“We Are The Olfanauts” by Deji Bryce Olukotun, recommended by OR Books
Issue No. 152
EDITOR’S NOTE
In October 2014, Wired published an article called, “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed,” that investigates the lives and careers of the 100,000-plus men and women, often from the Philippines, whose jobs are to scour and remove offensive material from the world’s social networking sites. These content monitors are exposed to the worst that humanity has to offer: bestiality, child pornography, decapitations, torture videos, hate speech, abuse of every kind. They are poorly paid, suffer a high rate of burnout, and many are psychologically scarred. Yet social networking companies find this kind of human labor to be increasingly necessary. “Active moderators” are more effective at censoring offensive content than moderation algorithms or reactive moderating, which rely on users to flag objectionable content before it’s taken down. This means that there’s often an invisible human curating our social media experiences for us, patrolling the border between the polite and profane Internet, protecting us from ourselves.
“The world was not a fair place, and I was the one that helped people forget that fact.” So says Renton, the narrator of Deji Bryce Olukotun’s terrific and chilling story, “We Are The Olfanauts.” Renton is one of these invisible curators, a content moderator for Olfanautics, the “global pioneer in scented social media.” He is an Olfanaut. He defends humanity from its own worst self. From behind his desk, his Trunk dutifully attached to his face, Renton has seen, and smelled, it all: ritual dismemberment, rape, a nun who gets her head smashed in. Despite these horrors, Renton insists that he remains unaffected, unchanged. One of the story’s great triumphs, and great tragedies, is that it shows us in rich but subtle psychological detail just how wrong he is. Outside of the office, he acts with casual disregard, sometimes cruelty, to those around him. He has a man fired for no reason other than his own wounded ego; he fails to comfort his lover, another content moderator, who feels her own humanity slipping away. His empathy is eroded by everything he’s seen.
In many ways Olukotun’s story is novel-dense, and I feel like there’s a novel’s worth of material here to praise: his perfectly rendered and eerily prescient near-future world; his keen social commentary; his wonderfully complicated and morally complex characters; his smart and powerful use of the Prometheus myth. But my favorite thing about the story is the way it engages with and explores our sense of smell. Smell is the most immediate of all the senses, the most intimate. Researchers have found that there’s a link between intensity of feeling and intensity of smell. The future where smells are shared across cell phones and screens in order to intensify virtual experience is not far off; in fact, it’s already here. But as Olukotun shows us all of this sharing, all of this access and intimacy, comes at a cost.
This is why I am so excited to recommend “We Are The Olfanauts” and why I so eagerly included it in Watchlist: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest, an anthology of fiction that explores lives lived in the new surveillance state. In addition to Olukotun’s brilliant story, the book features new and previously uncollected work by Etgar Keret, Chika Unigwe, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Aimee Bender, Lincoln Michel, Jim Shepard, Carmen Maria Machado, Zhang Ran, Robert Coover, Paul Di Filippo, Alissa Nutting, and many more. Watchlist is a book for anyone who’s interested in the politics of surveillance, the social impact of technology, and what it’s like to live in a world where the audience is ever-present and unknown. But more than that it’s for anyone who loves great literary and science fiction and authors like Deji Bryce Olukotun who turn fiction into a kind of surveillance technology, one that reveals something of our own dark and unexamined selves.
Bryan Hurt Editor, Watchlist
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We Are The Olfanauts
by Deji Bryce Olukotun Recommended by Bryan Hurt for OR Books
U have to whyff this.
Cant.
Y not? ☹
Just cant.
Shes bak.
Dont care. Send it up.
I pasted in the link anyway, ignoring Aubrey’s decision.
www.olfanautics.com/13503093!hsfi9hhhh
I knew she would whyff it eventually. One click and you were there. You may as well download it directly into your brain, and with a whyff the effect was nearly as instantaneous. I played the video again to confirm that it was as special as I remembered.
Close-up of a desk. Glass top on a chrome frame. On the desk, a knife, a leather strap, a small glass bowl, and the girl’s wrist. Light tan skin. The whyff: hints of lilac, clearly the girl’s perfume.
She holds the knife in her palm and waves her second hand over it, like a game show hostess displaying a valuable prize. Then she stabs the tip of her finger with the knife and lets her blood trickle into the bowl. The whyff is not of pain, nor the metallic scent of blood. It smells like the richest, freshest strawberries, collected right there in the bowl. And you can hear her laughing.
I should say that the girl appeared to stab the tip of her finger with the knife. You see, there was no proof that she had actually done it. When I slowed the video down, and advanced it frame by frame, her index finger and thumb obscured my view at the exact moment of puncture. She may have stabbed her own finger, or she may have somehow burst a capsule of fake blood with her fingers. Or, more likely, based on the whyff, a capsule of concentrated strawberry essence. It was either the work of a skillful illusionist or a deranged sadomasochist. With my Trunk on, it smelled hilarious.
Aubrey eventually messaged back: Told u to send it up.
What abt the whyff??
Send it up.
Shld Private Review.
Send it up.
Cmon, grrl. Strawberries!
This was the second video this user had posted, and each had ended with a whyff that completely subverted the image of the video with humor. It felt like she was playing with us, questioning whether we would believe our eyes or other senses. Wasn’t that reason enough to Private Review? To talk it through? Last week, Aubrey and I had met in the Private Review rooms twice. I wasn’t going to let her ruin my discovery, though. Instead of sending it up, as she had ordered, I posted the link to ALL-TEAM. Immediately I heard gasps in the cubicles around me.
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