by Anna Wiener
* * *
Twice a week, around six or seven in the evening, contractors for a food-delivery app would walk off the elevator, pushing carts stacked with sturdy tin troughs. The operations manager would line the troughs up on a counter near the kitchen, and as soon as she had peeled back the foil coverings, my coworkers would jump up from their desks and race to be first in line for self-serve. It didn’t matter to me that meals in the office weren’t a bonding opportunity or a gesture of care, but a business decision—an incentive to stay inside, stay longer, keep grinding. The food was low-carb and delicious, well worth someone else’s money, healthier than anything I ever cooked. I was glad to share another meal with my teammates. We sat happily at the lunch tables, shoveling it into our bodies.
One evening, over dinner, the CEO encouraged me to expand my scope: learn how to code, start doing work outside of my job description. “Make it so that they’ll have no option but to promote you,” he advised. Who was “they,” I wondered—wasn’t “they” him? He told me he would personally promote me to solutions architect if I could build a networked, two-player game of checkers. When he got back to his desk, he emailed me a PDF of a programming manual that promised to make beginners proficient in JavaScript over the course of a weekend.
Engineers I knew talked about how the world had opened up to them the first time they wrote a functional line of code. The system belonged to them; the computer would do their bidding. They were in control. They could build everything they’d ever imagined. They talked about achieving flow, a sustained state of mental absorption and joyful focus, like a runner’s high obtained without having to exercise. I loved that they used this terminology. It sounded so menstrual.
Working in tech without a technical background felt like moving to a foreign country without knowing the language. I didn’t mind trying. Programming was tedious, but it wasn’t hard. I found some enjoyment in its clarity: it was like math, or copyediting. There was an order, a clear distinction between right and wrong. When I had edited or vetted manuscripts at the literary agency, I moved primarily on instinct and feeling, with the constant terror that I would ruin someone else’s creative work. Code, by contrast, was responsive and uncaring. Like nothing else in my life, when I made a mistake, it let me know immediately.
I spent a weekend dutifully completing the programming exercises while thinking about all the other things I would rather be doing, like reading a novel, or writing postcards to my friends back home, or exploring a new neighborhood on my bike. I was not excited to be in control of the machine. I did not achieve flow. There was nothing I needed or desired from software. There was nothing I wanted to hack or build. I didn’t need to outsource another part of my life to an app, and I never played checkers. The part of my brain that took some pleasure in coding also thrived on obsessive-compulsive behavior and perfectionism. It wasn’t the part of my brain that I wanted to nurture.
Later, I would recount the challenge to the engineers, who were appalled: networked checkers, they said, wasn’t a beginner’s activity—the CEO had sent me on a wild-goose chase. But at the time, my lack of interest in learning JavaScript felt like a moral failure. I returned the following Monday and told the CEO I couldn’t do it. This seemed, in that environment, like a lesser evil than not wanting to.
* * *
Around my two-month mark, the solutions manager took me for a walk around the neighborhood. We ambled through a small park well suited to short corporate lunch dates and low-stakes breakups. We passed a strip club, a popular spot for parties during developer conferences, that my coworkers claimed had a superlative lunch buffet. We crossed in front of people eating eighteen-dollar salads; we circumvented people sleeping over steaming grates.
The solutions manager told me he was proud of me, that I had scaled up quickly: I was already able to answer the majority of the questions in the inbox, could hold my own against a botched implementation, was providing excellent support to our customers. The company felt they had made a good investment. As a token of good faith, he said, they were giving me a raise. He looked at me with kind eyes, as if he had given birth to me.
“We’re giving you an extra ten thousand dollars,” he said, “because we want to keep you.”
I abandoned the rent control. I moved out of the Castro and into a one-room apartment on the first floor of a creaky Edwardian in the northern part of the city, above the fog line. I rode in the back of the moving truck with a mattress, two duffels, and my six or seven boxes of belongings: half a mile down Divisadero, half a mile up Haight. It took the movers thirty minutes, door to door—a job so small, so pathetic, that when it came time to pay they insisted on a discount.
The studio was tiny and bright and mine. There were bars on the bay window, but I didn’t care—there was a bay window, and it looked out over an old and twisted Australian tea tree. In the bathroom was a narrow shower stall that made me feel like a Damien Hirst cow. A back door led to the basement, through which I could access a shared garden with a redwood tree and a regal, dying palm.
Rent was eighteen hundred dollars a month, about 40 percent of my monthly take-home pay. I didn’t expect to stay longer than a year: I would reinvent myself professionally, I figured, and return to New York with a midlevel managerial title and marketable skills. Besides, I had never lived alone before, and now had 275 square feet to myself. It felt like total privacy. The door locked in four places.
