by Dan Conway
The engineers who created the original machines are long dead, but the Machines live on, spawning and growing to infect each and every action an employee takes at Acme, from filing for mileage reimbursement to building access code certification, disaster readiness location verification, daily time tracking, and registration for maternity leave via the X89 system. God help those booking travel through the People Matter! Portal.
Chapter Five
Coffee and Confusion
I worked feverishly to gain a foothold. The Machines put up a stiff resistance. At the same time that I was trying to establish credibility with my team and show strategic insights to the big shots in California, Red State, and New York, I had the mounting number of email chains I’d been added to. I was trying to sign up for health insurance, enroll in the employee giving campaign, and complete a mountain of required online training courses. The computers crashed constantly, at all the wrong times.
I had a full head of steam driven by fear and ambition. When I fully grasped the importance of the levels of management, two thoughts came to mind. First and most importantly, Holy shit, I hope I can do what is required of a Fourth Level. And secondly, How do I get to Fifth Level? That’s where the real money was made and where I’d one day earn the salary I was (not) promised.
I worked my ass off. I’ve never been an outstanding sleeper, so once convinced I wasn’t going to fall back asleep, I’d get up early, sometimes at four. I’d drive to BART, get on a train like a zombie and arrive in downtown San Francisco when even the financial types on an East Coast schedule were just getting started.
Driven by a feeling that I was ahead of the game, I’d make myself a strong cup of coffee in the corporate kitchen and settle in for two or three hours of work before anyone arrived. I’d already have an inbox full of emails from Red State and New York. to deal with. I couldn’t respond to all of them, so I had to quickly figure out which ones needed my attention. Red State was particularly aggressive in asking my opinion on issues that I’d barely grasped or was not yet familiar with. Ok, I told myself. This is the big leagues, so suck it up and get it done.
There were numerous weekly calls with large regional teams comprised of people like me all over the country. Some were pure fluff and could be blown off, like Widget Wednesdays!, an internal training call that no one joined, but I didn’t know that yet. There were impromptu calls foisted onto my schedule by Red State and New York to discuss new ideas, projects, and initiatives dreamed up by ambitious executives who had bright ideas for California. I was often the only California representative invited to attend and was charged with sharing the “good news” about our assignments with the executives down the hall.
When normal business hours began at 9:00 a.m., I’d walk down the hall to one or more offices and explain to them what I (we?) had been asked to do. They frequently didn’t understand the strategy. Sometimes I didn’t fully understand it, either. In my dialogue with Red State, I hadn’t asked enough questions. In fairness to me, when I did ask questions, Red State implied I was either too stupid to understand what was being asked or that I had caught the California disease of defying central authority.
Since most of the people with these good ideas were higher than me on the chain, I couldn’t simply ignore them. The incentives of the system encouraged them to offer more ideas. They were simply hunting for their own credit in the corporate structure we were all operating in.
Red State was constantly asking me, “Do they have the votes?” in reference to our California lobbyist’s attempt to pass legislation beneficial to the company. At first, I shared my thoughts candidly. But I found that Red State used this sensitive information as a weapon, making me look like a careless gossip at best and a turncoat at worst. One of my new co-workers in California spelled it out for me, though I was already getting the picture. “You need to be very careful about what you tell Red State, or else people here will shut you out.”
I also had to protect Red State. California had a special relationship with New York. After I told my California workmates about the projects Red State asked us to pursue, they would backchannel to New York. The chronic complaint was that Red State wanted red-state strategies in blue-state California. California used my relayed requests to make Red State look like ham-fisted yokels. This would get me in trouble with Red State who, after being questioned and castigated by New York, would come to the conclusion that I’d fucked up describing the original direction. Or maybe that I was too stupid to understand it in the first place.
To be honest, sometimes I was slow on the uptake. But on many occasions, I felt I was being handed a half-baked idea fired off on a whim, of roughly the same quality as gibberish jotted down when waking from a dream.
In the afternoons, in between lunch, conference calls, and in-person meetings, I drank a lot of coffee. I needed to be juiced to keep up with the emails and projects. My own team was only marginally helpful.
I was not a particularly skilled manager.
Acme believed in the cult of the leader. I’d done good work in my career, but if I was honest with myself, I never felt comfortable acting as a leader. But that was the only path I saw to move up and make more money. I had also had mostly negative experiences working with so-called leaders, who usually had as many blind spots as I did. I felt most comfortable when I was doing the actual work, forgetting for a moment about having to defend my status in the chain of command.
Now that I was at my limits trying to establish myself on so many fronts, my confidence flagged. To build morale and show off my generosity, I treated my whole team to lunch one day at a high-end taqueria a few blocks away. Normally, lunch was my critical time to recharge, an urgent hour-long break from the storm of demands. I’d go off on my own, pull up a chair at the dingy Thai food place on Kearney Street, and inhale green curry with pork and the sports page.
