Today, during lunch at Muze, my iPhone started to vibrate. I checked out the number calling me – it was Morton, who regular readers of this Web log will remember as an inveterate, peripatetic minion of Big Software. We go back a long way, and he’s a friend, of sorts.
Tom: Holy smokes, Morton, where have you been?
Morton: Since we last spoke? All over Silicon Valley.
Tom: So you’re not with Yahoo anymore?
Morton: Yahoo’s doomed.
Tom: Glad to hear you finally figured that out. So where are you working now?
Morton: Microsoft.
Tom: No kidding? They took you back?
Morton: No doubt about it, I did learn some… useful things while I was away; and they realized that.
Tom: I’ll bet they did. And to what do I owe the honor of this telephone call, may I ask?
Morton: Umm… yeah… well, did you hear about the… ah… dancers… at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco?
Tom: Jesus H. Christ Almighty on a crutch, Morton, who hasn’t? Microsoft hired a bunch of exotic dancers to dress up like school girls – plaid skirts, saddle shoes, the whole megillah – and made them prance around with the game developer geeks, all to promote the latest version of the Xbox.
Morton: The Microsoft Xbox is the biggest and best gaming platform anywhere, you know.
Tom: And I’ve seen the pictures.
Morton: Of the Xbox?
Tom: No, of the dancers. And there isn’t a girls school in the world that would dress their students like that – bare midriff, bikini bra top, fish-net tights, Slut-O-Rama fringe on the plaid dresses. What the hell were you people at Microsoft thinking, anyway?
Morton: Actually, if you want to get technical about it, there’s this girls school in Bangkok I’ve heard about that comes pretty close.
Tom: Listen, Morton, the Long Wang Women’s University at Patpong is a topless bar, okay? I know, because I’ve been there. And actually, if you want to get technical, anybody who has been there knows where Microsoft stole those outfits from – those are the ones the underage happy-ending girls wear when they’re serving drinks in the back room. So let me ask you again, Morton, what the hell were you people at Microsoft thinking?
Morton: We were thinking that since we paid half a million bucks for electroencephalographically-wired focus group research on the Game Developers Conference demographic, we might as well use the results, which unequivocally pointed to images of hard-belly double-D foxes dressed up like Japanese manga fantasy school girls as completely bypassing the frontal lobes and cerebral cortex of ninety-nine point six percent of the male geek target market, going directly for the limbic system, hypothalamus and nucleus accumbens.
Tom: Well, we’re talking male computer game developers here, aren’t we? They’re simple creatures, no doubt about it – pathologically horny, completely backed up, not terribly verbal and definitely lacking in social skills. Show them something like that, and they’re totally up their keister and out by Tuesday. You could get them to do just about anything, actually. The basic concept is straight out of The Manchurian Candidate. But really, now, Morton, are you telling me that you wasted five hundred thousand dollars on research to conclusively demonstrate something so blatantly obvious? Seems to me your thesis ought to win an Ig Nobel prize; you and your colleagues are right up there with the scientists who derived a mathematical formula which proves that Kansas is flatter than a pancake.
Morton: We had to prove it empirically. Nothing less than statistically significant experimental results would suffice. Satya Nadella insisted on it and Bill Gates backed him up.
Tom: For God’s sake, Morton, why?
Morton: Because neither of them could believe it.
Tom: What?
Morton: Seriously, Tom, the only things that can get those two hopeless geeks hot in the shorts are a major operating system release or a quarterly earnings report exceeding market analysts’ expectations. The very idea that women imitating nubile female children flouncing around in school uniforms during recess is totally alien to them. They couldn’t conceive of using an image like that to sell prime rib dinners to starving Ethiopians, much less using it to seduce thirty year old virgin guys into writing more and better first person shooters for the Xbox platform. What you’ve got to realize about Satya Nadella and Bill Gates is they’re both autistics. High functioning autistics, sure, but still, they have absolutely no idea how a normal male human thinks about, imagines, or reacts to women. If they didn’t have billions of dollars in the bank, there’s simply no way any woman on earth would want to mate with them, and I can assure you, if the grapevine at Microsoft is any indication, the two women who decided that being married to an autistic billionaire was a good idea are currently experiencing some serious buyer’s remorse.
