2. The reality effect of an office building
Almost top floor, in an office with floor to ceiling windows and a minimalist desk with corresponding chairs. On one side, a tax consultant, designer glasses, his office; on the other side, a representative of a multinational corporation, Italian suit, visiting.
‘We will take care of everything. All you have to do is sign,’ the tax consultant said.
‘And what if this becomes public?’ the representative asked.
The consultant smiled.
‘It won’t. That’s why you came to us. We have numerous clients of your size, and nobody notices. Their headquarters are registered here, the post office forwards all mail to London, to New York, to Singapore, wherever, and all phone calls are already transferred to call centres in India or Malaysia, so there’s nothing to worry about.’[1] (00:13, 00:28)
The consultant paused and smiled.
The silence was broken by the faint sound of a fire alarm that started ringing in the hallway. The representative glanced in the direction of the door, then back to the consultant.
‘Probably an exercise,’ the consultant said. ‘Another drink?’
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After the evacuation, a man with a clipboard came around asking questions about the tone and frequency of the fire alarm, which had announced the danger an hour earlier. Over the left sleeve of his light blue shirt he wore a green armband bearing the word ‘SIMUVAC’.
Somewhere between the third and the fifth floor, at a time when most people left their desks for their coffee break, there had occurred a significant smoke development, filling the open office space with a hazy fog. The smoke detectors had been triggered, the sprinkler installation had soaked tables and chairs, and the fire alarm had sent everyone down the stairs to the parking lot behind the building.
The few people that were still at their desks when the smoke started to spread had been brought down with minor respiratory problems and were being treated in an improvised medical post.
I always thought that disasters brought people together. I thought that they sparked cooperation and communication. We stood in the parking lot, as isolated individuals, barely recognising one another, staring up at the floor where the smoke was supposed to be.
The man with the clipboard approached me.
‘How long would you say the alarm was ringing before you heard it?’
Somehow the question contained a logical error, but seeing this man in front of me, with his clipboard, his armband, and its cryptic message, carrying with him an aura of expertise, I felt compelled to just answer.
‘A few seconds, I guess.’
Looking satisfied he noted my answer on his clipboard.
‘That’s quite an armband you’ve got there,’ I said. Standing here in the parking lot, surrounded by strangers, in silence and anticipation, I was happy to talk to someone. ‘What does “SIMUVAC” mean? Sounds important.’[2]
‘Short for “simulated evacuation”. A new state program they’re still battling over funds for.’
‘But this evacuation isn’t simulated. It’s real.’
‘We know that. But we thought we could use it as a model.’
‘A form of practice? Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?’
‘We took it right into the action.’
‘How is it going?’ I said.
‘The insertion curve isn’t as smooth as we would like. There’s a probability excess. Plus we don’t have our victims laid out where we’d want them if this was an actual simulation. In other words we’re forced to take our victims as we find them. We didn’t get a jump on computer traffic. Suddenly it just spilled out, three-dimensionally, all over the building. You have to make allowances for the fact that everything we see today is real. There’s a lot of polishing we need to do. But that’s what this exercise is all about.’[3] (00:45, 01:03, 01:17, 01:32)
A half hour later, when the man had questioned everyone, we could return to our desks. Whether the smoke was gone seemed irrelevant.
‘I want to thank all of you on behalf of Advanced Disaster Management, a private consulting firm that conceives and operates simulated evacuations. We are interfacing with the fire brigade and the local authorities in carrying out this advanced disaster drill. The first of many. The more we rehearse disaster, the safer we’ll be from the real thing. Life seems to work that way, doesn’t it? You take your umbrella to the office seventeen straight days, not a single drop of rain. The first day you leave it at home, record-breaking downpour. Never fails, does it? This is the mechanism we hope to employ, among others. As long as we keep doing these simulations, we’ll be safe from the real thing.’[4] (01:47)
Since the smoke incident, the management had decided to run a series of fire drills in order to optimise the procedures of evacuation. In the weeks that followed the incident, there were daily exercises, each time with new instructions issued by a computerised voice through the speakers of the building.