I felt my battery blinking red at this team lunch. Two old hats told a long story about times past. They shot each other a look when I asked for the definition of a well-known widget acronym. Since I was the boss, everyone was paying close attention whenever I spoke. It made me uncomfortable. Every time I talked, little bits of taco shell flew from my mouth at my team. I was the only one who couldn’t control this talking-while-eating thing. Flip Side had apparently worked his way into my central nervous system.
I was able to weed out a few people who were jaded, ineffective, and toxic. It took enormous effort. The Machines required performance to be graded on a long list of nonsensical criteria, a soup of mumbo-jumbo best practices in vogue over the past forty years. The criteria had solidified in the Machines like fossils in stone, cholesterol in arteries. I had to demonstrate underperformance by rating employees according to categories like “Ability to Inspire through Program Management” and “Willingness to Lead through Teamwork.” I was looking for the field that asked, “Is this Person a Useless Asshole?” Because when you work with someone day in and day out, you know.
On the other end of the staffing life cycle, the Machines required Machiavellian and outdated public job postings that made us look like we were searching for cold-blooded killers. At a time when Acme was doubling down on smiley faces, perky hashtags and impossibly happy people in their TV ads, the job description listed a preference for candidates who could “influence through persuasion tactics,” and “achieve policy objectives by directing public sentiment.” In other words, if you were one of the operatives in The Manchurian Candidate, hit me up!
The systems all seemed so absurd and a waste of everyone’s time. I’d experienced bureaucracy and bullshit at past jobs, of course. All those things were concentrated and magnified at Acme.
Since Acme was one of the oldest companies in the Fortune 500, it made sense that these systems were entrenched. It felt like the end-stage of a dystopian corporate nightmare path many large companies might follow as they aged over the decades. I honestly didn’t give it too much thought other than constantly thinking, What a hassle. If I w
as ever going to escape, I first needed to survive and ultimately climb this ladder, no matter how badly it was shaking.
Chapter Six
Ethereum, a New Kind of Machine
In his famous 1937 book The Modern Firm, economist Ronald Coase Noah explains why corporations have run the world economy for so long. They allow contracts to be settled, and they make it possible for people to work together to get things done. By and large, people have been working under this template for generations. The litany of complaints at your local watering hole are the bedrock of the corporation: chains of command, bureaucracy, and a culture that values polished professionals with similar temperaments and few rough edges.
In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari points out that man is built to work together, to some degree. But Harari’s work doesn’t study how deep or long-term this cooperation is intended to be.
I’m skeptical that early humans would recognize today’s version of cooperation in the modern corporation. Take a group of prehistoric men on a deer hunt. Put them in chairs all day long and instruct them to send each other carefully typed messages through a glowing screen. Inform them that their day will be punctuated by brief spurts of rubbing up against each other’s insecurities and molesting each other’s blind spots across a round table down the hall, according to a hierarchy and rules enforced by the Machines and corporate culture. That’s not what they signed up for.
Of course, it’s not always that bad for everyone. But the stats show that for many of us, it is. According to a 2016 Society for Human Resource Management study, fewer than one-third of employees are very satisfied with the teamwork at their companies. We’ve become so used to the misery of modern work that we accept it like a sliver deep in our heel.
Despite low levels of job satisfaction, most economists would say the firm remains the best way to organize humans for work. Which reminds me of what Winston Churchill said about modern government: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all of the others.” The same could have been said of the modern firm. Until it wasn’t.
While I was struggling to master the corporate world, which had always eluded me, a young genius named Vitalik Buterin was creating Ethereum. More on Vitalik later.
Ethereum is a “Turing complete blockchain,” which means it can be programmed to do anything. Whereas Bitcoin has the functionality of a calculator and can transact digital money, Ethereum has the functionality of a computer and is a trustless—thus, supremely trustworthy —platform to transact any type of business.
To understand this, you need to think of Ethereum not as a way to buy coffee with digital money but as a computer that can be accessed with the cryptocurrency, ether (ETH).
The role of trust is a big deal in blockchain philosophy. Corporations do business by pooling resources and establishing trust with their customers, employees, and partners. As I mentioned, up until now, scaling trust was an expensive undertaking that required centralization in the form of compliance applications, organizational charts, and homogeneous corporate cultures.
The computer systems that comprise the Machines at Acme are basically trust engines. They hum along at all hours demanding adherence to corporate rules for workplace behavior, expense reports, travel guidelines, salary increases, and a million other things. These reports provide trust to managers to verify that their departments are creating economic value, as promised.
Ethereum’s killer app is the smart contract, an unalterable, ironclad agreement between two or more parties that is validated by the blockchain. If something happens at point X, the blockchain enforces the contracted action at point Y. The people whose computers are “mining blocks” (anyone who wants to) are rewarded with a small amount of ETH for validating these transactions on the blockchain. This is the engine that keeps Ethereum running without any central control or funding.
