Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

  Mr. Battle poured himself a glass. “The water from the tap just doesn’t taste quite as refreshing,” he said. “Now is that because I saw it come off the roof, and anything from the roof feels special? Maybe.”

  Gale-force ridicule followed. Stories like this—and the gleeful scorn they engender—are ostensibly a sort of scammer prophylaxis. Those idiots, we think, those morons drinking their tapeworm water: we would never be so dumb as to buy that. These stories crop up often in the food space, where it is easy for entrepreneurs to capitalize on the endless well of magical thinking that surrounds health and authenticity in our deeply unhealthy and inauthentic environment. Then, once they cross some line of absurdity or ineptitude, we get to make fun of the suckers who fell for the pitch.

  Before raw water, there was Juicero, the company that raised nearly $120 million to manufacture $700 juicers. In Juicero’s model, fruits and vegetables would be individually packaged in Los Angeles and shipped to Juicero customers, who would put the packs into the Juicero machine, which would scan the packs, cross-check them against a database, and then, finally, make a cup of juice. A Google Ventures partner told the Times that the company was “the most complicated business that I’ve ever funded.” The company’s founder boasted that his juicers were made out of aircraft-grade aluminum, that they contained ten circuit boards, that they could deploy thousands of pounds of force. But soon after Juicero’s machines went on the market, Bloomberg reported that you didn’t actually need them. If you squeezed the Juicero packs by hand, you could make juice even faster than the juicer. The company became an immediate laughingstock and, within a few months, shut down.

  It can be hard, of course, to draw a precise line between a scam and a product with a highly exaggerated sales pitch. One of the only ways to do so is finding a concrete misrepresentation—as a food blogger did in 2015 with Rick and Michael Mast. The Masts were two bearded brothers who lived in Brooklyn, dressed like they were in Mumford & Sons, and made $10 artisan chocolate bars. The Mast Brothers had always advertised themselves as “bean-to-bar” chocolatiers who processed all their cocoa beans in-house. But then a Dallas blogger named Scott Craig exposed the Mast Brothers for being “remelters,” meaning that they had, for years, melted down and remolded industrial bulk chocolate, wrapped it up in Italian paper, and called it a day. The story broke in another enormous schadenfreude tsunami, with the joke falling first on the Mast Brothers and then, ultimately, as it always does, on the dummies who bought their product. This is what you gentrifiers get with your hard-ons for artisanal garbage! the tweets and blog posts cackled. This is what you Instagram addicts get for paying three months’ rent money for a festival no one had ever heard of! This is what you get for being so rich that you need a QR code to make a glass of fucking juice!

  Right around this vicious and satisfying point in the scam news cycle, popular identification often begins to slide toward the scammer, who, once identified, can be reconfigured as a uniquely American folk hero—a logical endpoint of our national fixation on reinvention and spectacular ascent. Stories about blatant con artists allow us to have the scam both ways: we get the pleasure of seeing the scammer exposed and humiliated, but also the retrospective, vicarious thrill of watching the scammer take people for a ride. The blatant scammers make scamming seem simultaneously glorious and unsustainable. (In reality, the truly effective ones, like the prophets of the anti-vaccination movement, can keep going indefinitely, even after they get caught.) In 2016, news broke of a Florida teenager named Malachi Love-Robinson, who had been arrested for posing as a doctor and opening his own medical practice, and then for using false credentials in an attempt to buy a Jaguar, and then for pretending to be a doctor again. In 2018, Jessica Pressler at New York wrote the definitive story on Anna Delvey, the so-called Soho Grifter, a broke young woman with a mysterious European accent who effortlessly convinced hotels, private jet companies, and a bunch of vacuous art-world scenesters that she was a millionaire heiress who just needed to hold a couple grand. On today’s terms, figures like Malachi Love-Robinson and Anna Delvey are highly inspirational. As women’s conference after women’s conference might have told me had I attended them, it’s precisely that kind of self-delusion—deciding beyond all reason that you should have something, and then going for it—that will get you somewhere in this world.

