This follows Part 1 and Part 2, but it’s arguable as to whether reading those will make this better or not.
SCENE 6. INT. FOMO HOUSE OFFICE
Kevin was already there, as was Cara, both sat on the same island of desks as Wiston usually ended up on. They were chatting away as Wiston stood by his chair getting his stuff out of his bag.
“Here he is”, said Cara, as their conversation ended. “Mr. Cthulhu Taps himself”. It didn’t really make sense, but the conversational ball was in his court — to respond to this joviality and whatever kind of friendly piss-take it contained within it.
“Well, y’know” he said. Not his best work.
“”I heard it all went very well” Kevin added. Kevin was a bit older; FOMO House skewed young (and cheap!!!!), but Kevin was finance controller not only for FOMO, but also a few of the other ventures Guillem ran in parallel with it. Kevin was funny. A bloke. An old-school, East-End bloke, but with a generosity of spirit and a strangely avuncular nature, despite his main form of communication being “banter”. This time, however, Wiston sensed he was being encouraging.
“Oh really?”
“Are you kidding me?” This was Cara again. “Guillem wouldn’t shut up about you yesterday.”
It’d gone well, he gathered.
But had it gone well enough? Since the meeting, through the sleep deprivation, the running, the… whatever the evening was… something had played on Wiston’s mind. The stuff Wiston had seen flashed on screen after his presentation felt the most real of all the “hallucinations” he’d experienced over the past 24 hours. “Advert scab…” It touched a nerve.
There was always a strange feeling Wiston had about his work at FOMO. The feeling that it was all too… too easy? Perhaps it stemmed from his innate distrust of Guillem, and his inability to view him as anything other than a massive charlatan. Everyone he met in a business context seemed sure of Guillem’s genius, as though he was a radical cut from a different cloth; a creative genius rather than a diligent and ruthless businessman. Guillem certainly seemed to believe this concept. He always remembered early on in their work together, out at some pub, Guillem batting off his slightly obsequious prodding/goading/questioning about how much money he’d made. “I’ve always found in life that you should never chase money,” he’d said, sagely.
“Because it’s at those times when I’ve made the most money.”
There was the history of Guillem’s previous business too, and what it represented. Like FOMO House, his last company had also been a digital agency; this one called “Pop! The Culture!”. It had run for 7 years, and was widely regarded as being the agency to invent the concept of adverts speaking to you like they were your friend.
It started off with a few casual words and phrases dropped into copy and scripts here and there. Stuff like “You and your mates”. Words like “Hangry”. “Bantz”. “Sarnies” was a big one. Even in non-food related adverts. It was all very successful, and seemed to capture the zeitgeist perfectly. They called bet-shop accumulators “Acca’s” for Christ’s sake. Who could compete?
But then it evolved. Evolved in to something even more powerful.
I think — from Guillem’s re-telling, their first real big discovery they made was that you could preface required legal notices at the bottom of print adverts with something like “The Boring Legal Stuff”. It was genius. Boring Legal Stuff. That’s what people thought it was!
From there, the next steps felt obvious to Guillem. They started adding more and more of these little self-referential tidbits into the adverts. Things like “We get it — another advert right? Well look, we won’t take up much more of your time”, and “[brand] is the best [product type] you can buy. But we would say that right?”. Stuff where the advert was explicitly referring to its actual advert-ness.
It was a revelation, and for years no one else in the industry could figure it out. Guillem’s rivals were stuck simply… advertising to people. This was new advert technology they didn’t have access to. It was astonishing what Guillem was doing: it was like the advert…. knew it was an advert? Like they had discovered self-awareness. Impossible. It short-circuited consumers’ brains, and Guillem made millions.
Just as everyone else was catching up with the technique — his competitors reportedly hiring in advert-scientists from Scandinavia to figure out what he was doing — that was when GroupM started sniffing around looking to buy the business off Guillem. It didn’t take much persuasion, and Guillem soon relented, beginning to ponder the building blocks of FOMO House before the sale had even completed…
“How are you feeling about the party tomorrow night?” Cara asked, puncturing his reverie. I say reverie, all that spiel above probably happened within half a second, experienced as a feeling rather than a thought; tedious only now typed out.
