by
Anna Wiener
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With another early employee of the analytics startup, Noah was prototyping an app—application—to facilitate collective action in the workplace. “The critique, of course, is that we’re monetizing labor organizing,” Noah said when I went to see him in Berkeley. His cofounder saw it as a way to make capitalism function better, more efficiently; needless to say, the latter would be the investor pitch. They had considered going through the seed accelerator, until doing thirty seconds of research: Any industry that still has unions has potential energy that could be released by startups, the seed accelerator’s founder had microblogged. The accelerator claimed to want people who wanted to beat the system, but a tool for organizing workers was perhaps beating the system too hard. The wrong type of collaboration software.
[...] My reasons for deflecting and deferring were pragmatic—money, social affirmation, a sense of stability—but they were also personal. I still clung to the belief that I could find meaning and fulfillment in work—the result of over two decades of educational affirmation, parental encouragement, socioeconomic privilege, and generational mythology. Unlike the men, I didn’t know how to articulate what I wanted. Safer, then, to join a group that told itself, and the world, that it was superior: a hedge against uncertainty, isolation, insecurity.
These motivations were not aging well. In reality, there was nothing superior about those whom I was trying to impress. Most were smart and nice and ambitious, but so were a lot of people. The novelty was burning off; the industry’s pervasive idealism was increasingly dubious. Tech, for the most part, wasn’t progress. It was just business.
This was both a relief and a disappointment. It was also, perhaps, the root of my empathy for the young entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. Many of them were at least a decade deep into lives they had selected for themselves as teenagers. Surely, I thought, some must have wanted to try something different, get off the ride. Surely some were beginning to have moral, spiritual, political misgivings. I was radiant with projections.
I was always looking for the emotional narrative, the psychological explanation, the personal history. Some exculpatory story on which to train my sympathy. It wasn’t so simple as wanting to believe that adulthood was a psychic untangling of adolescence, willful revisionist history. My obsession with the spiritual, sentimental, and political possibilities of the entrepreneurial class was an ineffectual attempt to alleviate my own guilt about participating in a globally extractive project, but more important, it was a projection: they would become the next power elite. I wanted to believe that as generations turned over, those coming into economic and political power would build a different, better, more expansive world, and not just for people like themselves.
Later, I would mourn these conceits. Not only because this version of the future was constitutionally impossible—such arbitrary and unaccountable power was, after all, the problem—but also because I was repeating myself. I was looking for stories; I should have seen a system.
I was lucky. Draining my bank account to exercise my stock options was only tenable because I knew I could borrow money from family, or from Ian. Some of my coworkers, largely women in nontechnical roles whose work had been foundational to the company, but whose salaries did not allow them to save much in the city with the highest cost of living in the country, had been offered generous stock grants that they were unable to exercise after they left the company. Some women, I had heard, were promised extensions on their exercise windows, only to have the extensions vetoed by the board after the grants had expired. The acquisition was a once-in-a-lifetime bonanza. It passed them by.
Flat structure, meritocracy, non-nonnegotiable offers. Systems do work as designed.
Having declared that language is ultimately self-referential, Barth has also affirmed that novels themselves, because they do not refer directly to a knowable reality, unavoidably refer instead to other novels. This latter idea directly informs his essay "The Literature of Exhaustion," discussed at greater length in chapter 1. Briefly, Barth argues that all the advances in novelistic technique introduced by the modernist masters—from stream-of-consciousness to spatial form—were originally designed to provide a more accurate access to reality. Now that "reality" is understood to be nothing more than a construct of language. Since all literary conventions have been "exhausted" from overuse and have been undermined by recent theories concerning the relationship between language and the world, the postmodern novel would employ literary conventions self-consciously, thereby warding off the "death of the novel" by writing novels that dramatize that death. The end result would be a fiction that overcomes exhaustion by dramatizing it. Or, as Barth explains, "An artist may paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our time into material and means for his work—paradoxically, because by doing so he transcends what had appeared to be his refutation, in the same way that the mystic who transcends finitude is said to be enabled to live, spiritually and physically, in the finite world."'
I put a post-it flag on this page so I apparently thought this paragraph was worth saving but I'm not entirely sure why
Metafiction fails because it does not invite us inside but rather makes us stand back and watch the author look at his own reflection; the reader is left outside, alone, and the one thing Mark hates more than anything in the world is "to believe he is alone. Solipsism affects him like Ambrosian metafiction affects him. It's the high siren's song of the wrist's big razor" (303). [...] Wallace's work, conversely, seeks not to depict solipsism but rather to overcome it.
Even more importantly, Hal possesses a quality that Kierkegaard would call "hiddenness" and that most intensely identifies the aesthete. In Kierkegaard's analysis, aesthetes use self-conscious thinking in order to hide from themselves. Likewise, Hal, in hiding his marijuana smoking from his friends and family, also in a sense hides it from himself. As the narrator explains, "Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger is secret is that he's as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high" (49).
He is, in many ways, the fulfillment of Lacan's characteristic dictum, "Le desir de l'Homme, c'est le desire de l'Autre,"which is often translated to read, "Man's desire is for the Other to desire him."
relevant to the CF-type character who realises how dumb it is to define himself by the desire he inspires in others
A footnote to the endnote cites a scholarly article titled "Has James O. Incandenza Ever Even Once Produced One Genuinely Original or Unappropriated or Nonderivative Thing?" (990nn), the answer being, "No."
an idea for a fake review of my DFW story (from Infinite Jest)
Whereas the postmodern work of his forebears firmly grounds itself in a literary tradition whose grip it feels it cannot shake, Wallace's work demonstrates how the original postmodernists' reliance on self-consciousness, parody, and irony has now become a culture-wide phenomenon: not only is our pop culture equally self-reflexive and self-aware, but so are the people of Wallace's generation, for whom irony is a weapon and a badge of sophistication.
Irony is also a cage the doors of which his work wants to spring. He opens the cage of irony by ironizing it, the same way he uses self-reflexivity to disclose the subtle deceptions at work in literary self-reflexivity. The purpose behind this layered strategy is to create a space outside his work where direct, "single-entendre" principles can breathe and live.