  That was, anyway, the preferred tactic for Elizabeth Holmes, the thirty-five-year-old CEO and founder of Theranos, a health technology company that was once valued at $9 billion despite the fact that its revolutionary blood-test technology did not actually exist. A maniacally disciplined blonde with stressed-out hair, a Steve Jobs obsession, and a voice that sounded like it was being disguised to preserve her anonymity, Holmes had become fixated, at age nineteen, on the idea of a machine that could perform a vast array of blood tests from a pin prick. (She had a lifelong fear of needles: this was central to her personal myth.) She founded Theranos in 2004, raised $6 million by the end of the year, and began stacking her board of directors with big names: Henry Kissinger, James Mattis, Sam Nunn, David Boies. She had Rupert Murdoch and Betsy DeVos as investors. Her TED Talk went viral. She got a New Yorker profile and a Glamour Woman of the Year award; she spoke at Davos and the Aspen Ideas Festival; Forbes labeled her the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. And then, in 2015, John Carreyrou published an article in The Wall Street Journal exposing Theranos as a shell game. The company, which by then had contracted with Walgreens and Safeway, was performing most of its blood tests using other companies’ machinery. Its pin-prick technology had never worked as advertised. Its executives had been cheating proficiency tests.

  At first, Holmes resisted the story. In a company meeting, she suggested generating sympathy for herself by revealing that she had been sexually assaulted at Stanford. She went on CNBC and said, “First they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world.” But Carreyrou was right about everything. For years, Holmes and her boyfriend, Sunny Balwani, had been firing or silencing anyone who knew the truth. In 2016, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services gave Holmes a two-year ban on owning or operating a diagnostic lab. In March 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued her; in return, she consented to return her Theranos shares, give up voting control, and be barred from serving as an officer of a public company for the next ten years. In May 2018, Carreyrou published Bad Blood, a book-length investigation of the rise and fall of Theranos, in which Holmes’s belief in her own significance appears to border on sociopathic zealotry: at one point she proclaims, at a company party, “The miniLab is the most important thing humanity has ever built.” In June 2018, Holmes was indicted by a federal grand jury on nine counts of fraud.

  Holmes, unlike Billy McFarland and Anna Delvey, never became the subject of ironic celebration. This is partly because she did more than scam a bunch of rich assholes. (Americans like it when this happens, in part because many of us feel, instinctively and accurately, that rich assholes have generally benefited from the scams that pushed the rest of the country down.) Holmes went further: she knowingly toyed with the health of strangers for the sake of her own wealth and fame. Mostly, though, the scale of Holmes’s fraud is too horrifying to be funny. She was toppled eventually, but for years, she was one of the biggest success stories in the world. The absurd length of time that it took for Holmes to be exposed illuminates a grim, definitive truth of our era: scammers are always safest at the top.

  The Disruptors

  Amazon, a company now worth $1 trillion, was originally going to be called Relentless. Jeff Bezos’s friends told him that the name sounded too aggressive, but he hung on to the URL anyway—if you type in relentless.com, you’ll find yourself on Amazon, at which you can buy almost anything you could think of: an 1816 edition of the Bible ($2,000); a new hardcover copy of #GIRLBOSS ($15.43); a used paperback #GIRLBOSS ($2.37); paranormal romance ebooks published by Amazon its
elf (prices vary); a Goodyear SUV tire ($121 with Amazon Prime); a Georgia-Pacific automated paper-towel dispenser ($35 with Prime); 3,000 Georgia-Pacific paper towels (also $35 with Prime); more than 100,000 different cellphone cases under $10; 5,000 pens customized with your name and logo ($1,926.75); a jar of face mask made from sheep placenta and embryo ($49); a bunch of bananas ($2.19); a forty-pound bag of Diamond Naturals Adult Real Meat dog food ($36.99); voice-controlled Amazon hardware that will tell you the weather, and play you Tchaikovsky, and turn over evidence to the police if it needs to ($39.99 to $149.99); a stream of the 1942 movie Casablanca ($3.99 to rent); two seasons of the Amazon show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (free if you’re a Prime member, which more than half of American households are); a wide variety of data storage and cloud computing services (prices vary, but the quality is unbeatable—Amazon is used by the CIA). My Amazon homepage is advertising two-hour grocery delivery. Fifty-six percent of online retail searches now begin at Amazon.com.

