Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley

by Corey Pein

Thus I had failed. What other explanation could there be? As everyone knew, the internet was a level playing field, a free and frictionless medium for exchange, where the best ideas would inevitably rise to the top. Such was the foundational rhetoric of the internet, repeated like scripture, questioned only by cranks and cynics. It was also a load of crap, though I didn’t yet recognize it as such.

Since he had already raised the subject of money, I explained that many of our photographers were going into debt—not to mention risking arrest, abduction, and death—to go into war zones for the purpose of sending pictures to our little startup. With the vast resources of Corbis behind us, perhaps we could begin to pay these photographers a base rate—say, $100 per day? “That’s never going to happen,” the Drone said. Ditto health insurance.

The Drone did make clear that Corbis was happy to keep receiving newsy images of combat in Syria or Mali or whatever sorry country was sinking into hell, so long as we didn’t get too involved when our freelancers wound up in trouble.

This line of thinking eventually led me to the realization that the solution to all my problems was simple: I needed to become a billionaire, like my former employer.

Billionaireship is easily the most desirable career of the twenty-first century, with numerous advantages over fast-growing occupations like serfdom.

I recognized the freebies for what they were—not simple acts of personal generosity, but manna from above, bestowed by the invisible hand of venture capital.

So I installed the Lyft app on my phone, allowed the company to track my geospatial location and who knows what else, and then summoned a car to carry me and my luggage to my new digs across town.

Simone was bone-tired. I didn’t blame her. She was the model of a twenty-first-century microentrepreneur, which is to say she was a grossly exploited worker.

Fortysomething CEO Jeremy Stoppelman had personally donated $125,000 to the Democratic Party and its candidates. So when Yelp moved into its new global headquarters in 2013, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi of Pacific Heights, the most ostentatiously wealthy neighborhood in the city, cut the ribbon.

Even better, unlike the local newspapers that Stoppelman and his fellow tech execs helped to drive out of business, Yelp didn’t subsidize a small army of journalists to pester politicians like Pelosi with questions about her coziness with campaign donors, or to write honest, competent restaurant reviews.

Each had a mysterious “side project”—a startup in the making—that was inevitably too ill-formed to talk about, or far too technically complicated to remember. The drones seemed doomed to be desk jockeys for life, forever dreaming of their star turn as Job Creators.

Being fundamentally insecure, bullies were rarely found alone.

Another guy had been making the rounds of startups. The beefy dude offered his unsolicited advice: Stay positive. Talk the talk. “Passion is every other word,” he said. Good tip, thanks, bro.

Thus were the unicorns of Silicon Valley literally wished into being. It was the most magical thing about them.

We paused atop the Lyon Street staircase, where my friend pointed out U.S. senator Dianne Feinstein’s red brick mansion, purchased with her third husband, the big-shot investor Richard C. “Dick” Blum, in 2006. Just a few years before that, Blum’s company, Newbridge Capital, took a managing stake in a big bank in Shenzhen, the worldwide hub of electronics manufacturing, in time to cash in on the current tech boom.

Down in Palo Alto, Mark Zuckerberg purchased four properties adjacent to his $7 million five-bedroom home for a combined $39 million—more than ten times their assessed value. The purpose of the land grab was to maintain the seclusion of Zuckerberg’s backyard and master bedroom.

At around that time, the city of Palo Alto passed an ordinance restricting public records access in order to protect the privacy of certain “very high-profile tech-related residents.” Privacy was not, as the Big Data tycoons claimed, dead. Privacy was something that you paid for at a premium.

“We’re kind of like a startup, too,” Brody had said, by way of an excuse.

He now argued that the marketing of Ponzi schemes should be permitted so long as the terms were clearly stated. It was all in good fun, like a friendly game of poker. Of course, Bitcoin itself was a Ponzi scheme.

opened another hacker hostel and a brewery. He hadn’t conquered the world, but neither had he gone to prison. For a Bitcoin trader, that wasn’t bad.

I begged off shaking his hand, explaining that I had a cold. “I don’t care, man,” he said, taking my hand anyway. “I ain’t gonna die. I been shaking hands with dirty indigenous people half my life.”

As tech companies established their dominance over the city, more and more mundane aspects of life came to resemble Web-style terms-of-service agreements—unfair, unenforceable, vaguely threatening, and totally rigged.

The corporate gentrifiers plastered the skyline with enormous billboards promoting the techie version of domestic bliss, a cross between the households of George Jetson and Ebenezer Scrooge.

“If the poor don’t like it, let ’em buy their own city,” one Sharpie-wielding vandal opined on a wall in the Mission.

The assumptions of cutthroat libertarianism were so embedded in the worldview of these lucky newcomers that they spoke as though the victims of tech-fueled displacement and gentrification had chosen to live in poverty and squalor, just as they themselves chose to learn to code, chose a management-track job at a major corporation, and chose to set themselves up for a comfortable upper-middle-class suburban life.

