by Anna Wiener
I was always looking for the emotional narrative, the psychological explanation, the personal history. Some exculpatory story on which to train my sympathy. It wasn’t so simple as wanting to believe that adulthood was a psychic untangling of adolescence, willful revisionist history. My obsession with the spiritual, sentimental, and political possibilities of the entrepreneurial class was an ineffectual attempt to alleviate my own guilt about participating in a globally extractive project, but more important, it was a projection: they would become the next power elite. I wanted to believe that as generations turned over, those coming into economic and political power would build a different, better, more expansive world, and not just for people like themselves.
Later, I would mourn these conceits. Not only because this version of the future was constitutionally impossible—such arbitrary and unaccountable power was, after all, the problem—but also because I was repeating myself. I was looking for stories; I should have seen a system.
The young men of Silicon Valley were doing fine. They loved their industry, loved their work, loved solving problems. They had no qualms. They were builders by nature, or so they believed. They saw markets in everything, and only opportunities. They had inexorable faith in their own ideas and their own potential. They were ecstatic about the future. They had power, wealth, and control. The person with the yearning was me.
We were too old to use innocence as an excuse. Hubris, maybe. Indifference, preoccupation. Idealism. A certain complacency endemic to people for whom things had, in recent years, turned out okay. We had assumed it would all blow over. We had just been so busy with work, lately.
When it started to look like perhaps we were wrong—perhaps the United States presidency might actually go to a real estate developer who had once played the part of a successful businessman on reality television—everyone came up with a last-ditch, Hail Mary pass at civic participation. A group of founders poured money into get-out-the-vote initiatives, trying to encourage millennials to perform an in-person task via targeted advertising on mobile apps and social networks. Digital donations flowed. The open-source startup decided it would run a banner on Election Day, reminding users in the United States that it was Election Day.
In the grand tradition of affluent white Americans living in coastal cities in times of political crisis and social upheaval, I had turned inward. I thought we had it in the bag. I saw Silicon Valley as an unstoppable train; I had bought into tech’s self-flattering grandiosity, and trusted things would turn around in its favor. I didn’t know who was more delusional: the entrepreneurial class, for thinking they could change the trajectory of history—or me, for believing them.
* * *
At the beginning of November, I opened my laptop to find the Terms of Service team puzzling over a repository that claimed to be compiling research on a sex-trafficking and pedophilia ring run out of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. I scrolled through chat backlog, trying to catch up. The content had something to do with leaked emails from the presidential campaign, but everything was blurring together. It all carried a whiff of conspiratorial thinking.
I couldn’t bring myself to engage. I didn’t know what I was looking at, and didn’t want to. My teammates seemed to have it under control. I felt a deep gratitude for them, their willingness to tackle flare-ups; their good humor and curiosity about the matted underbelly of the internet. I turned my attention to copyright takedowns as they dropped emojis of spinning slices of pizza into our team chat. I didn’t give the repository a second thought, until it was all over the news.
Later, I would wonder if I had missed it because I was more of a product of the tech industry—with its context aversion, and emphasis on speed and scale, its overwhelming myopia—than I wanted to admit. Or maybe it was personal; maybe I wasn’t analytical. Maybe I wasn’t a systems thinker.
Even so: the systems thinkers missed it, too.
* * *
Patrick and I met for dinner. I found him sitting in the back of the restaurant, reading the house zine. He waited for me to shrug off my coat, then leaned across the table. “Is winter coming for the tech industry?” he asked. It was never winter in San Francisco, I thought; it was always winter. Mark Twain. Then I realized he was referencing a popular fantasy novel: winter meant the other shoe dropping.
There had been increased attention on Silicon Valley during the campaign season. The same publications that had, until recently, analyzed tech companies’ cafeteria selections with a level of detail usually reserved for SEC filings were beginning to reconsider the booster position. People were beginning to talk about antitrust, consumer product safety regulations, patent and copyright law. They were beginning to turn a critical eye to internet addiction and the ways tech companies were exacerbating economic inequality. They were catching on to the misinformation and conspiratorial content spreading across social networks. The industry was used to getting attention, but not like this.
The tech industry would be fine, I said, dipping a piece of bread into a trough of olive oil. If a reckoning was coming for tech, and a result was fewer startups making collaboration software or selling button-down shirts or underpaying contract workers, that didn’t seem like the end of the world to me. I was not worried about the tech industry. In any case, there seemed to be much graver possibilities. Patrick nodded. He looked as exhausted as I felt. It wasn’t the moment to relitigate the virtues of the Valley.
I wanted the optimistic perspective on what might happen, I said. What did he have for me? I was so used to him pushing a counternarrative, cheering me up, making the future feel new. He was so productive, so effective. Surely he had ideas about solutions. Patrick looked down at his hands. “I really don’t know,” he said. “It’s quite dire.”
Toward the end of our meal, he apologized—he had to take a work call, he said, but it wouldn’t be long. His company was in the final stage of closing a new round. Just an extra anchor in the future. There was so much political uncertainty. We split the check and left, zipping our black down jackets against the cold.