Every morning we received new plans with different escape routes, altering between spreading and concentrating the flow of people. They tested our reaction times at different moments of the day, when there was a high density of people in the building and when there was a low density. In the parking lot we had to answer questions about the intervals between the start of the alarm and hearing the alarm, between hearing it and recognising its message, between understanding the situation and the moment of reaction. Each time, different people were randomly assigned the role of victims, receiving instructions on what injuries to suffer and where to fall down.
The series of simulations was carefully recorded via the security cameras and sent somewhere for analysis.
‘What’s your injury?’ she asked. A woman seated at her desk stared at me.
‘I was on my way to rescue some people who were trapped in a conference room, but got caught in the smoke and passed out.’
I was lying on the floor, waiting for a man with a clipboard to pass by and take notes of my situation. I had received a message that morning announcing the exercise of the day, giving me the role of a primary victim. They had made a classification of victims according to the relation between the injury and the disaster. People who were injured as a direct result of the disaster were primary victims. Injuries resulting from the evacuation itself were secondary. Those who suffered psychological implications were tertiary victims.
‘You?’ I asked.
‘Panic attack,’ she said, rotating a full circle on her revolving chair. The woman sat a few metres away from me at her desk. ‘I have a feeling these simulations are becoming increasingly stereotypical, as if the real disaster will adjust itself to their computer models.’[5]
I had never seen her before, but being here together, cast in the roles of a hero and a woman in need, made me feel deeply connected with her. This wasn’t some random encounter. We had been brought together by an all-knowing, all-controlling mind. Our meeting had been planned ahead, engraved in the flow of time, as an inescapable event. We had been given a role to play. We had left behind our individual and contingent identities, and had become part of a greater, collective experience, connecting us on an existential plane. It was our symbolic roles, the masks we wore, that connected us. (02:02, 02:16)
‘I’ve never seen you before on this floor,’ I said, ‘do you work here?’
‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘I work for the Northeast Group, we change offices every few months. We are mostly based in New York, Delaware, London, Athens, Cairo, Beirut, Ukraine, Moscow, Malaysia, Singapore and China, but we tend to move around.’
She reached in her bag next to her chair and handed me her business card. ‘Associate Director Risk Analysis,’ it said. On the back of the card was a photograph of a skyscraper, with the logo of the company printed in the bottom right corner (03:20).
After the man with the clipboard had left, we returned to our desks. The simulation was over. We had played our roles. We were strangers again.
Three weeks later the smell of smoke drifted in through a ventilation duct. A pause, a careful thoughtfulness, seemed to settle in the open space. People started looking up from their desks, glancing around to see if anyone left, but avoiding looking at each other directly. There was no sign of official action, no sound of an alarm, no men with clipboards and armbands. An irritating sting in the nostrils, a taste of burnt plastic on the tongue. As time passed, the will to do nothing seemed to deepen, to fix itself firmly. There were those who denied they smelled anything at all. It is always that way with odours. There were those who professed not to see the irony of their inaction. Everyone had taken part in the SIMUVAC exercises but no one was willing to flee now. There were those who wondered what caused the odour, those who looked worried, those who said the absence of technical personnel meant there was nothing to worry about. My eyes began to water.
About two hours later, the scent suddenly lifted, saving us from our formal deliberations.[6]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
‘Isn’t this illegal?’ the representative asked.
The question had nothing to do with moral concerns. Not because the representative was an immoral man, it just didn’t occur to him that this could have something to do with morality. Moral concerns belonged in his private life. In this room he represented a multinational corporation, a structure that transcended any kind of personal morality. The question was just a simple pragmatic consideration, an attempt to calculate the risk in relation to the benefits, nothing more.
‘When you operate at this kind of scale, the question of legality becomes irrelevant,’ the consultant said. ‘It is only a matter of applying the rules in such a way that they benefit you, and outsmarting your opponents while doing this.’
They remained silent.
‘Take this,’ he said and gave the representative a brochure lying on his desk. The cover of the brochure was an image of the neoclassical facade of a small building. ‘In there is an overview of the results you can expect. Recalculate everything and then call me back to sign the deal.’ He smiled.
