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

by Corey Pein

We startup wannabes were not entrepreneurs. We were suckers for the shovel merchants, who were much cleverer than the thick-skulled “innovators” who did all the work while trading away the rewards. Selling shovels wasn’t the only way to make money in tech, but it was … the Silicon Valley way.

This was a smart business! In a late capitalist society with dwindling opportunities for cash-poor workers and few checks on entrepreneurial conduct, what could be better to sell than false hope? So many hungered for it.

His photo showed him avoiding eye contact with the camera and wearing a straight-brimmed fedora, a fashion accessory associated with a certain type of charmless chauvinist techie. Aron also expressed an enthusiasm for Bitcoin.

One face in the blur of satisfied customers stuck out. It was a woman. She looked and sounded so familiar. What was her name? Anna? Josephine? No—Rhoda! From Fiverr! “My name is Susan,” Rhoda said. “I’m a stay-at-home mom and, yes, I’m also a millionaire.” There was too much weirdness in this world. How could the internet be so small?

Any scam that depended on the greed of its victims also made them accomplices.

Zuckerberg’s titanic offspring had already made news for running a secret scientific experiment that manipulated users’ emotions through the selective editing of material that appeared on their “news feeds,” and would soon face congressional hearings for its role spreading foreign propaganda in the 2016 elections.

Whether or not his theories worked, it was disturbing to hear such an eagerness to exploit human behavioral tics for the sake of profit.

Most people in the industry were convinced that their work was moral because it increased consumer choice and therefore freedom. New technologies were evidence of progress and therefore innately good. And any criticism of the industry’s practices or motives therefore threatened freedom and progress.

By 2000, Gregg says, the tech press was completely co-opted by the industry, caught in a pincer grip from two directions. First, by well-known, award-winning journalists who covered figures like Steve Jobs as though they were rock stars—and second, by “former trade journalists who … got in through the trade world, moved up the food chain, and were never trained in adversarial journalism. They don’t even know what it is.”

And if tech press editors cared more about being the first to report the specs of say, the next iPhone model—rather than, say, Apple’s labor practices or its global efforts at tax avoidance—reporters had every incentive to make nice with industry public relations people, who were always happy to pick up the bar tab, anyway.

“Facebook is a reflection of what you see on the internet,” he said, “so if you don’t like what you see on Facebook, it’s your own damn fault.” I knew that his argument was bogus—Facebook’s story selection algorithms came with the biases of the engineers who designed them built in. But in the mind of this high-level tech journalist, there was no reason to doubt Facebook’s assertion of political neutrality, or question how the unexamined race, class, and gender biases of its designers might have influenced the decisions they made as programmers, and thus the daily media intake of billions of users.

Derrida

Although the East Coast press saw Thiel’s subterfuge for what it was—an attack on free speech—Valley players and even some in the tech press rallied behind Thiel, believing, as his fellow billionaire VC Vinod Khosla, put it, that disfavored “journalists need to be taught lessons.”

Such lowest-common-denominator marketing props up the whole of the internet. And no one has any incentive to improve the quality, trustworthiness, or fairness of the new media ecosystem.

Silicon Valley was trying to sell at the time. In the early nineties, the boom was about hardware. IBM and Apple had found a way to commercialize military-funded computer research by churning out personal desktop computers and accessories.

Then, in the late nineties, came another commercial boom, also underwritten by government research: the internet. This time, something changed. Wall Street got involved.

Wolff’s gift of invaluable public property to private interests was his own unilateral decision, made without consulting anyone.

“Might telcos become dominant? Of course there is such a danger,” Wolff argued. “But remember, if they employ illegal means of increasing market share, we have laws against anticompetitive behavior. I doubt that they would do something questionable and walk away unchallenged.” In America? In Silicon Valley? Never!

It ran on the same old mix of government-subsidized research, cheap labor, and a regulatory outlook inherited from the Ronald Reagan era that permitted corporations to unload the costs of doing business on customers, employees, taxpayers, and the ecosystem.

As Google grew, it also shrank—small enough to fit inside a mailbox in Bermuda, where it funneled $14 billion in annual profits via an intricate series of transatlantic shell companies that allowed it to avoid an estimated $2 billion in taxes every year. “It’s called capitalism,” chairman Eric Schmidt said when questioned about it.

The only reason anyone noticed was that the findings got published in a research journal. You can bet Facebook won’t make that mistake again!

And until the spring of 2017, founder Jeff Bezos refused to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in sales taxes in many jurisdictions, thus starving state and local governments while furnishing extra cash to crush the competition.

Uber, the unlicensed taxi service launched in 2010, proved once and for all that a few people really can change the world using nothing more than powerful connections, billions of dollars in capital, and a willingness to trample long-standing norms such as the nigh-universal requirement for taxi companies to obtain operating permits and insurance and to certify their drivers for the sake of public safety.