  Amazon is an octopus: nimble, fluid, tentacled, brilliant, poisonous, appealing, flexible enough to squeeze enormous bulk through tiny loopholes. Amazon has chewed up brick-and-mortar retail: an estimated 8,600 stores closed in 2017, a significant increase from the 6,200 stores that closed in 2008, at the peak of the recession. The company has decimated office-supply stores, toy stores, electronics stores, and sporting goods stores, and now that it owns Whole Foods, grocery stores will likely be next. Amazon, which spent years taking huge venture-backed losses so that it could lower prices enough to kill off all the competition, is now arguably the first illegal monopsony. (In a monopsony, a single buyer purchases goods from the vast majority of sellers; in a monopoly, it’s the opposite.) And all of this began when Bezos was working at a hedge fund in the nineties and got the idea to sell books online.

  Bezos chose books because they presented a unique market opportunity: whereas physical bookstores could stock and sell only a tiny fraction of all the books that were on the market, an online bookstore could keep a basically unlimited inventory. Books also gave Bezos a way to track the habits of “affluent, educated shoppers,” wrote George Packer in 2014, in a New Yorker piece detailing Amazon’s takeover of the book industry. With this data, Amazon could figure out what else it could sell the way it sold books—at artificially low prices, with razor-thin margins. As long as the company kept growing, “investors would pour in money and Wall Street wouldn’t pay much attention to profits.” Amazon didn’t get out of the red until 2001, seven years after Bezos started the company—at which point it was well on its way to effectively synthesizing human instinct with its consumer interface. Buying something on Amazon, Packer wrote, feels instinctive, reflexive, much like scratching an itch.

  Efficiency at this scale requires extreme devaluation. To use Amazon—which I did regularly for years, with full knowledge of its labor practices—is to accept and embrace a world in which everything is worth as little as possible, even, and maybe particularly, people. Its corporate culture is notoriously hellish. In 2015, the Times published a story that described Amazon as “conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable.” A former employee told them, “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.” Treatment is far worse at the warehouse level, and until recently, the pay was inexcusable: Bezos is the richest man in the world, but his warehouse employees often made just enough to clear the federal poverty line. (Of course, this is part of the reason he’s the richest man in the world.) Amazon warehouse workers, unlike most other warehouse workers, are unprotected by unions and often classified as temps, which for years allowed the company to avoid providing benefits and to skirt workers’ compensation claims for people who were injured, often seriously, on the job. They enter through metal detectors and spend the day strapped to Amazon-patented monitoring equipment, speed-walking in circles around an enormous, airless, fluorescent-lit warehouse, expected to pack and complete new packages every thirty seconds. (The new Amazon trackers even vibrate to warn workers that they’re moving too slow.) As Mac McClelland detailed in her 2012 undercover investigation at Mother Jones, managers time their workers’ toilet breaks—there are many stories of workers peeing in water bottles to avoid punishment—and if they don’t consistently adhere to what McClelland described as a “goal-meeting suicide pace,” they’re fired.

  Until the company became a target of sustained criticism for its labor practices, in no small part due to a series of worker strikes, Amazon warehouses were often unheated in winter and sweltering in summer: during one heat wave in Pennsylvania, rather than bring in AC units, Amazon chose the more cost-efficient solution of parking ambulances outside the doors to collect the people who collapsed. Exhausted workers sometimes passed out on the warehouse floor, and were fired. It’s because of this approach—treating everything, including labor, as maximally disposable—that Amazon has been so successful; it was like Walmart, except beloved even by the wealthy, in large part because the degraded conditions that the company both created and depended on were conveniently concealed behind computer screens. When, in 2018, the company finally responded to public pressure by raising minimum wage for its warehouse workers to $15, it made these changes at the expense of those very workers, taking their holiday bonus incentives and potential stock grants away.

