“Not her tether, Lisa. Her daughter.”
Lisa gave me hard look. “Yes, of course. The tether was her daughter.”
She pushed her chair away from the table and stood up slowly, wincing. “I’m going to bed. You should do the same, Adam. You’ll feel better when you’ve closed your eyes for a while.”
We didn’t know it yet, but it was the beginning of the hard years. The harrowing of the Affinities.
PART THREE
Tranche Warfare
Have we reached a new stage in the peculiar history of the Affinities?
It’s been just a quarter of a century since the science of social teleodynamics discovered new ways to model the boundary between consciousness and culture. And it was only a few years after the field’s founding that one of its most prominent figures, Meir Klein, traded the classrooms of Tel Aviv University for the corporate corridors of a then-obscure data-mining firm called InterAlia.
It must have seemed like a smart move, back in the day. InterAlia used Klein’s theories to launch the Affinities in North American markets, and both Meir Klein and the people he worked for grew very rich indeed. For a while. Until Klein was strangled in his sleep and InterAlia collapsed under the weight of the class-action suits brought against it.
Anybody remember how seductively fashionable the Affinities once seemed? Klein named the twenty-two Affinity groups after the letters of the Phoenician alphabet, for no better reason than that he was friendly with a colleague who taught ancient Near Eastern literature, and suddenly everyone was reciting those syllables as earnestly as Proto-Canaanite schoolchildren: Eyn, Pey, Qof, Rosh. And of course the biggies, Tau and Het. Some of us were bold or curious enough to take the test. Some of us qualified to join a local tranche. And some of us didn’t, and some of us envied those who did, as if they had been admitted to an exclusive fraternity, the one all the cool kids belonged to.
Yes, it was like that. Really.
A few years more and it became obvious that the pitch about how people “cooperate more successfully” inside the Affinities wasn’t just a come-on. Some of the Affinities were cooperating themselves into big money by way of entrepreneurship or investment. Outsiders weren’t invited to that party, either. And we did begin to feel very much like outsiders, those of us who failed to pass the test or who refused to be tested. We all knew someone who had vanished into the black hole of an Affinity group and no longer had the time or patience to show up for the cousin’s wedding or the niece’s bat mitzvah. Some of us were angry enough to join advocacy groups like NOTA (None of the Above) or, less formally, to get up in the faces of strangers who declared their allegiances a little too smugly. Amazing how a few well-publicized swarmings and knife fights brought the long sleeves down over those old Het or Wau tattoos. Big profits for the laser-tattoo-removal industry—and for tattoo artists who know how to hide a Phoenician letter under even more elaborate skin art. (Have you ever wondered how many thirty-somethings are walking the streets with a delt hidden in their dragon or a tau concealed in their pot leaf?)
Cheap, quick, universal Affinity testing—and the publication of Klein’s teleodynamic source code—saved the Affinities from the financial collapse of InterAlia. But it also created the Affinities as we know them today: circled wagons in a hostile desert, sometimes locked in fierce intergroup conflict. Tranche warfare, so to speak. Het is to Tau as Hatfield is to McCoy, insiders say, and rumor has it that actual bullets have been exchanged, though both groups deny it.
Social-tech regulatory bills currently before Congress will either defang the Affinities or delete them altogether, depending on which version of the legislation passes. It remains to be seen whether the remnants of Klein’s Affinities can survive the rigors of government oversight and increasingly stringent tort law.
But an even more serious challenge to the Affinities may be lurking on the horizon. People have been playing with the teleodynamic data by which Klein invented the original Affinity groups. There are other ways of interpreting those numbers, these people say. Other ways of sorting the human socionome. Radical new teleodynamic algorithms have been proposed and are currently being tested.
We’ve learned too much about ourselves to go back to the old ways. But how do we connect with one another, post-Affinities? That remains an open question. And, potentially, a very scary one.
Meir Klein identified cooperation as the keynote human skill, and he sorted humanity’s best cooperators into twenty-two hypercollaborative groups, the Affinities. It was his hope that these networked hypercollaborators would act together to further human progress.
But having your hand on a lever means nothing unless you know which way to throw it. The capacity to do work is only as important as the work we do.
New Socionome has designed powerful new outcome-directed social algorithms, open-sourced and freely available. Telos is the Greek word for “purpose” or “goal.” You might say we’re putting the telos back in teleodynamics. Inventing a better world, one hookup at a time.
Chapter 12
One January night when I was sixteen years old my stepbrother Geddy came into my room, terrified for no apparent reason.
When the sound of his anxious breathing woke me, my first thought was that something was wrong in the house: a fire, a break-in, somebody was sick. A glance at the window showed winter darkness and a lacework of ice and a few snowflakes drifting past the fogged glass, as the clock on my nightstand ticked from 4:10 to 4:11. “Geddy?” I said. “What the fuck?”
“You shouldn’t swear,” he said.
Geddy was a month shy of ten and still very much under the influence of Mama Laura, for whom even “hell” and “damn” were forbidden words. I told him that if he wanted to wake me up in the middle of the night he should brace himself for the possibility of a curse or two. Then I said, “So what’s wrong? Bad dream?”
It was a reasonable guess. Geddy suffered from chronic bad dreams. He was also an occasional bed-wetter, though the flap of his PJs looked dry tonight. He was pretty amorphous in his pajamas: a heavy kid, clumsily proportioned, strands of hair pasted to his forehead with sweat. Mama Laura kept the house swelteringly hot in winter. The furnace was roaring like a chained dragon down in the basement.
“Can I ask you a question?” His voice was plaintive.
“Can’t you ask Mama Laura?”
He hung his head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I’d wake up Daddy Fisk.”
Fair enough. My father was pretty touchy. Geddy was still getting used to his hair-trigger temper. Dad had not yet uttered an unkind word to or about his new wife in the six months they had been married, but his attitude toward Laura’s son Geddy was increasingly impatient. If Geddy was reluctant to wake the old man with a question, I couldn’t blame him.
Nor could he have gone to my brother Aaron. Aaron resented the way the family had changed since Dad’s second marriage. He was polite to Mama Laura—Aaron was too fond of being the old man’s firstborn and favorite son to put that status at risk. But he was only barely cordial to Geddy, and only when he thought he was being watched. When he figured the rest of us were out of earshot he could reduce Geddy to tears with a few choice words.