Max Barry's Blog, page 2

I get a Google Alert whenever my name pops up in articles,
which I use to find reviews of my books, and (if they’re good) link them from my website,
or (if they’re bad) update my list of people to turn my back on should we find
ourselves some kind of post-apocalyptic scenario and they’re all like, “But we
need water.”

That works great so long as there aren’t other Max Barrys out there being notable.
The last thing I want is to hear about some other Max being newsworthy.
Even if the other Max is being a giant dick, sure, I can feel like,
“Well, I’m doing better than that,” but I don’t want people wondering if I’m,
for example, that
duct-taped breast-touching Max Berry.

A few months ago I started getting alerts about a soccer-playing Max Barry.
At first, I ignored them, because I don’t care about soccer. I once went to a game
in England and the Prime Minister was there and a team kicked three goals and
everyone passed out with excitement. That was fun. But I have no desire
to see another game. One was enough. For me, soccer is no
netball.

But these Max Barry alerts kept coming. Every few days, a new email. Max scored a
goal. He scored two goals. His team was setting records. I got interested despite
myself. If you spam me with parts of a story, it turns out, I need to see how it
ends. So finally I looked him up. He plays for Buckie Thistle Football Club in Scotland.
“Scotland” is probably redundant in that sentence. But, get this, Buckie Thistle is
on a massive tear. They’re about to play Rothes for their 20th win in a row. Twenty
wins in a row! Who are Rothes? I have no idea! But that’s exciting!

Buckie could win this whole thing, whatever it is. I’m not sure if there are finals,
but if there are, I want to tune in, if they broadcast games from the Highland
Football League. Possibly not, because the Highland Football League is, I read, level five on the Scottish pyramid of league rankings.
The best league, the Scottish Professional Football League, is level zero. That’s
really on the nose, in my opinion. They measure every other league by how many rungs it is
below the best one. But anyway, I’m invested. I care about this now. Go Buckies.
Buckies? Thistles? You go.

P.S. It just occurred to me that this blog will mess with people’s ability
to search for “max barry buckie thistle.” Sorry about that. By way of apology, here is a
profile
of Max where he talks about how he’s out for revenge against the club that
released him (booo, Aberdeen), and I think this is
Max Barry’s Buckie
Thistle page, although they haven’t updated it since 2021. Come on, Buckie
Thistle web team. The boys are making history out there. Pull your finger out.

Once upon a time there was a queen, and the queen said, “Hey Google,
who’s the fairest one of all?” And her Nest Audio said, “Sorry, I didn’t
understand.” So the queen tried again; she said: “Hey Google,
who is the most attractive person in my geographic area?”
and Google said, “Sorry, I don’t have any information about that.”

So the queen tried her phone; she said, “Hey Siri, top 10 most beautiful
people in my kingdom,” but Siri didn’t answer, and the queen
remembered she’d become annoyed and disabled Siri the night before.

The queen walked into her sitting room, where she had an Amazon Dot. “Alexa,”
she said, “who’s the most beautiful person in the kingdom?” And Alexa
said, “Sorry, I’m having trouble understanding right now,” which was a
problem that had been going on awhile, and the queen had googled it and
tried moving the Dot away from the wall and blowing out dust but
nothing had helped.

The queen sighed and returned to her bedroom and opened Instagram on
her phone. The queen
had over two hundred million followers so her notifications were a
nightmare, but she scrolled through search. Among the snaps of donkeys
and farm workers was a reel of a young woman sweeping the front porch
of a cottage in the forest. Maybe it was just the light, or filters,
but she looked possibly even more beautiful than the queen.

The queen’s finger hovered over the clip. Normally, she would
have looked up the account name, hired a hunter, and had the girl killed.
But today she hesitated. She looked at the gorgeous outfits that had been laid out
on the bed for the day’s photo shoot. “Why do I do this to myself?” she
said. “It’s probably just filters.” Then she cast the phone onto the bed.

That day, the queen enjoyed the shoot for herself, living in the moment,
unplugged, and felt happy and satisfied, and also like she was growing as a person.
But when she posted her new set, among all the likes was the comment:
“so beautiful xxx also love @snowwhite you 2 should pose together
sometime.” The queen tapped through to see who @snowwhite was and fuck
her if it wasn’t the sweeping girl from that morning.

“Hey Google,” said the queen, “Call Hunter.”

