NO FOLLOWERS

“Apparently there’s a term for someone who gets turned on by intellectual stuff … What’s the word? I want to say ‘sodomy’?” Sean Rad, CEO, Tinder

Alpha

‘Do we have Insta?’

You’ve been sketching cute cats shooting bazookas on your iPad Pro because why bother listening in meetings cut-and-pasted from the black hole of ideas in which you interned?

Now, like then, the PM will always open by making a half-assed but fully-off reference to pop culture like can’t we get Grimes to collate us a Spotify playlist on the theme of drones? Followed by asking the room’s bowed heads something like ‘so how do we increase audience splashback?’

Your co-workers will throw tech-hat suggestions against the wall’s tasteful ‘urban art’ (white boy graffiti) until the PM closes by mentioning a social activity taking place soon, IPAs and charcoal sketching.

Everybody leaves and bitches at the arthritic coffee machine as to how nothing’s ever resolved in departmental meetings. You know your idiot co-workers consider you hard-working and attentive, though, because once, post-meeting, Kris said ‘good job with the notes, can I have a copy?’

You’d assumed this was male office banter (#MOB) until he followed it up by asking you for a drink. You’d answered ‘no’ to both requests.

‘Good question,’ says the PM. ‘We have Instagram. Don’t we, Laura?’

Laura nods and the room waits for you to cast another killer question. But although you’ve only been working in brand management for 18 months, you’ve already learnt that defying expectation is the sure (the only?) path to the higher pay grades. You mean, whoever thought Twitter would be a ‘success’?

(You’re not talking advertising dollars. You’re talking local news shows pimping Twitter handles. You’re talking your parents knowing what it is — that’s the litmus test of tech success — has Dad heard of it?)

Take a time machine to the year you were born, 1991, when Bryan Adams and Color Me Badd were piloting the cultural tugboat, and ask Bryan Adams or Color Me Badd whether a computer service facilitating expression of thoughts about lunch, racism, or pets’ toilet habits would ever make it. They’d laugh you out of Central Perk.

Somebody asks whether one of the company’s social medium accounts outperforms the others.

‘Uh huh,’ says the PM, ‘But we’re talking the difference between the last horse in the race and the one taking a bolt through his head after breaking a leg.’

Polite snickering crackles over a table designed to look like a huge iPad. During your first ever departmental meeting, you’d swept your fingers over its dark glass with the excited hope that you might awake a sleeping OS. Like Tom Cruise in the movie. That would have been some futuristic tech to boast about at house parties.

Alas, the table’s lack of functionality wasn’t your first Drown (pronounced Drone) disappointment, that honour was reserved for the coffee machine’s outrageous lack of choice — you’re not being precious: R2D2’s idiot brother didn’t even have an option for flat white.

Drown (pronounced Drone) aims to do for remote-control drones what Uber’s done for drunken rides home. The big boss, Si Harding, who lives/works remotely from his penthouse apartment at Balboa Terrace, occasionally appearing on workstation computers, like a holographic evil Emperor, to give pep talks, raised enough seed capital to rent the bottom three floors of a proud Tenderloin building made of 1950s steel and Indiana limestone, the building in which you now sit flicking from violent cats to your Instagram account.

The most recent picture posted, you as Uma Thurman from Kill Bill, has received no additional likes since last you’d checked (before the meeting) even though you were at 100% hot bae quotient that night. Tinder even messaged to request you remove the image from your Tinder account because it was too hot and was, like, causing the servers and the algorithms to go into meltdown.

You control the burning coal of resentment within your chest (some tech-clowns get like thousands of likes for absolute filth) and search for Drown’s account. There — the PM’s not wrong — the company does possess an account, with a blue tick and everything, but the last image, posted a month ago, is of a cat sans text. And, yes, it’s a cute-looking cat and we’ve already established how much you like cute cats and, yes, the Internet rates cats, but think of the brand, man. Who associates cats with drones?

You hold aloft your iPad Pro, peace in our time. Whoever it is speaking allows their voice to dribble away. Wise.

‘There,’ you say. ‘Posted a month ago. A cat. I mean we all like cats but …’

And you roll your eyes just like you’d learnt to do in undergrad seminars when someone was offering an interpretation or reference that contradicted one of the floundering points you’d made. Because you’d not even read the set-texts because this was college and P-A-R-T-Y. You can read Middlemarch when you’re in your forties and dead on the inside. The extra life experience you bring to the text might even mean that it’s not as coding boring as the first page suggests.