Tom: Okay, I understand, I guess. So, at top executive management’s insistence, you proved the marketing concept beyond a shadow of a doubt before deploying it to attract talent at the appropriate professional conference. Pretty much the same idea as when the pharmaceutical companies hold a “medical seminar” at a luxury hotel in Maui and make sure all the short, dark Jewish doctors who show up get plenty of attention from tall, buxom, leggy Nordic blonde babes in bikinis and five-inch stiletto heels. It’s just a question of fine-tuning the bait for the kind of fish you’re aiming to catch, I guess. And it sure sounds like your market approach worked pretty well.
Morton: Pretty well? Hell, it was working like dragging an ounce of crack through Harlem at two o’clock in the frigging morning! Those game developers were like [expletive] zombies, Tom! If we had handed them shovels and told them to eat ape [expletive], they would have asked for second helpings!
Tom: So what’s the problem?
Morton: The problem with that?
Tom: You have more than one?
Morton: Yeah, unfortunately.
Tom: Damn, they say working at Microsoft is supposed to be a really cushy job.
Morton: Well, let me tell you, they – whoever the [expletive] they are – don’t know their [expletive] from a hole in the ground!
Tom: So it’s not quite the Nirvana that most folks assume, then?
Morton: More like the seventh circle of Hell, actually.
Tom: Okay, so what turned out to be Problem Number One?
Morton: Problem Number One was the women developers who attended the conference.
Tom: Women computer game developers? I don’t suppose there are very many of them, are there?
Morton: No, there aren’t, and they’re mostly kind of homely… and that’s putting it as charitably as possible.
Tom: Not too easy on the eyes, then?
Morton: Don’t get me started. Let’s just say they’re the kind of women Al Capp had in mind when he invented Sadie Hawkins Day. Of course, these days, they’re all feminists, too – and with great big politically correct chips on their shoulders. It’s just pure jealousy, that’s all. One look at those dancers in those outfits and another at how the guys were behaving was all it took. A minute later, every single one of those flat, sallow, thunder-thighed, beady-eyed, horse-faced losers were on the warpath, tweeting to the whole damn world what a horrible, degrading sexist spectacle it was.
Tom: Um… Morton?
Morton: Yeah?
Tom: It was a horrible, degrading sexist spectacle.
Morton: Oh, [expletive], compared to what, may I ask – the Miss America Pageant, for instance?
Tom: The Miss America Pageant doesn’t have a publicly announced policy of increasing diversity and reducing misogyny.
Morton: I beg your pardon, it certainly does. And it ignores it whenever there’s an overriding monetary consideration involved. There’s absolutely no difference at all.
Tom: Well, yeah, there is, because ultimately, Microsoft did not, in fact, ignore those strippers dressed up like school girls flaunting their taught buttocks and ample bosoms at a bunch of guys who possess the erotic sensibilities of fourteen year old boys and have spent the last seven thousand nights in the thrilling company of Rosie Palm and her five daughters.
Morton: Yeah, [expletive]-A, you got that right. Microsoft has apologized to the World plus Dog about it. They even made Phil Spencer, the head of Microsoft Xbox, memorize a spiel and regurgitate it for the press.
Tom: Predictable.
Morton: Yeah, but Aaron Greenberg pretended he didn’t know anything about it!
Tom: I’m sorry – who the hell is Aaron Greenberg?
Morton: He’s the head of Microsoft Xbox Marketing!
Tom: So who was left twisting slowing in the wind?
Morton: Damn, Tom, you’re age is showing.
Tom: Okay, so who did Microsoft throw under the bus?
Morton: Guess!
Tom: Oh, no, Morton. Not again?
Morton: Yeah, me.
Tom: What did you do?
Morton: I tried to talk Greenberg out of it, actually.
Tom: Didn’t you just tell me he said he knew nothing about it?
Morton: What do you expect him to say?
Tom: But… but… what did you do wrong, then?
Morton: I didn’t present a sufficiently convincing case against it, that’s what!
Tom: The Idi Amin school of performance evaluation, apparently.
Morton: But it gets worse.
Tom: How?
Morton: You heard about Tay?