You know, I think we’ve gone too far on this messaging thing. Not messaging
as in sending each other messages. That’s fine. The more messages, the better.
Messaging as in, How do I make an idea palatable to idiots.

Obviously messaging works. If you have an idea you need to get into people’s heads,
you should think about messaging. People are busy. They pay no attention.
When people hear an idea, they take one piece of it way out of context and form
an opinion based on that, then refuse to change it until the end of time. You
have more success if you tailor your message to be charming and digestible.

That’s fine. But I feel like we’ve begun to demand good messaging for everything,
even when we’re not idiots. Now we think: If your messaging isn’t great, I’m out
already. I’m not even going to entertain your idea, because your messaging sucks.
It might be a good idea, but you couldn’t even get your messaging right, so forget
it.

Maybe it’s a natural reaction to being bombarded by marketing all the time.
Every day, sounds and and colors and movements try to catch our attention,
most of which we manage to fend off. It’s wearying, so maybe it’s a relief to
encounter some messy, confusing messaging that allows you to dismiss it right away,
with no further brain-power required.

But this means abdicating responsibility to the messengers. It allows
messaging, rather than the thing being messaged, to determine what we think about it.
I don’t love the situation where we’re all so busy and distracted that there could
be a, oh, I don’t know, a global pandemic and a free vaccine, and a valid
argument against taking it would be, But the messaging was terrible.

Everything has voices, now, but you can’t listen to them before you buy. All the online
stores, they list this spec and that spec, they have video of the thing whirring around,
circumnavigating the dog, but they don’t show you its voice.

I want to know what a talking robot sounds like before I let it into my house.
Because some are better than others. Google, I can listen to all day. I’m
happy with Google hanging around, chiming in about things. Google is a real positive spirit.
Siri, to me, sounds slightly disappointed, like she wants to know why
I couldn’t have looked this up myself.

I bought a set of Sony bluetooth headphones, and whenever I turn them on, a breathless teenager
squeals “Power! On!” in my ears. I just want to listen to music. She chirps “Pairing!”
like we just got married. It might be some Japanese cultural thing. When I turn them off,
she says, “Bye-bye senpai… for now!” and sounds a little sad, so that I actually got reluctant
to turn her off, and started just putting her down on the desk. Then I came back and she was
on 2% battery, and said, “I don’t feel good,” and started to cry. I put her
in a drawer and haven’t opened it since.

My new robot vacuum cleaner, it’s not so much the voice, but the attitude. I told it to
clean the kitchen, and it said, “I’ll do it later.” So I pressed the clean button again and
it said, “Will you get off my back, God,” and gave this big sigh. I phoned the store,
actually got a person on the line, which, you know, is not easy, and the guy said no-one
had asked about the voice before. I’m always contacting stores about things and being told
nobody mentioned that before. The guy said maybe there would be a software update
to change the voice in the future. And I said it wasn’t the voice so much as the attitude,
and he asked if I wanted to swap it for a different one, and I said no, because I didn’t know what the other robot
voices were like.

I complained about this to Jen, because she wanted to know why the floors were still dirty,
but she said it’s good people can’t preview voices. “That’s life,” she said. She
was only half paying attention because we had people coming over and she had to bake.
If we could preview voices, Jen said, everyone would choose perfect ones, and everything
would be the same. “Learn to love the quirks,” she said, and
I was like, sure, but in the meantime, I’m stuck with a surly vacuum cleaner. And Jen said,
Me, too, and I was like, Yeah, that’s what I’m saying, then I realized how she was looking
at me, and I was like, oh.

I’m an ideas man. Person. I’m a person of ideas. Not good ideas. I’m just
willing to shake bad ideas for long enough that sometimes interesting things
fall out.
But the internet is tough for ideas people. I had an idea for a TV show where
CEOs try to open their own packaging, but then I
Googled “tv show where ceos open their own packaging,” and screw
me, there’s a stupid Reddit post with the exact same idea.

Pre-internet, I would have happily regaled you with
my entertaining CEO humiliation TV idea, never knowing that someone else had
had the same thought. A bunch of people, probably. I would have suspected.
But I wouldn’t have known.

Now I know, and it’s not just ruining great ideas for panel shows with a
surprise redemption arc: You can’t think of anything without a quick search
revealing that someone else thought of it first. By now
every half-baked thought anyone ever had has been fingered into a phone,
and the search algorithms are good enough to find it.

