Urban Anthropology

Meursault rents a cubicle at the Aquarium, which is a real office building located at that chaotic crossroads between the real world and Meursault’s tormented imagination. When he first began writing to me from the Aquarium, I assumed his despatches would comprise the usual: complaints about coffee, cubicle politics, the slow death of dignity in young cities, corporate pretentiousness, corporate jargon, corporate poetry, corporate anything–and everything else that annoys a grumpy bastard like Meursault. But as the communiqués accumulated—each more pungent than the last—it became clear that he had developed an anthropological interest in the inhabitants of his glass-fronted workplace. He began referring to these notes as Field Notes; he assigned Latin binomials to his co-workers; he described scent cues, mating rituals, and feeding behaviours.

This is a catalogue of the creatures at the Aquarium—engineers, managers, aliens, housekeepers, caterers and other beasts—with excerpts taken verbatim from Meursault’s Field Notes. It was compiled to help readers find their bearings in the Aquarium’s terrain and to recognize its flora and fauna. Their behaviours may seem exaggerated. Meursault assures me that they are not. You decide. –Ed.

Taxonomic Classification: Avaricius dominatus crocodilus

Description: Chief Operating Officer and Co-founder of Generic IT Company With a Poncy Name , which everyone calls GITCo. Presumed female. Age indeterminate. She is rumoured to have bumped off her siblings after a hostile takeover of her mother’s womb.

Habitat: Corner office on the top floor of the Aquarium. On her desk she keeps a cactus which is watered on days when she plans to fire employees.

Languages: Unknown, but can shovel shite fluently in seven languages including Sanskrit. Can deliver a 90-minute all-hands speech without revealing a single actionable detail.

*Meursault uses the word shite to describe what those who are polite but similarly uncharitable would call “millennial corporatese”, or “marketing speak” or “spiel”. My suggestion to use a faux-NewSpeak word corpcomm was rejected by Meursault with the following: “Shite is offensive not merely to the nose and ears. It is an assault on one’s sense and sensibility.”

If our resident Austenagonist resorts to quoting Austen, I cannot possibly interfere–the bylaws of the Outsider Paradox prohibit tampering with irony. –Ed.

Character traits: Apex predator. Enjoys tormenting members of Binarius spp. and is rumoured to have invented a cocktail made with the tears of developers. Known to practice Quantum Yoga™.

Taxonomic Classification: Avaricius embeanus minimus, the Lesser MBA

Description: A former mid-level manager at a large IT company Ex-Man now “works” at the Aquarium to avoid explaining to his family that he was downsized. He wears a dark suit; he owns a ThinkPad whose trackpoint he actually uses; his cubicle contains everything from his old workplace including a framed certificate (with a facsimile signature of Larry Ellison) from the “Oracle for Managers” course that he completed in 2012.

Habitat: Cubicle 2, adjacent to mine, on the third floor. Takes lunch in the cafeteria, always orders the set vegetarian meal.

Languages: Reasonably proficient at MS-Excel, but otherwise illiterate. Recently seen plodding laboriously through an online Rust certification course. Unlike his cousins in Avaricius spp., Ex-man does not speak fluent shite, which explains why he lost his job.

Character traits: Cheerfully woebegone. Mostly solitary, but not unfriendly. Possesses a rare trait among Avaricius spp.: empathy. Also, Ex-man is unusually industrious. Apart from the computer course, he spends the days inside MS-Word.

From Meursault’s Field Notes: Ex-Man is one of the few creatures in the Aquarium who acknowledges the existence of the general population—developers who cannot afford cubicles and squat in the common areas. Though he has access to unlimited cubicle-grade coffee, he often stops by the communal filter machine around 9AM, just after it runs dry, and quietly replaces the filter. No one asks him to. No one thanks him.

Ex-man read history in college! I’ve discovered that he once wanted to become an archaeologist and is currently “writing a novel set in an ancient temple.” “Ah. A fellow-fan of Umberto Eco,” I said absently. Ex-man hadn’t heard the name; at lunchtime he was too depressed to eat. I feel terrible. He hasn’t yet showed me his draft, and if he does I promise I will be kind to him.

Taxonomic Classification: Binarius algorithmus primus

Description: Exactly as old as Google, Go Go Girl is an elite Golang developer. She was a paid ronin programmer well before she graduated with honours in mathematics at the age of sixteen; she’s never worked on a payroll, ever. Usually dressed in clothes bought from the local Gapkids, she wears a woollen cap year-round, even in summer, even indoors. Won the Aquarium Go tournament last year.

Habitat: Cubicle 4, shared with Javabot, on the third floor.

Languages: Can code in virtually any modern language, but favours Go, C#, and Haskell.

