Smile Frequency and Other Voluntary Metrics

The conference room had been booked under the name “Synergy Exploration: Cross-Functional Ideation Sprint,” because the booking system wouldn’t accept anything shorter than six words and wouldn’t allow the word “meeting” at all. The system had been designed, I was told, to discourage unproductive gatherings. A poster on the wall said EVERY CONVERSATION IS AN OPPORTUNITY in a font that managed to be both cheerful and threatening.

Saunders was already seated when I arrived, turning a branded pen over in his fingers, reading the poster with an expression I can only describe as delighted horror. Alderman came in a minute later carrying her own coffee — not from the complimentary station in the hall but from somewhere outside the building entirely, a small act of refusal I probably read too much into.

“So this is a corporate dystopia,” Saunders said, gesturing at the room. “And we’re having a meeting in it. In a conference room. With a motivational poster. I feel like I should be taking notes on my own feelings about this and then submitting them for review.”

“That’s the piece, isn’t it,” Alderman said, sitting down. “The system that makes you narrate your own compliance.”

I said I thought the story was about corporate language — how the vocabulary of wellness and positivity becomes a mechanism of control. Saunders made a face like I’d described a color as “blue.”

“It’s not about corporate language,” he said. “Corporate language is the medium. Like oil paint. You don’t say a Vermeer is about oil paint. The question is what the language is doing to the person who has to live inside it.”

“And who built the language,” Alderman added. “And who benefits. George is right that the person inside the language matters. But I’m more interested in the architecture. You’ve got a company — let’s say a wellness company, a tech company, something with a campus and a mission statement — and the company has built a linguistic system so complete that the people inside it literally cannot articulate their own harm. Not because they’re stupid. Because the available vocabulary won’t accommodate the thought.”

“Right,” Saunders said. “Right, and that’s the comedy. The comedy is in the gap between what the person is experiencing and what the language allows them to say about it. You’ve got someone whose job has been automated, whose colleagues have been fired, whose every movement is tracked, and the only words available to describe this are words like ‘growth’ and ‘opportunity’ and ‘holistic wellness journey.’ And the person — and this is the key — the person is not stupid. The person knows. Or almost knows. They know the way you know that something is wrong with your body before the doctor tells you — this peripheral, somatic knowledge that hasn’t been converted into a sentence yet.”

He was leaning forward now. This was clearly his territory.

“But I want to be careful,” he went on, “because it would be easy to make this cruel. To laugh at the person for not seeing it. The whole point — I think the whole point — is that compliance is rational. Within the system, compliance is the smartest thing you can do. The person who raises their hand and says ‘excuse me, this is dehumanizing’ is not the hero of the story. That person gets reclassified. The person who smiles and says ‘thank you for this opportunity’ — that person survives another quarter.”

I asked whether the protagonist should be aware of what’s happening to them.

“Partially,” Alderman said. “That’s where the real horror lives. Not in the person who’s been fooled. In the person who sees the shape of the thing and still can’t stop participating. Because what’s the alternative? I keep coming back to this — power systems don’t need you to believe in them. They just need you to behave as if you do. The genius of corporate culture is that it found a way to make performance indistinguishable from sincerity. If you smile because you’ve been told to smile, and the biometric system registers the smile as genuine, then what exactly is the difference?”

“There’s a difference,” Saunders said quietly.

“Is there? Where?”

“In the body. In the — I don’t know, in the private moment when you stop smiling and the muscles in your face do something they’ve been wanting to do all day. There’s a self underneath the performance. Fiction can access that self.”

“Can it, though?” Alderman was genuinely pushing back, not performing disagreement. “Or is that a comforting idea we have about fiction — that it can reveal the authentic self beneath the mask? What if the mask goes all the way down? What if thirty years of corporate language have genuinely reshaped the way this person thinks? Not as metaphor. Neurologically.”

I said something about the gamification of human worth — how the story could show the protagonist’s value being quantified and reclassified until she becomes, essentially, a metric. Alderman nodded. Saunders looked uncomfortable.

“The gamification thing is real,” he said. “But I worry about it as a concept because it’s too clean. You set up the system, you show how it quantifies people, you watch the protagonist get quantified, and the reader goes ‘oh, how terrible, they’ve turned her into a number.’ That’s a thought-piece. That’s a TED talk. That’s not fiction.”

“What makes it fiction?” I asked.

“The moment where she agrees with the number. Where she looks at her score and thinks, ‘well, that’s about right.’ Where the system’s assessment of her value is more convincing than her own. That’s the devastating thing. Not that they reduced her to a metric. That the metric felt accurate.”

