by Anna Wiener
* * *
In June, the seed accelerator announced a new initiative. The accelerator was looking to build a new metropolis, entirely from scratch. Jesus, I thought, reading the blog post announcing the initiative. Everyone’s getting in on this game. The world is full of people who aren’t realizing their potential in large part because their cities don’t provide the opportunities and living conditions necessary for success, the blog post stated. A high leverage way to improve our world is to unleash this massive potential by making better cities. Building new cities is the ultimate full-stack startup, in both complexity and ambition. The post ended with a series of questions: How should we measure the effectiveness of a city? What are a city’s KPIs? What should a city optimize for?
KPIs, optimization: it reminded me of the analytics software. Who would own the data sets, I wondered; what would they do with them?
The head of the initiative was the former CEO of a website that served as a repository of humorous images and videos optimized for social media virality—mostly cats doing improbable things, like riding robotic vacuum cleaners and getting stuck in hamburger buns. The website had raised nearly forty-two million dollars in venture capital. He would be working alongside another entrepreneur, a woman who had founded an on-demand housekeeping platform that had shut down amid a spate of lawsuits. The audacity was breathtaking.
I wasn’t sure why anyone should be so eager to hand the keys to society over to people whose primary qualification was curiosity. I wasn’t eager to go to bat for older industries or institutions, but there was something to be said for history, context, deliberation. There was something to be said for expertise. But also, if we were going to abandon expertise, I thought, in moments of deep pettiness, then why weren’t my friends being given millions of dollars to run research projects on making better cities?
What I didn’t realize was that technologists’ excitement about urbanism wasn’t just an enthusiasm for cities, or for building large-scale systems, though these interests were sincere. It was an introductory exercise, a sandbox, a gateway: phase one of settling into newfound political power.
“Do you think you hate yourself?” asked a therapist in Berkeley. Coming on strong for an intake session, I thought, but the next day I caught myself following a bunch of venture capitalists on the microblogging platform. It wasn’t exactly an act of self-care.
The venture capitalists were discussing a universal basic income, and I couldn’t look away. They were concerned about the unlocked economic potential of the urban poor. As icebergs melted and the ocean’s temperatures ticked toward uninhabitability, they were concerned that AI—specifically, the question of whether they or China would own it—would bring about the Third World War. They wanted to see automation and artificial intelligence jump-start a renaissance: the machines would do the work so the rest of us, rendered useless, could focus on our art.
The VCs wanted, one might deduce, to block-grant government services—or, should AI inspire revolution, a rationale for owning bunkers in New Zealand stocked with guns and peanut butter. I’d believe in an AI renaissance as soon as venture capitalists started enrolling in pottery classes; as soon as they were automated out of a job.
The VCs were prolific. They talked like nobody I knew. Sometimes they talked their own book, but most days, they talked Ideas: how to foment enlightenment, how to apply microeconomic theories to complex social problems. The future of media and the decline of higher ed; cultural stagnation and the builder’s mind-set. They talked about how to find a good heuristic for generating more ideas, presumably to have more things to talk about.
Despite their feverish advocacy of open markets, deregulation, and continuous innovation, the venture class could not be relied upon for nuanced defenses of capitalism. They sniped about the structural hypocrisy of criticizing capitalism from a smartphone, as if defending capitalism from a smartphone were not grotesque. They saw the world through a kaleidoscope of startups: If you want to eliminate economic inequality, the most effective way to do it would be to outlaw starting your own company, wrote the founder of the seed accelerator. Every vocal anti-capitalist person I’ve met is a failed entrepreneur, opined an angel investor. The SF Bay Area is like Rome or Athens in antiquity, posted a VC. Send your best scholars, learn from the masters and meet the other most eminent people in your generation, and then return home with the knowledge and networks you need. Did they know people could see them?
The venture capitalists were not above inspiration culture. They shared reading lists and product recommendations, and advised their followers to stay humble. Eat healthy, they said; drink less. Travel, meditate, find your why; work on your marriage, never give up. They preached the gospel of eighty-hour workweeks, and talked up the primacy of grit. Whenever they denigrated the idea of work-life balance as soft, or antithetical to the determination necessary for startup success, I wondered how many of them had an executive assistant. A personal assistant. Both.
I couldn’t imagine making millions of dollars every year, then choosing to spend my time stirring shit on social media. There was almost a pathos to their internet addiction. Log off, I thought. Just email each other.
Then again, if the internet was good for anything, wasn’t it this? Transparency in action; access to the minds of the industry elite. There was no better way to know which venture capitalists wrung their hands over the impact of identity politics on productivity, or how applying Stoic practices to life in Woodside was going. How else to know which members of the venture class defended megalomaniac founders as entrepreneurs who couldn’t scale, or mistook criticism as harassment and perceived themselves as victims of digital mobs? How else to understand the deliberately amplified identities, ideologies, and investment strategies of the people transforming society—the people I was helping make rich?
