty of time left to enjoy it, the clocks going forward at the end of March, reverting to BST, meant today’s ‘Challenge’ reveal would, presumably, return to its previous 10am slot (and stay there for the foreseeable future). Unwilling to risk getting caught out on timings again though, Stuart had already stress tested this expectation with a failed logon just after 9am.
“What’s planned for later?” Chris enquired. Possibly a diversionary tactic to avoid being plied with yet more toast by his daughter.
“Thought we’d look round the exhibition in the Mill,” Anne responded, “I really want to see the Hockneys. It opens at 10. Stuart will join us later, after he’s finished his ‘Challenge’ thing.”
They had tried to explain how this worked to Anne’s dad over dinner the previous evening, but it had proved largely inexplicable. Not that Chris seemed too concerned, “as long as he’s finished to buy me my lunchtime pint,” being his only observation on the matter. Stuart sincerely hoped his father-in-law would be granted his wish.
Post breakfast division of labour was agreed; Stuart washed up, Chris dried, and Anne busied herself to make sure the gallery tour party was ready to leave well before 10am.
“I want to get there when they open,” she had suggested, but Stuart knew, despite her claims otherwise, that she felt conflicted over being unable to help with today’s ‘Challenge’. She had rightly concluded, “it wouldn’t be fair on Dad,” but as a second best, Stuart understood, the military precision timing of their departure was being deliberately planned to ensure he would have a clear, undistracted run at things come the deadline.
With the laptop fired up and ready, the first time it had needed to be brought into Challenge play since Heathrow, with his fellow travellers already ‘off t’ mill’, Stuart was able to login precisely on the hour:
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(To be continued, at 10am tomorrow. Can you solve ‘Challenge 28’ in the meantime? Unlikely at this stage, but if you think you have got an answer (full or partial), then please reply direct to this email post, to help keep the ‘challenge’ open for other readers.)