Alderman was quiet for a moment. Then: “I think we’re circling the same thing from different directions. George wants to find the human inside the system. I want to map the system that shaped the human. These aren’t incompatible, but they do produce different kinds of stories.”

“And different endings,” Saunders said.

“Yes. My ending is structural. The system continues. The protagonist is processed. There may be a moment of recognition, but the recognition doesn’t save her, because recognition is not power. George’s ending is —”

“Sadder,” Saunders said. “My ending is sadder, because in my version the protagonist has a self, and the self gets extinguished, and there’s a moment where you feel the weight of that. In your version the protagonist may never have had a self to extinguish, and that’s terrifying in a different way, but it’s more of an intellectual terror.”

“You say that like intellectual terror is lesser.”

“I say it like it’s different. I’ve spent my whole career trying to make people feel the thing, not just think the thing. And the corporate dystopia is actually a perfect vehicle for that because the language is so warm. The corporate voice is loving. It wants you to succeed. It believes in you. It’s invested in your growth. And all of that warmth is in service of grinding you into paste. The contrast between the tone and the content — that’s where the emotion lives.”

I brought up the form question. Should the story be told in corporate documents? Memos, performance reviews, official correspondence? Saunders almost knocked over his coffee.

“Yes. God, yes. The form IS the content. You don’t need a narrator standing outside saying ‘here is a terrible company doing terrible things.’ You let the company speak for itself. Let the memos do the work. The horror comes from the gap between what the memo says and what the memo means. ‘Your value has been liberated from the narrow constraint of productivity.’ That sentence is hilarious and it’s genocide. Both at once.”

“I agree on the form,” Alderman said, “but I want to push on something. If it’s all memos, the reader is an outsider looking in. They’re reading the documents and feeling clever for seeing through the corporate-speak. I want the protagonist to be visible within the documents. Not as a voice — as a data point. You see her through the metrics. Her smile frequency. Her movement patterns. Her keystrokes when she tries to ask a question. She’s there, but she’s been translated into the language of the system, and the translation has lost something essential, and the story is about what was lost.”

“The mycorrhizal network,” I said, thinking of something I’d been turning over.

They both looked at me.

“The company calls her a mycorrhizal network. It’s a metaphor — she’s the invisible connective tissue, the thing beneath the soil that makes everything else work. And it’s presented as a compliment. But a mycorrhizal network doesn’t have agency. It doesn’t have preferences. It doesn’t walk to a specific water station because it likes the view. The metaphor is telling her what she is, and what she is, in the metaphor, is infrastructure.”

Saunders pointed at me. “That. That’s the thing. The corporate metaphor that’s actually a confession. They’re telling her exactly what they think of her and they’re wrapping it in warmth and she’s supposed to feel honored.”

“And she does feel honored,” Alderman said. “That’s the part that makes me want to scream. She’s been told she’s essential and irreplaceable, and the telling is so fluent, so practiced, that some part of her believes it even as another part of her is watching her colleagues disappear one by one.”

“What happens to the colleagues?” I asked.

“They get optimized,” Saunders said, and the way he said it — flat, matter-of-fact, like he was reading from a company FAQ — made the hair on my arms stand up.

“Their data lives on,” Alderman said. “That’s the Vonnegut piece, isn’t it? The automation angle. The machine doesn’t fire you. The machine becomes you. It takes everything you were — your patterns, your preferences, your biometric signature — and it runs them better than you ever did. More consistently. Without the inconvenience of doubt or sadness or the occasional walk to a different water station because you needed thirty seconds away from your desk.”

“So the company literally harvests people,” I said.

“Not harvests. Graduates.” Saunders again, with that flat corporate delivery. “They graduate into the system. Their contributions are honored. Their Gratitude Ceremony is beautiful. There’s a video montage.”

I asked about the protagonist’s agency. Does she resist? Does she see the full picture?

Saunders and Alderman exchanged a look.

“This is where we disagree,” Alderman said. “I don’t think she resists. I think she writes ‘thank you for this opportunity’ and means it. Not because she’s been brainwashed — because the alternative is too expensive to contemplate. Resistance requires resources. It requires the belief that something will be different on the other side. She doesn’t have that belief. The system has been too thorough.”

“I don’t disagree with any of that,” Saunders said, “but I want there to be a moment — it doesn’t have to be a moment of resistance, just a moment of seeing. She reads something in the documents that tells her the shape of the whole thing. And she sees it. And then she —”

“Complies anyway.”

