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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
In the midst of death and mayhem, Perry thinks up the ultimate killer app. Chapter 8 of "Themepunks."
Oct 31, 2005 | Kodacell is supposed to be a new way of doing business. Decentralized, net-savvy, really twenty-first century. The suck-up tech press and tech-addled bloggers have been trumpeting its triumph over all other modes of commerce.
But what does decentralization really mean? On her "blog" this week, former journalist Andrea Fleeks reports that the inmates running the flagship Kodacell asylum in suburban Florida have invited an entire village of homeless squatters to take up residence at their factory premises.
Describing their illegal homesteading as "live-work" condos that Dr Seuss might have designed, Kodacell shill Fleeks goes on to describe how this captive, live-in audience has been converted to a workforce for Kodacell's most profitable unit ("most profitable" is a relative term: to date, this unit has turned a profit of about 1.5 million, per the last quarterly report; by contrast the old Kodak's most profitable unit made twenty times that in its last quarter of operation).
America has a grand tradition of this kind of plantation living: the coal barons' company towns of the 19th century are the original model for this kind of industrial practice in the U.S.A. Substandard housing and only one employer in town -- that's the kind of brave new world that Fleeks's boyfriend Kettlewell has created.
A reader writes: "I live near the shantytown that was relocated to the Kodacell factory in Florida. It was a dangerous slum full of drug dealers. None of the parents in my neighborhood let their kids ride their bikes along the road that passed it by -- it was a haven for all kinds of down-and-out trash."
There you have it, the future of the American workforce: down-and-out junkie squatters working for starvation wages.
"Kettlewell, you can't let jerks like Freddy run this company. He's just looking to sell banner-space. This is how the Brit rags write -- it's all meanspirited sniping." Andrea had never seen Kettlewell so frustrated. His surfer good looks were fading fast -- he was getting a little paunch on him and his cheeks were sagging off his bones into the beginnings of jowls. His car had pulled up to the end of the driveway and he'd gotten out and walked through the shantytown with the air of a man in a dream. The truckers who pulled in and out all week picking up orders had occasionally had a curious word at the strange little settlement, but for Andrea it had all but disappeared into her normal experience. Kettlewell made it strange and even a little outrageous, just by his stiff, outraged walk through its streets.
"You think I'm letting Freddy drive this decision?" He had spittle flecks on the corners of his mouth. "Christ, Andrea, you're supposed to be the adult around here."
Perry looked up from the floor in front of him, which he had been staring at intently. Andrea caught his involuntary glare at Kettlewell, before he dropped his eyes again. Lester put a big meaty paw on Perry's shoulder. Kettlewell was oblivious.
"Those people can't stay, all right? The shareholders are baying for blood. The fucking liability -- Christ, what if one of those places burns down? What if one of them knifes another one? We're on the hook for everything they do. We could end up being on the hook for a fucking cholera epidemic."
Irrationally, Andrea burned with anger at Rat-Toothed Freddy. He had written every venal, bilious word with the hope that it would result in a scene just like this one. And not because he had any substantive objection to what was going on: simply because he had a need to deride that which others hailed. He wasn't afflicting the mighty, though: he was taking on the very meekest, people who had nothing, including a means of speaking up for themselves.
Perry looked up. "You've asked me to come up with something new and incredible every three to six months. Well, this is new and incredible. We've built a living lab on our doorstep for exploring an enormous market opportunity to provide low-cost, sustainable technology for use by a substantial segment of the population who have no fixed address. There are millions of American squatters and billions of squatters worldwide. They have money to spend and no one else is trying to get it from them."
Kettlewell thrust his chin forward. "How many millions? How much money do they have to spend? How do you know that any of this will make us a single cent? Where's the market research? Was there any? Or did you just invite a hundred hobos to pitch their tent out front of my factory on the strength of your half-assed guesses?"
Lester held up a hand. "We don't have any market research, Kettlewell, because we don't have a business-manager on the team anymore. Perry's been taking that over as well as his regular work, and he's been working himself sick for you. We're flying by the seat of our pants here because you haven't sent us a pilot."