The representative took the brochure and looked at it.
‘Where is this?’ he asked.
‘Nowhere. It’s not a building, it’s an image.’[7]
The representative looked around him.
‘That image has nothing to do with this reality, or anywhere else where we might work or live. The image of the architecture is only there to give the company a stable identity, it compensates for the endless flow of people and money the company is built on. It makes the company tangible. The architecture lends the company an aura of stability and continuity. It’s a fictional architecture, it’s there to make it easier to believe’.
In the hallway, the fire alarm kept ringing.
[1] In 2014 the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published the results of a journalistic investigation into tax rulings in Luxembourg, set up by PricewaterhouseCoopers for its clients. The publication caused a public scandal since it was revealed that hundreds of multinational companies had made custom tax deals with the government of Luxembourg to achieve tax advantages. This dialogue is a reference to the discovery that hundreds of companies had settled their headquarters in Luxembourg to achieve these tax advantages, while having little economic activity in the country. One address even housed more than 1,600 companies. See Wayne and others (2014).
[2] This dialogue is an excerpt from DeLillo’s novel White Noise ([1985] 2011: 162). In the scene the dialogue takes place during the evacuation of a town under threat of an ‘Airborne Toxic Event’ caused by a chemical spill from a rail car. In both White Noise and in this story the dialogue is used to discuss the discrepancy between the reality of the disaster and the simulated models used to control it, and the accompanying urge of human beings to adapt reality to their own invented scenarios.
[3] This remark is a reference to the ideas formulated by Jean Baudrillard in his Simulacra and Simulations, in which he argues that the society we live in has progressed up to the point where reality is substituted for the signs of reality: ‘The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control – and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. […] In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere. […] By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials’ (Baudrillard 1994: 2).
[4] This speech is an excerpt from DeLillo’s novel White Noise ([1985] 2011: 235, 236), and further develops the need to match reality with simulation.
[5] This remark tries to problematise the relation between reality and simulation and the way both systems interact with each other. The remark is a reference to the way Baudrillard problematises this relation in his work Simulacra and Simulations: ‘Organize a fake holdup. […] remain close to the “truth”, in order to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulacrum. You won’t be able to do it: the network of artificial signs will become inextricably mixed up with real elements (a policeman will really fire on sight; a client of the bank will faint and die of a heart attack; one will actually pay you the phony ransom), in short, you will immediately find yourself once again, without wishing it, in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour any attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to the real – that is, to the established order itself, well before institutions and justice comes into play. […] [But] if it is practically impossible to isolate the process of simulation, through the force of inertia of the real that surrounds us, the opposite is also true (and this reversibility itself is part of the apparatus of simulation and the impotence of power): namely, it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real. This is how all the holdups, airplane hijackings, etc. are now in some sense simulation holdups in that they are already inscribed in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media, anticipated in their presentation and their possible consequences. In short, where they function as a group of signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs, and no longer to their “real” end’ (Baudrillard 1994: 21).
[6] This paragraph is an excerpt from DeLillo’s White Noise, which serves to demonstrate how the simulation has overtaken and suppressed reality and has become a reality in itself. See DeLillo ([1985] 2011: 311).
[7] The excessive usage of images of architecture in corporate brochures, on business cards, in news articles about companies, and so forth can be explained in the same way Roland Barthes explains the usage of superfluous details in literature. In literature these superfluous details don’t relate to the plot of the story but are there to signify reality as such, they are used to create a reality effect, to convince the reader of the reality of the fiction: ‘Semiotically speaking, the “concrete detail” exists out of the direct and secret coinciding of the signifier and the signified. […] when “reality” as a denotative concept is removed from the realistic speech act, it returns to it as a connotative concept; because precisely at the moment that details are ought to signify reality directly, they only function as a sign of reality and nothing else. […] in other words, the actual shortcoming of the signified in respect to the signifier becomes in itself the signifier for reality: a reality effect occurs’ (Barthes 2004: 111; my translation). The architectural images in corporate publications can be viewed in the same way: they are there to give the abstract and unstable identity of the multinational company a tangible dimension.