Review: Live Work Work Work Die, by Corey Pein
In the wake of recent scandals, the ‘tech-lash’ is on. Now a new book reveals the dark heart of Silicon Valley from the inside.
The shiny, happy people of Silicon Valley are messing with us. “Belong anywhere” they promise at Airbnb, while Facebook advances the purest of motives in “connecting people”. Google may have quietly removed its famous “Don’t be evil” motto from its code of conduct earlier this year, but parent company Alphabet is still solemnly pledging to “do the right thing”.
This feel-good sloganeering has been a foundation stone of the tech industry since the mid-2000s, when “making the world a better place” became a kind of blanket mission statement for the coding class. The bloom, however, is off the rose.
The tech titans have worked hard to distance themselves from the amoral barons of finance and industry, but a growing scepticism has begun to tarnish the gleaming utopia they champion. Capitalism dressed up in hippie-libertarian rhetoric is still capitalism, the thinking goes. And what about the lack of regulation and oversight in Silicon Valley? The monopolistic behaviour of companies such as Google, Amazon and Apple? The threats to privacy and access and the erosion of trust. What about fake news?
The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the data-mining organisation harvested information from more than 50 million unsuspecting Facebook users in order to meddle in the US presidential election, confirmed the suspicions of many. The early promise of technology to better society, to make the world more open, honest and free, was an elaborate con job. The principled ideology was a sham.
American investigative reporter Corey Pein is the latest to join the so-called “tech-lash”, the global pushback against the supremacy of tech, with his book Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the savage heart of Silicon Valley.
Technology has made Amazon’s Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world, with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page of Google not far behind. Less is heard about the wannabes who inhabit what Pein calls “the US’s hottest billionaire factory”. One Harvard study puts the proportion of tech entrepreneurs who crash and burn at 95 per cent.
Pein was suspicious of the benevolent image the tech titans projected and, determined to cut through the hype, decided to embed himself gonzo-style within the industry’s proletariat ranks. In 2015, he took his Ivy League degree and his favourite hoodie and moved to Silicon Valley with twin motives: to get rich by selling a start-up and then write a book about it. He also packed a substantial measure of cynicism and contempt for the culture. Though his start-up almost predictably failed, his book is all the better for it.
Live Work Work Work Die opens with Pein moving into an illegal Airbnb in San Francisco’s warehouse district. The building he dubs Hacker Condo has more techies than beds and they all share a single key. (Luxury compared to a later abode: a tent pitched in someone’s yard in Mountain View, rented off Airbnb for $35 a day.)
Start-up culture worships the “fake it till you make it” hustle. Its denizens, Pein writes, hoover up freebies, feeding themselves at start-up party buffets and endless networking events where they “exchange boastful inanities” about platforms and metrics and “delivering eyeballs” in the “content space”. In reality, this vast army of drones and programmers and “tech bros” work insane hours in a virtual bubble in the hope their revolutionary algorithm or platform will become the Next Big Thing. Occasionally they pay to attend a pitch event where they will try to win over venture capital investors.
“I was beginning to become acquainted with the infinite solipsism of my new milieu,” Pein writes. “We were grown men who lived like captive gerbils, pressing one lever to make food appear and another for some fleeting entertainment – everything on demand. Airbnb and Foodpanda served the flesh, Netflix and Lifehacker nourished the soul.”
Pein’s start-up idea is called Laborize, a company that would hire itself out to unionise its client’s competition, theoretically disrupting their operations and distracting management. Sample slogan: Their solidarity is your opportunity.
Consumers may only now be coming to grips with the dark side of Big Tech, but Pein argues it’s been there from the beginning
It doesn’t work, largely because Pein doesn’t really know what he’s doing: he has no business plan and zero coding ability. But he can write, in a style that is snarky and often bitingly funny.
At least it’s funny until it turns frightening. From deep within the culture, Pein identifies a world view based on what he calls “cut-throat libertarianism”, which gives the tech industry an ability to blithely disregard any harm their disruptions might cause. “Most people in the industry were convinced that their work was moral because it increased consumer choice and therefore freedom,” he writes. “New technologies were evidence of progress and therefore innately good.”
Consumers may only now be coming to grips with the dark side of Big Tech, but Pein argues it’s been there from the beginning. “[It’s not] some unfortunate misstep in an otherwise heroic effort to ‘change the world’,” he writes.
Just last month, Australian entrepreneur and rich-lister Tim Kentley-Klay encountered that cut-throat world view when he was unceremoniously dumped as CEO of self-driving car start-up Zoox just a month after it was valued at $US3.2 billion ($4.35 billion). He seemed shocked and hurt. “Today was Silicon Valley up to its worst tricks,” he wrote in a Twitter post. “This town sells the story that it backs founders to create real change [but] the board chose a path of fear, optimising for a little money in hand at the expense of profound progress for the universe.”
Kentley-Klay shouldn’t have been surprised. “Profit-hunger, philistinism and misanthropy are and always have been at the core of the [Silicon Valley] enterprise,” Pein writes.
Live Work Work Work Die saves its most disquieting observations until last. Pein identifies a growing “tech fascist” movement that embraces dubious philosophies and “neo-reactionary” ideas such as eugenics and the abolition of universities and government. There are those in Silicon Valley, he says, who see themselves as members of a superior race rising above and beyond the constraints of democracy. These “pallid princelings of Silicon Valley” rewrote the rules of the global economy in their favour and the rest of us fell into line. Performing uncompensated labour by posting free content. Offering up our lives as a profit source through data mining. “We are tagged and tracked… poked with thousands of urgent yet pointless notifications from the ether. Create your account. Log in to continue. Click yes to agree… Click. Swipe. Share.”
Sound familiar? Fooled by the industry’s slick marketing and “lulled by the novelty and convenience of its gadgetry”, we the screen-addled public have been messed with. Tomorrowland gleams only for a chosen few.