News from the Surveillance Economy

By Christian Yeo

“Will you be an informant?” Marie asked. 

Hakim looked up at her. The light from her bedside lamp was washing out the sheen of her retinol. She looked like the rest of his life. 

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.” 

“Good. I’ll forward you Michael’s Teams message.” 

**

Marie had not always worked for the security agency. She had started, as a lot of them had, on the other side. Grown up with intuitions tempered by the pragmatic-exceptionalist logic underpinning even the best young Singapore liberals, ran the left-wing gamut in college as a resolute Marxist, temporary anarchist, and eventually, a Bohemian champagne socialist, spent a year in Dakar as a UN intern, and then returned, with her tail between her legs and a vague idea of holding on to Fanon and her long-term boyfriend, to the Ministry of Trade and Industry where she spent two years being screamed at on the phone by a mother of two who spent her days between Reformer Pilates, cell group at a trendy, socially conservative Reformed church (yes to cleavage, no to gay rights), and ferrying her children to Learning Lab, one of the few tuition centres in Singapore that had three entrance exams.

“Are you stupid? Did you lose your brain on the flight back?” Marie’s boss would scream. “How did you go to the schools you went to?”

Marie would minimise the Teams call when this happened, so that her boss became a tiny, irate box in the corner of her screen. The screen would vibrate. 

“Solve this problem, I don’t know why we pay scholars this much.” 

Marie would feel the edges of her vision start to blur. She would let her left thumbnail sink into the flesh between her right thumb and index finger, often drawing blood. Once, she drew out a chunk of flesh, and when the call was over, she let it dangle, sinew cinched underneath her left thumbnail, as it bungeed up and down, slowly, and then dropped to the floor. Then she would quickly go to the toilet to cry, taking advantage of the heaving to throw up her lunch as well, half a bowl of rice and seaweed soup and kimchie jjigae swirling down the bowl.

When the recruitment cycle finally came along, she jumped at the chance to go anywhere else. Her boss was a farmer, a non-scholarship-holder, in the local parlance and was not likely to be promoted anytime soon. She shuddered to think what results this stagnation at Deputy Director would yield in her mood disorder; what was more, she understood that her boss’s eoldest daughter, also called Marie, had done poorly in her terminal primary school examinations despite her attendance at Learning Lab, and so would not be able to attend any of the traditional elite secondary schools. She wouldn’t stand another two years of this. 

Sadly, Marie had lost her confidence by then. She was no longer the strident, energetic, ecofeminist cosmopolitan of yesteryear; she had become mousey and frantic, diligent and panicked. Worse still, she could see herself becoming more and more like her boss. She got the six- hundred- dollar mocha brown highlights and perm, she wore the cling dresses, she started going on yearly trips to Jeju or Bali. She knew she shouldn’t have downloaded Classpass but it was the cheapest option available; she’d even started going to Reformer Pilates too, for god’s sake, and her long-term boyfriend had started sending her links to rings and resale flats, now that she’d expressed her ambivalence at about converting to Islam for collectivist obligation, so that she both anticipated and dreaded the day she would go to see him for dinner on a morose Friday night and find that he had decorated an entire corner of Lower Peirce Reservoir, replete with all her friends and family and a guitar for him to sing “their song” (which was really just his song, probably something from Lauv or something she had pretended to like for too long and so could no longer reveal the truth about), whereupon he would get down on one knee and she would be expected to burst into tears and gratitude and wonderful womanly Reformer-Pilates-toned elegance, caught up in the excitement and romance and domesticity of it all.

She received one offer. It was from the national security agency, one that had imprisoned people without trial throughout its history, often on McCarthyist allegations of communism. It was a relic of the past but its public-facing front now purportedly stood to root out extremism and self-radicalisation.   

“Fuck it, we ball,” she muttered under her breath, and sent an email of acceptance typed almost by muscle memory. She closed her Outlook.

She would stay under the thumb of the skinny bitch no longer. She thanked God she wouldn’t have to hear about some kid who hadn’t gotten into NJC when instead she probably should have gotten into therapy. She would move, she would reform the agency from the inside, she would be complicit in no way except the absolutely compulsory, and she would not let another boss, draconian or Lean-In-Taylor-Swift-Love-Bonito-pilled or otherwise, ruin the remainder of her years. 

**

At first it was easy. Marie just turned up to things, monitored them, and gave reports. She attended Yale-NUS eco-activist circles, where attendees mostly shared readings from prolific but obscure pedagogues like Donna Harraway and talked about every sort of violence imaginable. She attended rallies. She made creative placards. She quoted Judith Butler at every juncture, sprinkled in some Simone Weil for eclecticity. 