Patrick joined a conference call as we walked down Folsom Street. The streets were dark, abandoned. He took a tablet out of his backpack, opened his email, and used a finger to scribble his signature on several documents. I was struck by the comfort and confidence with which he moved, very literally, through the world. I tried to loosen my grip on the handles of my tote bag.
We passed beneath the elevated highway, toward SoMa. I glanced at Patrick, who was chatting happily in brisk, complete paragraphs. If winter did come, I wondered what that would mean for him. I had no concept of the stakes. I couldn’t decide which one of us thought we had more to lose.
A few weeks later, reading the heavily moderated message board, I would come to an easy conclusion. The commentariat was discussing Patrick’s startup, which had been in the news for its latest fund-raising round: the valuation was among the Valley’s highest for private companies. In the ambient light beneath the freeway that night, he had become one of the youngest self-made billionaires.
* * *
I called the developer who had claimed he was responsible for the high-profile leak. Is there anything you can do? I asked, feeling like a child. I pawed at the carpet with my foot.
He was quiet for a moment. “I’m not exactly sure what you’re asking for,” he said. “This is really slow work. It could take months, and there’s no guarantee.” I wasn’t exactly sure what I was after either. Some validation of the utopian belief in information. Some justification of the networks, humming along at scale. Anyway, there weren’t months. There were just a few days.
* * *
I drove up to Reno with two friends from college and a coworker from the Sales team. We checked into an undersea-themed casino, like a bachelorette party with nothing to celebrate. None of us had thought to bring a swimsuit for the casino’s pools; none of us played the slots. We wandered the grounds and channeled our discomfort into social media consumables, posting photos of
the casino’s indoor palm trees and illuminated water features, fountains of spurting mermen and dolphins backlit blue. We lay two to a bed in our room that night, sleepless and alert in the dark.
The next morning, we made our way to a volunteer center, turning in to a strip mall behind an electric car with California plates. As we stood in line for clipboards, I realized I did not know where we were. We had plugged the address into a mapping app and followed it blindly, just as we had driven up from San Francisco. I could have been anywhere.
The next two days were spent canvassing, walking through suburban sprawl. I hated our conspicuousness, the imposition on strangers; hated that they all knew what was coming the minute we clomped up onto the porch. In working-class neighborhoods with streets that were quiet and still, half the parked cars bore windshield decals from ride-sharing startups. My coworker fretted about rumors she was hearing of the Sales team starting layoffs. PRAY FOR JESUS TO LOWER INFLATION, advised a bumper sticker.
On Election Day, engorged with anxiety and optimism, I secured an enamel pin shaped like a uterus to my jacket and went to scout breakfast. A line of men sat at the slot machines, smoking. As the woman behind the casino coffee bar rang me up, I asked whether she had a plan in place to vote that day, reciting the opening of a script I still needed to memorize. “Not this year,” she said, shaking her head. I was taken aback. I don’t blame you, I said, not sure if I meant it.
Few people answered the doorbell that day. We trudged along, sitting on curbs to share water and snacks. One of my college friends wore a nameplate necklace that said NASTY WOMAN and a T-shirt with a cat that read THIS PUSSY GRABS BACK. On my phone, celebrities looked glamorous in thrifted pantsuits, and strangers rubbed linty I VOTED stickers on the graves of suffragettes. A venture capitalist posted a photo of a bottle of champagne beside a bottle of vodka, adding a grayscale filter for historical effect. Friends shared selfies from outside their polling places, faces staunch and optimistic, drenched in fall light. The company chat rooms were uncharacteristically subdued.
Life in the attention economy had made me oblivious. My social media feeds overflowed with feminist slogans, iconography, and products: ceramic vases shaped like naked breasts, baby onesies that read THE FUTURE IS FEMALE. This had been my internet for months.
It did not transfer to suburban Nevada. Women stood behind screen doors and looked at us, with our clipboards and patriotic stickers and aestheticized coastal corporate feminism, and simply shook their heads. At the curve of a cul-de-sac, in an affluent neighborhood of compact SUVs and ornate landscaping, we leaned against our rental car, bent over our phones. I unpinned the uterus and put it in my pocket. It had all seemed possible. It had seemed real. As if in slow motion, I felt the force of the swerve.
The polls were closing. The air was beginning to cool.
EPILOGUE
For months after the election, my friends and coworkers were not doing well. Stomachaches, insomnia, astrology. They drank too much. They took up moderate vaping. They went to meditative sound baths and considered microdosing to stave off looming depression or regain lost productivity. They appended their email salutations with phrases like “given the circumstances” and “despite the news.” Everyone engaged in deep and irresponsible magical thinking.
On the heavily moderated message board, the commentariat discussed a Marshall Plan of rationality, a new enlightenment. On social media, a sales leader at an education software company suggested crowdfunding private planes to fly over red counties and drop leaflets with facts about the travel ban, and a former executive at the analytics startup asked his connections if anyone could recommend a place to buy gold bars. Time to get good at crypto, everyone said. Those of us in or adjacent to the tech industry advised friends and family members to download encrypted communications apps. Our solution, as ever: more technology.
