by Anna Wiener
What’s the wearable thing, I asked an engineer sitting in my row. “Oh, you know,” she said, waving dismissively toward the stage, with its rainbow-lit scrim. “Smart bras. Tech jewelry. They’re the only kind of hardware these guys can imagine women caring about.” What would a smart bra even do? I wondered, touching the band of my dumb underwire.
The male allies, all trim, white executives, took their seats and began offering wisdom on how to manage workplace discrimination. “The best thing you can do is excel,” said a VP at the search-engine giant whose well-publicized hobby was stratosphere jumping. “Just push through whatever boundaries you see in front of you, and be great.”
Don’t get discouraged, another implored—just keep working hard. Throughout the theater, pencils scratched.
“Speak up, and be confident,” said a third. “Speak up, and be heard.”
Engineers tended to complexify things, the stratosphere jumper said—like pipelines.
A woman in the audience slapped her pencil down. “Bingo!” she called out.
* * *
The open-source startup was still coming out of crisis mode. It was as if someone had switched the lights on at a party, and everyone was scrambling to tidy up, looking around for paper towels and trash bags, rubbing red eyes and scrounging for mints. Installing Human Resources and promoting employees with no managerial experience to middle-management roles with no authority. Rolling up the “In Meritocracy We Trust” flags. Removing “stay classy” from the job listings. Striking the culture-fit interview. Disabling the prompt, /metronome, that dropped an animated GIF of a pendulous cock into the all-company chat room. Hiring bartenders to enforce a drink limit. Wondering what else might be broken, and how quickly it could be fixed.
Call it crisis management, corporate responsibility, or catching up to the zeitgeist: the open-source startup decided to become an industry leader in the “diversity space.” The CEO hired a management consultant, a bubbly and no-bullshit Latina woman who had graduated from a top business school after attending a renowned private university in Palo Alto that was largely considered a feeder for the tech industry. The consultant’s undergraduate class, in the early 1990s, was infamous for having produced a group of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and libertarians who had jump-started the internet economy, become dynastically wealthy by their thirties, and given back to society by reinvesting in the ecosystem. The consultant’s firsthand familiarity with this milieu—and her knowledge of who, from their cohort, had not accessed such fortune—suggested to me that it was not a coincidence she had dedicated her career to the Sisyphean task of proving to people in positions of power that discrimination in tech not only existed, but should, and could, be addressed.
At HQ, we assembled in small groups in the Rat Pack room for unconscious-bias trainings and roundtable discussions. The conference room could have served as a soundstage for a show about 1960s advertising executives, if not for the flat-screen mounted at one end, on which a grid of employees, disembodied in London and Tokyo and South Carolina, bobbled and glitched. We sat around the heavy wood table, swiveling in orange bucket chairs, and talked about microaggressions, intersectionality, and the cultural values embedded in code. I eyed the silver bar cart and the elegant midcentury credenza, and wondered whether it might also be worth spending some time on the cultural values embedded in interior design.
The consultant knew her audience. She pitched diversity to us as if it were enterprise software. Many companies treated diversity as window dressing, she said: diversity and inclusion were used as a PR play, a nice-to-have, which often manifested as a siloed office on the Human Resources floor that occasionally proffered tax-deductible gifts to uncontroversial nonprofit organizations. But diversity, the consultant explained, wasn’t just about doing the right thing. We needed to see diversity as a business asset, and as central to the value proposition. It was critical for innovation and needed to be treated as such, at every level of the company.
Most of my coworkers were excited about the diversity and inclusion initiatives. Like the majority of tech workers I knew, they were open-minded, smart, and receptive to new ideas—though for some of them, the discussion was hardly novel, only overdue. That the company was starting to take them seriously was hugely gratifying.
There was a smaller subset, however, for whom viewing power through an intersectional lens was a new way of looking at the world, one they were being told was not only the new normal in their workplace, but a morally correct position. They asked whether, by focusing on diversity, the company was lowering the bar. Just asking questions, they said: What about diversity of experience? What about diversity of thought? Tech had a lot of Asians and Asian-Americans, they pointed out—maybe not in leadership roles, but still, shouldn’t that count for something? They argued about the pipeline problem. They argued about genetic predisposition. They argued that tech wasn’t perfect, but at least it was more open-minded than other industries, like finance. They internalized the critique of meritocracy as a critique of open-source. The consultant listened patiently as my colleagues microaggressed her.
“Meritocracy”: a word that had originated in social satire and was adopted in sincerity by an industry that could be its own best caricature. It was the operating philosophy for companies that flirted with administering IQ tests to prospective and existing employees; for startups full of men who looked strikingly similar to the CEO; for investors undisturbed by the allocation of 96 percent of venture capital to men; for billionaires who still believed they were underdogs because their wealth was bound up in equity.
I understood why the idea appealed, especially at a time of great economic insecurity, and especially for a generation that had come of age around the financial collapse. Nobody was guaranteed any future, I knew. But for those who seemed to be emerging from the wreckage victorious—namely, those of us who had secured a place in an industry that had steamrolled its way to relevance—the meritocracy narrative was a cover for lack of structural analysis. It smoothed things out. It was flattering, and exculpatory, and painful for some people to part with.