A lot of it was not so different from what she’d actually been doing when she’d actually been on the inside. There were nights that she’d wake up, in cold sweat, screaming or crying, but the existential dread or the feeling of having killed some sort of small animal never really consumed her. In any event she would just go to the toilet to throw up; she usually cheated before bed anyway, consumed by an animal hunger and animal disdain for food, and so it was all useful in the teleological amble towards self-maximisation. 

The point of contention came, finally, when her boss, Michael, a genteel, good-looking, immaculately indie-Japanese-brand-clad Rich Chinese Gay, told her that one thing she would have to produce by the end of the year was a recruit to the agency. It wasn’t to her benefit that she thought of her boyfriend, long-suffering and amenable and still in thrall to the thought of spending the rest of his life replicating the structures she had spent her youth trying to get away from (he accused her often of not respecting him, a charge she denied though she knew it was true). 

When she’d asked him to be an informant, and she’d known instantly that she would, he’d said yes without hesitation. She felt almost guilty, but the muscle of emotional repression and self-justification, long dormant during her years spent outside the country, reared its head just as quickly. 

“Thank you, my love,” she said, pecking him on the cheek. 

“I would do anything for you.” 

“Thank you.”   

“You are the prettiest girl of all the girls I’ve dated.” 

“Okay, thank you.”

**

It was October. They were walking on one of the sidewalks at Orchard Rroad and there were Christmas lights. These things sickened her these days, made her want to throw Hakim’s hand away for continuing to look at her with pandering eyes even after all these years. Were they still eighteen? Would she ever wash off this humiliation?

“I love Orchard Rroad during Christmas,” Hakim said happily. 

“I hope Michael contacted you.”

“He complained about me not giving him any information. But it’s like, I don’t have anything for him, I’m not in those sorts of spaces. And they wouldn’t trust me with the information you get.”  

“I told you, it’s not that difficult to pretend to be a liberal. You just need practice. Like, see: metatheatre, greenwashing, gaslighting. Clitoris, postmodernism, gentrification.” 

“You guys use so many big words. Even Michael, and he doesn’t seem like he would.”  

“He’s my boss, and unlike most men there’s actually a reason he’s there.” 

Marie felt physically ill. An image of a road in Dakar whose name she couldn’t even remember now, people spilling from the streets dancing with abandon, came to mind. She thought better than to mention it, to make a point about the rarity of genuine festivity in the contemporary age. It did no one any good to reveal her worldliness, even and especially not to a male partner; it inspired inspiration and envy that then morphed into bitterness.

“I mean, still. I can’t pretend to say things I don’t know how to.” 

“You just need one or two. We even went thrifting so you could look the part.”  

“I think I’m not cut out for it, maybe I should quit.” 

“It’s not like you to quit. You’ve never quit anything.” 

It was true: Hakim was as perfect on paper as she’d been. Gone to all the right schools, even Tel Aviv for a Master’s in War Studies, and was now a captain in the Singapore Aarmy. He was the sort who ran half-marathons for fun in his college shirt and ACS watch, and he was on every career day slide deck because he was a Malay officer in the army; he cooked steak so often he had highlights for his Instagram story, and every now and again he would post a long caption, padded with purple, Pinterest-coded descriptions of natural landscapes, about how he could see the flaws in the country, same as everyone else, but how he loved his home for his friends and family anyway. Not a single free or creative bone in his body but he was a dream birthed by the Singapore state, and probably would have been a wealth manager if he hadn’t been a regular; he seemed like he might have the affect of ennui, but she knew he would happily have some children and retire as a Brigadier-General and call it quits. He probably had political ambitions, and certainly was in favour of monopolies. She was beginning to think it’d been a mistake to pull him into the agency.  

“You’re right, I won’t quit. I’ll get good at it, just give me some time.”

“You’re good at everything.” 

“Thanks for always believing in me. You’re the light of my life.” 

“You were my recommendation. What else would I do?” 

**

In the months after, Hakim did try harder. Surpassing Marie’s expectations and failing his own, he could sufficiently blend into a crowd but the moment the task got too specific the stench of inauthenticity surfaced. Marie knew what it was because she could sense it from a mile away. It was like rotting flesh; you knew when you knew.

