View all notes
The clean-up crew stays deliberately out of sight [...] their clients think consulting them will constitute a capitulation. An admission that what they're running is a business, that their career is in the end just a career, that gravity has some kind of purchase on their meteoric trajectories.
A lot of the younger VCs are themselves highly successful founders, and the contingency of their own success hasn't yet sunk in. [...] Why do they deserve their good fortune? What does it mean?
This matters because only those who have encountered the most stupefying, most inexplicable success will end up funding the next generation of startups. [...] Among those who do have that kind of cash, their sense of reality can be deeply warped - perhaps it almost has to be a little bit, shell-shocked as they all can be by their extraordinary luck.
[...] The term "lifestyle business," he points out - meaning a business that is designed to keep its owners fed and happy rather than making them brain-meltingly wealthy - is "kind of a pejorative in this world." Because to be reminded of why people normally work is an unwelcome dose of real life, of gravity, of adulthood.
love the last bit. startup life is about escaping the reality that most people are compelled to sell their labour-power merely in order to survive. it's fetishising work-as-choice
The reason is what one VC calls “the repeat business effect”. Sure, a 24-year-old can run his company into the ground – but he’s still a 24-year-old, with time and energy for another startup, and then another. And any one of those could pan out and make everybody fantastically rich. It is, as one founder told me, “the luxury of having a lot of runway left”. Why would you upset a person like that and potentially miss out on a future payday?
There is a lot of money sloshing around Silicon Valley in search of that payday. It laps up Sand Hill Road, all the way to the famous Rosewood Hotel with its Tesla-filled parking lot and tech divorcees on the prowl. [...] The money that pours in – from pension funds, hedge funds, private investors – has to go somewhere. It is agnostic about individual failure or success; its mantra is the law of averages. By the time one venture crashes and burns, everyone is already on to their next one.
But failure comes encased in bubble wrap – at least among those who have a reasonable expectation of running into each other again. What about those who don’t? Many of the employees who have foregone sleep, pay, healthcare and a social life for the benefit of now-worthless shares will not be instrumental in making the next spin of the wheel the winning one.
There are many ways to close up shop in Silicon Valley: get acquired or acqui-hired, wind the company down, buy out your investors and start anew as a small business. Depending on how a company dies, however, most or all of the employees will not be part of these transactions. Google won’t acqui-hire the receptionist, or even the publicity person. They won’t take on those who were only contractors, or those who mysteriously got the boot right before a desperate final funding round.
And even among those with titles, salary, and equity, the acqui-hiring party gets to pick and choose: in an acqui-hire truly deserving of the name, the company’s product and assets matter little. It’s really a way of hiring a very small group of people – and it falls to that group to stand up for those members of the company that the hiring party is not interested in. “They know what they’re prepared to spend,” one person whose company got absorbed into Google told me. “How equitably that gets spread around is basically one big prisoner’s dilemma.”
That’s the funny part of the tech industry’s narrative about itself. For tech, failure is always assumed to be temporary; for everyone else, it’s terminal. Taxicab companies are going out of business because they’re losing money? Creative destruction, my friend – sink or swim. Uber hemorrhages cash? Well, that’s just a sign of how visionary the company is. This double standard justifies the exploitation of workers outside of the tech industry – and, in certain cases, the exploitation of workers within it.
Cartoonists, sex workers, mommy bloggers, book reviewers: there’s a pretty clear gender dimension to this division of labor. The programmers at Yelp are predominantly men. Its reviewers are mostly female—and, at least in the initial years of the company, this was even more true as you got to the most active “elite” reviewers. Early rewards for elite reviewers—spa dates and skin care events—suggest that the company was aware of this and counted on it. Men build the structures; women fill them. Without users providing the content, a review portal like Yelp would be deeply pointless. Nevertheless, the users aren’t compensated, or are compensated only with stickers and perks: their labor is “gamified”; they earn special status or are sent book galleys. The problem isn’t that the act of providing content is ignored or uncompensated but rather that it isn’t recognized as labor. It is praised as essential, applauded as a form of civic engagement. Remunerated it is not.
Rand presents a world in which self-reliance is easy and pure. And her work depends on an understanding of self-reliance that doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny once you’ve had to, you know, actually self-rely. She is an absolutist about things that are clearly socially conditioned, which can give her world a kind of taxidermic feel. She celebrates capitalist enterprise while ignoring the communal and moral frameworks that it presupposes in order to function. Her fiction is almost entirely about the world of adult workplaces—architecture firms, boardrooms—but it seems to have a purely aesthetic view of what work is all about. There are many moments in Atlas Shrugged (1957) and The Fountainhead (1943) in which the fun house version of capitalist society presented in these books comes into gorgeous, bizarre focus. Consider the moment when the all-powerful architecture critic (yes, you read that right) Ellsworth Toohey, who is a Marxist and also in league with monopoly capitalists and also beloved by the populace, schemes to take over Gail Wynand’s newspaper, the Banner, on the strength of (and I’m not making this up) his writing a column in it. The right pieces are there, but they hang together in baffling ways—like an economic system dreamed up by Borges.
Again and again, Pixar indulges the tropes of flip-flop-wearing Northern California but ends up with something that sounds a lot like Ayn Rand. For a big-budget Disney production, Wall-E gets pretty brutal in its takedown of consumer capitalism. Thanks to the efforts of a giant corporation, Buy n Large, humanity has been reduced to large indolent blobs, driving around in jazzy chairs in a Carnival Cruise–style spaceship, waited on by subservient robots. But you get the sense that the film doesn’t direct its anger toward the big, bad corporation behind it all—instead, it spends most of its time lampooning the consumers who allowed themselves to be brainwashed by it. The cultural critic and blogger Mark Fisher has called this the film’s “gestural anti-capitalism,” and it is characteristic of Silicon Valley Randians: they are disgusted not so much by the manipulators as by the manipulated. This is how tech entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel manage to be both vocal opponents of elites and hugely elitist: if you’re dumb enough to buy what I’m selling, he seems to think, you really shouldn’t be voting.
The Thiel Foundation, set up in 2006, has taken an active role in disseminating Girard’s “mimetic theory”—it is one of the foundation’s three central tasks, along with the Thiel Fellowships and an incubator program for small companies. The Imitatio group within the foundation funds book series, periodicals, and conferences. Thanks to the foundation’s money, the Girardians’ reach is far. They are well connected within Stanford’s fabulously wealthy Hoover Institution. More recently, the Imitatio crew provided intellectual cover and manpower for Donald Trump’s transition team—suddenly, people you’d see around Stanford’s campus trying to put together panels to discuss Girard’s work seemed to be taking up offices in Trump Tower. A strange trajectory for any academic theory, let alone one in the humanities.
oh lol
Girard’s ideas are another flyby between tech and the academy. The Girardians may lament the marginal status of his theories within the academy; even Thiel may lament it. But secretly, or not so secretly, that marginality is what draws a man like Thiel to Girard. For in Girard you get your own intuitions repackaged as esoteric knowledge. You get a feeling of oppositionality while remaining at the center of things. You get to feel like a victim while having all the power. And this, as we’ll see, may be the most secret of Silicon Valley’s secret desires.
But the concept of disruption also tells a more covert and fundamental story about continuity and discontinuity, and it concerns capitalism. Are the changes the tech industry brings, or claims to bring, fundamental transformations of how capitalism functions, or are they an extension, perhaps a bit less varnished, of how it has always functioned? You can see why different parties would have a lot at stake in the answer to this question: it determines what regulatory oversight is necessary or desirable, what role the government or unions should play in a new industry like tech, and even how the industry and its titans ought to be discussed.