"You need an MBA to tell you not to turn your workplace into a slum?" Kettlewell said. He was boiling. Andrea very carefully pulled out her pad and wrote this down. It was all she had, but sometimes it was enough.
Kettlewell noticed. "Get out," he said. "I want to talk with these two alone."
"No," Andrea said. "That's not our deal. I get to document everything. That's the deal."
Kettlewell glared at her, and then he deflated. He sagged and took two steps to the chair behind Perry's desk and collapsed into it.
"Put the notebook away, Andrea, please?"
She lowered the book and tucked her pen into a back pocket.
"Guys, the major shareholders are going to start dumping their stock this week. A couple of pension funds, a merchant bank. It's about 10, 15 percent of the company. When that happens, our ticker price is going to fall by 60 percent or more."
"They're going to short us because they don't like what we've done here?" Perry said. "Christ, that's ridiculous!"
Kettlewell sighed and put his face in his hands, scrubbed at his eyes. "No, Perry, no. They're doing it because they can't figure out how to value us. Our business units have an industry-high return on investment, but there's not enough of them. We've only signed a thousand teams and we wanted ten thousand, so 90 percent of the money we had to spend is sitting in the bank at garbage interest rates. We need to soak up that money with big projects -- the Hoover Dam, Hong Kong Disneyland, the Big Dig. All we've got are little projects."
"So it's not our fault then, is it?" Lester said. Perry was staring out the window.
"No, it's not your fault, but this doesn't help. This is a disaster waiting to turn into a catastrophe."
"Calm down, Lionel," Perry said. "Calm down for a sec and listen to me, OK?"
Kettlewell looked at him and sighed. "Go ahead."
"There are more than a billion squatters worldwide. San Francisco has been giving out tents and shopping carts ever since they ran out of shelter beds in the nineties. From Copenhagen to Capetown, there are more and more people who are going off the grid, often in the middle of cities."
Andrea nodded. "They farm Detroit, in the ruins of old buildings. Raise crops and sell them. Chickens, too. Even pigs."
"There's something there. These people have money, like I said. They buy and sell in the stream of commerce. They often have to buy at a premium because the services and goods available to them are limited -- think of how a homeless person can't take advantage of bulk-packaged perishables because she doesn't have a fridge. They are the spirit of ingenuity, too -- they mod their cars, caves, anything they can find to be living quarters. They turn RVs into permanent homes. They know more about tents, sleeping bags and cardboard than any U.N. SHELTER specialist. These people need housing, goods, appliances, you name it. It's what Tjan used to call a green-field market: no one else knows it's there. You want something you can spend ungodly amounts of money on? This is it. Get every team in the company to come up with products for these people. Soak up every cent they spend. Better us providing them with quality goods at reasonable prices than letting them get ripped off by the profiteers who have a captive market. This plant is a living lab: this is the kind of market intelligence you can't buy, right here. We should set up more of these. Invite squatters all over the country to move onto our grounds, test out our products, help us design, build and market them. We can recruit traveling salespeople to go door to door in the shanties and take orders. Shit, man, you talk about the Grameen Bank all the time -- why not go into business providing these people with easy microcredit without preying on them the way the banks do? Then we could loan them money to buy things that we sell them that they use to better their lives and earn more money so they can pay us back and buy more things and borrow more money --"
Kettlewell held up a hand. "I like the theory. It's a nice story. But I have to sell this to my Board, and they want more than stories: where can I get the research to back this up?"
"We're it," Perry said. "This place, right here. There's no numbers to prove what I'm saying is right because everyone who knows it's right is too busy chasing after it and no one else believes it. But right here, if we're allowed to do this -- right here we can prove it. We've got the capital in our account, we're profitable, and we can roll those profits back into more R&D for the future of the company."
Andrea was writing so fast she was getting a hand cramp. Perry had never given speeches like this, even a month before. Tjan leaving had hurt them all, but the growth it had precipitated in Perry was stunning.
Kettlewell argued more, but Perry was a steamroller and Andrea was writing down what everyone said and that kept it all civil, like a silent camera rolling in the corner of the room. No one looked at her, but she was the thing they were conspicuously not looking at.
