As an onboarding gift, the open-source startup gave all employees a step-count wristband: fit workers were happy workers, and probably cheaper to insure. I wore the wristband for a week, tracking my steps and calibrating my caloric intake, until I realized I was on the brink of an eating disorder.
The ecosystem’s fetish for optimization culture and productivity hacking—distraction blockers, task timers, hermit mode, batch emailing, timeboxing—had expanded into biohacking. On the internet and in San Francisco’s finer coffee shops, systems thinkers swapped notes about their stacks and dosages. They optimized their sleep cycles with red light and binaural beats. They bought butter-laced cold brew, shot up their thighs with testosterone, and purchased haptic-feedback wristbands to self-administer 150-volt electric shocks.
The body was a platform, the biohackers argued: if an upgrade was available for their laptop’s operating system, they would download it posthaste, without question. The same was true of their human organisms. New companies sold nootropics, unregulated cognitive-enhancement drugs claiming to unlock next-level thinking, to those striving for peak performance.
I wanted to be above it, but I wasn’t above it. Too curious; too wistful for my college roommate’s ADHD medication. I ordered capsules of nootropics from a startup claiming to be manufacturing Human 2.0. The capsules weren’t approved by the FDA, but the startup was funded by the same investors who paid my salary. I took them in anticipation of high productivity, but my thinking remained locked, maxing out at the usual level.
“I don’t like this new phase,” Ian said, inspecting the nootropics package. The capsules rattled in their glass jar, branded with a lightning bolt. “L-theanine? This is like what you get from a homeopath, just with flat design.” He declined my offer of a mocha-flavored caffeine gummy.
There was something a little bit sad about body optimization, I thought, after accidentally spending an afternoon on nootropics in the bathroom with my eyelids taped, watching makeup tutorials and attempting to perfect a dramatic cat-eye. The goal was productivity, not pleasure. And to what end—whom did it serve? Perhaps gunning for high output in one’s twenties was a way to compress the peak-of-life productive years, tee up an early retirement with a still-youthful body, but it seemed brazen to play God with time.
It seemed more likely that biohacking was just another mode of self-help, like business blogging. Tech culture provided endless outlets for men to pursue activities coded as female—including, apparently, body manipulation. I could see how tracking personal metrics offered a sense of progress and momentum, measurable self-betterment. Leaderboards and fitness apps encouraged community through competition. Quantification was a vector of control.
Self-improvement appealed to me, too. I could stand to exercise more often, and be more mindful of salt. I wanted to be more open and thoughtful, more attentive and available to family, friends, Ian. I wanted to stop hiding discomfort, sadness, and anger behind humor. I wanted a therapist to laugh at my jokes and tell me I was well-adjusted. I wanted to better understand my own desires, what I wanted; to find a purpose. But nonmedical monitoring of heart rate variability, sleep latency, glucose levels, ketones—none of this was self-knowledge. It was just metadata.
Going into work wasn’t mandatory, but for a while I did it anyway. It was a pleasure to spend time at HQ, in the same way it would be a pleasure to kill a few hours in the lobby of a boutique hotel. There were vending machines stocked with new keyboards, headphones, cables, and cords, all of which tumbled down, free, with the tap of an employee badge. The elevators were never broken. An engineer was rumored to have lived in the office for a while, sleeping in a lounge area atop an indoor shipping container—a visual pun on shipping code—until he was discovered, by the security team, bringing home a date.
My coworkers treated it as much like an office as a clubhouse. People roamed around barefoot, juggling and playing guitar. They came in wearing expressive and ironic clothing: spandex leggings printed with unicorn emojis, shirts printed with teammates’ faces, bondage collars, Burning Man pelts. Some played video games while they half worked, or napped in the coder caves—dark, cushioned booths designed for those who worked best under conditions of sensory deprivation.
It seemed like half of the engineers were DJs—a group of developers regularly performed at a club in the Mission, with a data scientist who projected angular and geometric visualizations on a screen behind them. Some of them practiced on a mixer across from the company bar, reminiscing proudly about dance parties they had hosted in the office, and the times neighbors had threatened to call the cops.