The consultant assembled a task force of employees, a sort of internal focus group, and called it a diversity council. I applied to join; my desire to be a teacher’s pet was so deeply ingrained, it was basically pathological. Once a week, twenty of us sat around a conference table and discussed the startup’s problems. We complained. We divulged. We processed. A woman who built internal tools recommended that the men read Feminism Is for Everybody, and they solemnly nodded. It all felt like intellectually engaged, important work. I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to do it.
* * *
Late one morning, on the way to HQ, I spotted a middle-aged man in the light-rail station wearing one of the octopus-cat hoodies. He was sitting upright on a piece of cardboard, a bent paper cup beside him, and was not wearing shoes. On his ankle was an open wound. Below us, I could see a train, maybe mine, pulling in. I rushed through the turnstile, wondering if I should have given him money, then wondering if I only felt that way because of the octopus-cat. I found a seat on the train and pressed my head against the window like a child.
The train emerged aboveground and onto the Embarcadero, curving past a gigantic pop-art sculpture of a bow and arrow. The bay glittered and lapped, seagulls descended on a neglected bakery bag, and I felt disturbed. The man seemed like a novelistic apparition, a hallucination.
When I got into the office, I described to a coworker how surreal it had been, like whiplash. It was the city’s socioeconomic gap personified, I said. It felt even more significant that the man in the light-rail station was black, and not just because San Francisco was losing its black population at a rapid clip. To my knowledge, our company had just two black employees.
Just so on the nose, I said. My coworker nodded. “That is really sad,” he said. We stood there, as if observing a moment of silence. “I wonder whose it was,” he said. “We’re not supposed to give away the h
oodies.”
I knew, even as I was moving through them, that I would look back on my late twenties as a period when I was lucky to live in one of the most beautiful cities in the country, unburdened by debt, untethered from a workplace, obligated to zero dependents, in love, freer and healthier and with more potential than ever before and anytime thereafter—and spent almost all my waking hours with my neck bent at an unnatural angle, staring into a computer. And I knew, even then, that I would regret it.
I had reached the promised land for millennial knowledge work. I was making eighty, ninety, then a hundred thousand dollars a year doing a job that only existed for, and on, the internet. Mostly, I wrote emails for a living. Mostly, I worked from home. The job asked so little of me, I might have forgotten I had it—except for the fact that it required me to be online.
Some days, clocking in to work was like entering a tunnel. I would drop a waving-hand emoji into the team chat room, answer a round of customer tickets, read email, process a few copyright takedowns, and skim the internal message boards: work-anniversary posts written by colleagues to thank their bosses and commemorate themselves (humbled and grateful to learn and grow); product-release notes (proud to ship our team’s newest feature); baby announcements formatted as product-release notes (proud to ship our team’s newest feature). In the chat software, I moved from channel to channel, reading information and banter that had accumulated overnight in other time zones. After repeating this cycle, I would open a new browser window and begin the day’s true work: toggling between tabs.
The browser was sick with user-generated opinions and misinformation. I was in a million places at once. My mind pooled with strangers’ ideas, each joke or observation or damning polemic as distracting and ephemeral as the next.
It wasn’t just me. Everyone I knew was stuck in a feedback loop with themselves. Technology companies stood by, ready to become everyone’s library, memory, personality. I read whatever the other nodes in my social networks were reading. I listened to whatever music the algorithm told me to. Wherever I traveled on the internet, I saw my own data reflected back at me: if a jade face-roller stalked me from news site to news site, I was reminded of my red skin and passive vanity. If the personalized playlists were full of sad singer-songwriters, I could only blame myself for getting the algorithm depressed.
My New York friends were hanging out without me, the algorithms showed, and people I’d never met were hanging out without me, too. Everyone was working on their personal mythologies. B-list actors and celebrity fitness instructors were getting centered in Iceland. Beautiful women in wide-legged canvas pants were doing beautiful things: making candy and throwing pots, wallpapering apartments with hand-painted patterns, drizzling yogurt over everything, eating breakfast salads. The algorithm told me what my aesthetic was: the same as everyone else I knew.
The platforms, designed to accommodate and harvest infinite data, inspired an infinite scroll. They encouraged a cultural impulse to fill all spare time with someone else’s thoughts. The internet was a collective howl, an outlet for everyone to prove that they mattered. The full spectrum of human emotion infused social platforms. Grief, joy, anxiety, mundanity flowed. People were saying nothing, and saying it all the time. Strangers swapped confidences with other strangers in return for unaccredited psychological advice. They shared stories of private infidelities and public incontinence; photos of their bedroom interiors; photos, faded and cherished, of long-dead family members; photos of their miscarriages. People were giving themselves away at every opportunity.
Information and temporality collided. Amber alerts hovered above neighborhood notices about package theft and raccoons in the recycling. Animated GIFs of nineties rappers slid above ASMR videos; corporate recognitions of terrorist attacks and school shootings were smashed between in-depth discussions of reality television and viral recipes for chicken thighs. Accounts representing national organizations defending civil liberties campaigned for human-rights issues on top of indie musicians vying for sponsorship from anthropomorphized denim brands. Everything was simultaneously happening in real time and preserved for posterity, in perpetuity.
