Dead Code Society

2/19/2020

I heard the yell before I saw him.

“GERONIMO!!”

“Did someone just yell Geronimo?” I asked my roommate. He wasn’t sure. We were walking from the freshman dorm to the dining hall on a Sunday afternoon on a path that crossed right in front of the mysterious and infamous Skull and Bones “tomb” in the heart of Yale’s campus. A man with what appeared to be a feathered tomahawk was walking calmly away from the tomb. I didn’t think much of this event until the next week I heard him again.

“GERONIMO!!!”

It was the same guy with the tomahawk! After his yell he simply turned away from Skull and Bones and walked away. I saw him the next week and the next and eventually witnessed his whole ritual: On Sundays at 5pm he would calmly walk down the sidewalk to where a branch would split off towards the Skull and Bones tomb about 30 feet back. There, careful to stay on the public part of the sidewalk, he would stop and turn toward the tomb, bow his head, tomahawk hanging limply from his hands (a symbol, not a weapon) and he would mutter a prayer that I couldn’t make out. Then he would look up to the sky and cry out:

“GERONIMO!!”

And walk away.

This bizarre and habitual occurrence led me to google “Skull and Bones + Geronimo” and sure enough, back in the early 1900s, some Bonesmen (including Prescott Bush, (grand)father of the presidents) “allegedly” dug up the actual Geronimo’s grave site and took his skull back to their tomb where it has been ever since. This man was visiting Skull and Bones in protest.

The memory of this defiant man came back to me last week when I was reading Mark Greif’s Essays Against Everything, a contrarian compendium that takes down aspects of popular culture one by one. It’s even more contrarian than you’re thinking -- if you’re for something then he’s against it, if you’re against it then he’s for it. Exercise: against. Healthy food: against. Reality TV: for. Over the course of the book the essays wrestle with more serious topics. Greif draws inspiration for his societal critiques chiefly from Henry David Thoreau, and like Thoreau he starts by closely examining contemporary habits and modes of living, but ultimately arrives at the need and potential methods for producing revolutionary change in society.

Greif reminds us of Thoreau’s philosophy for producing revolutionary change in a democratic, but nevertheless unjust, society: a single individual with moral conviction is already a “majority of one” who should act according to their conscience immediately, without waiting around to see if there are enough people like them for their action to succeed. Thoreau says you should “cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.” Greif clarifies that “while government can be maintained by voting, the perversion of government cannot be fixed by voting … the men and women with consciences must go to the junctures where the government has leagued with injustice and clog them, with their whole selves, body and soul: to force a decision.” If there aren’t enough people to jam the gears of injustice, then at least even one person can still irritate people, interrupt their ease and convenience, remind them of their capacity to choose which side they could be on.

And here’s Thoreau on how to combat the injustice of slavery and the Mexican-American War:

“If the tax-gatherer or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, ‘But what shall I do?’ my answer is, ‘If you really wish to do anything, resign your office.’ When the subject has refused allegiance and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.”

When I was working up the courage to quit my job at Facebook a few months ago thoughts of Thoreau were already swirling around in my head -- I re-read Civil Disobedience the night before I told my manager my decision and reasoning. But reading Mark Greif last week and remembering the man with the tomahawk only fires me up even more. It makes me want to go back to Facebook’s Like sign outside the headquarters and say a prayer for the thing inside which has been desecrated and then cry out its name.

PRIVACY!

CIVIC DISCOURSE IN AMERICA (AND ALSO THE REST OF THE WORLD)!

Eh, they don’t really have the same punch as “Geronimo” which is already used as a battlecry and proclamation of fearlessness. Reality is seriously stranger than fiction here: the guy was wielding a tomahawk yelling the battlecry Geronimo at this building, but Geronimo’s literal skull is in there! It’s too good. Nothing I could yell at Facebook would come close. Besides, I already resigned my office.

Here’s a thought experiment: what if the man with the tomahawk was at one time himself a member of the Skull and Bones secret society. What would it have been like for him to talk to his fellow Bonesmen about the kidnapping of Geronimo’s skull. “Well, yeah, we’re Skull and Bones, of course we’ve got to have some skulls, preferably famous skulls, or else discerning Yalies won’t take us seriously” nevermind that skulls of the famously-disenfranchised are easier to acquire than other famous dead people’s. When it comes to the specifics of a gravesite being violated, well, the Bonesmen don’t like to think too much about it, it distracts them from their day to day bonesly activities, and they weren’t the ones brandishing the shovels outside Fort Sill Oklahoma that night in 1918, so… Not to mention the fact that the perks of being a Skull and Bones member are top notch: connections with noteworthy alumni, 24/7 tomb access, hell there’s probably a micro-kitchen in there.

Why might someone like the tomahawk man have joined the Skull and Bones secret society in the first place, if he was only going to leave in protest and disgust? If it sounds unrealistic that he even would, then why did I join Facebook, only to leave in protest and disgust? To attempt to get at this I want to talk about two more societies: Facebook’s informal Dead Code Society, and the movie Dead Poets Society from which Facebookers took the name.

