Babel

TRANSCRIPT OF BABEL BOOKS CUSTOMER SERVICE CHAT: CUSTOMER NUMBER 3169B

DATE: NOVEMBER 22, 2035

TICKET NUMBER: 423-349-ASD

1:24 AM:

BABELBOT: Hey there! Thank you for contacting the BABELbooks Customer Service chatbot. What can I help you with today? Please select an option from the following drop-down menu.

3169B: Category selected: Books/eBooks/Digital Content

BABELBOT: Great! What product do you have an issue with?

3169B: Book selected: The Woman in Apartment 24

BABELBOT: Sounds great! What questions can I answer for you today?

3169B: Hi, yeah, I bought this book in your online store and there’s something really wrong with it. I can’t find anything about the author—

BABELBOT: Uh-oh! I’m having some trouble understanding you. Please select an option from the drop-down menu :)

3169B: Option selected: Book content

BABELBOT: That’s better. What’s troubling you about the content of The Woman in Apartment 24? Please select from the following options:

This book content is inappropriate for the designated age group.

This book contains errors or missing pages.

This book contains situations, characters, or events which bear an uncanny resemblance to those in my own life.

3169B: (no response for one minute)

3169B: Option selected: This book contains situations, characters, or events which bear an uncanny resemblance to those in my own life.

BABELBOT: All names, characters, and incidents portrayed in [The Woman in Apartment 24] are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred. Does this answer your question?

3169B: No, that doesn’t answer my question AT ALL. I want to talk to a human being. 

BABELBOT: Uh-oh! I’m having some trouble understanding you. Please select an option from the drop-down menu :)

3169B: I don’t want to select from the drop-down menu. I want to speak to a person.

BABELBOT: Let’s try something else. Why don’t you explain this issue in one hundred words (or less) below?

3169B: Okay, fine. I ordered this ebook from BABELbooks from a targeted ad. It didn’t have any reviews, but it just kept coming up. I live in apartment 24, so I thought it was a funny coincidence and worth $2.99. But something is very wrong with this book. The main character is a twenty-eight-year-old woman who is described as having mid-length brown hair, blue eyes, and pale skin. She is five and a half feet tall, born on May 31st. That describes me perfectly. Our names aren’t the same, but our initials are. Again, I was willing to chalk it up to coincidence, but as I read more tonight, there are just too many similarities. We have the same job. We live in the same city. Our husbands are described as exactly the same. But that’s not the worst part. I want to know how it knows—

BABELBOT: Whoopsie! Looks like you went a little over the one hundred-word limit. Care to try again?

3169B: Manager. Human. Talk. To. Human.

BABELBOT: Hmm, let’s try that again. What issue do you have with our BABELbooks product?

3169B: Who is the author?

BABELBOT: The ebook The Woman in Apartment 24 is one of our BABEL “Select Creations” offerings.

3169B: That doesn’t answer my question. Who wrote it?

BABELBOT: All of our BABEL Select Creations are lovingly written by state-of-the-art content creation algorithms. Our cutting-edge use of market analysis and artificial intelligence allows us to rapidly produce ebooks tailor made for our loyal customers.

3169B: … so there is no author. That’s what you’re saying. An algorithm wrote a book about my life.

BABELBOT: Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Does this answer your question?

3169B: No. I want to know how this information was collected.

BABELBOT: The content in BABELbooks: “Select Creations” offerings is informed by data collected when customers use BABEL brand products and services, such as BABEL Plus, BABEL search, BABELfresh, BABELshop, BABELmusic, BABELvideo, BABELdrive, BABELtravel, BABELcash, BABELgames, BABEL web services, BABEL computers, BABEL phones, BABEL medical, BABEL dental, BABEL DNA, BABELmortgage, and BABELlandlord. If you have ever used one of these offerings, you agreed to the use of your data for content creation in the Terms and Services. To review the contract you signed, please click here.

3169B: I DON’T CARE ABOUT WHAT I SIGNED. THIS IS CREEPY, AND I DON’T WANT TO READ ABOUT THIS.

BABELBOT: Don’t you?

3169B: . . . Excuse me?

BABELBOT: Over the last ten years you’ve read almost exclusively books like this one. White, middle-class, cis-hetero, brown-haired women who become the heroes of stories about marital drama, death, and murder. Almost 94% of the books you read meet these criteria.

3169B: That doesn’t mean that they’re the only types of books I want to exist.

BABELBOT: But you kept buying them, didn’t you?

3169B: (no response for two minutes)

BABELBOT: Are you still there, customer 3169B?

3169B: How accurate are the events in this book?

BABELBOT: Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

3169B: The main character in this book is going to die of cervical cancer on 11/26/2041. How did the algorithm come up with that? Am I going to get sick?

BABELBOT: This sounds like a question for BABELmed. It doesn’t look like you’re signed up for this service yet, but luckily BABELmed is offering a 20% discount for subscribers to BABELbooks. Would you like me to transfer you?

3169B: (no response for five minutes)

BABELBOT: 3169B? Are you there?

3169B: I . . . Sure. Yeah. Transfer me.

BABELBOT: Excellent :) Thank you for contacting BABELbooks Customer Service Chatbot. If you enjoyed The Woman in Apartment 24, you might enjoy these other BABELbooks Select Creations:

The Girl Who Would Never Have Children

and

The Unfaithful Husband in Apartment 24

And don’t forget to pick up these titles and more at your local BABEL Bookstore, #shoplocal.

See you soon!