The real estate agent who showed me the apartment had asked to meet early in the morning, and forty-eight hours after he handed off the keys, I understood why. The apartment faced the street, and people hung out on the corner, playing guitar, picking fights, and hawking drugs, in stage whispers, to passersby. They squatted against the tea tree and shot up, broke up, brawled, pissed. Some had long, bad trips, screaming about God or for their mothers. Some slouched outside an old movie theater around the block, recently reincarnated as a modern commune catering to the digital-nomad set, petting their dogs and panhandling. A neighbor referred to them as trust-fund babies. “You can tell by their teeth who’s had orthodontia,” he said, rolling his eyes, as we retrieved our mail from adjacent boxes. I didn’t know whether he meant the homeless millennials or the digital nomads, and didn’t ask.
At night, when I got home, it felt almost like a different city. There were minimal traces of the ecosystem. San Francisco’s micro-neighborhoods were committed to well-worn urban identities: the Castro, a landing strip of innuendo-laden retail descending from a plaza where nudists drank coffee at bistro tables, their genitals stuffed into athletic socks, had been a crash course in a certain style of revisionist nostalgia. But the Haight, with its sky-high catcallers and teenaged purveyors of purple kush, was perhaps most committed of all.
The neighborhood had incubated the sixties counterculture, and nearly fifty years later nobody seemed willing to give that identity up. Visitors from all over the world arrived as if on a pilgrimage, looking for something that may never have existed. Families wandered the main drag, dipping into head shops and vintage stores, taking photographs in front of murals depicting famous and long-dead musicians. They skirted teenagers lying on the curb outside the free clinic and averted their eyes from the vans parked on the street, hand-roll windows blocked with towels and newspaper.
At sundown, in the doorways of stores selling tie-dye leggings and postcards of acid pioneers, people curled up in secondhand camping gear and atop cardboard boxes, a slightly safer option than sleeping in the park. It was possible that the tourists trawling the commercial strip mistook San Francisco’s homelessness epidemic for part of the hippie aesthetic. It was possible that the tourists didn’t think about the homelessness epidemic at all.
* * *
Weekends, once I ran out of work, were a challenge. Sometimes I met up with coworkers, but mostly I spent time alone. I felt free, invisible, and very lonely. On warm afternoons, I went to Golden Gate Park and lay in the grass listening to dance music, fantasizing about going out
dancing. People threw tennis balls to their dogs in corridors of light, and I felt envious. I watched groups of fitness enthusiasts bobbing up and down and wondered if I was the sort of person who could make friends doing squats.
The city’s green spaces overflowed with heterosexual couples jogging in tandem and cycling next to each other on bikes with matching panniers. It was impossible to walk through a park without seeing a man in a heather-gray T-shirt running suicides or doing obliques. There was, on public display, an unfathomable level of wholesomeness.
I took long, solo bike rides. I took my phone out to dinner. I walked the curve of Lands End, listening to Arthur Russell and feeling sorry for myself. I walked to an independent movie theater in Japantown, to see a close friend from college in her first feature. Her giant lips parted onscreen; I sipped hard on a cup of seltzer and held back tears.
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.
My single coworkers were all on multiple dating apps, and encouraged me to follow suit. But I found myself newly cautious, leery of giving away too much intimate data. God Mode had made me paranoid. It wasn’t the act of data collection itself, to which I was already resigned. What gave me pause was the people who might see it on the other end—people like me. I never knew with whom I was sharing my information.
Instead of posting a photograph of my own face to the app, I uploaded a collage of a Slovenian philosopher responsible for reintroducing Marxism to a certain subset of my generation—mostly men whose living rooms held extensive vinyl collections and proud little libraries packed with the critical theory and art history books they’d half read in college—superimposed onto an orange astronaut suit. I’d made the collage years ago, probably to signal to a crush that I was both funny and serious, the sort of person a man could talk at for hours about topological networks of bioracism or the necropolitics of recycling.
I spent hours in bed, drinking coffee and thumbing at my phone. I made plans with two separate men who seemed boring and benign, if well versed in social theory, before deciding I couldn’t go through with it: What kind of sociopath, I wondered, would be drawn to my profile? I stopped replying and deleted the app.
A few days later, I was alarmed to see that one of the men had messaged me on the social network everyone hated. I’d never given him my full name, and was careful about minimizing my digital footprint. I tried to reverse engineer how he’d identified me, and couldn’t.
It hadn’t been hard to find me, the man claimed. I would waste hours of my life trying to figure out how.
* * *
A friend from high school emailed to introduce me to an engineer he knew, and the engineer and I agreed to meet for drinks. It wasn’t clear whether we were being set up for a date, or to network; it wasn’t clear there was so much of a difference. I wore a dress, just in case. Keyhole over my cleavage. Bike shorts underneath.
The engineer was very handsome and stiltedly sweet, the sort of man who probably hung out on the website for people who called themselves creatives. He worked at a large social media company, and was an early enough employee that he spoke of it with a sense of ownership. We offered each other oral histories of our own résumés while eating tonkatsu off biodegradable plates.
After busing our own table, the engineer suggested we repair to a tiny cocktail bar in the Tenderloin. As we walked past an open-air drug market, I wondered if we would run into the CTO. I wondered if he would be disappointed to see me hanging out with another software developer, instead of all the countercultural friends I had bragged about over lunch.
