Live Work Work Work Die by Corey Pein

Author:Corey Pein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

VII

The Aristocracy of Brains

The best part about the torpid mixture of indifference and contempt that greeted my ideas in Silicon Valley was that it brought a swift end to my entrepreneurial folly. This meant that I would soon have plenty of free time to contemplate and investigate the greater injustices I’d witnessed, many of them perpetrated by a managerial class that was convinced its cutthroat profiteering made the world a better place. Even better, it meant that soon I wouldn’t need to spend one more second in an airless conference room listening to some techie talk about his passion for sales metrics and his grand plan for a me-too smartphone app designed to make corporate advertising even more inescapable and corrosive than it already was. I found it taxing to spend so much time with such hysterical optimists—that was why I so valued my fleeting interactions with Lawrence. I’m not saying he would’ve made the world’s greatest roommate, but he was fun in small doses, and his idiosyncratic illusions were not the kind of pipe dreams that threatened to enslave the populace. I did not, however, believe his New Agey woo-woo about manifesting success by cultivating inner peace. When it comes to the question of why some feast on caviar and champagne while others starve in the streets, I’m inclined to agree with Rome, the union leader: The answer comes not from within, but from without. Politics made this world, even the digital parts.

In a land of righteous engineers, this simple observation constitutes a kind of heresy. Lawrence’s belief in material success as a manifestation of inner clarity, conviction, or drive was shared by just about everyone in the Bay Area tech scene. Silicon Valley prefers to tell its story in terms of individualistic entrepreneurial achievement against the odds, marked by dramatic moments of insight, in the mythical tradition of Isaac Newton and the Buddha—not as I see it: as a twisted multigenerational shovel-selling enterprise that goes all the way back to the Gold Rush. Code is pure, but politics is messy. Although a klutz with computers, Rome understood the nature of the tech industry more clearly because he did not shy from the gritty work of sorting out who gets what, when, and how. “We had to straighten out this congressman here who said something real positive about the sharing economy,” he told me at one point in our conversation. “We said, ‘What the fuck? Don’t you understand what it is?’”

“What did you tell him?” I asked.

“We said, ‘This isn’t any sharing economy—this is taking the responsibility of employment away from employers and putting it one hundred percent on people’s backs.’”

Rome’s diagnosis was so simple and succinct, even a member of Congress could understand it. Of course, such hypocrisies are not confined to the phony “sharing economy.” They span the industry. Similarly, sympathy for the tech company perspective spans American political institutions, beginning with both major parties. “I look at the Democrats as the mafia,” Rome told me. “They make us pay them for protection but they don’t do shit for us.

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