Fat Linda throws an incomplete pass

by David Benjamin

“Data technologies do not simply predict the future by guessing what an individual or group might do or want to do in the future. It is rather that those futures already exist, completely realized, and they reach backwards into the present to guide it. The possible paths for our desires to travel are mapped ahead of time by algorithms in the hands of platform capitalists.”

— Alfie Bown, Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships

MADISON, Wis.—Until last fall, I was able—with the occasional glitch—to watch National Football League games on my Mac laptop in Paris, through a program called NFL Game Pass. This sometimes required that I set my alarm for 2 a.m., Monday but, hey, I’m a fan. Then, this year, the NFL threw a pass.

It fell incomplete. Into the bleachers. Which were empty.

On the day of the Green Bay Packers’ clash with the New Orleans Saints, I signed in to Game Pass, typed my password and saw, instead of the game, a one-second view of four letters, D A Z and N, doing a little animated quick-step, after which my screen went black.

I tried to sign in again, and again, and again. The screen stayed black 

This began my trek through an online labyrinth that led me forth, back and forth through the Game Pass site to DAZN, which I interpreted as either a European NFL subcontractor or some digital virus quietly sucking the life out of my hard drive. Eventually, by a sort of fluke (I think I accidentally tapped one of those mysterious “F” keys), I landed on DAZN’s “customer support” site. Fearful of the black screen’s return, I hastily crafted an email explaining my dilemma. Over the next few weeks, various DAZN “team” members—with whimsical names like Armando, Redi and Andy—offered advice, empathy and the assurance that, yes, the autopay function at NFL Game Pass had snagged my $200 subscription fee. My account was “active,” a word that Redi used with no hint of irony. In her turn, Fat Linda (yes, that was her name), wrote the following:

“This is to inform you that we have signed you out of devices on your account in order to provide some troubleshooting steps and check if the issue persists. We suggest that you delete apps and reinstall then sign in again. Also, try to sign in through browser, and any other device and let us know if issue persists.”

Of course, I followed Fat Linda’s instructions and reaped, as my reward, a familiar dancing “DAZN” and the Nietzschean void.

But I had learned. Based on their writing “style,” I could tell that my “team”were not four actual people named Armando, Redi, Andy and Fat Linda but one octopoid algorithm with a Rolodex of aliases. 

Chastened by my digital impotence, I suspended my siege on the Great Wall of DAZN, missing games while staying in Paris. But I resolved, when I got back to America, that I would contact the mother-ship NFL and fix the problem.

Or punt?

It turns out that, unless you’re, say, Bill Belichick, you can’t just pick up the phone and dial the NFL’s front office on Park Avenue. The number the league provides to riffraff like me (and you) is an 800 exchange that sends you to the NFL’s “help”—again. no irony intended—site for “customer support.”

There I went, hope springing eternal in my human breast. Arriving at NFL “help,” I was invited to “chat,” a form of communication that I’ve found, in the past, to be, at best, autistic. But, on a web page cunningly designed to deflect and befuddle, it was my best option. As succinctly and unemotionally as I could manage, I described to a nameless chat interlocutor my battle with the black screen and the abject failure of Armando and the DAZN team. My response was a series of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) whose effect was to make clear that my question was not frequently asked. If at all. And I’ve got some nerve asking!

Okay, it didn’t say that. But there was a definite implication.

Anyway, the following dialog ensued.

ME: I have other questions.

NFL: Sure! Here are the main options:

I had already seen the main options. So I interrupted. 

ME: Is there someone there, or am I talking to an algorithm?

NFL: Sorry, I do not understand your message. Can you rephrase it?

ME: So, you’re an algorithm.

NFL: Sorry, I do not understand your message. Can you rephrase it?

ME: Are there any people there, or is this just a loop of pointless questions?

NFL: Sorry, I do not understand your message. Can you rephrase it?

(At this point, I suggested a phone call, to me. I typed my number.) 

NFL: Hi there! There are things where I can help. Please click the Menu button to get started…

ME: Ah, back to the algorithmic loop. Bye!

NFL: OK then, see you soon (emoji)

Through a fairly pathological persistence, and the foolish dream of recovering my two hundred bucks, I managed to access another, more seemingly anthropomorphic, chat site where “Pearl” was my “help.” After I had again recounted my life in Paris, my devotion to the Packers, my football-viewing in the wee hours of a French Monday and my head-on collision with the Black Hole of DAZN, Pearl cheerily said well, yes, David, you have questions and we have every goddamn answer you’ve ever imagined in your wildest dreams. Just go HERE.

HERE turned out to be another website, called JustAsk, where, for $5 a question, I could climb every mountain, swim every stream, follow every rainbow… 

After she had thus fobbed me off, I understood that Pearl, like Andy, Redi and Fat Linda, was neither friend, foe nor human, but an illusion composed of ones and zeros endlessly scrolling, fizzing and obfuscating through a chloroform cloud of cyberoblivion.

In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), of course, it grows ever less likely that any human will be able to get another human providing “customer support” on the phone. Nor will I, nor anyone, achieve contact with any money-collecting organization through any medium other than an algorithmic Andy. There are, I’ve discovered, philosophers and even poets exploring the dilemma that carbon-based life forms face not just with NFL Game Pass but with an entire society in which machine minds and digital voices—looping FAQ scripts like a runaway tilt-a-whirl—are the only source for figuring out what the hell is wrong.

Poet Abhijit Naskar has written, “Algorithm without humanity is mental holocaust.” And, in a book called Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari said, “Today corporations and governments pay homage to my individuality, and promise to provide medicine, education and entertainment customized to my unique needs and wishes. But in order to so, corporations and governments first need to break me up into biochemical subsystems, monitor these subsystems with ubiquitous sensors and decipher their working with powerful algorithms. In the process, the individual will transpire to be nothing but a religious fantasy. Reality will be a mesh of biochemical and electronic algorithms, without clear borders, and without individual hubs.” 

In the end, I declined to fork my fin over to the “experts” at JustAsk. Having already tried that routine with DAZN and the NFL, with Armando, Fat Linda and the coquettish Pearl, I knew my answer without asking, preordained and packaged, worth not even a buffalo nickel, much less five bucks.

“Don’t ask.”