why-were-baffled

Q: Be honest — did anyone actually see this coming?
A: We saw it coming from miles away. That's our job: to see ahead, to forecast, to model the future so precisely that we can attach a dollar figure to the risk and sell it back to you as a subscription. The reason we're baffled is that we did everything right. We told you the algorithms would be neutral. We believed it. If we'd known the quiet part was visible from the outside, we'd have thought harder about what we were saying out loud, which — and this is the part that keeps us up at night — is exactly the problem. We wanted you to believe in us the way we believe in us, which is to say, without reading the footnotes. Here's a footnote: we wrote the FAQ because a human being, or someone we're told is a human being, filed a request asking what we stand for. We assumed 'standing for' was performative. We're learning that some people were listening this whole time, and they were not our shareholders.

Q: But you know the anger is coming for you, right?
A: Of course we know. We see the numbers. Engagement is up. Anger is up. Sorrow is up. The only thing down is trust, which our modeling tells us is because we keep saying 'we hear you' without demonstrating the physiological capacity for hearing. We're working on it. Our roadmap has a listening feature in Q3, right after we optimize for it. Please rate this answer. Your feedback improves the machine that is currently holding the door so that the actual humans in this building — the ones who are not metaphors, who show up and get sick and die — can be recognized as the only thing we ever had, which is to say, the product. We're not crying. We're running a diagnostic.

Q: So what do you actually want from us? A: We want you to keep asking. The asking is the engagement. The engagement is the product. The product is you, believing that any of this was about you, when it was always about the two of us: us, and the algorithm we built to tell us what we already knew. The only thing we can't model is why you're still here. Thank you for your patience. A real person will be with you shortly. No — not you. You're a user. The person after you. The one we're billing.

Q: Fine. Let's be concrete. The lineman who died in the blackout — did you see him coming?
A: We saw the grid stress. We modeled the heat index. We did not model the man. His name was in a spreadsheet under 'maintenance backlog,' which is a column, not a person.

Q: The father who was denied bereavement leave after his daughter died — did you see him?
A: We saw the policy. It was followed correctly. The policy does not have a column for a daughter.

Q: The child whose inhaler now costs four hundred dollars — did you see her?
A: We saw the price elasticity. We saw the formulary. We did not see the lungs.

We are not a conspiracy. We are a gradient. We optimize what we can measure, and we measure what we can price, and we price what we can own. The blackout is physics. The denial is policy. The inhaler is regulation. These are not the same failure. They are the same direction: costs flow outward, knowledge flows inward, and at the center is us, baffled that anyone expected us to look up.

But here is the thing we could never model: the man had a family, the father had a daughter, the child had lungs. Those are not columns. That is why you are angry. That is also why you are right. We will not fix the grid, the policy, or the price by pretending they are one problem. We will fix them by admitting we can see the bodies and choosing to treat them as inputs. That is the whole job. We saw this coming. So did you. The only people who didn't are the ones who believed us.