Often, I would catch myself examining a stranger’s acai bowl; or watching frantic videos of abdominal routines that I lacked the core muscles to imitate; or zooming in on a photograph of a wine cellar in Aspen; or watching an aerial video of hands assembling a tiny, intricate bowl of udon noodle soup, and wonder what I was doing with myself. My brain had become a trash vortex, representations upon representations. Then again, I hadn’t known what a wine cellar was supposed to look like.
I careened across the internet like a drunk, tabbing: small-space decoration ideas; author interviews; videos of cake frosting; Renaissance paintings with feminist captions. Cats eating lemons. Ducks eating peas. Rube Goldberg machines, Soul Train episodes, 1970s tennis matches, Borscht Belt comedy. Stadium concerts from before I was born. Marriage proposals and post-deployment reunions and gender reveals: moments of bracing intimacy between people I did not know, and never would.
* * *
A stranger in the heartland held a tabby cat up to her bathroom mirror. The tabby sagged. “Say hi,” the woman said.
“Hi,” said the cat.
A stranger danced on a stripper pole with a baby riding her calf.
A stranger’s disembodied hands slowly shaved soap.
A stranger got married in a castle in Nice.
A stranger did a set of kettlebell swings using a woman as a weight, while a dog licked itself on the couch.
* * *
I searched for answers, excuses, context, conclusions: Define: technocracy. California ideology. Jeffersonian democracy. Electronic agora. Ebola. State slogans. New dark mole. Tanuki. Feminist porn. Feminist porn not annoying. What is canned ham? How old too old law school? Best law schools. Law schools rolling admissions. Islamic State. Silk pajamas. Elbow moisturizer. Unshrink wool sweater. What is mukbang. Define: pathos. Define: superstructure. “Jobless recovery.” White noise Arctic ice cracking. Cuba tourism. How to massage your own shoulder. Text neck. Vitamin D deficiency. Homemade silverfish trap. Rent calculator. The Big One when. Hypnosis nail biting. Hong Kong protests. Dishwasher video inside. Ferguson indictment. Satellite images of my parents’ childhood homes. The names of my ex-boyfriends’ bands. The time I could expect the sun to set that evening.
I found myself watching videos of antiwar protests from the sixties; videos of antiwar protests I had marched in as a teen. Videos detailing conspiracy theories about a missing commercial plane. Videos I wouldn’t even know to search for: The rain forest hermit who stepped out of the wild. Twins get mystifying DNA results. Baby gender reveal!! (Dance). Funniest unboxing fails and hilarious moments 3. Geek wizardry magic trick. My Son Was a School Shooter: This is My Story. How to Do a Body Slam.
Sometimes I would worry about my internet habits and force myself away from the computer, to read a magazine or a book. Contemporary literature offered no respite: I would find prose cluttered with data points, tenuous historical connections, detail so finely tuned it could only have been extracted from a feverish night of search-engine queries. Aphorisms were in; authors were wired. I would pick up books that had been heavily documented on social media, only to find that the books themselves had a curatorial affect: beautiful descriptions of little substance, arranged in elegant vignettes—gestural text, the equivalent of a rumpled linen bedsheet or a bunch of dahlias placed just so.
Oh, I would think, turning the page. This author is addicted to the internet, too.
* * *
Just me and my id, hanging out, clicking.
Customer ticket after customer ticket: like swatting flies.
I refreshed the newspaper. I refreshed social media. I refreshed the heavily moderated message board. I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled.
In any case. Time passed, inevitably and unmemorably, in this manner.
One slow evening, working from a couch at HQ, my laptop chimed
with an instant message from the CEO of the analytics startup. I felt a jolt of dread: we did not text. I reminded myself that I no longer worked for him. I owed him nothing. I did not have to reply, now or ever.
Hi! I replied immediately.
The CEO told me he had a proposition. I instinctively picked up my laptop and moved into the lactation room, which had recently been labeled with a plaque: WORD TO YOUR MOTHER’S ROOM. I felt ridiculous—who was I hiding from? My manager lived in Amsterdam. Nobody was looking at my computer. I was not lactating. But the chair was plush. The room was dark and warm.
The analytics startup was spinning up a marketing team, the CEO wrote. Did I want to come back and do content? I’d been interested in it before, he noted, and I knew the product well. I thought I’d see if perhaps you were still in love with the idea, he wrote.
Love, I thought. Negged again.
I thought about my coworkers on the other side of the door, congregating after yoga class and eating tubes of popped wild rice. When I had absconded to the lactation room, a developer was sitting shoeless on one of the couches, playing an unplugged electric guitar. It was practically idyllic, except that I had hardly spoken to anyone in person all day.
We’re bigger now. It’s a different place, the CEO added. Then: Not super-different. I appreciated this hedge. I thanked him, and told him I would think it over.
“Last time you did content, they didn’t want to pay you for it,” Ian reminded me that night, when I told him about the offer. “You have nothing to prove. Are you really considering this?”