  The model of business success in the millennial era is that of dismantling social structures to suck up cash from whatever corners of life can still be exploited. Uber and Airbnb have been similarly “disruptive.” Where Amazon ignored state sales taxes, Uber ignored local transportation regulations, and Airbnb ignored city laws against unregulated hotels. With Uber and Airbnb, the aesthetic of rapid innovation—and, crucially, the sense of relief these cheap experiences provide to consumers who are experiencing an entirely related squeeze—obscures the fact that these companies’ biggest breakthroughs have been successfully monetizing the unyielding stresses of late capitalism, shifting the need to compete from the company itself to the unprotected individual, and normalizing a paradigm in which workers and consumers bear the company’s rightful responsibility and risk. Airbnb didn’t tell its New York City users that they were breaking the law by renting their apartments. Uber, like Amazon, has been artificially holding down prices to take over the market, at which point the prices will almost certainly go up. Driver pay, in the meantime, has been declining sharply. “We are living in an era of robber barons,” said John Wolpert, in Brad Stone’s The Upstarts. (Wolpert was the CEO of Cabulous, an Uber-esque company that had tried to work with San Francisco’s taxi commission instead of against it.) “If you have enough money and can make the right phone call, you can disregard whatever rules are in place and then use that as a way of getting PR.”

  At the other end of the venture-capital disruption spectrum are a bunch of companies that raked in heaps of money for doing nothing at all. A company called Twist raised $6 million to build an app that would text your friends when you were late to something. A social network for people with curly hair, called NaturallyCurly, raised $1.2 million. DigiScents, which promised to build a device that would perfume your home with scents attuned to your internet browsing, raised $20 million. Blippy, which advertised all your credit card purchases publicly—that was it—raised $13 million. Wakie, which set people up with human alarm clocks, strangers who would call them at whatever time they wanted, raised $3 million. The most infamous of all, maybe, was the app Yo, whose exclusive function was allowing users to send the word “Yo” to one another, and which raised $1.5 million in 2014. These companies represent a socially approved version of millennial scamming: the dream of being a “founder” who gets a dumb idea, raises a ton of money, and sells the company before he has to do too much work.

  Configured this way, success is a lottery—just as survival today can look like a lottery, too. If you’re super lucky, if everyone likes you, if you’ve got hustl
e, you might end up making millions. Similarly, if you’re super lucky, if everyone likes you, if you can get that GoFundMe to go viral, you might end up being able to pay for your insulin, or your leg surgery after a bike accident, or your $10,000 hospital bill from giving birth. In any case, everything is so expensive that you might find yourself reading about the recent rash of suicides among New York taxi drivers as you take a slightly cheaper VC-subsidized ride from the company that has destroyed the taxi industry. You might find yourself routinely taking advantage of warehouse workers who have to pee in water bottles to get two-day shipping on a box of doggie poop bags you could’ve bought down the street. This is, in any case, mostly how things have worked out for me, even though my life is so easy, relatively speaking: I don’t have dependents, I don’t live with a disability—I never needed the reliability of Amazon to do what our current social contract won’t.

  Aside from this dead-end sense of my own ethical brokenness, what bothers me most about this situation is the idea that our cut-out-the-middleman era has somehow made everyone more equal—that a lack of technological barriers and a surplus of hustle have ushered in a fairer world. But venture capital is social capital, doled out according to networks and affinity and comfort. Seventy-six percent of venture capital partners are white men. Only 1 percent are black. In 2017, 4.4 percent of all VC deals went to companies founded by women, which was the highest percentage since 2006. Until now, only white men have been able to boldly stride forward the way Amazon and Uber did—on a business model of sidestepping regulations, cutting out protections, shoving off liability, and siphoning as much money as possible away from the people who physically do the work. Whenever this changes, whenever women and minorities are allowed to be their own Bezos, it will hardly be a victory for anyone at all.