The Slide Deck

Nobody stumbles into this. There are revisions.

Whenever a company ruins people at scale, tobacco marketed to teenagers, opioids sold with quarterly targets, feeds engineered for children, I never think about the outcome first. I think about the deck.

Because there was a deck. There is always a deck. Somebody stayed up late on it. Somebody agonized over the font. Somebody moved a bullet from slide nine to slide four because it landed better there, and then moved it back. The thing went through revision after revision, the way I revise an essay, little cut here, little tightening there, read it aloud, sleep on it, revise again, until finally the author felt comfortable enough to stand in a conference room and present it to other adults.

That is the part I cannot get past. This is not a bar fight. It is not a punch thrown at midnight that you confess to your wife two days later, sick about it. I know that kind of regret. My wife holds the receipts. But a bar fight is weather. A slide deck is climate. Premeditated, methodical, revised, approved, versioned. Q3 strategy for addicting your children, final, final v2, FINAL.

And then a room. There is always a room too. Different levels of power in it, different levels of charisma, someone persuasive, someone silent, someone doing math on a legal pad. A decision gets made. Everyone stands up. Everyone drives home.

Here is where my imagination fails. Every night I talk with my kids in bed. We joke around, because you need gallows humor to function, or at least I do. And they ask genuine questions. What did you do today. How do we pay for things. They ask because they assume the answer is honorable. That is the credit children extend. They have never once considered that the answer might need laundering, and the fact that I have never had to launder it is the closest thing I have to a clean conscience.

The man who ran the deck drives his kids to school the next morning. They ask him the same questions mine ask me. Whatever happens in his head at that moment has never been put on a slide.

The trick, I think, is retrieval. People imagine the brain as a hard drive. It is not. It is git, and the mind is a gifted, dishonest engineer. It rebases. It squashes the ugly commits into one clean line called Strategy Work, 2019 to 2021. It force pushes over the branch where the teenagers were. The history is still in there. It just never gets checked out.

That is how they sleep. Not because they are monsters. They sleep because the brain is version control and they have quietly rewritten main.

I sleep badly. I have always slept badly. But I lie awake over things I actually did, the altercations, the flaws, the ordinary human wreckage.

My insomnia has a clean commit history.