“Maybe,” I said. “But how popular do you think an experience of a Black person thinking really nasty thoughts about white people would be? Because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but some white folks really like finding ways to be the victim.”

He pushed his lips together and looked around the room.

“I see your point,” he said. And I think he did, but I also think he was thinking that all of this complicated social shit really did get in the way sometimes. But he wasn’t going to say that out loud to me.

I was extra nice to Andy for the rest of the visit because, y’know, that’s what I have to do, I guess.

After he was gone, April and I were sitting on the couch organizing our army of social media activists. Carl was curled up at April’s side.

“I hadn’t thought of any of that stuff before you brought it up,” she said. “I mean, I thought, of course the Space would be bad for inequality because fundamentally some people can’t access it, either because they can’t afford to or because of body dislocation.” She thought for a minute and then said, “But you’re right. People will just share the things that confirm their ideology, and those things will always exist. Our reality isn’t about what’s real, it’s about what we pay attention to.”

CNBC INTERVIEW BETWEEN ANCHOR STEPHEN JACOBS AND INVESTMENT STRATEGIST LINDSAY McALLIS

Stephen Jacobs: Joining us today on Market Showdown is Lindsay McAllis, and Lindsay, wow, today has been a showdown. Nothing is up except one thing. What is an investor to do on a day like today? We were already in a recession, a drop like this is unthinkable. The market is back to the nineties. Is this the time to buy?

Lindsay McAllis: Stephen, no asset manager wants to be the one to call a panic, but it now might be time to panic. We don’t have granular data right now, but our early research is indicating that every metric is bad. Consumer confidence is down, consumer spending is down, unemployment is up, and, worse, labor participation is cratering. I think the bottom is a long way away from where we’re at right now.

SJ: That is something to say in a world where we’re already down over 60 percent from highs.

LM: Assets are moving into two places, heavy metals and cryptocurrency. And the vast majority moving into crypto is in AltaCoin. This isn’t a normal restructuring. It’s not that the market was overvalued, we’re already in a recession. No, I think the market is waking up to the fact that the old ways may actually be over. People who have been to the Premium Altus Space are assuming that a fairly significant portion of the US economy is going to take place only inside of that one company. And since it’s not publicly traded, the only way to capitalize on it without resorting to private markets is AltaCoin. It’s up 500 percent, Stephen, and this time I actually don’t think it’s a bubble. People don’t need to spend money if they’re living their whole lives inside Altus. If anything, the rest of the economy is the bubble.

APRIL

DAY NINE OF NINETEEN

This was when our campaign to hurt Altus’s public image caught fire. Many people were angry at Altus before. There were people who understood the sociology of Altus and were concerned, and others who had lost friends or family to addiction to Altus or even to the increasing number of Altus-related deaths. But if you really want public opinion to turn against you, come for the economy. As the Altus Premium Space was rolled out to hundreds of thousands and then millions, people rushed to mine AltaCoin at the expense of pretty much everything else. Layoffs were rampant; some retirement accounts were down 70 percent. Carl’s brother didn’t care—economic anxiety just made people easier to manipulate. People could hate Altus all they wanted. Companies don’t close because people dislike them.

But we were hoping maybe public opinion would be a part of the solution. So we hired a company to do a tracking poll—to call people and ask them what their opinions on Altus were. Every day, we were seeing an increase in people with negative views of the company, including lots of people who actually used Altus.

The tide was turning; unfortunately, Altus had a big ship, and it was well out to sea.

DAY TWELVE OF NINETEEN

We got a little glimpse of something beautiful for a while. At Robin and Maya’s urging, I didn’t tweet anything but @replies or links the entire time we stayed in that apartment. If I wanted to say something, I had two ways of doing it.

 1. I could make a video, which I did, but only a few times.

 2. I could do a podcast.

Podcasts were nice because they lasted a long time. When you did a radio or TV interview, you had to squish every thought into five or ten minutes. Everything was talking points and nothing was nuance. Podcasts gave you time. You could think together with the host, and it felt natural.

I did that a little bit, each time setting up an encrypted call so that no one could trace us, even though, apparently, Carl could protect us from snooping.

In public, I was calm and as noncontroversial as I could manage. Yes, I subtly dropped hints about how Altus was making people more anxious and less connected, but I didn’t say anything confrontational. I left that to the armies we had created.

And they had, in such a short time, become extremely powerful.

We had been able to segment people into over five hundred small groups of a hundred or so people with specific concerns and demographic similarities. One person from each of these groups was elected to be a representative in a central committee group. There were around thirty central committees, and each of them sent a representative to the leadership chat.

That final group was the only one that Maya and I talked to directly. Each one of those thirty people represented roughly three thousand, for a total of ninety thousand people in our little army. They were the ninety thousand most dedicated, most concerned, least-likely-to-rat-us-out individuals from the more than fifty million who had ended up responding to our survey.

I know ninety thousand people doesn’t sound like a lot, and it’s not! But if they’re organized and work together, they can make things look big when they’re small or small when they’re big. They can weaken arguments and drown out disagreement.

And it was working.

The tide was turning against Altus. It didn’t hurt that the world was dystopian as fuck. The moment people could make good money in the Altus Space, a lot of people had just stopped going to their jobs. Some people, desperate for the success that first adopters had seen, were cutting every corner they could to maximize the money they were keeping in AltaCoin. That included, apparently, forgoing rent payments and eventually living on the streets with their headsets chained to metal cuffs on their necks.

Congress was investigating Altus, and also investigating what laws they could write that would limit it, but they were coming up against the limits of their own power.

Altus wasn’t an American company, it was based in Val Verde, and they were giving the government of Val Verde so much money that international pressure wasn’t having an effect. It was looking increasingly like Altus had become Val Verde. Forcing laws on them was starting to look roughly as difficult as forcing laws on another nation.

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT:

WALK WITH US PODCAST

Adam DiCostanzo: This is the Walk with Us podcast. I talk to interesting people, and you take a walk. And today, we’re a little bit overwhelmed that our guest has agreed to talk with us—it’s April May. Usually I do an intro in this space, but you know who April May is. In fact, it’s much more likely that you don’t know who I am. I’m Adam. I have a podcast where I interview people and, at least I hope, the people listening take a walk. Maybe by themselves, maybe with someone they like or love or maybe have just met.