Silence, until …

‘Laura,’ says the PM. ‘Find the intern responsible for running the Instagram account and ask whether they might put their Ivy League degree to use for a split-second and consider posting more appropriate images, yeah?’ The PM smiles, rolls her eyes just as you had done. ‘Like ones that get…’ The PM pauses. ‘What do they calls likes on Instagram? You like Facebook posts. What about Instagram? What do …’

Geoff interrupts.

‘It’s likes,’ he says. ‘Likes.’

Classic Geoff. Nobody knows what he does, other than to interrupt meetings. And, to give him his due, he’s great at it. Geoff’s about as secure as a MagSafe connector.

‘Likes?’ the PM asks you.

‘Likes,’ you confirm.

‘Likes,’ nods Geoff.

‘Make a note, Laura,’ says the PM. ‘Likes.’

Laura is the PM’s PA. She acts like she was born sucking on the sourest of Skittles. Maybe she was/is. She struggles to enter the note into her iPad Pro. (Fact: up until a week before release, the iPad Pro was to be named the iPad Big, until some Apple exec expressed the fear that the name sounded a bit like iBad Pig and, of course, that phrase doesn’t fit the Apple marketing profile.) Her inadequate fingers, month-old manicure, lose their grip and the tablet cracks against the table. The PM fixes a smile as Laura makes hushed apologies, recovering the tablet like a neurotic glazier.

A throat is cleared. Your focus, as with the rest of the table, turns to Nicola, a young woman with glasses larger than her face. Her hand is raised. She could have been in kindergarten, about to brave the spelling of C-A-T.

‘I run the Instagram account,’ she says. ‘And I oversee Twitter and Facebook too. Actually, I asked last month if we could get an intern to help but I was told they were too busy organising a table tennis tournament.’

‘OK,’ said the PM, fiddling with Laura’s iPad stylus.

‘Awkward,’ says Geoff.

‘And I also requested other colleagues contribute to Twitter and Facebook, but …’

The PM speaks as she continues to attempt to line the stylus parallel with the edge of the table.

‘And a very good job your team does,’ she says, without looking up. ‘I was joking about the intern. Earlier.’

You release air from your cheeks. A couple of co-workers turn. In solidarity, you reckon, because you’d hardly made a sound. But Nicola hasn’t finished. The rest of her career might turn on what she says next, you think.

‘It’s just that Instagram, you know, is all about images and I tried with the cat picture because research done at Berkeley suggests that audiences engage with cat pictures. And I’m sure I’ve impact data and …’

You nod. It’s time.

‘It is a cute cat,’ you say. ‘I never disputed the cat’s cuteness rating. But, Nicola, we work with drones. Not animal shelters. Or, you know, kids. Or fire ladders. Things associated with cats, I’m trying to say.’

Nicola catches your eye, frowns, turns back to the PM. So young and so many lines across her forehead. Like a 2D representation of a hill. You don’t feel guilty for going for the jugular. It’s a cat-eat-cat world.

‘Yeah but with all the time spent working on Twitter and Facebook, and there’s only so many pictures of drones that have nothing to do with the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and I’m not so sure completely ignoring the military angle is a good strategy because…’

Her voice trails off. Her head jerks in a sharp nod that is either a tic or an indication that she’s finished speaking.

‘How about this as an action point?’ says the PM. ‘Everybody let Nicola have suggestions for Instagram content. By the end of the week. Nothing military. And nothing sexy, Kris, for the last time, but seriously. Nothing military.’

The meeting ends with a reminder of tomorrow’s charity ‘wear your mother’s shirt’ day. The PM commands you all to ‘stay awesome’. The room empties into the workspace like a swarm of bees with that colony collapse disorder that always used to be in the news. Nobody’s any surer of anything, least of all you, aside from the inevitability of another meeting and the inevitable repetition of the exact gnawing/empty feeling you’re experiencing now.

But that’s life.

Or is it that you’ve not had your morning croissant?

You join the muted queue at the coffee machine, heads bowed to the soft distraction of their iPhones, and you sigh and you check your phone. Still no more Insta likes.