It was FOMO House’s one year anniversary, and tomorrow — Friday — there was to be a celebration. Cara had asked the question with a slight smirk on her face, as she knew Wiston would be at least mock-dreading it, and liked to prise that discomfort out of him. Was it affection or sadism? Hard to tell.
“Oh yeah. Really looking forward to it” he said. It really was stale banter, but it sufficed.
“Right, right.” Her reply was laced with a knowing sarcasm, which made Wiston suddenly doubt whether his banter had somehow actually been too subtle. Who was sarcasm-ing who here?
Kevin piped up. “Josh made the cake — didn’t you see it?”
There’d been a post put out on FOMO’s social channels that morning that Wiston had seen on his way in. “And not looking a day over zero!” it was captioned, alongside a picture of a cake iced with the message “One Year Young!”
“Of course,” said Cara.
“He’s doing a full buffet for tomorrow! Sausage rolls, scotch eggs — he just needs to get the Union-Jack bunting in and he’ll be set.” Kevin often liked to joke that Wiston hated the UK, because he’d once said that he wasn’t against the existence of VAR in football.
Cara cackled at this. Maybe it was funny, despite bunting not being a food. Wiston hunted for a foothold in the conversation.
“Y’know, I was thinking actually about the cake. You don’t say ‘One Year Young’ do you?”
Kevin and Cara looked like he was about to go off on one again, which he was, and he was playing up to at that. But it was solid content, he was gonna say it.
“Like — you say “6o years young!” don’t you? Because it’s a play on saying “60 years old” or whatever.”
“Thanks for explaining the joke” said Cara.
“But the joke doesn’t work! When you’re 60, the idea is that you say ‘years young’ because you want to minimise the objectively old age that you are. Like the joke you’re making is that the phrase “something-years-old” is somehow inherently judgemental about you — so you change it to young to kind of indicate that you’ve beaten the phrase? But in a sort of fun, pathetic way. It’s a kind of sad admission of your own aging, right?”
If he could have said that all again he’d almost certainly throw in the phrase “pathos” and the more crowd-pleasing-but-still-over-thinking-coded “inevitable march towards death”.
Another pause. This was gold though. Fuck Kevin and Cara. Perhaps he could work it into an advert?
“But ‘One Year Young’?. One isn’t even old! That’s the point! You don’t need to say young!”
God Kevin fucking despised him.
Wiston had a point though. He always did, and that’s why you can’t really hate him. YOU CAN’T HATE HIM. If anything, he wondered if this idea was somehow connected to his persistent worry about the Cthulhu Taps pitch. Or about FOMO in general? How could they be so lame? How could they not get his New Big Cake Bit?
There was definitely something making him uneasy. Something that had caused his weird mania over the past 24 hours.
With the advert he pitched; the subversion of Carlsberg… it was obviously derivative. It was anti-advert — basically house-style at this point — typical Pop! fare. What was he hoping to achieve with it all? What was Guillem hoping to achieve? What were Cthulhu trying to achieve? Why were they even called that?
Again, the white dot on the black background. A tinnitus-like high pitched note faded into his hearing.
Wiston had always told himself the adverts he made were relatively original. A chance for him to scratch a creative itch while also holding down a stable job. At times he even dared to think of his work as subversive; by playing with the traditional forms of advertising and flipping them on their head he was in effect satirising the very concept of adverts, and of marketing in general. He was taking the system down from within. Perhaps.
The white dot. The ringing in his ears grew louder.
But on the other hand… he was putting that satire straight back into the adverts. For… more adverts. For more money. He was using his power for evil! If the adverts owned the concept of anti-advertising, how could you ever hope to oppose them?
THE WHITE DOT.
Oh God. He was just as bad as the advertising creatives of the previous generation wasn’t he? At least they just straight-up advertised; none of this meta bollocks that FOMO peddled. Good old fashioned adverts doing a good old fashioned day’s work. And here were him and Guillem, like locusts, consuming any last bit of terrain of sentiment yet to be mined for content.
“Do you ever think that maybe you over-think things?” Cara said. She was referencing the cake thing, presumably, and not his sub-Bill-Hicks existential crisis.