Character traits: Works alone. Can crunch indefinitely. Listens to dead hip-hop singers. Swears in fluent Japanese. Greets people with a cheerful しんじまえ. “Drop dead”. Lives on a diet of tofu, yogurt, kale smoothies, korumame senbei, and Kirin Light.

From Meursault’s Field Notes: Go Go Girl is easily the most elegant programmer in the Aquarium. Javabot describes her code as being ‘shredded.’ I accept his evaluation at face value.

To the uncompiled masses, all developers belong to an awkward, nerdy, shy, nocturnal species that speak in an incomprehensible language to lifeless machines. This is not entirely inaccurate. Javabot and I belong to an older breed of developers: our code is terse, imperative, and entirely joyless; we were bred to run fast in a straight line, like greyhounds. Go Go Girl, by contrast, codes like a cheetah hunting a gazelle: expressive, fluid, occasionally flamboyant, sometimes deliberately showy. Her style makes me wonder whether computer code, like language before it, is slowly creating a literature of its own. Perhaps one day, the uncompiled masses will read a piece of elegant code and feel something stir inside. Take, for instance, this well-known recursive code written in Python:

def factorial(n):
	return 1 if n == 0 else n * factorial(n - 1)

This code is terribly inefficient especially if one doesn’t know the value of N. Each call stacks atop the last like an unpaid invoice—but it’s curiously elegant, with its logic folding inward like origami.

Greyhounds run in a straight line. For those of you still reading: when Javabot began working at Sun in 1998, this is how he would have written the same program:

public class FactorialCalculator {
	public static int factorial(int n) {
		int result = 1;
		for (int i = 2; i <= n; i++) {
			result *= i;
		}
		return result;
	}
}

Sometimes Go Go Girl joins Javabot and me at our lunch table. We take a leisurely hearty lunch; she eats a cup of yogurt and nibbles on crackers while quietly browsing on her phone. I don’t know why she chooses to sit with us, but we enjoy her silent company, and she treats us—two ageing cursor-herders—with a kind of amused respect. Sometimes Go Go Girl rounds up smaller prey and sends them in our direction. Sometimes, without ceremony, without attribution, we receive emails from companies we’ve never heard of. A side gig here. A short contract there. “You were referred to us by a mutual connection.” It doesn’t take much to guess who that mutual connection is. When we ask her, she wrinkles her nose, sticks out her tongue, then changes the subject.

We accept her benevolence with gratitude. While I continue to remain irrationally suspicious of all vegetarians, she is the only member of any vegetarian denomination with whom I am happy to break bread.

Taxonomic Classification: Binarius algorithmus nerdus

Description: Middle-aged. Engineer caste. Dressed recursively, in yesterday’s jeans and tomorrow’s shirt, Javabot is both a relic and a prophet. He joined Sun Microsystems right out of college, back when Java was still a revolution. Though he rarely speaks of it, his work can still be found buried deep inside the open-source compiler javac. When Oracle acquired Sun, Javabot wasn’t sacked, but he walked out in quiet protest. He became a one-man migration specialist, porting legacy Java codebases to open-source JVM ecosystems, often spending weeks under the fluorescent “suns” of high-security server rooms.

From Meursault’s Field Notes: Javabot sees the future as a hostile fork of the present. He laments that software is no longer written—it is generated, templated, and regurgitated. He fears a world where code is no longer read, only executed.

Javabot keeps a printed copy of the Java Language Specification in his drawer, dog-eared and lovingly annotated.

Habitat: Cubicle 4, shared with Go Go Girl, on the third floor. Migrates every hour to the cafeteria to maintain his blood-caffeine levels at 11.

Languages: Java, C++. Chronically suspicious of dynamically-typed languages. For some reason, he lurks on the Raku IRC.

Character traits: Javabot is a respected elder at the Aquarium. Most developers today live in frameworks; Javabot, like most Sun engineers of his era, lived in the compiler’s bloodstream. Few people understand computers like he does.

From Meursault’s Field Notes: I think of Javabot as a friend. We share an appreciation of irony. His company offers online “bot” services such as website scrapers, contact-harvesters, API battering rams, POSTers, like-bots, chat-bots, Captcha solvers, and so on; ironically, he’s also hired to probe weaknesses in systems and fortify them against bots like his own: Javabot versus Javabot’s bots!

His code contains gracefully ironic fallbacks and poetic panic messages. I found this existential scream in one of his chat-bot programs:

	throw new LifeIsMeaninglessException()

Taxonomic Classification: Avaricius dominatus rattus

Description: A.k.a Don Rat. Age unknown. Apex caste. Rarely seen, never photographed. Presumed male. Chairman and CEO of The Rattone Organisation, a holding company registered in the Cayman Islands. Don Rattone’s empire includes shell firms, call centers, and data laundering outfits registered in various jurisdictions, all with flexible law enforcement practices. His relationship with US regulatory bodies—FCC, FTC, SEC—is best described as “long-distance, polyamorous.”