In the movie, Robin Williams plays John Keating, the new English teacher at an exclusive and rigorous all-boys boarding school. Mr. Keating uses poetry to show the boys that there is more to their lives than academics and the one-dimensional expectations of their parents, teachers, and society at large. A group of the boys get really into the poetry, along with Henry David Thoreau’s edict (which they recite by flashlight in a cave) to “live deep and suck the marrow out of life,” and to prevent the tragedy that “when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” They pick up the mantle of the Dead Poets Society to commune together in celebration of and reverence for those who had previously risen above the ordinary path of obedience set before us all. In the end, the school’s most promising student dies by suicide and the institution, scrambling to exculpate itself, pins the blame on the one faculty member who gave the student any hope: Mr. Keating. The boys in the Dead Poets Society are powerless to stop Keating’s firing.

But they don’t have to stay quiet about it. As Mr. Keating exits the classroom with the last of his things, the boys one-by-one stand up on their desks (a trick he had taught them earlier in the year to obtain a new perspective) and say “O Captain, My Captain!” in one of the most powerful scenes I’ve seen in any movie (they’re quoting Walt Whitman in his poem about the regrettable death of Abraham Lincoln just as his goal to unite the country and end slavery was achieved).

I don’t know what Facebook’s recruiting is like these days in the post-Trump world, but when I was signing my contract back in 2015, Facebook’s message might have really appealed to the boys in the Dead Poets Society. “Remember those expectations from your parents, peers, and communities? Feeling conflicted about wanting to live up to them while also following your passion and working to better the world? Well here you can have all three” is what Facebook’s recruiting message boiled down to. The catch is that you are working on a platform for the rich to disseminate their propaganda to precisely the eyeballs they pay us to. But if that part makes you uncomfortable you don’t have to work on it directly -- there is also messaging, and digital stickers, and even whole programming languages and datacenters. Also they are quick to point out that some of the propaganda people pay for is good! Before Donald Trump, convincing ourselves that Facebook let us have it all was easy, afterwards, it got harder.

Facebook’s Dead Code Society was formed by Facebookers who like to delete “dead” code, that is, code that is not being used any more. They have a cool t-shirt that has the same font as the movie poster and their Facebook group’s cover photo is a screenshot of the scene of all the boys standing on their desks defiantly. And yet the Dead Code Society so completely misses having anything to do with the movie that the name is a non sequitur. Shouldn’t it be Dead Coder Society? Shouldn’t we celebrate the code instead of just delete it? So it was at Facebook at large: a lofty ideal followed by a largely unrelated and extremely technical, frivolous, or downright deceptive piece of technology. “We’re giving people a voice!” … with a clunky messaging app that intersperses ads between your threads and sucks up your photos and contacts. “We’re giving people the power to create!” … by letting you digitally add makeup to your face or turn it into a dog in your selfies. If we were really trying to make software that achieved Facebook’s stated lofty aims, I have trouble believing it would look anything like Facebook the product actually looks today.

Facebook employees cope with the post-2016 reality in a variety of ways: doubling down on taking Facebook’s messaging at face value and dismissing all evidence that the words don’t align with the action, or lashing out in pitiful frustration at anyone and everyone around them (that one was/is me). Or most commonly just not thinking about it very much. We’re giving people a voice, and yeah there are some desecrated skulls, but like, I didn’t dig them up, and so why should I feel bad about quietly partaking in my passion working on “stickers” or “stories” or compilers or datacenter optimization while the powers-that-be do what they will?

My response to this is that, yes, it’s unfair for those of us who joined before Donald Trump ran, to quote VP Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s loquacious sociopath-in-residence, “the best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen”, before Cambridge Analytica, before Republican operative-turned-VP of Public Policy Joel Kaplan threw a celebration party for rapist/supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh the night after his inauguration. Before those things made it crystal clear that Facebook’s leadership will sell us all out in exchange for money and influence. It’s unfair that the company we joined is not the one it is today. It’s unfair that Facebook purposely sought out to do their bidding conscientious but insecure 22 year olds who grew up watching Dead Poets Society and promised us a company qualititatively better than any other, but then gave us the same soulless rat race just with higher salaries and more artistic posters on the wall. And yet, to stay is to lend your conscientiousness to Facebook. To stay is to decrease your own reputation (“you work at Facebook?”) while increasing Facebook’s (“well, he works at Facebook and is a good person, so it must not be that bad”). To stay is to signal to your co-workers that you think that all this is actually totally fine, or at least fine enough that you show up every day.

And so I finally quit. My last day was maddeningly anti-climactic. Turning in my badge reminded me of the scene in Rick and Morty when Jerry, seemingly held captive inside a childish interdimensional Jerry daycare, declares angrily to the alien secretary that he’s going to walk right out the front door and they can’t stop him! “Ok…” She says emotionlessly, “that was always allowed.” From the outside it’s been hard to steady my nerves. Going from living a life so contrary to my self-proclaimed values every day for years, to living one of total freedom made possible only by the money I made selling out is jarring in its serenity. I feel like I need to do more. Like I need to convince my old coworkers to quit too. Like I need to prepare a ceremonial keyboard and take it to the Like sign and yawp at the sky. Mark Greif’s Essays Against Everything has helped me to reckon with my simultaneous powerlessness and agency. I’m not quite sure where to go next, but it’s nice to know I’m not alone out here screaming into the void.

I don’t remember seeing the man again after my freshman year at Yale, but I also no longer had to walk by Skull and Bones to get to dinner any more. So who knows, maybe he’s still getting out there, eight years later, going face-to-face with injustice and yelling his battlecry at the sky. I hope so.

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