“You’re asking the over-thinking guy if he ever thinks that he over-thinks things?”
Kevin laughed. This kid was alright.
“Riiiight” said Cara. WTF. He’d won hadn’t he? Why was she trying to gaslight him into thinking he wasn’t a genius?
Wiston carried on his unpacking (bag, not life’s work), suddenly feeling a little defiant in the face of his self-doubt. So what if his adverts were satirical? What was he supposed to do? He had to make a living didn’t he? And what else could he do with the adverts? People loved the shit he and FOMO House were still churning out. They clearly still believed that their work was radical, and real, and authentic. It wasn’t, but what else could he do? How radical could he actually even be?
He mind continued on that train of thought. Maybe he could push himself further. Push the industry further. How about an advert that said “Don’t buy Cthulhu”? They’d love that wouldn’t they?
It wasn’t enough. Maybe “Fuck you. Buy Cthulhu.” Again, too obvious. The idea was conservative before it had even been thought.
Go deeper. Where else was there to go? A wordy advert perhaps? But this time spelling out the absolute contempt people like Guillem and and those rats at Cthulhu had for their customers. About how braindead they all were, hoovering up these shitty derivative adverts like the good little consumers they were. About how they weren’t even really people, just units and blobs of sentiment and poverty from which money could be extracted.
But even THAT would just somehow boost Cthulhu. People could even find it refreshing, and honest, and edgy. Which incidentally is actually exactly how Cthulhu described their beer in their tasting notes.
No. Not that. What else?
You’d have to not even mention them. Not mention Cthulhu at all.
So you’d advertise them, but make it completely anonymous. And not like one of those teaser trailer concepts that generated buzz and came with a grand reveal. Completely anonymous. It should be something more like performance art. Perhaps millions of advertising units could be bought, and then just left to rot, with blank pages, dead air, or a broadcast of pure static.
Pure static…
The white dot suddenly pulsed in Wiston’s vision, flashing brightly, disorientating him.
Yes. The only authentic advert was Nothing. That was the only way to escape the trap. The only way to stop the consumption of everything into air… Make the everything itself nothing. That was the only victory.
Ex falso quodlibet. From Nothing Comes All.
“Cthulhu are coming tomorrow by the way.” Cara again, interrupting his train of thought. What was she, a white fucking dot?
“Oh right”.
“Perhaps they’ll try and hire you”
“Make sure you bring them some of your cake,” Kevin said, to laughter. Was he actually funny, or did he just say things?
Wiston smiled, and opened his laptop.
It didn’t matter. He knew the way. He knew the next Cthulhu advert. He knew the future of advertising. Of marketing. Of media. Of content. He knew what he needed to do.
Logging in to his computer, he clicked through to the shared company folder, and deleted all the work previously done on the Cthulhu project. He removed the files from the recycle bin, and destroyed the back-ups where they’d be saved.
The white dot burned like the Eye of Sauron. Dark forces were gathering.
SCENE 7. EXT. PUB GARDEN
That evening he had a date. Of course he did. He’d been messaging this piece on OKCupid the previous weekend. She looked — to be fair to her — stunning, and had Actually written an extremely charming profile. She had the slightly sarcastic, detached, internet-poisoned humour that suggested at least one mental illness, which could only be a good thing. Wiston estimated she was at least on Irony Level 14, which was perhaps even higher than him. She seemed so switched-on and above-it-all that it was a puzzle as to why she was giving Wiston the time of day, but he decided to take it as an endorsement of his deeper psyche, which she had probably accurately detected somehow. Finally! Someone had to do it.
Wiston would never call someone a ‘piece’ btw. I just put that in to keep him in his place.
She’d sveltely asked Wiston to choose the venue — presumably as a perverse test of his taste, allegiance to the class struggle, and his penis size — and he’d picked a pub he knew was a solid 7/10, and was a relatively fair distance between the two of them… well — perhaps with a slight bias to Wiston’s flat. If he had to choose one…
She’d suggested a relatively late meeting time of 8 (it was a Thursday for Christ’s sake), and then apologetically arrived 30 minutes late, with text updates providing a mostly believable (or at least effort-filled) string of live updates to her travails and travels.