The thing that Marie had never really apprehended was, people wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that Hakim was an informant, which made him a crapshoot at the game. Michael assured her all the time that he was fine and they cast their net wide anyway; he’d even been able to turn up to a few decolonisation reading groups with some Oxbridge graduands. So what if he’d only been able to talk in inaccurate condescensions about what he’d heard? So what if he’d been phased out fairly quickly? She knew he would never get into the right rooms; he was too inane and decorated, unable to hide his predilections because he’d never hitherto had to. No matter how much he liked to brag that the army had taught him how to get along with anyone, the truth was that it had simply enabled him to give instructions to anyone. He’d gone straight from high school to basic training to officer school, so that by the time he took charge of a platoon he would only ever interact with the gangsters he anecdotally paraded at Sunday brunches from a position of authority. In a game of equals he stood no chance and he had no clue. He was simply the latest in a factory line of scholar-gentry, the leash loosened but cut from the same cloth. 

“He’s exceeded our expectations,” Michael said with a trace of irony. “Really.” 

“I wasn’t aware you had any to begin with.” 

“No, we didn’t. How did you end up dating him anyway?” 

“We were friends from high school.” 

“He’s going to propose soon, isn’t he?” 

“I think so. I don’t know, I can’t really tell with him.”

“Piece of advice, though I’m sure you don’t need it. Let him down gently before he buys the big balloons.” 

**

Almost a year after Marie made her request, she and Hakim had brunch with some of their friends from Junior College, their classmates. It was an annual Christmas Eve tradition for them at this point, and she’d looked forward to it for a while. There was another couple, Shi Ting and James, who’d both read business at SMU and who both did something in finance that Marie could never remember probably. And then there were Hamza and Mathias; Marie had heard that Hamza had slept with a lot of guys when he’d done film at USC, specifically from Hamza himself, who’d self-declared, “I’ve been a real slut” to Marie one time when they’d been drinking, but he was now firmly playing the role of a traditionally devout Muslim man. She suspected it had something to do with all the Meet-the-People sessions he was suddenly at; she wondered if he still smoked a joint before going to bed every night, or if he’d ever fucked Mathias, who was equally playing the role of devout Christian man, but whom she’d known to grab girls’ (and guys’) asses all the time when he used to go to the now-disappeared F Club with Hakim. It was par for the course that Mathias was now a prosecutor; she understood that for men like them the rules didn’t apply.  

“What’s up, boys,” James said when he entered the café, dapping Marie and Hakim up. He was wearing some shitty, expensive Armani perfume. Marie and Hakim had been earliest to their minimalist Telok Ayer café of choice.

“Damn, you look tired,” James said to Marie. 

“Don’t say that,” Shi Ting said, hitting his arm. “That’s so rude.”  

“What,” James said, shrugging his shoulders. “I just say it like it is. I didn’t say she looks like shit, I just said she looks tired.” 

“I’ve been working hard,” Marie said. “A lot of late nights at the office recently, I’m not surprised I look like what I am.” 

“Marie works super hard, I think she’s going to be promoted soon,” Hakim said. 

“No one’s said that,” Marie said. “Don’t overhype it.” 

“If you think work in the civil service is hard you should see work in finance. Man, we work hard as fuck,” James said. “That’s why we smoke so much weed.”  

“But we get paid well for it,” Shi Ting said, hitting James’ arm coquettishly again when he mentioned the drugs.

“Don’t say that in front of the prosecutor, man,” Hakim said. 

“What? I didn’t hear anything,” Mathias said cheekily.

“What do you guys do again?” Marie asked, keeping a straight face. Shi Ting giggled and explained what they did, flipping her voluminous hair to one side. Marie felt a stab of pity for her. In a different life Shi Ting might have stayed single long enough to develop a personality.

“That’s amazing,” Marie said. 

“It pays the bills,” Shi Ting chirped. 

“I’ll bet it does,” Marie said. Hakim kicked her under the table.

After they all ordered a round of flat whites with oat milk from the barista, a young twentysomething in cargos and a tiny beige crop whom Marie saw Hakim and James give a once over, Hamza and Mathias joined them. They all stood up and the boys dapped each other up again and gave the girls hugs. Was it her or had Hamza’s voice gotten even deeper and his social manners more slippery? He had the affect of a meerkat. Mathias’s beard had grown too.

“What have you been up to, Hakim? Since Marie’s been working so hard, I’m sure you don’t see her much then,” Hamza said. 

“It’s been really cool to be an informant,” Hakim said.

Marie froze. 

 “Informant for what, bro?” James said. 

“Is it like a consultant?” Shi Ting asked.

