The Critique Boutique

“The Critique Boutique”

by Robert J. Hansen

What a surreal nightmare.

A room: bland, featureless, gray. A table, two chairs, and an interlocutor so average-seeming I’m surprised I remember him. Well-dressed but not designer, charcoal topcoat and pale gray suit, no necktie but a lavender silk tucked in his pocket.

He wasn’t smiling. I immediately knew that I knew him but couldn’t remember from where. His not-smiling was a show of respect, I remembered: he saw no point in even trying lesser shows of intimidation, like smiling, when he knew they’d fail.

I knew Mr. Gray and was afraid of him, but couldn’t tell you how or why.

“Mr. Hansen,” he began, no false camaraderie from him. “It’s unfortunate we must again meet.” I noted the anastrophe, filed the fact away: whatever this was, the forest primeval it wasn’t.

“It’s your dime,” I told him. “Make your case.”

Mr. Gray set his briefcase on the table between us, opened it, pulled out a manila folder. “This isn’t the full write-up,” he said as he handed it over. “Only the tip of the iceberg.”

As I leafed through the pages I saw each had a public social media post of mine, along with a multi-axis score. They seemed to be using the Big Five personality model, one of the few personality tests with real-world reliability. But there were also multi-axis neurosis and psychosis evaluators, a Jungian making commentary on hypothetical links between how I flirt and my Shadow, and more.

“This is well done, really,” I said as I handed it back. I hoped I’d throw him off-balance.

Instead, Mr. Gray smiled, pleased; he knew I was being sincere. “You should see the trade secret version.” As quickly as his smile appeared, it vanished. “Management escalated you to the Board. Our prior attempts at persuasion having failed, the Board has authorized these extreme measures.”

“I don’t know what it is you think I’ve done.”

“You’ve thought, Mr. Hansen. You’ve put modernity beneath a magnifying glass and said ‘no, I refuse to accept delivery of this future’. We are creating a marvel, sir, a world where everyone thinks they’re free and yet lives under social controls that would choke a Stalinist: the best of both worlds—and oh, so profitable!”

“Refusing to accept the crapsack world people are creating for us is kind of like humanity’s hobby—”

“—Yes!” he said. “The model accepts that, plans for that, makes profit from that, even depends on that. Who donates the most to political campaigns? It’s not billionaires. It’s the poorest people who give the most powerful people twenty bucks each time they make a speech about the unfairness of income inequality. Mr. Hansen, you mistake us completely: we love dissent. We love it so much that it must be shepherded, cultivated, pruned, grown to exacting standards, at industrial scale, and above all else standardized. Noam Chomsky wrote extensively on how democratic societies rely on manufactured consent, but you and I know he was always behind the curve. It’s mass-manufactured dissent that makes the Machine tick!”

I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“You, sir,” he went on, “with your artisan dissent, your little Etsy shop of handcrafted criticism, you are simply doing too much business. You’re spoiling our plans. We’re tired of you and we won’t have it. We’ve offered to buy you out, offered you money and every decadent thing to be found in dreams, and you’ve refused us. The Board now sees what Management didn’t: that some men are too stubborn to let themselves enjoy the carrot.”

He tapped the folder lightly. “Stick. In six months we’re releasing a new textual AI bot, trained on you. We’re not going to make you famous: we’re going to make you public domain. Every bit of analysis, flavored in your voice—its asides taken from your bon mots—a sea of nonsense the world will embrace, which you will never be able to escape!”

“Excepting that I’ll be right,” I said. “I won’t misattribute Archie MacLeish to Keats, or—”

Mr. Gray jumped in his seat slightly as if he was having trouble not clapping his hands in glee. “Nobody cares! Everybody knows it’s nonsense and they’re perfectly fine with it. In a world where hardly anyone has read T.S. Eliot, hardly anyone cares about what The Waste Land means. They care about appearing to others like someone who’s read Eliot and knows what it means. Fake it until you make it, Mr. Hansen. Our next AI model will drown the world in fakery… all of it sounding like you.”

I shivered. I didn’t know if he would do it, but I knew his organization had the resources to. I just didn’t know if they’d make good on their threat.

“Shut your little critique boutique and join the program,” Mr. Gray said. “It’s not too late. If you respect the stick I can still let you have a little bite of the carrot.”

I shook my head no. “I just remembered something,” I said, something akin to triumph in my heart. “Why, if I say you’re only a pack of cards, you’ll all fly away. I’m asleep. You don’t exist. You’re a dream.”

Mr. Gray stared at me open-mouthed in surprise. “You don’t… do you really think we’d ever speak to you this plainly, this directly, outside of a dream?”

He shook himself as he slipped the folder back into his briefcase. He stood up, holding his briefcase in one hand while buttoning his topcoat. “I have many, many other appointments to keep,” he said. “You can wake up now.”

And I just did.

_______________

Robert J. Hansen is a forty-something who’s still trying to figure out how to describe what he does for a living, much less what he wants to be when he finishes growing up. A former Iowa farm boy, he’s lived in Virginia for the last fifteen years, and his neighbors are just beginning to forget he’s not a local. “The Critique Boutique” is a real nightmare he really had, and he’s pleased you can now have it, too.