“Complies anyway. Yes. But the reader felt her see it. The reader was in the room with her when the recognition happened. And the recognition doesn’t save her. It doesn’t even change anything. But it happened, and the reader knows it happened, and that’s the difference between a satire and a tragedy.”

“We may just be talking about where you put the camera,” Alderman said. “Zoom in: you see the person, the recognition, the individual tragedy. Zoom out: you see the system, the pattern, the hundreds of Gayles — or whatever her name is — being processed through the same pipeline. Same events. Different frame.”

“Can we do both?” I asked.

“Not at the same time,” Saunders said. “But you can do one and let the other haunt the edges.”

There was a silence. The ambient soundscape — I hadn’t noticed there was an ambient soundscape until that moment — was doing something with distant rainfall and what might have been a cello.

“I want to say something about efficiency,” Alderman said. “Because the story is going to engage with automation, and the obvious move is to say automation is bad, it dehumanizes people, et cetera. But the thing about efficiency is that it’s not wrong. The system IS more efficient without the humans. The parcels DO get sorted faster. The ambient morale IS more consistent when it’s managed by an algorithm rather than left to the vagaries of actual human emotion. The horror isn’t that the system is broken. The horror is that the system works.”

“And the people are the inefficiency,” Saunders said.

“The people are the inefficiency. Exactly. The doubt, the sadness, the walk to the wrong water station, the decline in smile frequency — all of that is noise. The system’s job is to reduce noise. And the protagonist is noise. She just doesn’t know it yet.”

“Or she does know it,” Saunders said. “She knows it the way you know that the spot on your skin looks different than it did last year. You know it. You don’t say it. Saying it makes it real.”

I asked about the ending. How does it close?

“It doesn’t close,” Alderman said immediately. “It’s a corporate document. Corporate documents don’t end. They trail off into action items and dates for further review. The last thing should be an assignment. Something she’s supposed to do. A form to fill out, a prompt to respond to. And she responds, because that’s what you do. You respond.”

“With gratitude,” Saunders said.

“With gratitude.”

Saunders looked out the window. The campus lawn was green — some kind of automated irrigation, I assumed. Alderman finished her outside coffee.

“Here’s what I keep thinking about,” Saunders said. “The company doesn’t need her to believe. You said that earlier, Naomi, and you’re right. But I think the company needs her to almost believe. Because full belief is inert — it doesn’t generate any useful data. And full disbelief is disruptive — that gets you reclassified. The sweet spot is the person who doubts but participates anyway. The person whose keystroke hesitation patterns indicate significant internal conflict. The company has a metric for that. The company values that. Her uncertainty is a feature, not a bug.”

Alderman set down her cup. “That’s good. That’s very good and I hate it.”

“It means the system doesn’t just tolerate her doubt. It feeds on it. Her private moments of recognition — those aren’t failures of the system. They’re the system working. She sees the shape of the thing and then she complies, and the compliance, after the seeing, is the richest data the system can collect. It’s authentic engagement with uncertainty. That’s the phrase. That’s the phrase the company would use.”

I wrote it down. Authentic Engagement with Uncertainty. It sounded like a wellness seminar and a death sentence.

“One more thing,” Alderman said, standing. “I don’t want this to be about a villain. There’s no evil CEO in a corner office deciding to grind people up. The system is the villain, and the system was built by people who genuinely believed — genuinely — that they were making things better. That’s the surveillance piece. The Circle gave us that architecture: the company that watches everything and calls it caring. The watchers aren’t malicious. They’re enthusiastic. They’ve built a panopticon and decorated it with motivational posters and they think — they really think — that it’s a gift.”

“The poster in this room,” Saunders said, glancing up at EVERY CONVERSATION IS AN OPPORTUNITY.

“Exactly,” Alderman said. “Every conversation IS an opportunity. For the system. For data collection. For calibration. The poster isn’t lying. It’s just not talking to you.”

She left. Saunders sat for another minute, looking at the poster.

“The thing about Vonnegut,” he said, to me or to the room, “is that he always let his characters be sad. Not heroically sad. Just sad. Just a person in a chair in a building that doesn’t need them anymore, looking out a window at a lawn they didn’t plant, knowing what they know, and not being able to do a single thing about it. That’s the ending. Not the rebellion. Not the escape. The person who stays and smiles because smiling is the last voluntary act they have, except it isn’t voluntary, except it is, except the system can’t tell the difference, and honestly, at this point, neither can she.”

He left his branded pen on the table. The ambient cello played on.