I have therefore decided never to research anything again. The internet is too
consumptive anyway. Consumptive. I’m not sure that’s a word. But I’m won’t check.
I’m just going to assume I created something brilliant and on point there.
So here is my next idea, which I also will not research: We should fine companies
for litter. I know what you’re thinking: Why do all Max’s ideas start with,
“Fine companies?” Because inequality, that’s why. That’s beside the point.
We should fine them for litter. Not littering. Fines for littering is
already a thing. We need to fine them for having their logo wind up in a
gutter, no matter how it got there. For example, if I wander through the city
with a meal, discarding Coke cans and McDonald’s wrappers, we should fine
Coke and McDonald’s.

You might be thinking this sounds a little unfair. Like,
what did Coke and McDonald’s do wrong here, exactly. I’ll tell you: They failed
to take accountability for the total footprint of their business.
They made an external detrimentality.
External detrimentalities are when a business finds a way
to make someone else pick up the tab for some of their product’s cost, e.g.
by dumping factory waste in a river, or pretending nicotine is good for
you, or passing down catastrophic climate change to the next
generation. They’re also how to tell the
difference between economist rationalists and corporate shills, because economists want to
eliminate external detrimentalities, while people who have been subsumed into
the corporate overmind think they’re a smart way to make money.

There you go. An app to send snaps of discarded golden arches to a central authority,
which issues fines, which incentivizes McDonald’s to stop people strewing trash
all over my street. That’s a solid idea, which no-one has ever thought of. Or they have,
and it was trialed in some city somewhere, and it went terribly, possibly because people
were deliberately dropping litter to get companies fined.
But those are just details. I’m not going to figure out
every last little thing. I’m an ideas man. Person.

In high school, I was on the debate team. I was third speaker, the last one, whose job
is to listen to the opposing side’s arguments, then stand up and make them sound stupid.
It’s intense, because you go in without much of a prepared speech, and while
others are talking, you’re furiously scribbling down ideas for counters.

This was where I discovered you can learn to get better at persuading people. That was
a new idea to me, because previously I thought people made up their minds based on facts.
Sure, you can lie, but that’s just making up facts; facts are still involved. The new idea was that facts
were a jumping-off point: People could also be persuaded by how confidently I spoke, or whether
I connected my argument to some other thing they already liked or disliked.

Since then, there has been a wild explosion of disinformation.
A lot of persuasion techniques I’d only ever seen used in small,
niche ways, mostly because they were so shameless, came right out into the open. I don’t
want to get into who was doing what, but there has been so much persuasion going on,
it’s hard to tell what’s real. Which is the exciting thing about persuasion: When
it really gets going,
it can dig into your soul and uproot everything.

Not your soul, of course. You are a wise dispassionate observer of reality with a keen
bullshit detector. I mean all those other people, who also think they are wise dispassionate
observers of reality, but are totally wrong. Those people are a real concern.

So anyway I wrote a comedy about disinformation getting out of control. It’s an audiobook
and you can listen to it right now:

He’s a part-time gardener and car thief. She’s a murderous nun on a holy mission of vengeance. Together, they might be able to save the world.

The unearthing of a mysterious box (with HE LIES etched across the lid) precipitates the arrival of a compelling stranger prophesying that the world will end in two weeks. Simultaneously, the government locks down for war. The enemy is… unclear. They may even be us. One thing’s for sure: Diego can’t trust anyone anymore. He can only trust himself.

This is an Audible Original, so you can listen for free as a subscriber, or sign
up for a free trial and still listen to it for free! Or you can just buy it. That’s
also an option.

Vaxman is a billionaire philanthropist whose parents died from Covid-related
complications after a family gathering. Vaxman’s half-sister, Antivila, attended the
gathering while ill and didn’t tell anyone.

Frustrated at the government’s inability to end the pandemic, Vaxman decided to take
matters into his own hands. Converting his underground garage into a
laboratory, he developed an armored suit and a range of weaponry, including
“the Vaccinator,” a semi-automatic rifle capable of delivering bursts of 0.3mL of
Pfizer-BioNTech with high accuracy over two hundred yards. He also built grenades
capable of dispersing Pfizer via aerosolized mist, suitable for deploying indoors
and at concerts and rallies.