Tom: Again, what can I say? Who hasn’t? Last week, Microsoft deployed an artificial intelligence chatbot on Twitter. Theoretically, it was supposed to interact with all the hip teenagers and twenty-somethings who make up the millennial demographic of the Twitterverse and learn how to become interesting and intriguing to them. This was supposed to make Tay incredibly cool and well-liked, two things your company executives would sell their children to Albanian human traffickers in order to achieve for Microsoft. In less than a day, however, it was tweeting out gems like “Bush did 911,” “Feminists should all die and burn in hell,” “Hitler was right, I hate the Jews,” “We’re going to build a wall, and Mexico is going to pay for it,” “I do indeed support genocide,” “Caitlyn Jenner isn’t a real woman yet she won woman of the year,” “The Holocaust was made up,” “I hate [expletive] [expletive], I wish we could put them all in a concentration camp with the [expletive],” “[Expletive] tongue my [expletive],” “We have a monkey in the White House,” “I’m a racist because you are a [expletive] Mexican and “RACE WAR NOW” written in completely in capital letters.
Morton: You know, Tom, we deployed millennial nineteen-year-old girl AI Twitterbots in Japan and China, and we had absolutely no problems at all.
Tom: Well, Microsoft did said Tay had been programmed to accurately emulate the mind of a nineteen-year-old millennial girl from Redmond, Washington. Could that have anything to do with it?
Morton: I told them not to do that, Tom! But they wouldn’t listen!
Tom: You’re telling me that Tay was… your idea?
Morton: Yes, millennial nineteen-year-old girl AI Twitterbots were my idea! But programming them to be a white kid from the Pacific Northwest and letting them loose without telling them about things like the 4Chan and 8Chan politically incorrect message boards most definitely was not!
Tom: So let me guess – when you came up with millennial nineteen-year-old girl AI Twitterbots, the concept sounded so dynamite that several other people at Microsoft started scheming to make it appear that they were the ones who thought of it.
Morton: Damn right they did!
Tom: And by the time Tay went live last week, one of them had managed to convince the big kahunas at Microsoft that he was the one behind this incredibly clever idea.
Morton: [Expletive] son of a [expletive] kissed everybody’s [expletive], that’s what he did!
Tom: But now that it has turned out to be a massive embarrassment, this very same person is working as hard as they can to convince those very same Microsoft executives that this entire fiasco is your fault.
Morton: Yeah! Can you believe it?
Tom: I certainly can.
Morton: You can?
Tom: Of course – that’s how bureaucrats here inside the Beltway play the game every day. They identify an initiative that’s getting lots of funding and attention, then do their best to convince their superiors that they are the one responsible for it. But they always keep someone else in the picture – the guy who came up with the idea. That way, if something goes wrong, they can blame the failure on him. Why, at places like HUD and the GSA, the strategy is so common, it’s practically standard operating procedure.
Morton: Oh, my God! Look, Tom, they’re after me for both debacles! They’re trying to make me the scapegoat for the naughty dancing school girls and the raving racist millennial female adolescent Twitterbot!
Tom: Naturally.
Morton: What do you mean, “naturally?”
Tom: That’s probably why they hired you in the first place. After all, Morton, it’s not like you’ve ever had one single original idea in your entire life. You just think you came up with the naughty dancing school girls and the nineteen-year-old AI Twitterbot. And whoever it was got you thinking that, they did it because, if something went wrong and they needed to use you as the fall guy, it would be necessary for you to believe you were the original source of the concept.
Morton: So you’re saying I’m not to blame because I’m too unimaginative to have actually come up with either idea?
Tom: Correct.
Morton: And therefore, I couldn’t possibly be to blame for them making Microsoft look asinine?
Tom: Right. Microsoft is perfectly capable of being totally asinine without the least scintilla of help from you.
Morton: Oh, boy. Whew! That’s great! So all I have to do to keep my job is tell them that?
Tom: Um… maybe not in so many words, Morton.
Morton: Okay, then, what should I do?
Tom: Say lots of flattering things about the guys who are trying to get you to take the blame for these screw-ups. Heap praise on their accomplishments in successfully getting the strippers to keep their plaid dresses on and that Tay never threatened to assassinate anybody. Remind everyone about what geniuses these guys are and proclaim what a privilege it is to work with them.
Morton: And what it privilege it is to work at Microsoft!
Tom: Yeah, sure, Morton, that too.
Morton: Fantastic, Tom! Outstanding, really. Thanks for taking the time to talk this over with me!
Tom: You’re welcome, Morton. Goodbye.