140 Characters In Search Of An Author

This is a story set about one month into the future. Everything in it is true.

Jack is a high-up in a largeish corporate. He's not quite reached the heights of what I always hear as “sea level”. And he's wondering what he can do to fight his way to the next rung. It helps that ladders are turning into snakes all over the organisation, and that Jack is adept at swinging from trend to trend. He's going to survive this downturn – in fact, he's going to para-survive. If anyone deserves to wind up on top, it's Jack.

Jack realises that the world is becoming ever more complicated and interconnected, and that he needs to invest in his own reputation capital, an area of personal grooming that he has neglected since leaving university. For one thing, it would help his profile in the organisation if he looked like some kind of world-class mover 'n' shaker. For another thing, if he improves his standing in the wider world, he stands a better chance of landing a new position if everything goes pear-tastic at his current employer. That's two things that Jack has figured out already today: he now needs a nap.

When he wakes up, Jack gets a Twitter account. Now he can project his personality on a real-time basis to a growing audience of twepcats. He can send out 140-character bulletins about what he's thinking, what he's doing and, you know, how great and important his life is. What he'll be doing is building an evidence base as well as a fan base. He'll be lighting up the sky, creating a trail. He'll be somebody.

Thing is, Jack doesn't have much to say. He doesn't want to say anything too original, in case it makes him look like a nut, or offends somebody, or makes him look out of the loop, or behind the curve – or otherwise geometrically compromised. He can't say too much about what he's doing at work, because it's confidential and/or boring. He'd comment on the news but he doesn't know what to say about the news until he's got someone else's opinion on it, and then what's the point of being an echo chamber? Saddest of all, he has no thrilling appointments in his calendar and is scheduled to go precisely nowhere for the next few weeks.

So, Jack has a brilliant idea. He will hire a ghost. He'll get someone else to tweet for him.

He posts his requirement on elance and chooses from the array of eager respondents. He doesn't choose the cheapest, nor the most expensive. Jack chooses the ghost who seems to “get” Jack best. This is the ghost who's mixed together the right amount of sight-unseen flattery and desperation, together with a reasonable fee. Jack already feels three feet taller. He awards the contract and settles back to see just how smart and busy he's about to become.

And it's sweet. In twitterland, Jack is witty. His finger is on the pulse. He's helpful. And, above all, he's busy. Jack is forever on the way into or out of a conference, a meeting, a party, or a show.

A few weeks in, Jack's ghost suggests that Jack's identity could be further enriched with greater content, such as longer think-pieces in his blog, and pictures of the places he's visiting. The ghost will construct the textual content for him, using a tried-and-tested dodgy-dossier program that spatches together bits of pre-existing resources. The ghost will swipe the pictures from flickr and Photoshop them, adding Jack in to some of them. (The ghost calls this procedure reverse-Trotskying, after the hallowed Soviet practice of airbrushing fallen heroes out of photographs.) Naturally, the ghost's fees go up, but that makes sense. After all, you don't get anything for nothing.

When some of Jack's followers begin to suspect that something is amiss and un-follow him, the ghost suggests an expansion of the human team. He recruits people to generate original Jack content, including video that could have been taken with Jack's phone. It's easy enough: the ghost has control over Jack's imaginary schedule, and can book people to take the pix in the relevant locations at the relevant time. Jack's fees get sliced and diced and passed around this growing network of elves.

Nine months in and Jack is pretty proud of what he's achieved. Never mind that the company's toy budget set aside for social media has all been spent on some guy off of elance – Jack's riding high on every Twitter measurable known to humankind. In an online vote of business people in his industry, Jack rates in the top five for profile and approachability.

It's time to cash in on all this hard work. Jack braces his boss at a company party, held to celebrate the closure of another fifty outlets. The doors of the conference suite seem to be locked... This is because security men are removing all the computers and files and furniture from the headquarters building and taking them to a patch of waste ground where they can burned. The boss keeps looking at his watch (poor sap still uses one) as Jack tells him what an asset he, Jack, is to the company, and how it's time he was elevated to the board.

“That's great, Jack,” says his boss. “I see that you are currently in Berlin, talking about economic resilience and post-lean manufacturing.”

“Yes...” says Jack, at a loss for words.

“That leaves you with 137 characters,” the boss points out, as he walks away.

Jack prises open his laptop. He checks what his followers are saying and doing. They all seem to be busy, upbeat and articulate today. Maybe they can offer him some solace?

And if only they were real, perhaps they might.