Introducing: User Zero
Ade's latest book, available for free on Substack
User Zero is coming to Substack, one chapter a week, available for all my (free) subscribers. This is the first installment, a preview introduction to get you ready for what is coming…
It was 5am on the bridge of the John S. McCain, a $1.8 billion Navy destroyer off the coast of Singapore, August 2017. Sleep was a rationed luxury and the crew was overworked, undertrained, and unaware of the death and destruction just moments away.
There may have been the smell of urine hanging in the air as it was not uncommon for sailors to bring an empty bottle with them should the urge occur at a moment when they were unable to leave their post. Ignoring the lack of convenient bathrooms however, the ship itself was state-of-the-art. Earlier in the year the old manual controls had been swapped out for bright touchscreens and the computer guidance was upgraded with autopilot. You could be forgiven for concluding that the ship could drive itself.
With all the new touchscreens, standing at a control station of the McCain felt like being on the Starship Enterprise. The graphics were polished and sharp, reminiscent of a modern video game. Rich streams of data pulsed right beneath fingertips, the mind of the ship danced on the screens. With the ships functions automated, it makes you wonder if the crew could have controlled the ship with their phones from the comfort of their bunks rather than packed on the bathroomless bridge with a dozen other bored sailors.
As the morning shift changed, an 18-year-old sailor took one of the four command stations. Almost immediately the ship began to veer left. The crew looked at their screens trying to identify the cause of the turn. Everything appeared correct. What was going on?
Concerns rose as the ship veered further left. Finally, the head officer gave orders to slow the boat down. The ship slowed, but it continued to veer left. Confused, the crew began to panic. The destroyer seemed to be controlling itself.
Seconds later the out of control destroyer crossed into the path of a Liberian tanker. The side of the McCain was ripped open by the collision. Sailors asleep in their bunks awoke as water began flooding their quarters. Ten men were crushed, drowned, or swept out to sea. As the stunned crew on the bridge tried to come to grips with what had just happened, they knew there would be hell to pay.
In addition to ten deaths and 48 injuries, repairing the McCain would cost over $200 million. There would be investigations, court-martials, and hundreds of pages of documents trying to explain what happened. Officially, the Navy blamed incompetence and lack of training for the accident. But what really happened?
Technically, the details of the story I have just described are true. It is meant to get your blood boiling, to prime you to ask, “Why.” There is a crack in the universe, an alternate version of the McCain story hiding in plain sight. What may not be obvious is that the way I framed the story contains false clues, hints that point you in the wrong direction. Were the sailors too young? Were they undertrained? Overworked? Sleep-deprived? Was this a case of a self-driving vehicle that went rogue? We jump to conclusions because these excuses are easy to believe. They give us simple villains to criticize and they allow us to separate ourselves from the mistakes. The lessons we learn from the mistakes of others are often shallow and tend to miss the root causes. We don’t see ourselves in the accident. Newsworthy accidents are always someone else’s problem and we want to believe that we could have done things differently. It is easy to criticize from a distance.
If I had been on the bridge of the McCain, I am certain I would have crashed the ship. I would have been fooled by an illusion that the ship was controlling itself. By the end of this book you will be ready to appreciate the full story and maybe even relate to the mistakes the sailors made. Better yet, you might see similar errors in your environment and stop tragedy before it swings its careless fists.
We are susceptible to errors not because we are incompetent, but because we are human. That isn’t an excuse, it is an opportunity to understand where we are vulnerable and identify methods for protecting ourselves from mistakes. This book isn’t about the McCain. It is about you. It is about why catastrophes feel distant, like somebody else’s problem and why it is so hard to believe that we could make the same tragic mistakes.
Putting ourselves in the deck shoes of a sinking ship and accepting blame requires imagination and courage. That is what I challenge you to bring to this book. From the safety of these pages, we will experience self destruction first hand. We will sit in the cockpits of airplanes and fly them into the ground. We will watch as our cars crush us in our driveways. We will inhale toxic fumes that seep from the walls of our homes. We will get swindled, poisoned, burned alive, and drained of energy. We will fall off of cliffs and crawl across sandy deserts in search of water. We will cradle blue babies and hurl innocent animals off ledges. We will experience these things not as bystanders, but as participants. We will place our boots firmly on ground zero, make the same mistakes, think the same thoughts, and meet the same fates as the people who couldn’t escape tragedy. These aren’t stories that happen to other people, they are things that could just as easily happen to us.
And they do happen to us, just in less catastrophic ways. Thankfully our missteps don’t typically get broadcast on the news. Our errors rarely go viral. We consume the news as spectators, oblivious to the reasons tragedies strike, clueless about how to protect ourselves, and unaware of our powers to alter reality for the better. We won’t be simply reenacting tragedy for fun, we will be hunting for the lessons that we can use to form a better world. If that sounds unbelievable, reserve judgement for a few more chapters.
When we return to the bridge of the McCain in chapter 22 we will be equipped with a new vocabulary that will explain the illusion of a self-driving Navy destroyer. The chapters of this book are small quests to find the right words to describe concepts that will bring that untold story into focus. The ideas in the following pages will equip you with new skills that can unlock the enormous power within you. Like the secret of the McCain accident, there is an alternate reality hiding in plain sight, a version of yourself destined to take control of your world. Join me as we search for user zero.
Thanks for reading. I am releasing User Zero one chapter at a time on Substack for free to all subscribers. Physical copies are available from Amazon. Stay creative.