These kids knew it was their destiny to inherit the place. Systematically and faster than anyone expected, the city was being remade to cater to the tastes and prejudices of these callow child princes.

As one Twitter wag observed, San Francisco’s “tech culture is focused on solving one problem: What is my mother no longer doing for me?”

If the techies shared an enviable certitude regarding their future careers, they were lost as to their personal desires, except when those desires concerned consumer products.

That became his routine, and he never questioned it. Come to think of it, like a lot of his contemporaries, he never questioned anything.

In this milieu, a certain tolerance for phoniness was a prerequisite. It was not enough to have the right skills, put in your time, and get the job done—you had to be fucking pumped about your job,

” They could only face themselves in the mirror if their business card proved that they were rock stars or ninjas or something romantic and brave and individualistic—anything but the truth, anything but a drone.

So many of the complex, discrete tasks involved in the creation of a website or an app had been routinized and automated that it was no longer necessary to possess an extensive or even fundamental knowledge of software mechanics.

“My role is, I’m stupid, I don’t know how anything works, and if I can’t figure out how to use this in four seconds, it’s over,” she said. I could tell she was passionate about being stupid.

The largest favored “stack ranking,” which pits colleagues and departments against one another in a mad scramble to stay out of the lowest-rated percentile during performance reviews and thus avoid a pink slip.

“Are startup founders capital, or are they labor?” It depends, he replied. “Mark Zuckerberg is capital. But for every Zuckerberg there’s one hundred guys who basically got fired from their startups. They aren’t capital. They’re labor,” he said. They were ideal laborers, too, being allergic to the concept of solidarity.

He no longer took time off on the weekends, or put in less than a twelve-hour day during the workweek, without triggering feelings of overwhelming guilt and the subtle scorn of his colleagues, who were also his friends.

Adrian, already a private cynic when it came to startup culture, said he learned one thing from his experience: Corporations don’t care about people. But he was glad to be alive, and working as a headwaiter at a midmarket chain restaurant.

Every tech industry campaign designed to spur investment in the Next Big Thing—at that time, it was the “sharing economy”—concealed a larger program for the transformation of society, always in a direction that favored the investor and executive classes.

“Get rich or die trying.” President George W. Bush called it the “ownership society.” Obama, smitten with his Silicon Valley donors, gave us “Startup America.” And Donald Trump, history’s luckiest winner, reigned over a nation of “losers.” Under the latest iteration of the American Dream, if you aren’t a billionaire yet, you haven’t tried hard enough.

The trick was to break the necessary work into a series of discrete and minuscule tasks appropriate for the structure of Amazon’s platform.

A Turker’s life was not for me. I applied but was rejected by some Amazonian algorithm. “Our account review criteria are proprietary and we cannot disclose the reason why,” the email said. The lonesome sterility of their presentation made one wish for a crowded old-time union hiring hall—or an unemployment line, for that matter.

The Twitch Partners were the beneficiaries of a larger effort by marketing departments far and wide to anoint new celebrities who were fit to serve as advertising vehicles to a younger audience that was resistant to more traditional methods.

According to the futurist Ray Kurzweil, there soon “won’t be a clear distinction between work and play.” If that seems far-fetched, consider how successfully Facebook gamified friendship.

“I don’t have any real friends,” one camgirl wrote. “They are all at university or living their lives or having new relationships and I feel thoroughly forgotten about.” While traditional social institutions left such underemployed, undereducated young people behind, the postwork sharing economy came to the rescue by affording them the opportunity to serve as virtual strippers. Who says the tech industry doesn’t make room for women?

Full-time Fiverring took a physical toll, as well, with many slavish gig-peddlers reporting rapid weight gain. “I know what you mean! I bought some jeggings this weekend,” one woman wrote. Another commenter saw opportunity. “If anyone is interested,” he wrote, “I’m putting together a Fiverr gig where I will be offering online fitness coaching.”

Fiverr offered a glimpse at the new model worker: a fat, depressed con artist forever scheming against his comrades, egged on by the distant architects of the virtual marketplace—the only real winners.

When busyness became a status symbol, the glamorization of exhaustion was inevitable.

Her clients were thrilled. “So natural! OMG!!” wrote one. Another praised her “authentic real person feel … NOT a corporate mouthpiece.” Clearly not.

he spent less time doing the labor-intensive Web design and more time searching for the cold fusion of internet marketing: “passive income.” This was shorthand for a variety of techniques whereby one could generate wealth while sitting around doing nothing. Some were proven yet not easily attainable, such as living off the compound interest from one’s investments and savings. Others—unlike Corey’s methods—were elaborate, unworkable, or illegal, such as pyramid schemes and spambot-powered credit card fraud.

“It comes to a point where trading your time for money—it’s limiting, you know?” Corey said. Oh, I knew.