They’d all just been shooting the shit, but Hakim had come up with this out of nowhere. Maybe he’d grown tired of the modest-posturing of the finance-bro-couple. To an extent she understood. They were always telling stories about being drunk at SMU that felt increasingly untrue. James wore a watch that he’d once said cost twenty grand. Shi Ting had a new designer bag every time they met. Marie hoped they got divorced. She wondered what their GPAs had been.

“The national security agency,” Hakim said. 

“Fuck off,” James said, or Hamza said, or they both said. Shi Ting shot James a look. Hamza looked intrigued and Mathias was typing on his phone at the side of the table. 

“I feel like Jason Bourne,” Hakim said. “I was like, no way they’re going to give us briefings and pay with envelopes of cash, in cars outside my house.” 

“Oh wow, that’s really interesting,” Shi Ting said. “I’m really happy for you, leveraging these kinds of old jobs. I guess there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.”

“You sound fucking crazy, bro,” James said. 

“If you’re really working for them, why are you telling us?” Hamza asked. 

“I’m just not very good at hiding it. I think I’ve told too many people already,” Hakim said. Marie balked at this: how many people had he told? “And anyway, I’m not with them, I just give them tip-offs.” 

“How do you even become an informant? Like, who contacts you?” James asked.

“Recommendation only. And actually, if you’re interested, I can recommend you guys.”

“They don’t even pay you somewhere deserted? Like, in Lim Chu Kang?” Hamza asked. 

Marie was looking for an exit route. She heard the mockery in his voice and saw the opportunity. 

“Men are so stupid,” Marie said. “You thought they would buy it, Hakim? National security informant? Really?” 

“Hey, I really am—” Hakim protested. 

“—seriously, you need to start coming up with better shit,” Marie said. “Sorry guys, you know what he’s like.” 

Everyone laughed in relief. Marie felt the tension slip away from the table. She spread her hands as if to say, what can you do?

 “Men may be stupid but we’re chill,” James said. “At least we’re not as uptight as women, I swear most of the ones at work have a stick up their ass, especially the C-suite.”

“It’s true, women are so gossipy and sensitive,” Shi Ting said. “Women bosses are the worst.” 

Pick-me, Marie thought to herself, but she felt relieved that the inanity had returned, which meant the danger was over. 

The conversation moved on swiftly. Mathias, who had been clued out of the conversation and showed no interest in regaining a point of contact within it, came back on board. 

“What did I miss? Sorry, I just had to reply a work email.”

“Hakim, you retard, you almost had me,” Hamza said. 

“Just Hakim talking shit as usual,” Marie said. “What’s been up with you, Mathias?”

Mathias began extemporizing, as he always did: he’d had an encounter with the Lord the previous week at a prayer room and felt like he really needed to encounter the person of Jesus, to see the ground where he’d stepped on. He’d had a picture of the Garden of Gethsemane and felt really convicted to start praying Luke 14 over his life. No one’s perfect, Mathias said, but to grow in Christlikeness was the greatest joy. 

“Bro, that’s beautiful,” James said. “I think you should really do it.” 

“Exactly, exactly,” Shi Ting said, nodding vigorously, her expensive ponytail bobbing up and down. “Once you start walking with the Lord in that kind of way, you start to really find that it makes a difference in your spiritual life.” 

Marie felt like asking what all the girls (and guys) he’d sexually assaulted would think about this, but she stopped herself. There was no point with these sorts of men. You just had to move them out of the way and stop them from harming people. 

“When James and I went to Israel it was so important for our faiths. I felt like we both really met the Lord there,” Shi Ting continued. “And it was important for our relationship as well. I’d really been struggling with this idea of, like, the man being the head of the family and in the church, but after Israel I felt like I really could submit to God, and James.” 

“I felt like that too when I went on pilgrimage,” Hamza said. “It was really enlightening for me, I felt like I had a breakthrough.” 

“Your Instagram stories looked lit,” Hakim said. “I really want to go to Saudi at some point.”  

“Israel is really expensive,” James said. “Especially Jerusalem.” 

“We chose insanely good restaurants though,” Shi Ting said apologetically. “But then again, I was like, why should I be sorry? It’s not like God said don’t be rich. If anything, it just means our faith is strong.”

**

Marie broke up with Hakim the week after brunch.

“It’s not you at all, you’re a really good person,” Marie said. She was relieved to find herself crying but didn’t feel any grief. “You’re really kind, but I just think I’m not at the point in my life when I can settle down.”  

“How can you not be ready? We’re so old.” 