Despite the robust amenities and club culture, the office was rarely full. Meetings were held over videoconferencing software, and people dialed in from wherever they happened to be: public transportation, pool loungers, unmade beds, living rooms with partners napping in the background. An engineer attended his daily stand-up meeting from an indoor climbing wall, gripping a plastic rock and wearing a harness. A telepresence robot rolled around the first-floor event space, lanky and conspicuous, a bridge between worlds.
People came and went, operating on individualized schedules. I never knew whom I would run into at HQ, or whether I would be working alone. On every floor were mounted television screens displaying heat maps, and lists of employee avatars indicating who was in the building and where. The heat maps felt like a violation—I didn’t know how to opt out. I side-eyed the television monitors whenever I walked to the bathroom, waiting for my data, a radiant orange blob, to catch up. The maps almost offered a feeling of company cohesion. It was surprisingly affecting to be the only node.
I still wanted to be part of something. I staked out an unclaimed standing desk in a cluster of engineers, and left my new business cards next to the monitor: a flag in the ground. I decorated my laptop with octopus-cat stickers from the company store. I patronized the in-house masseuse and received a cautious, fully clothed back massage, the decadence of which left my body tense with shame. I drank scotch with coworkers in a room hidden behind the library bookcases and designed to look like a nineteenth-century smoking parlor: coatrack of velvet jackets, a globe that served as a stash box, and, above the mantel, an oil painting of the octopus-cat as Napoleon Bonaparte. I tripped over my own ankles on the company soccer team, doing my part to help meet the two-woman quota. I used the office gym and showered anxiously in the office locker room, deciding to never again get naked at work. I walked around proudly in my employee hoodie: my platform handle lettered down the sleeve, the silhouette of the mascot plastered over my heart.
I was employee number two hundred and thirty-something. At that point, the number didn’t matter. I had no trouble identifying the early employees, and not just because some listed their hire numbers in their social media bios. I saw my former self in their monopolization of the chat rooms, their disdain for the growing nontechnical teams, their wistfulness for the way things had been.
I did envy these early employees, their inside jokes and well-deserved pride. Sometimes, reading their banter or seeing photos of their children dressed as the octopus-cat for Halloween—or skimming engineers’ personal blog posts extolling the virtues of asynchronous collaboration and the Zen of open source—I would think about my foregone institutional authority, or the stack of data-driven T-shirts I kept folded beneath my towels, and feel a jolt of nostalgia. Desire. Corporate loneliness. I would yearn for the sense of ownership and belonging, the easy identity, the all-consuming feeling of affiliation. And then I would remind myself: There but for the grace of God go I.
Support met once a week, for an hour, over videoconference. I prepared for these meetings by brushing my hair, closing the curtains to the street, then frantically tossing visible clutter on top of my bed and covering it with a quilt.
“Maybe we should split your job,” Ian suggested one morning, watching me position my laptop so that the laundry rack, draped with underwear, was out of frame. “We can both work part-time, live off one salary, and travel around the world. Who would ever know?” No one, I said. While we were at it, I told Ian, he might as well get us promoted into Engineering. I could do the video chats, and he could write the code.
While my teammates did fly out to HQ from time to time, it was strange when we were embodied, disorienting to see everyone from the neck down. Our relationships, fostered through software, did not immediately map onto physical reality. We were all more awkward in person than in the company chat rooms and over video, where conversation flowed.
I liked the specific intimacy of video: everyone breathing, sniffling, chewing gum, forgetting to mute the microphone before clearing their congestion. I liked the banter, the frozen mid-sentence faces, the surprise of seeing an animal emerging from under a desk. I liked watching everyone watch themselves while we pretended to watch one another, an act of infinite surveillance. The first ten minutes were almost always spent correcting the videoconference software, during which I became acquainted with my teammates’ home interiors, their color-coded bookcases and wedding photos, their earnest letterpress posters or obscure art. I learned about their hobbies and roommates. I grew fond of their children and pets.
At the start of these meetings, I would log in and lean into my laptop, enjoying the camaraderie and warmth of a team. For an hour, my studio would fill with laughter and chatter, conversation tripping when the software stalled or delayed. Then I would stand up, stretch, tape back over my laptop camera, and open the curtains—adjusting to the silence, alone in my room.