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what cynics called a bubble, optimists called the future, and my future coworkers, high on the fumes of world-historical potential, breathlessly called the ecosystem.
It was a year of new optimism: the optimism of no hurdles, no limits, no bad ideas. The optimism of capital, power, and opportunity.
It was a year of promise, excess, optimism, acceleration, and hope—in some other city, in some other industry, in someone else’s life.
My desires were generic. I wanted to find my place in the world, and be independent, useful, and good. I wanted to make money, because I wanted to feel affirmed, confident, and valued. I wanted to be taken seriously. Mostly, I didn’t want anyone to worry about me.
Like the patron saint of mislaid sympathies, I speculated that perhaps they were just lonely. They were, of course, not lonely. They were focused and content.
Smug and self-congratulatory, I translated most of my friends’ questions to mean, simply, What about us?
oyster, unavoidably yonic, with a perfect pearl.
At the end of the night, I walked downtown alone to the farthest possible subway station, savoring.
my inability to keep my homemade lunch untouched until lunchtime was an expression of my lack of self-control, the reason I still had baby fat at an age when the fat might have been postpartum, but instead was just me; I was the baby.
it became clear to me that the utility of the e-reading app was not so much about reading as it was about signaling that you were the type of person who would read, and who would use an app with a cutting-edge reading experience and innovative, intuitive design. The ideal user of the app, I deduced, was a person who thought of themselves as a reader, but wasn’t, not really: licensing cost money, and anyone reading more than a few books a month could generate a licensing expense exceeding the subscription fee.
Books were an opportunity, I understood, but not the endgame. It was just one type of content, and only the first step. Expansion: that was the endgame.
What I also did not understand at the time was that the founders had all hoped I would make my own job, without deliberate instruction. The mark of a hustler, a true entrepreneurial spirit, was creating the job that you wanted and making it look indispensable, even if it was institutionally unnecessary. This was an existential strategy for the tech industry itself, and it did not come naturally to me.
I had always been interested in learning, and I had always been rewarded for it; learning was what I did best. I wasn’t used to having the sort of professional license and latitude that the founders were given. I lacked their confidence, their entitlement. I did not know about startup maxims to experiment and “own” things. I had never heard the common tech incantation Ask forgiveness, not permission.
Take ownership, he had advised in the post. Be optimistic. Write down your opinions.
I had also been spoiled by the speed and open-mindedness of the tech industry, the optimism and sense of possibility.
Both of them asked questions that were self-conscious and infuriating. “What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” asked the solutions manager, twisting his wedding ring around and around. “How would you explain the tool to your grandmother?” “How would you describe the internet to a medieval farmer?” asked the sales engineer, opening and closing the pearl snaps on his shirt, sticking his hand thoughtfully down the back of his own waistband.
and they would finally let me out, like an elementary-school student, and the city would absorb me and my humiliation.
a vivid caricature of the dotty, linty liberal arts major—the antithesis of all that the tech industry stood for.
Still, though the interviews had been inane, they only served to fuel me. Here was a character flaw on parade, my industry origin story: I had always responded well to negging.
I was worried about a lot of things: loneliness, failure, earthquakes. But I wasn’t too worried about my soul. There had always been two sides to my personality. One side was sensible and organized, good at math; appreciative of order, achievement, authority, rules. The other side did everything it could to undermine the first.
m,hmm
History saw the Gold Rush as a cautionary tale, but in Silicon Valley, people used its metaphors proudly, provided they were on the right side of things.
Good interface design was like magic, or religion: it cultivated the mass suspension of disbelief.
Noah spoke in absolutes and in the language of psychoanalysis, offering definitive narratives for everyone, everything. I had the uneasy feeling that he could persuade me to do anything: bike across America; join a cult.
the fetish for big data. Data sets were mesmerizing: digital streams of human behavior, answers to questions I didn’t know I had.
It would have been logical, too, if logic—or basic economics—had any governance over the venture-backed ecosystem.
The city, trapped in nostalgia for its own mythology, stuck in a hallucination of a halcyon past, had not quite caught up to the newfound momentum of tech’s dark triad: capital, power, and a bland, overcorrected, heterosexual masculinity.
They looked tired, resigned, sheepish. Mostly, they looked at their phones.
This concentration of public pain was new to me, unsettling. I had never seen such a shameful juxtaposition of blatant suffering and affluent idealism. It was a well-publicized disparity, but one I had underestimated. As a New Yorker, I had thought I was prepared. I thought I’d seen it all. I felt humbled and naïve—and guilty, all the time.
Every so often, I felt a wave of affection for San Francisco, a thrill like hope—a sense, however small, that it could eventually become home.
The product manager came to say good night, and she was beautiful: tipsy but not toasted, radiant with absorbed goodwill.
A car, by contrast, was a tunnel to home. I found myself ducking into strangers’ sedans on a nightly basis, meekly extending my fist for a tap, chattering on mindlessly from the back seat. Clutching my keys, crossing my fingers.
code. I still clung, condescendingly, to the conceit that art could be an existential curative. That music or literature was all anyone was ever missing. That somehow these pursuits were more genuine, more fulfilling than software. I didn’t consider that perhaps he liked his life—that he wanted it to look in no way like the one I had left.