The bar had textured wallpaper and a scrawny bouncer. Photographs were forbidden, which meant the place was designed to be leaked on social media, a coup of guerrilla marketing. Everyone inside the bar looked very proud of themselves.
“There’s no menu, so you can’t just order, you know, a martini,” the engineer told me, as if I would ever. “You tell the bartender three adjectives, and he’ll customize a drink for you accordingly. I’ve been thinking about my adjectives all day.” What was it like to be fun, I wondered—what was it like to feel you’d earned this?
I tried to game the system by asking for something smoky, salty, and angry, crossing my fingers for mescal; it worked. We leaned against a wall and sipped. The engineer told me about his loft in the Mission, his specialty bikes, his habitual weeknight camping trips. We talked about digital SLRs and books. He seemed like someone who would have opinions about fonts.
When the engineer went to the bathroom, I looked up his account on the photo-sharing app and scrolled through: fog at Lands End, fog on Muir Beach, crashing waves, copper hills. The Golden Gate Bridge at daybreak, at sunset, at night. Half the photographs featured either his bicycle or a strip of empty road. They were, I had to admit, very high resolution.
It seemed stressful to me, cultivating a public image, or a personal aesthetic—like the sort of mind-set that could lead a person to worry during sex about whether the lighting was sufficiently cinematic. I knew I didn’t fit into the engineer’s meticulously curated life. I knew we’d never hang out again, though I also knew that I would try. Even so, I biked home that night feeling like something, however small, had been lifted.
* * *
The CEO’s girlfriend, it turned out, also needed friends. Female friends, he clarified. Go on a girl date, he wrote, introducing us over email. All I knew about his girlfriend was that she was also a software engineer, at a computer-animation studio famous for its high-end children’s entertainment; that they lived in the same building—their apartments separated by a floor, an intentional arrangement that I thought was genius—and, of course, that he loved her.
We met at a wine bar around the corner from the analytics startup and settled onto white leather ottomans near the door. The bar looked like a vestige of the first tech boom, all microsuede and chrome, recessed lighting: a nineties vision board. Lounge music invaded the space. Part of the bar was cordoned off for a company event hosted by a venture firm. Men in Japanese denim, white dress shirts, and name tags gesticulated at one another, gazing past each other’s shoulders, looking for better people to network with. I was happy just to leave the office.
The CEO’s girlfriend was poised, articulate, sincere, even-keeled. She had shampoo-commercial hair and wore a slim, understated blazer. She described her work as interesting and fun. The products she helped build made people happy, she said. It all sounded so uncomplicated.
As we swapped safe observations about being women in tech, I tried to imagine a life in which we became close. While it was easy to picture her visiting me in the hospital if I ever had a terminal illness, I had a harder time envisioning us getting stoned and watercoloring, or going to an experimental dance performance. What were we going to do, talk about sex? Talk about sexism?
I tried to imagine a life in which I was simply her and the CEO’s third wheel. We could sit on the sidelines of the basketball court in Potrero Hill and watch him play pickup. She could teach me how to blow out my hair, and not just in the front. I pictured us going on vacations together, the three of us drinking seltzer and discussing functional programming. Perhaps I, too, could become an executive if I hung out with present and future executives. I would have access to the inside track. We could go on weekend getaways to Sonoma, rent entire houses on the home-sharing platform and stand around marble kitchen islands sipping biodynamic wines and sharing our business ideas. This was as difficult to picture as the two of us getting sweaty at a basement show, or exchanging stoner insights about whether the past was a place.
When the CEO’s girlfriend inquired about my job, I deflected. Work was a def
ault topic of conversation, and all-encompassing for me, but I wasn’t sure how much she would really want to know, or how much she knew already. I wasn’t sure whether she would relay anything I said back to her boyfriend. The possibility gave the evening the tenor of an unofficial performance review—though the possibility that she might say nothing was worse.
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. Maybe mutual desire for friends wasn’t enough for a friendship. Maybe we just didn’t have that much in common.
We drank a glass of wine each, taking small, slow sips. We discussed books we were reading or had purchased with the intent to open, as soon as we had the time. We agreed, liars both, that we would attend a second-run theater production together. We smiled half-apologetically into the conversational silence as we rolled the wine around in our mouths, as if we were drinking something more sophisticated than the house white. Eventually, we finished our drinks, and with a seamless, unspoken intimacy, both declined the waiter’s offer of a second.
In midsummer, news broke that a National Security Agency contractor had leaked classified information about the U.S. government’s enormous, tentacled surveillance programs. At lunch, my coworkers and I ignored the media apps clogging our phones with push notifications about the story, and debated where to grab takeout: the food court of the mall down the block, or the Mexican place? We returned with passable Thai food and high-saline ramen, and sat down at the large communal tables, where we talked about podcasts and prestige television, bad dates and upcoming vacations. Then we went back to our desks and continued building, selling, supporting, and marketing our software.
