by
Anna Wiener
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“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.
The search-engine giant offered perks that landed somewhere between the collegiate and the feudal. Ian got checkups at the health center and returned home with condoms the color of the company’s logo, printed with the words I’M FEELING LUCKY. Employees were offered a roster of physical-education opportunities—not just Rollerblading—and Ian started attending intensive functional fitness classes during his lunch hour. He began lifting, bulking, quantifying; I began finding protein bar wrappers in the lint trap. “I’m worried I’m becoming a brogrammer,” he said, pulling up an app to show me his stats. I was not worried about Ian becoming a brogrammer—I was more concerned about him seeing his colleagues naked in the communal locker room. It all seemed so intimate. He reassured me that it was a big company.
As executives shuffled and reshuffled the acquisitions, it began to seem as if the moonshot factory had vacuumed up some of the more innovative companies in robotics, then put them on the back burner for several years. Later, we would read in the news about a number of sexual harassment charges against the men Ian referred to as his super-bosses. These offered at least a few useful explanations for institutional stagnancy. The super-bosses must have been busy.
Even on the farm, people were talking startups. With a measure of reluctance outdone only by the exhaustion of precarity, Noah and Ian’s friends had begun moving into the industry; the ecosystem found a way to absorb those with college degrees and fluency in middle-class social cues. A principal at a public elementary school took a job at an education startup making scheduling software. A music critic wrote copy about fitness and meditation apps. Journalists switched into corporate communications. Artists took residencies at the social network everyone hated, and filmmakers found themselves in-house at the larger tech corporations, shooting internal promotional content designed to make workers feel good about their professional affiliations.
Everyone needed a hustle: artists, musicians, blue-collar workers, and public servants were leaving San Francisco, and new ones were not taking their place. In blond-wood coffee shops that opened for people who wanted to take meetings in coffee shops, the baristas were not, as they had once been, young and new to the city. They were older and softer and still protected, at least for the moment, by rent control, but the writing was on the wall. Even comedians began offering corporate improv seminars, workshops for startup employees to strengthen team relationships through mutual humiliation. “What’s your opinion on coding boot camps?” the cuddle therapist asked Ian.
Tech was only about 10 percent of the workforce, but it had an outsized impact. The city was turning over. People kept coming. The Mission was plastered with flyers addressing newcomers. Nobody cares about your tech job, the flyers read. Be courteous of others when in public and keep the feral careerism of your collegial banter on mute.
Rents rose. Cafés went cashless. The roads were choked with ride-shares. Taquerias shuttered and reopened as upscale, organic taco shops. Tenement buildings burned, and were replaced with empty condominiums.
On the side of San Francisco where streets were named after union organizers and Mexican anti-imperialists, speculators snapped up vinyl-sided starter homes and flipped them. Amid tidy rows of pastel Edwardians, the flipped houses looked like dead teeth, muted and ominous in freshly painted, staid shades of gray. Newly flush twentysomethings became meek, baby-faced landlords, apologetically invoking arcane housing law to evict inherited long-term tenants and clear the way for condo conversions. Real estate developers planned blocks of micro-apartments, insistent that they weren’t just weekend crash pads, but the new frontier of millennial living: start small, scale up later.
Against the former factories and chipping Victorians, the car-repair shops and leather bars, downtown’s new developments looked placeless, adrift. To differentiate themselves, they added electronic locks and Wi-Fi-enabled refrigerators, and called the apartments smart. They offered bocce courts, climbing walls, pools, cooking classes, concierge services. Some hosted ski trips to Tahoe and weekend trips to wine country. They boasted bicycle lockers, woodworking shops, dog-wash stations, electric-car chargers. Half had tech rooms and coworking lounges: business centers designed to look like the residents’ offices, which were themselves designed to look like home.
i love the movement
The head of the initiative was the former CEO of a website that served as a repository of humorous images and videos optimized for social media virality—mostly cats doing improbable things, like riding robotic vacuum cleaners and getting stuck in hamburger buns. The website had raised nearly forty-two million dollars in venture capital. He would be working alongside another entrepreneur, a woman who had founded an on-demand housekeeping platform that had shut down amid a spate of lawsuits. The audacity was breathtaking.
totally forgot about this lmao too good
The VCs were prolific. They talked like nobody I knew. Sometimes they talked their own book, but most days, they talked Ideas: how to foment enlightenment, how to apply microeconomic theories to complex social problems. The future of media and the decline of higher ed; cultural stagnation and the builder’s mind-set. They talked about how to find a good heuristic for generating more ideas, presumably to have more things to talk about.
Despite their feverish advocacy of open markets, deregulation, and continuous innovation, the venture class could not be relied upon for nuanced defenses of capitalism. They sniped about the structural hypocrisy of criticizing capitalism from a smartphone, as if defending capitalism from a smartphone were not grotesque. They saw the world through a kaleidoscope of startups: If you want to eliminate economic inequality, the most effective way to do it would be to outlaw starting your own company, wrote the founder of the seed accelerator. Every vocal anti-capitalist person I’ve met is a failed entrepreneur, opined an angel investor. The SF Bay Area is like Rome or Athens in antiquity, posted a VC. Send your best scholars, learn from the masters and meet the other most eminent people in your generation, and then return home with the knowledge and networks you need. Did they know people could see them?
The rationalist swept her hair behind one ear. Contrarianism was underrated, she said. The intellectual contributions were, on net, positive. It was difficult to judge, in the present moment, which ideas would hold water; thus, better to err on the side of more debate, rather than less. “As an example, think of the abolitionists,” she said. I asked what the abolitionists had to do with libertarian contrarianism. “Well,” she said, “sometimes minority opinions lead to positive and widespread adoption, and are good.”
As a neutral statement, this was hard to disagree with. Some minority opinions did lead to positive change. I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. But we weren’t talking about a neutral statement. We were talking about history.
I took a sip of red wine from a glass that I hoped was mine, and ventured that the abolition of slavery was perhaps not a minority position. Slaves themselves were surely abolitionists, I said. Just because no one was polling them didn’t mean they did not exist. I was trying to be lighthearted. I was trying to be kind. I was trying not to embarrass both of us, though that ship might have already sailed.
The rationalist turned to look wistfully at the other partygoers, now gathered in the living room and happily instructing a virtual-assistant speaker to play workout music. She sighed. “Okay,” she said. “But, for the sake of argument, what if we limit our sample to white people?”
lmao