Listening to EDM while I worked gave me delusions of grandeur, but it kept me in a rhythm. It was the genre of my generation: the music of video games and computer effects, the music of the twenty-four-hour hustle, the music of proudly selling out. It was decadent and cheaply made, the music of ahistory, or globalization—or maybe nihilism, but fun. It made me feel like I had just railed cocaine, except happy. It made me feel like I was going somewhere.
unfortunately relatable sometimes
Was this what it felt like to hurtle through the world in a state of pure confidence, I wondered, pressing my fingers to my temples—was this what it was like to be a man? The sheer ecstasy of the drop made everything around me feel like part of a running-shoe ad or a luxury car commercial, though I couldn’t imagine driving to EDM, or even online shopping. I couldn’t imagine playing it for my parents. I would lean against my standing desk and dance while pounding out emails, nodding in solidarity with the rest of the team. My feet may as well have been turning the world.
Some days, helping men solve problems they had created for themselves, I felt like a piece of software myself, a bot: instead of being an artificial intelligence, I was an intelligent artifice, an empathetic text snippet or a warm voice, giving instructions, listening comfortingly. At the top of every email the men received, my avatar, a photo taken in Brooklyn by a close friend, smiled shyly from behind a curtain of hair.
He looked at me with kind eyes, as if he had given birth to me.
I eavesdropped on conversations in parks and restaurants, listening eagerly to strangers my age gossip about other strangers. I wrote long, detailed descriptions of nothing, and sent them by email to friends. I went to concerts alone and attempted to make deep and prolonged eye contact with the musicians. I brought magazines to bars and sat by dingy electric fireplaces, hoping and not-hoping that someone would talk to me. No one ever did.
The CEO was with us without being with us, and this prevented me both from revealing myself and from seeing her as an independent human. I felt ashamed by my inability to see her fully. I did not like that my primary frame for her was as someone’s girlfriend, a sidekick, an appendage, but I couldn’t transcend my workplace anxieties.
The idea of the cloud, its implied transparency and ephemerality, concealed the physical reality:
The CEO and I didn’t always speak each other’s language. I was interested in talking about empathy, a buzzword used to the point of pure abstraction, and teaching the support engineers how to properly use punctuation. He was interested in running complex data analysis on our team’s performance and holding the boys accountable to numbers. I talked about compassionate analytics. He talked about optimizing. I wanted a team of tender hearts. He wanted a team of machines. “Why would I thank you for doing your job well?” the CEO asked, frowning. “That’s what I’m paying you for.”
In any case, my friends’ world was sensuous, emotional, complex. It was theoretical and expressive. It could, at times, be chaotic. This was not the world that analytics software facilitated. It was a world I wasn’t sure I could still call mine.
What was anyone ever talking about? People said things like “co-execute” and “upleveling”; they used “ask” and “attach” and “fail” as nouns. They joked about “adulting.” They substituted viral memes for social currency. They deployed internet slang as if it constituted a vocabulary—as if acronyms weren’t already standing in for other words. “You know that animated GIF of the stick figure?” a coworker in his early twenties asked, to describe his emotional state. I did not. “Lol,” he said, not laughing. Ha ha, I said. Not laughing.
Sometimes it felt like everyone was speaking a different language—or the same language with radically different rules. There was no common lexicon. Instead, people used a sort of nonlanguage, which was neither beautiful nor especially efficient: a mash-up of business-speak with athletic and wartime metaphors, inflated with self-importance. Calls to action; front lines and trenches; blitzscaling. Companies didn’t fail, they died. We didn’t compete, we went to war.
Noah took me under his wing. Meeting his friends was like swinging open the gate to a side of the Bay Area I thought had been pushed out. Here were chefs and social workers, academics and musicians, dancers and poets. Few were employed full-time. They practiced radical honesty and believed in nonreligious spiritual orientation. They spoke in the language of encounter groups. They sat in each other’s laps and snuggled in public. They owned costume boxes. It was not unusual, at parties, to walk into a bedroom and find someone administering Reiki.
Some of the women instituted systems of gender reparations with their male partners. Staunch atheists bought tarot decks and fretted over how best to infuse them with powerful energy; they discussed rising signs and compared astrological birth charts. They went to outposts in Mendocino to supervise each other through sustained, high-dose LSD trips, intended to reveal their inner children to their adult selves. They journaled, and discussed their journaling. They went on retreats to technology-liberation summer camps, where they locked up their smartphones and traded their legal names for
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Processing as a hobby made me feel an affinity for the cool, impersonal bullshit of business culture. Radical honesty often looked to me like a collapse of the barrier between subjectivity and objectivity. It could look like cruelty. But it also seemed to work.
I did not want to judge them. I admired their collectivity, which seemed to me wholesome and intimate. The trust among friends was familial, openhearted, optimistic. There was true community. The future was blurred and the present was unstable. Life was characterized, to varying degrees, by persistent precariousness. Everyone was doing what they could to keep a toehold on the city, to keep a part of the culture sacrosanct; to build what they believed would be a better world.
I was always trying to be everyone’s girlfriend, sister, mother.
The film was a transparent riff on Plato’s Cave, or so the internet said—I had never read Plato. It was also a delicious allegory for techno-libertarianism, and probably LSD. It was easy to see why the movie appealed. Canonically, what hackers accessed was the ability to surveil without consent. I knew the genuine thrill of watching a cross-section of society flow through a system, seeing the high-level, bird’s-eye view—the full map, the traffic, the stream of data pouring down the screen. The movie didn’t just make hackers look sexy. It glamorized circumvention, the outcast’s righteous
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enjoyed these outings, even if they bore the metallic taste of duty—less a support network than a mutual acknowledgment.