As a fully functional third-party ledger, Ethereum has the potential, as it matures, to run corporate alternatives as decentralized entities. These decentralized corporations running on a blockchain wouldn’t need, or even allow, centralized control. This could theoretically allow people to work without becoming employees of a firm or having to play by its rules.
This would allow everyone, including those deemed less desirable in today’s economy, to earn a living by contributing to projects that suit them. An elderly lady with no corporate experience but a lot of intellectual curiosity could help design a decentralized recipe-sharing application just by plugging into the blockchain. An ex-con could jump in and contribute to a decentralized government accounting audit. An insecure man like myself could write content for a public relations campaign without having to fake confidence. We’d all be rewarded with ether or other cryptocurrency, which could be converted to dollars.
It sounds touchy-feely, a little scary, and also too good to be true. We aren’t there yet, by a long shot. But a lot of future-looking, smart people believe it is coming.
Naval Ravikant is CEO of AngelList. He is one of the best at explaining how the blockchain-based Internet could be the heart of a new, decentralized economy. Why does Ravikant think this is more likely to happen now, years after the migration to the gig economy and independent contractors is underway? Blockchains powered by cryptocurrency. He says, “The Internet evolved media from physical to digital, from paid to free, from editorial to social. Next up: from corporate to ownerless.”
The gig economy provides some measure of freedom, but it still requires people to play by the corporate rules, like Google’s army of contractors, or hand over a disproportionate cut to its market maker, like Uber and Airbnb. In the gig economy, workers more or less still need to know the right people, laugh at the right jokes, and have the right credentials.
On this open Internet, blockchains would allow independent agents to compete on an even playing field. They would choose when they want to work in communion with those they select, for a price they set. The cartels who now make the rules and are rich enough to own the trust machines would no longer have a stranglehold on the economy.
As Ravikant explains, this would be groundbreaking economic freedom. He says, “Blockchains are a new invention that allow meritorious participants in an open network to govern without a ruler.”
The results would be transformative, not just for individuals but for business as we know it. He says, “An economy run by markets/blockchains instead of middlemen/authorities would make our current society look like a communist bureaucracy.”
Techcrunch summed up the revolutionary potential of Ethereum in the article “Business in the Age of Ethereum”: “Blockchain technology provides a platform for people to work together with the persistence and stability of an organization but without the hierarchy.”
In an article titled “Disrupting the Trust Business,” The Economist placed this invention in its historical context: “If double-entry bookkeeping freed accounting from the merchant’s head, the blockchain frees it from the confines of an organisation.” Eventually, over time, as The Economist asserts, “Some companies could be no more than a bundle of smart contracts, forming true virtual firms that live only on a blockchain.”
Chapter Seven
Taking the Edge Off
It was clear that this job was more difficult than I’d imagined it would be. I was determined to make it work. The stakes were obviously high, considering the three souls Eileen and I were raising. So I was happy to blow off steam when I could.
On the drinking front, thankfully, our peer group at this time—friends from school and the neighborhood—were enjoying heavy alcohol consumption. I didn’t usually stand out. We’d all been thrown together, and we had a lot in common. We showed up at the same places, like Little Gym, Small Heathens’ Drumming Class at the rec center, and the big slide at Coyote Point. It was easy to meet up at Celia’s for a big margarita dinner. It was a lot of fun.
I’d go to Beverages and More on two-cent Tuesdays and load up on wine, using the sale a
s an excuse to buy a big stash. Eileen constantly asked if I was drinking a normal amount, and I’d feed her a steady stream of bullshit, assuring her that I was.
Eileen and I would sometimes have margaritas together. That was fun. I’d make mine “authentic” with just tequila and a splash of lime and hers “normal” with a lot of sweetener. We talked about having a two-person 80s dance party in the kitchen after the kids were asleep, but we rarely found the time.
I was finding my pleasure from the booze, rather than my family. With my hectic work schedule, answering emails late into the night, and having to care for the kids during every free moment, I relied on the alcohol to accelerate my decompression. Eileen was as busy as I was. We never had time to talk, and I could never tell what was on her mind. It was clear we were drifting apart, but that seemed less important than keeping everything running.
I had also been dealing with another major stressor involving my sister, Maureen.
Maureen was sixteen years older than me. She’d always been the most unabashedly Conway-like among us. Once, at her daughter Mary’s post-softball game gathering at Round Table Pizza, La Bamba played on the jukebox. That was Maureen’s favorite song, so she jumped up on the table and sang the whole thing, becoming an instant legend. To be clear, no alcohol was involved.
When each of my children was born, Maureen stayed in the hospital waiting room no matter how long it took, despite any other obligations. She loved underdogs. She was always drawn to the quietest people at any party. She wanted them to have some fun. Later, she might flash her boobs. Once I mooned a man in the park who was filming me because my dog was off-leash. I briefly feared I’d be arrested for a sex crime. I realized I’d been channeling Maureen.
