Google uses contract labor, in a manner similar to Amazon; to save money on labor by making employees as disposable as possible. 'People would be asked to leave at a day's notice,' said Danielle. 'We were employed through a subcontractor company and they reserved the right to terminate at any time or for any reason. There was a climate of fear ... People worried about making mistakes that would get them fired, people worried about not being able to keep up with the work quotas the team leadership started making us have to fulfill, [and] people worried that the new leadership wouldn't 'like' them, and that that would get them fired,' she added.

Contractors tend to be much lower than the salaried employees' wages, Danielle explained. 'We didn't really talk about salaries, but there were full-time Google employees doing the same thing as contractors - we just had different statuses. Those employees could make three times what a contractor did. That felt bad.'

The vast wealth of Silicon Valley - the $100,000 Teslas that zip up and down the freeways, the walled-off estates of the tech titans, the exclusive parties and the expensive restaurants - all of these do not exist because a few smart whiz kids had an idea that they turned into an app. They exist because of people like Audry Bialura in the Congo, Yu Tiang in Shenzen, and Bill Woolcock at the Staffordshire Amazon fulfillment center. Gadgets are forged and shipped through their labour. And for every Mark Zuckerberg, there are 10,000 Yu Tiangs and 100,000 Audry Bialuras upon whom Mark Zuckerberg stands, like a circus performer atop a human pyramid.