The tool should have been straightforward. It was, in theory, simple enough to be used by a marketing manager. At least, that’s what my coworkers said—a blessing upon modern software. For years, the catchphrase had been So easy, your mother could use it, but this had grown uncouth and politically incorrect, to be used only in meetings where women weren’t present, of which there were plenty. But our users were endlessly creative in their ability to implement it incorrectly. They activated their own code, only to find that ours was silent, unresponsive. They checked their dashboards, refreshed and restarted their browsers. Then they would email, angrily.

“There’s no menu, so you can’t just order, you know, a martini,” the engineer told me, as if I would ever. “You tell the bartender three adjectives, and he’ll customize a drink for you accordingly. I’ve been thinking about my adjectives all day.” What was it like to be fun, I wondered—what was it like to feel you’d earned this?

At the analytics startup, we never once talked about the whistleblower, not even during happy hour. In general, we rarely discussed the news, and we certainly weren’t about to start with this story. We didn’t think of ourselves as participating in the surveillance economy. We weren’t thinking about our role in facilitating and normalizing the creation of unregulated, privately held databases on human behavior. We were just allowing product managers to run better A/B tests. We were just helping developers make better apps. It was all so simple: people loved our product and leveraged it to improve their own products, so that people would love them, too. There was nothing nefarious about it. Besides, if we didn’t do it, someone else would. We were far from the only third-party analytics tool on the market.

It didn’t take long to see that in Silicon Valley, non-engineers were pressed to prove their value. Hiring the first nontechnical employee was always the end of an era. We bloated payroll; we diluted lunchtime conversation; we created process and bureaucracy; we put in requests for yoga classes and Human Resources. We tended to contribute positively, however, to diversity metrics.

We sat in a row, backs to the window, laptops open. I looked around the room and felt a wave of affection for these men, this small group of misfits who were the only people who understood the backbone to my new life. On the other side of the table, the solutions manager paced back and forth, but he was smiling. He asked us to write down the names of the five smartest people we knew, and my coworkers dutifully obliged.

Smart in exactly what way, I wondered, capping and uncapping my pen. I was not accustomed to stack-ranking my friends by intelligence. I wrote five names down: a sculptor, a writer, a physicist, two graduate students. I looked at the list and thought about how much I missed them, how bad I’d been at returning phone calls and emails. I wondered how I’d stopped making time for the things and people I held dear. I felt blood rush to my cheeks.

“Okay,” the solutions manager said. “Now tell me, why don’t they work here?”

Sometimes it felt like everyone was speaking a different language—or the same language with radically different rules. There was no common lexicon. Instead, people used a sort of nonlanguage, which was neither beautiful nor especially efficient: a mash-up of business-speak with athletic and wartime metaphors, inflated with self-importance. Calls to action; front lines and trenches; blitzscaling. Companies didn’t fail, they died. We didn’t compete, we went to war.

“We are making products,” the CEO said, building us up at a Tuesday team meeting, “that can push the fold of mankind.”

Like me, the men on the Solutions team wanted nothing more than to stand in the CEO’s light. Even if we rarely saw it, he had a great smile; it was thrilling to make him laugh, to crack the veneer. We’d seen him happy. We knew he had good friends, many of whom had been founders in his cohort at the startup accelerator. We’d all celebrated the company’s fifth birthday on the roof deck of his apartment building, where he fed cake to the technical cofounder as the technical cofounder fed him. We were fascinated by his psychology. We wanted to figure him out.

“If I had to guess,” a sales engineer said over drinks one evening, “he had a childhood where people were not particularly nice to him. I wouldn’t have been nice to him. But because he never felt included, he’s really distrusting of people’s motivations, and really defensive of whatever authority he’s able to gain.”

“I don’t think he likes seeing people suffer,” an account manager said, “but he knows producing suffering in people is productive.”

It would take me a while to realize how rarefied the CEO’s world was. He was surrounded by people who were crushing it, and people who had chosen him. Kingmakers. People who did not like to admit defeat. The CEO’s community was the business community, and it would take care of him. He wasn’t in peril. Even if the company was a failure, he could easily fund-raise for a new one, or, in the worst-case scenario, become a VC. Unlike the rest of us, he could never backslide.

I was the feminist killjoy. I did not pick my battles. I died on every available hill. I asked my coworkers to stop using words like “bitch” in the company chat room. I bitched about being one of six women at a company of fifty. I wondered aloud if perhaps it was inappropriate to converse in graphic detail about app-enabled threesomes in the open-plan office. I stopped wearing dresses, to stanch a recruiter’s stream of strange and unsettling compliments about my legs, which he spoke about as if I were a piece of furniture. A chair without a brain. A table with shapely legs.

The problem, he said, was that the most important issues facing the tech industry were also the most tedious. It was in their interest to fight, but founders and tech workers didn’t know how to organize. They didn’t have the patience to lobby. They didn’t consider their work political. “They all assume this will just last forever,” he said.

We watched an elegant older couple drift by, properly dressed for a night out. I felt a little guilty for ruining their scenery. “The worst part,” Parker said, “is that the technology is getting worse every day. It’s getting less secure, less autonomous, more centralized, more surveilled. Every single tech company is pushing on one of those axes, in the wrong direction.”

My throat felt like acid. Hey, I said, and paused. Parker looked over at me. Sugar dotted his lower lip. Do you think I work at a surveillance company? I asked.

“What a great question,” he said. “I thought you’d never ask.”