Brutal

With its “break laws first, buy influence later” strategy proven,

Its CEO and cofounder, Travis Kalanick, was a big fan of the novelist Ayn Rand, and at times his behavior seemed to imitate one of Rand’s infinitely selfish antiheroes.

Uber didn’t give a flying fuck about the law. That’s what made it so successful.

Prior to the computer age, “unbundled” lending went by many names: usury, gouging, loansharking.

The conventional wisdom held that illegal conspiracies were best conducted in secret. But the tech boom that began in 2005 changed all that.

“This was just, like, something completely out of left field, where suddenly there’s this government agency that’s like, you know, telling us we’re not allowed to operate.” It’s fair to say Conrad’s mellow was thoroughly harshed.

Entrepreneurs devised new ways to break the law, while investors spotted and bankrolled the most promising schemes. That was the secret of the Silicon Valley shovel merchants.

Tactical Robot (EATR), a very special war machine. As its developers explained, EATR recharged its batteries by extracting energy from “biomass” and “other organically based energy sources,” such as plants—and, presumably, should the mission call for it, people.

Literally Horizon Zero Dawn

They said, ‘Well, he’s got a PhD on his team, he must know what he’s doing.’” Usually, he went on, this “team member” was some random Joe with a PhD whom Adolphe had taken out for doughnuts for a couple of hours.

Even with small armies of highly educated analysts at their disposal, Ghazi explained, most VC shops were not actually qualified to assess the technical merits of all the various startups looking for money in Silicon Valley.

Neither was having revenue, or customers. In fact, the last thing that mattered in Silicon Valley was technological innovation. Marketing came first and foremost.

The odds were much worse for entrepreneurs, who were almost certainly doomed even if they secured VC funding.

This company, called Clinkle, secured investors before settling on a product. Clinkle was, in the words of its founder, Lucas Duplan, “a movement to push the human race forward,” but beyond that no one seemed quite sure what the company was all about. Duplan was a nineteen-year-old Stanford computer science major and an insufferable showboat.

The outside world understood Silicon Valley by the wealth of its winners and marveled at their miraculous triumphs. However, as Ghazi saw it, the system could not function without a far greater number of losers. This might not seem like such a revelation to anyone versed in the theory or practice of capitalism, but in this context, Ghazi’s point was not only profound but heretical.

I had read that Andreessen-Horowitz’s motto was inspired by an obscure and archaic Trotskyite buzzword: “permanent revolution.” Salvaged from the forgotten struggle for a classless society and reclaimed for the new era of capitalist dominion, the old Marxist dogma gained a crisp motivational pizzazz.

weren’t the only workers caught in this bind. Most of the startups pitched as “Uber for X” boiled down to “Cheaper Labor for X,” and they had the same effect of depressing wages across an industry, just as the VC money Uber used to subsidize its cheap fares undercut taxi drivers who hoped to earn a decent wage.

I discerned a pattern in these high-level appointments. Schulte was one of the most obnoxious tools I had the displeasure of encountering in San Francisco.

The Zuckerberg-backed group also lobbied for an expansion of the existing H-1B specialty workers visa, the lucky winners of which live in perpetual uncertainty and are exploited mercilessly by tech industry labor brokers known as body shops.

the United States “if I may say, is falling sharply every year.” On that point, he was correct, but it was not because the government didn’t do enough to champion the cockamamie libertarianism of hucksters like Tamkivi.

“We’ll be able to save many, many lives,” the doctor said. “We don’t invest in that area,”

When it comes to the question of why some feast on caviar and champagne while others starve in the streets, I’m inclined to agree with Rome, the union leader: The answer comes not from within, but from without. Politics made this world, even the digital parts.

‘This isn’t any sharing economy—this is taking the responsibility of employment away from employers and putting it one hundred percent on people’s backs.’”

“I look at the Democrats as the mafia,” Rome told me. “They make us pay them for protection but they don’t do shit for us. And the Republicans are out to kill us, so we have to support the Democrats to keep what we’ve got.”

The government frowns on solidarity, yet it smiles on all manner of corporate con jobs—like the startup bubble itself.

“This is the new disruption. Influence the influencers,” Chi said. “The populist phase of Big Tech is over.”

A great big bearded man in shorts darted through the curtain, startling me terribly. A burglar? Nay, he was Jeannie’s boyfriend, which meant that I, not he, was the strange man wandering through the house in the dark.

An overseas investor had recently purchased her single-story apartment complex and raised her rent by $600 a month. Her neighbor, the former groundskeeper, lost his job at the same time the rent increase hit. Two other tenants on the property had their rent go up by $1,000 a month. “In the law they call that ‘constructive eviction,’” Jeannie said. Renting out a tent in her backyard was not something she’d always dreamed about.

Contrary to its reputation as a quirky corporate Xanadu, the Googleplex looks like pretty much any other dismal suburban office park.