by
Anna Wiener
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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.”
Unfortunately for me, I liked my inefficient life. I liked listening to the radio and cooking with excessive utensils; slivering onions, detangling wet herbs. Long showers and stoned museum-wandering. I liked riding public transportation: watching strangers talk to their children; watching strangers stare out the window at the sunset, and at photos of the sunset on their phones. I liked taking long walks to purchase onigiri in Japantown, or taking long walks with no destination at all. Folding the laundry. Copying keys. Filling out forms. Phone calls. I even liked the post office, the predictable discontent of bureaucracy. I liked full albums, flipping the record. Long novels with minimal plot; minimalist novels with minimal plot. Engaging with strangers. Getting into it. Closing down the restaurant, having one last drink. I liked grocery shopping: perusing the produce; watching everyone chew in the bulk aisle.
Warm laundry, radio, waiting for the bus. I could get frustrated, overextended, overwhelmed, uncomfortable. Sometimes I ran late. But these banal inefficiencies—I thought they were luxuries, the mark of the unencumbered. Time to do nothing, to let my mind run anywhere, to be in the world. At the very least, they made me feel human.
The fetishized life without friction: What was it like? An unending shuttle between meetings and bodily needs? A continuous, productive loop? Charts and data sets. It wasn’t, to me, an aspiration. It was not a prize.
I had not really thought about that. But I believed in the mission, I told him. I didn’t see the harm. I confessed that I thought the open-source platform had radical potential. Parker was quiet for a moment.
“For me, it’s a dark specter of centralization,” he said. “In a world without it, we could still do the things the platform allows, and people would be freer.” He sighed. “But I’d prefer not to shame you, no matter where you go. There almost isn’t a company you can work for that’s good. Maybe a few nonprofits that aren’t actively making things worse, but that’s it. It’s a very short list. Nothing you do is going to be more pernicious than the background radiation of SoMa.”
I’m just going to take it, I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
The engineers all read a heavily moderated message board, a news aggregator and discussion site run by the seed accelerator in Mountain View. The message board was frequented by entrepreneurs, tech workers, computer science majors, libertarians, and the people who loved to fight with them. People whose default conversational mode was debate. Mostly men. Men on both sides of the seawall; men all the way down.
It wasn’t for me, but I read it anyway. It struck me as the raw male id of the industry, a Greek chorus of the perpetually online. The site’s creator had specified that political debate destroyed intellectual curiosity, so political stories, and political conversation, were considered off topic and verboten. Instead, the guidelines asked that users focus on stories that were interesting to hackers. I had always considered hacking an inherently political activity, insofar as I thought about hacking at all, but it seemed the identity had been co-opted and neutralized by the industry. Hacking apparently no longer meant circumventing the state or speaking truth to power; it just meant writing code. Maybe would-be hackers just became engineers at top tech corporations instead, where they had easier access to any information they wanted. Whatever; I wasn’t a hacker.
“Meritocracy”: a word that had originated in social satire and was adopted in sincerity by an industry that could be its own best caricature. It was the operating philosophy for companies that flirted with administering IQ tests to prospective and existing employees; for startups full of men who looked strikingly similar to the CEO; for investors undisturbed by the allocation of 96 percent of venture capital to men; for billionaires who still believed they were underdogs because their wealth was bound up in equity.
I understood why the idea appealed, especially at a time of great economic insecurity, and especially for a generation that had come of age around the financial collapse. Nobody was guaranteed any future, I knew. But for those who seemed to be emerging from the wreckage victorious—namely, those of us who had secured a place in an industry that had steamrolled its way to relevance—the meritocracy narrative was a cover for lack of structural analysis. It smoothed things out. It was flattering, and exculpatory, and painful for some people to part with.
yep
As we left the theater in pursuit of a hamburger, I felt rising frustration and resentment. I was frustrated because I felt stuck, and I was resentful because I was stuck in an industry that was chipping away at so many things I cared about. I did not want to be an ingrate, but I had trouble seeing why writing support emails for a venture-funded startup should offer more economic stability and reward than creative work or civic contributions. None of this was new information—and it was not as if tech had disrupted a golden age of well-compensated artists—but I felt it fresh. I emitted this stream of consciousness at Leah, swearing to delete my ad-blockers and music apps, while she hailed us a cab.
We wanted to be on the side of human rights, free speech and free expression, creativity and equality. At the same time, it was an international platform, and who among us could have articulated a coherent stance on international human rights? We sat in our apartments tapping on laptops purchased from a consumer-hardware company that touted workplace tenets of diversity and liberalism but manufactured its products in exploitative Chinese factories using copper and cobalt mined in Congo by children. We were all from North America. We were all white, and in our twenties and thirties. These were not individual moral failings, but they didn’t help. We were aware we had blind spots. They were still blind spots.