* * *
The intellectual culture of Silicon Valley was internet culture: thought-leadership, thought experiments. Message-board intellectualism. There were economists and rationalists; effective altruists, accelerationists, neoprimitivists, millennialists, objectivists, survivalists, archeofuturists, monarchists, futarchists. Neoreactionaries, seasteaders, biohackers, extropians, Bayesians, Hayekians. Tongue-in-cheek and deadly serious. Witting and unwitting. It did leave something to be desired.
At a party in Noe Valley, I fell into an argument with an enthusiastic participant in the online rationality community. Rationalism was considered a truth-seeking movement, at least by its practitioners. In an effort to see the world more clearly, rationalists sampled from behavioral economics, psychology, and decision theory. They talked about argumentation techniques, mental models, and steel men, and deployed the language of science and philosophy: “On balance,” they would say, “on margin”: “n is net positive”—or “n is net negative,” “n is overrated,” “n is underrated.”
I could get on board with truth-seeking, and as far as I could tell, rationality primarily offered frameworks for living that bordered on self-help. This made sense: religious institutions were eroding, corporations demanded near-spiritual commitments, information overwhelmed, and social connection had been outsourced to the internet—everyone was looking for something.
But rationalism could also be a mode of historical disengagement that ignored or absolved massive power imbalances. A popular rationality podcast covered topics such as free will and moral responsibility; cognitive bias; the ethics of vote trading. When the podcast did an episode with an evolutionary psychologist who identified as a transhumanist, bivalvegan classical liberal, she and the host discussed designer babies optimized for attractiveness without once bringing up race or the history of eugenics. Arguing fervently about a world that was not actually the world struck me as vaguely immoral. At best, it was suspiciously flattering to power. I found the subculture astonishing, not least because it flourished among grown adults.
I had trouble squaring this with the rationalist at the party, who was pleasant and inquisitive. We w
ere sitting at the kitchen island in a scooped-out Edwardian, which had recently been renovated with high-gloss cabinetry and high-gloss walls. The cabinets did not have handles, and everything was white—like a smartphone or a tablet. A group standing around the island had been discussing the venture capitalist who believed software was eating the world, comparing notes on the most valuable insights they had learned from him. I took a pass.
Talk turned to a libertarian economist, an academic and director of a conservative research center. The center was bankrolled by fraternal oil magnates, two right-wing billionaires who had wielded unchecked political influence for decades, but the economist fashioned himself as a contrarian. He blogged on topics such as whether or not price gouging during emergencies could actually be beneficial; whether there was an optimistic explanation for the uptick in racial violence in the United States; whether nations could be startups—African countries looked promising. Perhaps philanthropy was too democratic, he posited; perhaps mass conversion of low-income people to Mormonism could lead to greater upward mobility; perhaps we could take a cue from Lagos and consider the constructive capacity of nationalism. His work was popular among the self-styled contrarians of Silicon Valley. I was only aware of him through Patrick, who, to my dismay, was an ardent reader of his blog.
I volunteered that many of the economist’s purportedly contrarian opinions—conceived under the guise of being lighthearted thought experiments intended to upend mainstream biases—actually betrayed a much darker vision for society than any of his followers wanted to admit. Most of his ideas were not new; we had simply, as a culture, moved past them already. Was it possible that the libertarian economist was just a reactionary? I said. Just asking questions.
The rationalist swept her hair behind one ear. Contrarianism was underrated, she said. The intellectual contributions were, on net, positive. It was difficult to judge, in the present moment, which ideas would hold water; thus, better to err on the side of more debate, rather than less. “As an example, think of the abolitionists,” she said. I asked what the abolitionists had to do with libertarian contrarianism. “Well,” she said, “sometimes minority opinions lead to positive and widespread adoption, and are good.”
As a neutral statement, this was hard to disagree with. Some minority opinions did lead to positive change. I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. But we weren’t talking about a neutral statement. We were talking about history.
I took a sip of red wine from a glass that I hoped was mine, and ventured that the abolition of slavery was perhaps not a minority position. Slaves themselves were surely abolitionists, I said. Just because no one was polling them didn’t mean they did not exist. I was trying to be lighthearted. I was trying to be kind. I was trying not to embarrass both of us, though that ship might have already sailed.
The rationalist turned to look wistfully at the other partygoers, now gathered in the living room and happily instructing a virtual-assistant speaker to play workout music. She sighed. “Okay,” she said. “But, for the sake of argument, what if we limit our sample to white people?”
Venture capital was an intervention, a blunt force. The previous summer, the open-source startup had raised a Series B of two hundred and fifty million dollars, at a valuation of two billion dollars. With the funding came new expectations. The VCs had, after all, doubled down on a business whose foundation was the distribution of free software.
The driving values of venture capital were growth, acceleration, and fast returns, and they could be transformative. They helped explain the search-engine giant’s pivot from an academic archive of the world’s knowledge into an advertising juggernaut; the proliferation of ask forgiveness, not permission and done is better than perfect as mantras; the reason “software margins” was practically an aphrodisiac south of San Carlos. Once again, the open-source startup needed to grow up—a little faster this time.
