By the beginning of Quire’s latest emergency board meeting, the video had generated three million hits and climbing, a trending hashtag (#Quiremadehimdoit), a line of T-shirts breaking records on Etsy, and a Jimmy Kimmel sincerity moment that was chasing the original stream on YouTube. All in all, the only thing that wasn’t trending up in the aftermath was Quire’s share price, plummeting like it had BASE-jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge minus the wing suit.
“Somebody tell me he was on Ambien,” V.T. mock pleaded, pausing the video, then on its way to four million hits since they’d started watching it. The CEO waited between the projector and screen, wearing the boy’s static suicide. He began humming the tune for Final Jeopardy. But none of the board members stepped forward with news of a pharmaceutical scapegoat.
“Okay,” V.T. resumed, “at least tell me he wasn’t part of a sosh trial.”
But no one around the table was ready to confirm or deny that Rupert Jr. had been part of a sosh trial, mainly because, well, he had been. And that was the real corporate crisis Quire found itself facing. Because the boy hadn’t been bullied, didn’t have an incurable health condition, and hadn’t been humiliated, either sexually or financially. In the end, he’d killed himself thanks to a confluence of bad decisions, both personal and corporate.
On the personal side, Rupert Jr. made the mistake of quiring a host of socioeconomic inferiors who in real life were total strangers but online constituted his “quire of besties.” The idea—ill-conceived as it turned out—was to discover how the other half (or, if you’re a stickler for stats, the other ninety-nine percent) lived. Being the scion of those bankable man nips, Rupert Jr. had never in his life been exposed to the riffraff that make up the vast majority of humanity. And so the lives of the unrich and unfamous became a source of curiosity for him, as is often the case with forbidden things.
The other bad decision happened at the corporate offices of Quire, which had unknowingly included Rupert Jr. in a so-called “sosh trial,” which was shorthand for social engineering optimization study. As part of the trial in question, Quire’s social engineering team manipulated the news stream of three different groups of users to see what balance of good/bad news led to optimal clicking behavior, especially the click-through rate to the ever-coveted “Buy Now” button. The engineers had already discovered that moderately depressed Quire users tended to buy more stuff, a practice they’d dubbed “retail therapy.” The question was, What would clickers do if they were really depressed?
And no, Rupert Jr. wasn’t part of the group that was fed especially depressing news from others in their quire. He also wasn’t part of the control group whose news feed was left untouched. No, he’d been placed in a group intended to confirm the research question’s corollary, i.e., “Do vicariously happy people buy less stuff?”
The only problem: Rupert Jr. wasn’t online to be cheered by the good news of the proletariat. He’d been hoping to find misery to cheer him out of his own. Because it had come from somewhere, hadn’t it? Depression didn’t just happen. There had to be a cause and, from that, maybe, a cure. Which is when Rupert Jr. recalled how vaccines work. You exposed yourself to a manageable amount of the disease, thereby building up an immunity to it. So maybe if he exposed himself to the highly manageable unhappiness of others who’d already started out way less fortunate than he was . . .
But instead of feeling better by comparison, what he found was this: average Americans trying to make other average Americans jealous. While that’s frequently what people got in their news feeds even without manipulation, what Rupert Jr. got was as relentlessly upbeat as a motivational speaker in an ice cream truck playing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” This amplification was achieved by stripping out the political rants, fake news, proselytizing, and clickbait that clogged most news feeds, leaving behind a highly curated glimpse into the lives of others as they portrayed themselves online. The results, unsurprisingly, skewed toward the full spectrum of bragging, including but not limited to: the humblebrag; the brag brag; the proxy brag (“Look at my kids, my parents, my lovely spouse . . .”); the brag with parsley (“Look at my breakfast, lunch, dinner . . .”); the anthropomorphic brag (“Look at how much my dog, cat, pony, goldfish, et al. loves me . . .”); the geo-tag brag (“Will you look at that view . . .”); and the holier-than-bragging brag (“Click here to donate to a cause you never heard of, you heartless bastard . . .”). All in all, it was too much vicarious self-adulation for a celebrity-by-proxy to handle, suggesting not only that money couldn’t buy happiness but perhaps it bought the very depression he’d been grappling with.
And so even though his family wasn’t Jewish or Christian but more free-form Buddhist (it was a Hollywood thing), Rupert Jr. decided to see what the Bible had to say about his theory. (Oops.) Well, perhaps great art was the balm his soul needed. So he watched Citizen Kane, a verified Hollywood classic. (Oh crap.) Maybe A Christmas Carol, about which he’d heard good things, about once a year, it seemed. And there, finally, was the misery vaccine he’d been looking for, in the form of Tiny Tim and the Cratchits. Except Rupert Jr. didn’t feel any better. In fact, he felt worse. Because it was pretty clear who Scrooge was in the scenario. And it was pretty clear where the whole thing was going, no need to watch all the way to the bitter end.
By this time, Rupert Jr. was deep into that peculiar voodoo mind-set of the clinically depressed in which random events and coincidences become the voice of the universe, talking to you, letting you know what needs to happen next. And if you don’t listen the first time, the universe will repeat itself in the form of even more resonant random events and coincidences until the sheer weight of them forces you to finally get it—and get on with it.
And with that, Rupert Gunn Jr. placed the family namesake into his mouth and got started on getting life right the next time around.
Several million mouse clicks later and there was V.T. Lemming, CEO of Quire, standing with both fists planted at the head of the boardroom table, another him inverted in its shiny surface, as if the CEO was balancing on his twin via the nexus of their fists. “I’m going to be testifying about this one,” he said, lifting his head to look down the length of the table. There they were—his board—all heads silent, all heads bent over their smartphones, perhaps watching their share prices free-fall in real time.
“Somebody say something!” V.T. finally shouted.
Nothing.
He’d been hoping for a flinch at least. But when the bent heads remained silent, V.T. Lemming took a breath and proceeded to practice some of the anger management skills that would come in handy a few months later, surrounded in a Home Depot parking lot by the Bay Area’s finest, their guns drawn on the only available suspect.
The irony was, they’d already been working on the suicide thing—teen suicide especially. It had seemed the corporately responsible thing to do, seeing as teens still had a lifetime of earning ahead of them, meaning the settlement for a liability case would involve some serious ouch money, even for a non-celebrity-related teen, should some grieving parent decide to blame Quire for their loss of a child. That was the thinking triggered by that Harvard Business School study. They had checked the study’s numbers against Quire’s own usage stats among teens and found that a “not insignificant” number had left the platform “with extreme prejudice.”