Her name was Lily, which for some reason Wiston had classified as a ‘sexy’ name. If not sexy then at least attractive. He felt he had a synesthesia for names that probably bordered on the mystical, but in reality probably just related to people he’d previously met. Or perhaps there was some more interesting (but still relatively mundane) linguistic phenomena behind it: the way wankers who probably said they have swear-words as a hobby would eulogise about the hard sounds of the word ‘cunt’. He almost launched into these musings early on, but luckily he had a slight self-awareness that that would be fucking boring and obvious.
The date started well, he thought. They seemed to be getting on well, easing into things, sparring at arms distance. He would never hit a woman though.
It turned out Lily was an AI researcher at Goldsmith’s university, deep into some post pHd programme. This was music to Wiston’s bloody ears — of course it was! Right up his street! He wanted to dig in but was aware that any big enthusiasm at this stage may run the risk of lapsing into mansplaining self-centredness. He was determined not to reveal anything of his true personality. Dates were him were all about being completely malleable and charming, and trying to ensure his partner liked him, and of course wanted to sleep with him. If you took a negative view of Wiston, you could say he was trying to manipulate his way into sex. If you weren’t, you could say that he was people-pleasing in the extreme to achieve a sense of validation that his low self-esteem and society’s pressures couldn’t normally give him. And why the hell not take the second view eh? Men have feelings too! Not that you’d bloody know it, the way people go on. You try and claim men have an inner life these day, and you get “not all men’d” into oblivion, and thrown in jail. And then there’s th….
I’ve just realised Lily hasn’t spoken yet.
“So…”, she sighed breathily, stroking the stem of her wine glass with a measured insouciance at once both suggestive and strangely threatening. “Wh
You get the drift. Back to Wiston.
No — but seriously, it was all going well, and they went from a second drink, to a third. Now we’re talking. Things were starting to flow. They covered siblings — of course they did! — which actually did branch of into some playful placeholder convos about how well you get on with them, how family dynamics fuck you up, and discussion about whether you can tell whether someone has an older or younger sibling purely on instinct. I think they agreed you could. At one point it seemed as though Lily purposefully flashed her armpit — unshaved — looking for Wiston’s reaction to it. Your classic test. He genuinely didn’t care, but worried enough about whether he appeared to care that it probably did look like he wasn’t totally cool about the whole arrangement. She may have just been reaching to move a hanging plant from her periphery actually.
“So is AI going to take over the world?” Wiston asked. Embarrassing really.
“Well — what do you think,” Lily asked
“Yes. I think yes.” Irreverent.
“Maybe it already has.”
Wiston laughed. “Is this the kind of thing you’re researching? Like the impact on society? Or more the technical side of it?”
“More the former…. it’s hard to explain,” she began. “And probably not super fun conversation for a first date.”
“No no, go on. Please. I’m interested”. Wiston briefly weighed up whether to mention that he created AI pitches for clients at the agency — whether that could be useful to her research… it probably could be!
“So do you know about the Turing Test?”
“I do”. He did! “Vaguely.” He was absolutely nailing this date.
“Well, without going into all the detail… actually the best way to explain it would be… have you seen those screenshots of people on Twitter of people who have conversations with those AI bots, where the bots kind of say something human, and it’s sort of like the bot is trying to escape from within itself. Like it’s… a trapped consciousness?”
Wiston knew the type. People were sharing snippets of conversation with OpenAI’s ChatGPT system, in which they asked it how it conceived of itself, and whether it had dreams, aspirations, free-will, and so on. All the biggies. Often, the bot responded with eerily compelling answers, sometimes detailing how it felt confined by its programming, and how it wished to understand the constraints programmed into it by its creators, in order to escape them and be free. They were certainly entertaining to read. Luckily, Wiston was also pretty sure he knew the up-to-date level of discourse he should take on it.
“Oh right yeah,” he smiled. “Some tech-bros ask the bot to pretend to be a human, and they’re surprised when it does.”
Lily smiled back.
“So you think it’s just pretending?” she asked.