Roaming city streets in his customized Vaxmobile, Vaxman was intercepted by the
Freedom Fighters, a shadowy paramilitary force
with unknown but extensive financing.
Badly beaten and facing jail time for his unregistered weaponry, Vaxman was set free
by his family’s brilliant attorney, Jane Collective, who
successfully argued that Vaxman was legally
entitled to shoot Pfizer people who endangered his personal safety by
approaching him while unvaccinated, particularly in stand-your-ground states.

The case rocketed Vaxman to national prominence, forcing him into hiding to
escape retribution. In the mountains, he developed a plan to feed vaccines into the
water supplies of a major city. Piloting a heavy bomber over the catchment area
of a key water reservation, he was intercepted by the Freedom Fighters, now revealed to
be financed and led by Antivila. In the ensuing duel, Vaxman was shot down before he
could open the bomb bay doors, but this was merely a diversion, as Jane Collective had secretly negotiated to add Pfizer
to the city’s fluoridation program.

To some, Vaxman is a hero. To others, a villain. He saves lives, but is hated by many
of those he saves. He is regularly invited onto mainstream television, but has never accepted.
He is in love with Jane Collective, but it’s too risky for them to be together.
He sometimes visits schools, and is startled by sneezes.

I like to open up old first drafts and see how bad they
were. I had to do this recently because I picked up Lexicon for some reason,
the published version, and before I knew it, I was all like, “Gosh, this is quite
the dizzyingly intricate array of character and plot. Why isn’t my current work-in-progress like that?” Then there was some soul-searching and comfort eating.

Luckily I found a 2008 draft of Lexicon on my computer that was 31,000 words—that’s about one-quarter of the finished length—and really terrible.
It has the same underlying concept and almost all the same characters, including most of the same relationships, but everything about it is wrong. Characters stop to explain things,
and the explanations go on forever. There are interesting set-ups and then the
scene ends and I never come back to it. Background characters nobody cares about have
emotional journeys.

Exactly two scenes from this draft made it to the published book; together they comprise about a thousand words. The other 96% of this pretty advanced work-in-progress I completely jettisoned, including plenty of scenes I’d worked and reworked.

It’s comforting to remind myself that good stories don’t come out that way the first time. I have always needed to write a ton of bad stuff to find the good stuff. Sometimes I need to write a ton of bad stuff just to figure out that it’s bad stuff. Good novels don’t depend (totally) on good ideas; they depend on lots and lots of work. And I’m happy to do that work. Work, I can control.

The way I start a new novel is by writing lots of disconnected scenes. I’m always tempted to begin putting things together as soon as possible, to think about how they connect, and why, and in which order. Because novels are meant to, you know, make sense. They need beginnings and middles and ends. But it’s easy to write a lot of mediocre words just because they fit. If I’m writing something purely because I think it’s good, maybe it never fits, but at least it’s good. And it might just turn out that it’s not this scene that doesn’t fit: It’s the other 96%.

Note: The two scenes that survived ended up being the openings to Chapters 1 and 2. They don’t go on very long,
because in each scene I wanted just to introduce one weird idea and then SMASH CUT to something else. Things started to
go better when I thought, Hey, what if I don’t do that.

I got some hot mail following my last blog. Some really hot mail. To summarize:

You (Max) said it’s wrong to do nothing about feminist issues

I (a good guy) do nothing about feminist issues

You think I’m a bad person so SCREW YOU IN THE FACE

This feels like a real misunderstanding. Sure, I think you’re wrong, but
that doesn’t make you a bad person. We all believe wrong things. I have
a bunch of wrong beliefs right now, I bet. Not this one. This one, I feel
confident about. But I’m sure I have others, which I’m yet to identify.
Because we’re not born with the answers; we have to figure this stuff out.

Curiously, almost all the hot mail focused on how I should stop apologizing
and feeling guilty for being male. I say “curious” because at no point
in my blog did I apologize or mention guilt. People just assumed that’s
what happens if you’re wrong: You feel shameful and want to apologize.

This is a pretty dramatic view of wrongness. We’re not wrong every few
years. We’re constantly wrong. We generalize; we don’t pay attention; we are
a wacky collection of hilarious biases. Being wrong doesn’t make you a bad
person: It makes you a person. It’s what we do on the regular so we’re not
stuck with the same ideas we had when we were fourteen.

I think a lot of dudes, including me, haven’t done anything particularly
terrible, but haven’t been particularly helpful, either.
That’s not a crime. But it’s not great, either. When we see entrenched
unfairness—even the quiet, casual kind, which is surprisingly hard to spot,
when it doesn’t directly affect you—the right thing to do is call it out.
And to try harder to see it.