Habitat: Unknown. The Aquarium hosts one of the Rattone Organisation’s many subsidiaries–Another Anonymous Telemarketing and Trading Company –which occupies the floor below GITCo. Don Rat does not do business in person. Instead, he employs anonymous Rat Bosses. These are mid-tier emissaries belonging to Avaricius rattus who conduct business on his behalf.

Languages: Unknown. Rumoured to have graduated from Harvard Law School, so is probably fluent in shite.

Character traits: Apex predator. Can smell subpoenas. Loves the smell of freshly laundered dollar bills.

From Meursault’s Field Notes: Don Rat is a myth, a shadow, and it is entirely possible that he is more than one person. Pool Pot (see below) once told me that Don Rat owned the Aquarium, and, indeed, owns a stake in every asset-management company that hosts a Rat Org subsidiary.

Taxonomic Classification: Binarius potheadus stallmanii

Description: Pool Pot can quote Asimov, debug your shell script, and inform you that the cafeteria’s microwave relays biometric data to the CIA, all while stoned silly. He no longer codes for a living but, according to Javabot, he used to work at Cisco. He may be a contractor working for the Aquarium, but I can’t be sure. When asked about his job he picks a random response from the following array of strings: [“Just surviving, my friend”, “Fighting the good fight.”,“Staying alive.”, “Hmm?”, “Yeah, man. Yeah.”, “Peace, man.”]

Habitat: Unknown. Some say he lives in the Aquarium; others say that he cultivates vandal-strength weed in a forgotten maintenance room in the basement. Can be found playing pool when he isn’t communicating with the mother-ship orbiting Ganymede. He also runs the Aquarium’s betting racket from the smoking area in the basement.

Languages: C, C++. Compiles everything from source on a Slackware system that requires a drop of his blood to verify and decrypt the bootloader.

Character traits: Pool Pot is the Aquarium’s only reliable source of gossip, conspiracy theories, OEM licenses, “liberated” proprietary software, assorted edibles, and arcane sci-fi memorabilia. Known for high signal-to-noise ratio in gossip transmission. Believes that knowledge is power, and that power rightfully belongs only to those who possess knowledge; ergo, even if root access is to be gained illegally, one has the moral imperative to do so.

From Meursault’s Field Notes: Last Tuesday, I found Pool Pot, armed with a laptop and a logic analyser, crouched behind the vending machine in the cafeteria. The maintenance crew had just installed a new digital payment interface—the kind that flashes a QR code and chirps when it’s scanned.

Pool Pot claimed the vending machine company was tracking interactions with the machine and selling the data to advertisers. I watched him plug a USB cable into the service port and then run a series of scripts on his laptop as he muttered angrily about the sale of private data.

Pool Pot isn’t a thief; he is believes in freedom, above all else. In his view, the vending machine company had “stolen freedom by monetizing the user info of the hungry masses” and, consequently, he was forced to intervene. He modified the firmware on the machine to anonymise all user info; also, as compensation for the data already sold, the machine now dispenses a free KitKat to anyone who types #SUDO LIBERATE KITKAT NOW into the keypad and presses Enter.

Taxonomic Classification: Avaricius rattus

Description: Rat Bastard is a Rat Boss. Age unknown. CEO of Yet Another Anonymous Telemarketing and Trading Company , commonly called The Rat Shop, one of Don Rattone’s shady telemarketing firms. All Rat Bosses begin life as Avaricius embeanus vulgaris i.e., as a Common MBA. Transformation into A. rattus is triggered by a catalytic act of betrayal. Documented triggers include: selling fake stock to a childhood friend; faking kidney failure to solicit organ donations, then selling the organ on the black market; extracting banking details from a grandmother by pretending to be her grandchild imprisoned abroad; blackmailing ex-girlfriends with AI-manipulated photographs. Once triggered, within 24 hours, any remaining shame is sloughed off like dead skin, a scaly tail emerges from the coccyx, incisors lengthen, and the creature becomes nocturnal. Avaricius rattus is born.

Habitat: Corner office on the fifth floor.

Languages: Unknown. Fluent liar.

Character traits: Apex scavenger. Will lie to his own mother to make a sale; will sell his own mother to meet his weekly earnings quota. All Rat Bosses appear to be identical clones of each other, though they can tell each other apart. This trait allows Rat Bosses to be virtually anonymous–hiding in plain sight with their identical cousins!

