It was amazing how many industries automation had so quickly thrown into disrepair. Service, retail, and factory jobs were hit hardest, but white-collar industries were also affected, from IT to sales to customer service. Even former blue-shirts were out in force, ex-cops who’d cuffed dozens in 2011, now linked in solidarity against the tear gas–equipped drones that had stolen their street beats. A workers’ strike meant nothing in this automated city, or if not nothing then the opposite of its intent: it reminded the masters what little need they had for a human workforce. For now, the tear gas stayed unsprayed, but as the sound of the human mic increased in volume, and drumbeats quickened to amphetamine tempo, and protesters pounded fists against palms, one couldn’t help but wonder if, this time, true violence might ensue.
A few blocks away, outside Goldman Sachs, a smaller demonstration was at hand. A group of young people gathered around a card table, holding signs with anti-Goldman slogans. Seated at its center, I was surprised to see, was Jay Devor, founder of a social network and new-media empire called Nøøse. Begun as an app for finding protest events in the tristate area, Nøøse had grown into a large-scale nonprofit with offices on both coasts, two hundred full-time employees, print and online publishing arms, and a user base nearing the two million mark.
Nøøse had been instrumental in spearheading #Occupy’s organizational upgrade, in part by creating a manageable infrastructure for earmarking donations, and by implementing an online voting system that pushed the movement closer to its vision of a true direct democracy. Devor—a baby-faced elder statesman among his Gen Z cohorts—had become the de facto face of the movement after his public arrest during a reading of Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener. The reading stopped traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, and Devor appeared handcuffed on Page Six, smiling for the cameras: part Robin Hood, part Zuckerberg, part Jewish JFK.
Devor and I were classmates at Columbia, and had crossed paths at Brooklyn bars and mutual friends’ birthday parties in the years since. Beyond his disgust at what I did for a living, I sensed a begrudging respect. I’d recently emailed Devor with an article pitch for Nøøse’s eponymous webzine of culture and politics. The piece was an unwritten excerpt from the book I was writing—or planning on writing—called Eminem: American American in America. I had yet to receive a reply.
“Devor,” I said, and he looked up with the same soft eyes that had conjured the removal of so much women’s wear, the sparkling tube tops and chic retro Umbros of fangirls from Greenpoint to Red Hook and as far north as Washington Heights. There were probably even coeds who commuted from Bronxville, Young Trotskyites of Sarah Lawrence. He looked me over before responding, unsure about fraternizing with the enemy, or else gauging the health risks of shaking my hand.
“Mixner,” he said with a nod. We’d never made the transition to first names, which spoke to either a lack of intimacy, or a deeper intimacy built of nostalgia.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I come in peace.”
“If that’s the case,” Devor said, and handed me a flyer. I had to remove the reading glasses from my bag to read it, and in doing so grabbed a tube of moisturizer and passed it to Devor. The sun had emerged from behind the clouds, and I figured Devor, a pale guy like myself, might benefit from the product’s SPF-15 infusion. “For your face,” I said.
Devor rubbed the ointment into his cheeks in mechanical circles like he’d practiced in a mirror after watching a YouTube seminar on the subject. In another life, he might have been me, and I him. We were like the dual Lindsay Lohans in the remake of The Parent Trap, identical in nature, but nurtured to form separate systems of belief. I, with my working-class upbringing, had come to value personal prosperity over fiscal equality, while Devor, descendent of Day-Glo kibbutzniks, had learned that sharing led to caring led to casual threesomes.
My phone buzzed, but I ignored it and looked at what I’d been handed, an invitation to a Funeral for Capitalism at 8 p.m. in Union Square. Letterpress printed on crème card stock, it was the second printed invite I’d received for an event that night. The other had come from a junior colleague, a cocky young trader raised in the crotch of Greenwich luxury, complete with a home bowling alley and servants cruelly uniformed in oversized bow ties. This colleague’s life had been a procession of silver-spoon achievement—prep school grade inflation, Harvard gut curriculum and golf team heroics, genetically blessed Anglo-aquiline bone structure—and now, at the first blush of failure, he was throwing a, no-joke, Great Gatsby theme party in the penthouse suite of SoHo’s Zone Hotel. The invitation, which sat in my briefcase, was similar to Devor’s, except it was printed on cheaper card stock, and in pedestrian Geneva font.
Ricky had convinced me to make an appearance at the Gatsby party, promising top-shelf bourbon and behavior that might provide anecdotal evidence for my theoretical excerpt, a think piece on the way white investment bankers misappropriated rap lyrics as justification for fiscal Darwinism. I no longer wasted brain space wondering if I attended these events sincerely or ironically, the line between the two having been irreparably blurred sometime in the early aughts.
My father once told me that everyone who lived through the sixties had his own personal Altamont—the day the idealism died—and I think one could claim an analogous moment for nineties kids, when each of us realized that Kurt Cobain was gone, complaints about selling out were nostalgic, and those adorable indie shops from Seattle were now the giants come to destroy. For many, this moment arrived with the posthaste corporatization of Cobain himself, his face become logo on T-shirts sold at Target so teens who’d never heard him could flash the style markers of disaffected rebellion while listening to the disco-soul cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” from last week’s The Voice.
I liked hip-hop, a genre stridently open about its impure relationship with commerce, and thought I was exempt from this kind of disillusion. I was wrong. I distinctly remember the first time I saw a photo of Vampire Weekend—Columbia kids who dressed in Brooks Brothers beach duds and played a preppified genus of Paul Simon worldbeat—and feeling surprised and disappointed that the boat-shoe class had developed a claim on youth culture. It felt like a rigged game to bring more power to the powerful, to deprive the less privileged of their monopoly on cool.
Still, I looked forward to the party. Maybe I could pre-game at Devor’s protest and pitch my book. There were sure to be plenty of editorial types on hand. My being a banker was of fetishistic interest, the protectors of the literary realm turning polite and deferential to anyone wearing a suit in a performance of open-mindedness that masked a deeper lust for proximity to dollars.
What I couldn’t do was go home. I’d been ignoring calls from Wendy since leaving the house, and it was only 9 a.m. I worried that she’d tried to use our Visa and it had been declined. A single login to E*Trade and she could suss out the breadth of our financial situation. I didn’t want to imagine her reaction. We were in bad shape already: scratching bug bites, staring at cellphones instead of each other. A heartfelt apology wouldn’t cut it. I needed to offer, alongside my confession, a recovery plan.