The saddest thing about people like Adrian was that they hadn’t suffered from some outsize ambition. They were only doing what they were told. Barack Obama’s White House had endorsed Silicon Valley’s “learn to code” campaign—it was an official government job-creation program. With the traditional U.S. job market still a smoldering charcoal pit after the 2008 crash, computer programming skills were promoted as one sure way to attain the sort of prosperity and stability Americans had over many decades come to expect—nice house, new car, good credit, big TV, full medicine cabinet, all the latest toys, and a retirement plan.

But why, then, were so many programmers who’d “made it” in Silicon Valley scrambling to promote themselves from coder to “founder”? There wasn’t necessarily more money to be had running a startup, and the increase in status was marginal unless one’s startup attracted major investment and the right kind of press coverage. It’s because the programmers knew that their own ladder to prosperity was on fire and disintegrating fast. They knew that well-paid programming jobs would also soon turn to smoke and ash, as the proliferation of learn-to-code courses around the world lowered the market value of their skills, and as advances in artificial intelligence allowed for computers to take over more of the mundane work of producing software. The programmers also knew that the fastest way to win that promotion to founder was to find some new domain that hadn’t yet been automated. Every tech industry campaign designed to spur investment in the Next Big Thing—at that time, it was the “sharing economy”—concealed a larger program for the transformation of society, always in a direction that favored the investor and executive classes.

In the first seven years after the 2008 crash, sixteen million people left the U.S. labor force. And in that same period, thanks to Silicon Valley’s timely opportunism, the country gained an endless bounty of gigs. Tech startups, backed by Wall Street, swept in to offer displaced workers countless push-button moneymaking schemes—what Bloomberg News called “entrepreneurialism-in-a-box.” Need fast cash? Take out a “peer-to-peer” loan, or start a crowdfunding campaign. Need a career? Take on odd jobs as a TaskRabbit or pitch corporate swag as a YouTube “vlogger.” Nine-to-five jobs with benefits and overtime may be in the process of getting disrupted out of existence, but in their place we have the internet, with endless gigs and freelance opportunities, where survival becomes something like a video game—a matter of pressing the right buttons to attain instant gratification and meager rewards.