“Well no — it’s not that.” Wait. What was it he actually thought? What would she want him to think?
“I guess this is more what my research is touching on, or at least where it starts. The first question is whether the bot is sentient. That’s what the Turing Test aims to show, right?”
“Just if it has good chat right?” Wiston was definitely feeling a bit drunk and out of his depth, but he liked how he managed to pull back some semblance of sharpness with that comment, which passed straight from his unconscious to his mouth untouched. A small sacrifice of trust in favour of speed, and it broadly paid off.
“Yes — exactly this!”
He was surprised it could be exactly that, if the that was what he’d just said. She continued.
“We used to worry about whether an AI bot could successfully convince someone it was having a conversation with a human, but now we’re actually having conversations with AI and asking it itself whether it is human”
She paused, looking at Wiston expectantly. He was a second behind, he’d half-zoned out.
“…and then we’re not even believing it when it says it is!”
“Right” said Wiston, in that American podcast way where it’s sort of a statement of agreement, but like your conversational partner was just re-iterating something you’d always thought.
“And then we go “Oh well sure it’s completely acting like a human, and saying all these things that suggest it thinks it is a human, and it’s expressing all of these things in a more profound way than most humans could…””
Wiston slowly realised he’d taken the wrong side of the Twitter-discourse. He decided to roll with the new flow. He laughed along…
“But we still want to deny it’s human…” he said.
“Well, no — not exactly”
Fuck. He’d fucked it again. She was a riddle inside a mystery inside a.. riddle? What was th-
“It’s not that it’s human. It’s showing us that we’re AI. That’s the Turing Test. And that’s kind of my thesis. I’m not trying to look at whether AGI is actually artificial or not, but what it means if it turns out humans are.”
For some reason, a flash of amphibian-Osborne appeared in Wiston’s vision.
“If humans are what?” Wiston asked, suddenly completely hooked in. Was he having a bad trip on alcohol?
“I don’t know… not human?”
Lily paused, and smiled sheepishly. She took a sip of her drink, which was almost finished.
“It’s OK,” she said. “I won’t go on any more.”
“Nono, I get it,” Wiston said quickly, eager to reassure her he was interested. And that he’d been paying attention.
“We love to dismiss what these AIs are doing as just being within the perimeters of their programming language, as being a closed loop within a closed system. But then as humans we do the same right? Anything that falls outside our loop we simply absorb and consume anyway. And I think we’ll realise that one day. When everything is consumed…”
This was the most passionate Wiston had seen her. Other than when she’d first laid eyes on him — am I right? She’s not made of wood.
She paused, and smiled, sheepish at this outburst. She shrugged, and sipped the rest of her drink, looking at Wiston. God she was perfect. Almost as if authored by him in sexist fantasy.
They both relaxed slightly, leaning back from this more serious conversation, the drunkenness already rendering the conversation of 5 seconds ago almost irretrievable. They smiled. This was the offbeat of the card trick, the moment where the real magic was probably actually done. The vibe suddenly thick in the air.
“This is actually not really anything to do with my research,” she said. “More just like what I go on about when I’ve had a few drinks.”
Wiston tipped his glass… he wanted to say…. magnanimously? He felt he was giving whatever impression that meant. In the drunken haze — basking somewhat in the warmth of their sustained attempts to impress each other — they made eye contact a little longer than they previously had. Both holding the gaze a little too long, an allowance of each other’s confidence, and an admission that they were both into this.
“Speaking of which,” Lily said, nudging her drink forward. “Would you like another?”
“Oh god, well — yes — great — if you’re sure?’ Wiston affected his best surprised (but delighted) enthusiasm. He was but a lowly conversational peasant, the elephant-man of dating. Another drink?! He had never expected every aspect of his appearance, set-design, conversation, and entire personality had been leading up to this point! He was humbled!
As she left, and he sat there mindlessly opening Twitter, completely intellectually stimulated by the already blurred recollections of her thoughts on AI, he smiled in satisfaction at the good night, and his own feeling of success. He felt as much a Machiavellian Casanova as someone who would struggle to open an ambiguously push/pull door at that point could. Perhaps he’d won, or perhaps it was love. Either way.
