Perkins sees himself as a casualty of his chosen profession, which is a bit like a cat burglar becoming irate because he threw out his back scaling your building. But this is the reasoning required to do his job. He loses money. He gets threatened. People have vowed to hunt him down and cut his throat. Even so, I can tell that it takes such extremes for him to register contact as anything but further proof that humanity is divided into chumps and not chumps. There are countless ways to divide the world in two. Gender, religion, nut allergies. But Perkins does some of the more cynical line-drawing I’ve ever witnessed. When I tell him as much, he says he doesn’t see it that way. Not at all. In fact, he thinks he’s providing a service.
“Listen,” he says, leaning in close. “The domain could end up in someone’s hands who’s bad. Some of these mega-rich domainers, they won’t even sell you the domain back, yeah? They use it for traffic or adverts. At least I’m giving people the opportunity to buy it back.”
This steal-from-the-rich, sell-to-the-poor policy ebbs and flows. Perkins cops to the real reason he sometimes contacts domain owners at the last minute—and it’s not because he’s trying to be an upstanding citizen. It’s because he “got carried away” in an auction and would rather those people purchased their sites back before he has to pay for them. I am visibly disappointed but, as Perkins points out, the calculus cuts both ways. The real reason he redirects personal sites to pornographic ones is not so nefarious as it seems. It’s so he can turn a profit while he waits for the original owner to pony up the cash. And should the flashes of asses expedite the process? All the better.
Plus, as he is quick to remind me, it’s all perfectly legal. I posit the idea that legality and morality don’t always overlap. There are a lot of bad things in this world that are perfectly legal. Laws are created by man and man is fallible. He shrugs. He has my money and I don’t so he’s more or less done with this particular debate.
“The interesting thing,” he muses, “is there seems to be a lot of personal sites now. A lot of what I call ‘love me’s. You know, the girls who love themselves and it’s all ‘I’m this, I’m that, blah blah blah,’ because they watch too much TV and they get caught up in their own lives and they all think they’re Kim Kardashian.”
I know exactly of what he speaks, having screenshotted an Instagram feed or two in my time and texted it to a like-minded friend. But I am unwilling to turn my back on my own gender in his presence. Perkins concedes that there are exceptions to the rule. Like his own daughter, a college student with her own lifestyle and fashion site. He set it up for her—and nearly let it expire.
“Can you believe it? Bad! I know. But I have thousands of ’em.”
“Does she know what you do for a living?”
“She just knows I do something with domains. The thing you have to understand, yeah? Is that this is all a simple business transaction. I don’t do nothing to people. If you value your entire business at five hundred dollars, then it’s time to close your doors. It’s a self-inflicted lesson.”
Talking to Perkins is like talking to a perfectly reasonable person until, only when he turns to the side, you see a little chunk of his head is missing. Because he’s not wrong—not a bastion of ethics, but not wrong. He’s taking advantage of a deeply flawed system. If you lose a watch and I buy it for cheap at a flea market and then wind up selling it back to you on eBay, well, I can sleep at night knowing I’ve done that. Chances are I’m not just giving it back. What bothers me is the idea of doing it every day, intentionally combing the world for lost watches until I am an expert watch reseller and, more frighteningly, an expert sleeper. Until people are not people but watches with wrists still in them. I suggest that Perkins could be doing something else with his time—he has an eye for the stock market, a certain charm and, clearly, Web experience—but he shakes his head no. He likes the thrill of this too much. Plus, he thinks he’s hungrier for it than most.
“I’m not like these domainer guys who do this who are from rich backgrounds. I’m more from the streets. And I do think other people have more money than me. I mean, take you. You live in New York. Your apartment costs three million dollars.”
At this, I can’t help but smile. Between him and GoDaddy, I paid over two months’ rent to get back something I owned and made. This wasn’t a medical expense or an airfare change fee, both infuriating but both the price of living life. In this case, I just set the money on fire. Until I am on the ransom end of an actual hostage situation, this will be the most painful expense I ever have. And let’s say I did live in a three-million-dollar apartment. That wouldn’t mean I deserved this. But if there’s one business Perkins and I have both willingly entered, it’s the business of being an adult. In the end, it is not my place to convince him what he’s doing is wrong any more than it’s his to convince me that it isn’t.
“You think I should feel guilty,” he says, as we leave the café. “I never feel guilty. If I was rich, maybe I’d keep the algorithm going and set up a charity and tell all these people to donate to some cause instead of paying me.”
He smiles, running a simulation of this alternate