The company had already grown by nearly two hundred people, to five hundred, since I had joined. It was beginning to look a lot like any other company—at least on the surface. There was talk of time sheets, talk of metrics. A spate of experienced corporate players joined the leadership team, and a spate of them left. Leadership was a revolving door. Every few months, Engineering went through a reorganization. No one knew what anyone else was working on; no one knew who was responsible. A high-level executive came on to do strategy; when I asked a coworker what he did, I was told he set strategic meetings.
The board installed a new CFO. Benefits were reevaluated, as were certain job functions. The Oval Office was torn out and replaced by a café, in homage to the startup’s decentralized, coffee-shop roots. The café was like every other café—people flirting with the baristas and pretending to work while looking at social media—except the drinks were free. The coder caves were replaced with an open-air workspace. The free swag shop was replaced by a vending machine. Policies were tightened; budgets were slashed. Members of the Social Impact team huddled over cups of tea, looking exhausted and grim. There was convincing evidence we were headed toward an acquisition or exit.
My coworkers and I speculated about who our new parents could be. There were only two real options: the search-engine giant or the highly litigious Seattle-based software conglomerate. The conglomerate had a history of trying to litigate the open-source software community into oblivion, but they had recently shuttered their competitive project, and our founders had not openly gloated.
One of the startup’s investors had also posted, to social media, a photograph of the conglomerate’s CEO deep in conversation with our CEO at a venture summit. The photograph circulated in private chats and back channels, and we scrutinized it with the obsessiveness of message-board detectives tackling unsolved crimes. “VCs love swinging their dicks at each other,” one of my friends in Engineering said. He was convinced we were going to be acquired by the Seattle-based conglomerate. “There’s no reason to post that otherwise. I’d be happy, to be honest. I’d probably end up working for one of them anyway.”
Salespeople followed capital; they washed in on the tide. They came into the office every day, bringing hypoallergenic designer dogs who got trapped in the elevators and defecated under the desks. They drank cold brew at the bar while flinging around acronyms. They monopolized the third-floor sound system, playing Top 40 and mellow EDM while the engineers migrated to the floors below.
I’ve seen this movie, I thought, as I watched men play sloppy, inarticulate games of Ping-Pong by the first-floor bar; as I walked onto empty elevators laced with aftershave; as I opened the fridge on the Sales floor to find it full of half-and-half. I’ve read this book before.
* * *
It seemed like half the tech workers I knew were starting to be interested in socialism—or, at least, interested in joking about it on social media, where people shared cat memes (Socialism meow!) and joked about disrupting capitalism. Something was stirring, or taking root. People were coming to politics for the first time through their white-collar labor. They were developing theoretical frameworks on the internet; they were beginning to identify with the Worker. They talked about universal basic income over free cocktails at the company bar.
On social media, there were whispers of dissent among people whose avatars were their fursonas. Site reliability engineers posted nuanced Marxist critiques in the middle of their workdays. A labor reckoning for the tech companies seemed to glimmer on the horizon, slowly taking shape.
With another early employee of the analytics startup, Noah was prototyping an app—application—to facilitate collective action in the workplace. “The critique, of course, is that we’re monetizing labor organizing,” Noah said when I went to see him in Berkeley. His cofounder saw it as a way to make capitalism function better, more efficiently; needless to say, the latter would be the investor pitch. They had considered going through the seed accelerator, until doing thirty seconds of research: Any industry that still has unions has potential energy that could be released by st
artups, the seed accelerator’s founder had microblogged. The accelerator claimed to want people who wanted to beat the system, but a tool for organizing workers was perhaps beating the system too hard. The wrong type of collaboration software.
At HQ, I cautiously expressed my excitement about the prospect of a tech workers’ union to an engineer. Maybe people would acknowledge the security guards if they had a shared interest, I said. Maybe the money would spread out a little bit. Maybe the people building the tools could have a say in how those tools were used. Maybe we shouldn’t all be so quick to identify with charismatic CEOs; maybe we shouldn’t assume that the money and the perks and the job market would be there forever; maybe we should factor in the possibility that we might age out. What were we doing, anyway, helping people become billionaires? Billionaires were the mark of a sick society. They shouldn’t exist. There was no moral structure in which such a vast accumulation of wealth should be acceptable.
“Please don’t start quoting Marx, telling me that our coworkers need to seize the means of production,” the engineer said, shaking his head. He had grown up poor, he reminded me; he had spent years working on actual assembly lines before teaching himself to code. “It’s not about a means of solidarity or longevity for them. It’s just about personal leverage. When I was exposed to asbestos, nobody doing comp-sci at an Ivy League was showing up to help.” I had not chosen the right audience. I was not prepared for this argument.
This was just the next phase of the artisanal fetish, the engineer said. It was like LARPing, like Burning Man. “It’s a working-class MMOG,” he said, shooting me a withering look. “We are not vulnerable people.”