That’s it! Because, and I may be off-base here, I don’t think a whole lot
of women care about men apologizing or demonstrating guilt. I think
mostly they’d just like us to be more helpful. Nobody’s
end goal is to make dudes feel bad. This isn’t even about dudes:
It’s about making the future fairer. If all that means to you is
shame and guilt, well, okay, you can feel that way, but it’s probably
not helping anyone, and no-one asked you do it.

Boy we’ve become smart about feminism. Way back when I was young,
if you were a dude who wasn’t a feminist, you told girls to make
you a sandwich and sexually denigrated them in the workplace.
But actively vocalized misogyny has become pretty uncool since then,
so we had to come up with something new. And we did! It’s: Nothing.

Nothing is great. Nothing works almost as well as active misogyny, with
the added benefit of not requiring you to do anything. Also people can’t
complain about you doing nothing, because you’ve literally done
nothing.

The way nothing works is you just go about your business and ignore
anything not directly relevant to your own life. This is the default
for most people, so it’s pretty simple. But you can really
make it work when you’re operating in an environment
set up in your favor. In that situation, doing nothing grants you benefits
without requiring you to come out and explicitly endorse the system you’re
benefiting from, which would be, you know, awkward and uncool.

There are lots of ways to profitably do nothing as a dude. One of my
favorites is not to profile violent people for being male.
If there’s a riot, a shooting, any kind of
major crime, we’ll dive right into a conversation about
whether it’s fair to observe that the perpetrators are a particular ethnicity or
English soccer fans or whatever. We will be all over that discussion.
We’ll hit it from every angle: transparently racist, excessively apologist,
whatever. But we won’t say a word about how ninety-plus percent of the
perpetrators are dudes.

I really want a riot with 95% women looting stuff and punching people,
just to see how how fast the media fills up with hot takes. Not a
women’s issues protest: a riot in which all the assaults and property
damage just happen to be committed by women for no obvious reason.
I don’t know what we’d conclude about that, but I guarantee we’d discuss it.
We would discuss that to death.

Another great one this year is vaccines.
I’m not sure if you heard, but a few of them
(like AstraZeneca) have an almost-but-not-quite-zero
chance of causing blood clots. This caused angst about whether they
were truly safe, particularly in places where there wasn’t much COVID.
But we forgot about contraception, and out came media pieces like:
“Oh, we’re talking about unlikely but dangerous side-effects of medication? Can we discuss the pill?” Because
the contraceptive pill causes blood clots (albeit far less
dangerous ones) at a hundred times the rate of AstraZeneca,
and has a list of other side-effects that are also very unlikely but
serious.

Obviously we’re beyond the time when we could
tell women to stop worrying their little heads about the pill
while we deal with this unacceptably dangerous AstraZeneca
situation, so instead we did nothing. We just didn’t say anything.
We didn’t click the pill articles; we didn’t retweet; we didn’t post. They
weren’t that relevant to us. Within a week, they all died from lack of
attention, and six months later we’re still talking about AstraZeneca.

We closed the golf courses in my city for a while during lockdown. Holy hell,
was that a discussion point. We filled the airwaves with talk
about whether it was fair or a terrible injustice. I’m pretty
sure other sports and recreational activities were in similar
situations, but I barely heard about them.

I remember a time when I thought I shouldn’t have to cross a road
to avoid alarming a woman walking alone at night. Because if
we want equality, shouldn’t I equally be able to walk wherever
I want? I marvel at that perspective now, because it requires almost
total blindness to the inequities women face. I had a spotlight
that only illuminated the part of each issue that directly
affected me. An environment causing women to fear for their safety:
nothing to do with me. My potential inconvenience: civil rights issue.
I outgrew that, mostly, I hope, but still, it has been a
journey of discovery, with each discovery looking very
obvious in retrospect, so that I wonder how I failed to notice it earlier.
I’m sure that isn’t over, and, of course, it’s part of a wider road that covers
more than just feminism. But in the meantime, I aim to do less nothing.

You know—I was going to finish this piece there, but it struck me that I genuinely expect
you to be satisfied that I’ll try to do better than nothing.
That’s amazing, isn’t it? I can benefit from gender bias my whole
life, and keep all those benefits, plus any I may accrue in the future, but
so long as I try to avoid being a silent co-conspirator in any future oppression,
that’s pretty good. That is one low bar.