From Meursault’s Field Notes: I have never met Rat Bastard. No one I trust has spoken to him. Pool Pot claims to have seen Rat Bastard once—on the roof, at 3AM, whispering into a satellite phone. He was wearing a trench coat, despite the humidity, and gesturing toward the skyline as if negotiating with it.

Taxonomic Classification: Avaricius embeanus vulgaris. A common subspecies of the MBA (A. embeanus) species. Noted for its high visibility and low impact.

Description: Product Manager at GITCo. Aged in the early-30s though his LinkedIn profile describes him as a “seasoned executive.” Introduces himself variously as a “growth hacker”, “marketing maverick” and “synergy guru”. Dresses in tight M&S suits paired with florid ties; proudly wears his ID card as if it were a Victoria Cross. Worships WAP Demon (see below).

Habitat: Mid-floor cubicle inside GITCo. Frequently seen shovelling shite in the cafeteria to attract females.

Languages: Illiterate, but can shovel shite fluently–refers to PowerPoint decks as “narratives”, and to corporate busywork as “crunching in beast mode”.

Character traits: None. The Common MBA is unremarkable. His “identity” (the closest word I can imagine) is defined entirely by the bar code on his ID badge.

From Meursault’s Field Notes: SAMM speaks in bullet points. His sentences arrive pre-packaged with action verbs and trademark symbols.

SAMM is a survivor. Not because he excels, but because he endures. He was hired for no specific reason and will likely be fired for one equally vague.

From the moment they receive their MBAs, the souls of managers begin a frantic race towards what might be called an event horizon of self-delusion that, once crossed, makes all delusions unnecessary. Delusions become reality–mediocrity becomes “solid potential”–and the manager can no longer distinguish between truth and shite. Yet they are aware of the time when they could… SAMM inhabits this post-delusional space. Shovelling shite in all directions becomes a subconscious attempt to camouflage their mediocrity.

Taxonomic Classification: Avaricius dominatus baskervilii

Description: Unknown.

Habitat: Unknown.

Languages: Unknown.

Character traits: The Dogfather doesn’t wield power; he is power.

From Meursault’s Field Notes: Yesterday Pool Pot and I were “quality-testing” his most recent harvest when he told me about the most mysterious creature ever to have been seen at the Aquarium. Years ago, when the Aquarium was being repurposed into a co-working space, Pool Pot was part the network-infrastructure crew that laid down the fibre-optics, routers, firewalls, and so on. One morning, all mobiles phones in the building mysteriously dropped off the network. Pool Pot walked up from the basement to investigate and was blocked at the stairwell by a Minor Hellion guarding the lobby. The Dogfather, said Pool Pot, arrived at the building in a Cadillac long enough to span the Potomac. He was received at the entrance by the Evil Queen, two Greater Demons (WAP Demon’s minions?), an anonymous Rat Boss, and a herd of piggy MBAs wearing earpieces, Aviators, and ID badges. He took a short tour of the building and left by helicopter.

I have left out all the obvious garnishings sprinkled into this tale, which a sky-high Pool Pot narrated over a half-hour. I will include this: The Evil Queen curtseyed, and the Demons and their hellions all bowed solemnly when the Dogfather stepped out of the car!

I hope to see this creature one day…

Taxonomic Classification: Avaricius dominatus luciferus

Description: WAP Demon earned his dosch during the brief window between dial-up and 3G internet. He sold his WAP services company to Blackberry a couple of months before Apple’s iPhone keynote. He now spends his time golfing, fornicating, and investing in startups, often simultaneously. Owns dozens of companies. GITCo is one of them.

Habitat: Unknown. WAP Demon prefers warm climates. He was last seen in public on an unnamed Caribbean island on New Year’s day.

Languages: Unknown. Possibly fluent in C++, but hasn’t coded since the First Browser War.

Character traits: Refers to himself in the third-person. Speaks in riddles about “the blockchain of consciousness” and “quantum synergy.” No one understands him, but everyone nods.

From Meursault’s Field Notes: Javabot refers to him as “the ghost of dotcoms past.”

Go Go Girl still remembers the first time she saw the WAP Demon during a conference call at GITCo. The memory made her shudder, and Go Go Girl isn’t easily scared. 実 悪 she said. “Pure evil”. I’ve never seen her react that way to anyone.

Editor’s notes

• This article will be updated as and when required. The Dog Father was mentioned once in Meursault’s early Field Notes, but never in any of his Aquarium stories. I was intrigued by this character, as was Pica, who imagined his likeness from the cues in Meursault’s cryptic notes!

• If you work at the Aquarium and are reading this: I do not know if Pool Pot’s KitKat code works, but have changed it anyway. It isn’t “sudo whatever”. Please pay for your KitKats. The Outsider does not condone any illegal acts.