Secret Agent
If I told you, I'd have to kill you...
Secret Ballot: Secret Agent was a literary reading/Acela invasion held at Night Club 101 in New York City, last Friday, July 31st. Thank you to our fabulous readers: Catherine Shannon, Emma Glenn Baker, Sam Venis, Dylan Partner, and Harry Krinsky, who all read on the topic of espionage. Below, enjoy Harry’s piece, with photos taken by lil stinky and Joaquin. Follow Secret Ballot on Instagram to keep abreast of future events across the Eastern Seaboard.
From Russia with Love
Harry Krinsky
I was told a very funny rumor recently.
I was told that there is growing concern at OpenAI that Chinese and Russian spies may attempt to steal company secrets by having sex with OpenAI engineers.
It is an anecdote that has captivated my imagination since I heard it.
I was told that the company is so concerned about this possible threat, that they called a meeting with all of their senior engineers, thirty-eight men to be specific, and told them, as delicately as they could, that if they have recently started dating a Slavic or Chinese person they previously thought to be out of their league, they need to be open to the possibility that he or she might be a member of the intelligence community.
Everyone’s knee-jerk reaction, myself included, is to laugh at these hypothetical rizzless millionaires. There’s a certain collective relief that we feel… that as a society, there are ever-emerging ways we are finding to give nerds wedgies.
But then I think a sadness sets in — what must it feel like to be told that it’s so unlikely that you’d get the woman of your dreams, the most logical answer is that she is a trained paramilitary asset.
What must it feel like to sit in a cold, sexless conference room and have an HR professional you’ve never met, in a striking power suit, attempt to wipe honey pot honey off of your face?
Dating can often feel like an act of collective mass hyperstition. The moment you believe someone is out of your league, they become out of your league.
The project of dating is then often a delicate balance of holding two lies in your head– objective hotness is not real, except of course, for the specific attributes that make me hot.
It’s depressing, then, to imagine that not only is this hierarchy Very Real. But that your transcendence of it might be a matter of national security.
Finally, though, for me at least, envy sets in.
I want to be spied on.
I want to have a job or a life that is so important that someone tries to infiltrate ME. In the so-called attention economy, which increasingly dominates our lives, you must be pretty wealthy if you have the attention of the KGB.
I started to think about the funny cliché in spy movies where the spy falls in love with their target. Is this not what we all want?
To be so important, so essential to the grand plan, that our enemies send a spy to sabotage us from the inside. But then to also have insides that are so rich and interesting and seductive, that when the spy is confronted by the stark beauty of your interiority, she decides to disregard her country and become your girlfriend.
I genuinely cannot think of something more romantic and powerful. I think we all feel this way about espionage. It’s no accident to me that one of the James Bond films is called The Spy Who Loved Me.
Perhaps, if my career in miscellaneous multimedia production breaks right, I will be in the position to be infiltrated by a Chinese or Russian spy. If that happens, I will be an easy mark. I will gladly let her explode my life. It’s what I want. I hope she has brown eyes. I hope she is funny.
harry krinsky is a writer and podcaster living in Brooklyn. He is the cohost of the Nothing But Respect podcast and co-creator of the blog Good Hang.
 | A guest post by
|