CEOs and venture capitalists, oh-shit patriots with fiduciary duties, extended olive branches to elected officials. Industry leaders protested in the airports, or at least posed for photographs. They advocated for more generous immigration policies, prioritizing immigrants who knew how to code.
Everyone was staying up late, anxiety-scrolling, and the advertising algorithms stayed up, too. Friends bought weighted blankets designed for people with sensory processing disorders, marketed to them on social media, and lay underneath with their arms at their sides, waiting for the oxytocin to drop. Fascist ideology and paranoid conspiracies circulated. Hoaxing and misinformation and memes, long the trappings of message-board culture, moved into the civic sphere. Trolling was a new political currency.
There was Nazi iconography in the news, and Nazi rhetoric in the Terms of Service team inbox. Our field was still new, and not unified. Depending on the company, our work was called Policy, or Community Policy, or Trust and Safety, or Community and Safety, or, simply, Safety; depending on the company, the team was six years or six months old. No one was equipped to adjudicate speech for the millions of people spending their lives online. Outside the industry, people argued about the First Amendment. Inside, we were calculating risk, determining the seriousness of threats, trying to react thoughtfully but nimbly. The nature of online abuse evolved quickly; it was always just a little out of grasp.
At a gathering of people in the field, a high-level employee of a household-name startup approached me to talk about our industry’s new burden of responsibility. We balanced paper plates covered in cheese and fruit. We passed our anxieties back and forth. My interlocutor leaned in conspiratorially. “There are no adults in the White House,” he said, with a trace of a smile. “We’re the government now.”
* * *
I thought, for a while, that everything would change. I thought that the party was over. I thought the industry was in for a reckoning, that it was the beginning of the end, that what I had experienced in San Francisco was the final stage of a prelapsarian era, the end of our generational Gold Rush, an unsustainable age of excess.
Then I left the house. There was the world, with its addicts and joggers, its fortified strollers and leather boutiques and swishing eucalyptus, everything bright and intact. Cranes swung over warehouses stuffed with new transplants. Shuttles crested the hills, riding the brakes on descent. The city and the industry, bound by the ecosystem, continued to cycle and churn.
* * *
I could have stayed in my job forever, which was how I knew it was time to go. The money and the ease of the lifestyle weren’t enough to mitigate the emotional drag of the work: the burnout, the repetition, the intermittent toxicity. The days did not feel distinct. I felt a widening emptiness, rattling around my studio every morning, rotating in my desk chair. I had the luxury, if not the courage, to do something about it.
In early 2018, I left the open-source startup. I wanted a change, and I wanted to write. My impulse, over the past few years, had been to remove myself from my own life, to watch from the periphery and try to see the vectors, the scaffolding, the systems at play. Psychologists might refer to this as dissociation; I considered it the sociological approach. It was, for me, a way out of unhappiness. It did make things more interesting.
Leaving a remote workplace was anticlimactic. On my last day, I had a sixty-second exit interview, conducted over video chat. I dropped a waving-hand emoji into the Terms of Service chat room and posted a brief farewell to the company’s internal message board. I didn’t know you worked here, wrote a colleague, in the comments. Then I sat on my bed with my laptop, watching my access to internal platforms be revoked, one by one. Every 404 error like a light going out. A whole world, zippered up—easy come, easy go.
After three and a half years, most of my employee options had vested. I was ambivalent about exercising them, despite the rumors of a pending acquisition: the stock was not cheap, and I was uncertain that it would amount to anything.
I convinced myself I had to play the game. On the ninetieth day of my ninety-day purchase window, I hand-delivered a check to HQ for the entirety o
f my savings account, to buy as many of my vested options as I could. As I stood in the guest entrance, waiting for the stock plan administrator to collect the paperwork, I watched my former coworkers chatting happily with one another in the on-site coffee shop and felt, wrenchingly, that leaving had been a huge mistake.
Certain unflattering truths: I had felt unassailable behind the walls of power. Society was shifting, and I felt safer inside the empire, inside the machine. It was preferable to be on the side that did the watching than on the side being watched.
* * *
Former employees of the open-source startup still hung out in a chat room, an unaffiliated alumni club where people tried to poach one another for their startups between debates over whether or not our stock options would ever be worth anything. They talked shit and traded speculative financial advice. They continued to swap photographs of their home-office setups and their octopus-cat stuffed animals. They waxed nostalgic about early employee summits, lost weekends, blowout parties in the office. That time they completed a team-building treasure hunt involving selfies with a stripper. That time they stashed acid at HQ. Their reminiscences hardened into shared mythology. Stories I knew, a shadow oral history, remained untold.
In June, news broke that the open-source startup had been purchased for seven and a half billion dollars, by the highly litigious Seattle-based conglomerate. The conglomerate had, in the nineties, attempted to stomp down the open-source software movement—but this was a new era, insisted everyone involved in the deal.
In the ex-employee chat room, people compared secondhand information about the share price; they posted celebratory photographs of themselves in octopus-cat T-shirts. TFW you wake up retired, wrote one of the early employees. Another expressed her ambivalence about the windfall. It’s like having a conflict diamond, she wrote. It’s valuable, but it came at an unforgivable human cost.