“We’re not even thirty yet.” 

“That’s such bullshit.” 

Marie realised it was easy to be kind when you had the upper hand. She felt a strange satisfaction looking at Hakim crying in his army uniform. They were sitting in her car outside his camp. She wondered if she’d done the right thing telling Michael about what Hakim had done. She felt some guilt that she’d brought him into it, but it was only abstract. When she stared at the green pixels on his pants she felt her vision blurring, felt herself falling into something, or away, something new.

“Your biological clock. Aren’t girls supposed to care about that?” 

“That’s an excuse from girls—women—who don’t want to adopt and who are trying to pressure their boyfriends to get hitched.” 

“We haven’t exhausted the possibility.” 

Hakim leaned towards her and she let him. He slid his hand onto her right boob and tried to kiss her. She recoiled and put her hand up to block his face. 

“Take your hand off my boob, Hakim.” 

“Marry me.” 

“Fuck off, Hakim.” 

“You’re the only one for me.” 

She removed his hand. He didn’t lean back away. “It’s over, Hakim,” she said. “It’s never going to happen, now or again.”

He unbuckled himself. “You’re a slut. I’m glad I fucked you as much as I could and didn’t marry you.” 

“You weren’t good enough for me, and that’s the truth.”

She knew him well enough to know it would come to this. He would beg and then he would lash out. But the abusive things he did would allow her to close the door on him for good and be the innocent party in retellings. Her panel would back her up and word would get round back to him, his presence would always be coloured by this. He was an army man in the end but she knew how to socially punish him. Mostly, she felt freed.

“Why did we stay together for so long? I love you so much. I’ll die without you.”

“Hakim, I’m too old to be lovebombed. Get out of my car.” 

**

Hakim’s camp was in the East so it would be a long journey home. Marie took the highway. She rolled the window down because it felt like the thing to do. The roads were dark and sparse and full of landmarks she would never recognise in the day. 

The HDB blocks in the East were unique in that they’d always have one or two Singapore flags over the balconies, no matter the time of year. Her mother told her stories often, of her childhood growing up in the East playing soccer with boys, of her granddad eating sticks of butter and drinking coffee from old Carnation tins with her on his lap. That was before she’d made her money, and before she’d married and divorced a misogynistic corporate lawyer. Once, Marie had asked her if she ever wished she was back in that time. We were poor, her mother had responded. What is there to miss? 

The oily murkiness of the sea was hidden by motion, so that it seemed like a sheen of darkness. The roads rolled on and the cars shifted around her like sands. Before long she realized she was in the CBD; the buildings came rapidly up into view, and she saw buildings with all the lights on. It was two a.m. and the city refused to sleep. Maybe James and Shi Ting were up there somewhere looking at Excel spreadsheets, though Marie knew she didn’t really actually care if they lived or died.

When she’d been at college and had had to come home over the summers she was often comforted by the skyline and this sea of lights. It felt like no matter how much things changed on the ground, she would always have the illusion of sameness from above. No matter how much everything shifted she thought it would be the same thing she could return to. No one ever returns though, she’d once said at an alumni sharing, not in the same way. 

One SUV was keeping pace with her. She turned and was surprised to see a woman driver despite herself, but then clocked the kids sleeping at the back, one of their cheeks squashed against the window. He looked about ten, and he had a haircut in the shape of a bowl. The mother seemed more worn out than most; driving, but somewhere else. They made eye contact and Marie nodded to her. The woman smiled vacantly, or sadly, or probably Marie was just projecting. Marie inclined her head as if to say, go on. The woman nodded her thanks and Marie caught a last glimpse of the sleeping kids, the jet-black back of their heads, before the SUV pulled away seamlessly. She’d always known women were the best drivers, they were safest and didn’t have the undeserved confidence of male drivers, who were the ones who caused the most accidents anyway.

Marie wondered if she—herself, not the woman—would make her Pilates class tomorrow. She probably would. In a broken system, ideological purity was another name for illogic. Why waste the credits she’d already spent?

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Christian Yeo Xuan is a writer and actor based in Paris. Christian has been published notably in The Mays and The Foundationalist, among many others. He won the Arthur Sale Poetry Prize, placed 2nd for the Aryamati Poetry Prize, came in 3rd for the National Poetry Competition (Singapore), and was shortlisted for the Poetry London Pamphlet Prize, the Bridport Prize, and the Sykes Prize. He received a scholarship to attend the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop and has worked with the Asia Creative Writing Programme and Berlin Writer’s Workshop.

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