The startup was moving into the enterprise. We were selling to major corporations in and outside of the tech sector. We were selling to the United States government. We were becoming accountable.
The company was growing. There was never any coffee. We stood by the machine territorially, watching it brew. The operations manager installed a surveillance camera in the kitchen, posting screenshots to the company chat room of trespasses against the commons: dirty hands stuffed into the buckets of pretzels and chips, chocolate plucked out of the trail mix, bowls of milk and cereal poured into a backed-up sink. When I slipped and projectile-spilled a bucket of granola, the footage immediately entered the company record as an animated GIF.
The office was teeming with salespeople: well-groomed social animals with good posture and dress shoes, men who chuckled and smoothed their hair back when they couldn’t connect to our VPN. They booked up the conference rooms, annexed the server closet, took calls in the stairwell. Their desks were scattered with freebies from our customers, stickers and beer sleeves and flash drives. Their base salaries were rumored to be more than twice what the support engineers were paid. They’d chosen cash over equity and, as such, were not to be trusted.
As early employees, we were dangerous. We had experienced an early, more autonomous, unsustainable iteration of the company. We had known it before there were rules. We knew too much about how things worked, and harbored nostalgia and affection for the way things were. We didn’t want to outgrow the company, but the company was outgrowing us. None of us had anticipated that success would be to the detriment of what made the place feel special—what made it feel like ours. The new employees treated it like any other job. The new employees had no idea.
“Our culture is dying,” we said to one another gravely, apocalyptic prophets toasting bagels in the company kitchen. “What should we do about the culture?”
It wasn’t just the salespeople, of course. The salespeople were both consequence and harbinger. Our culture had been splintering for months. The CEO wouldn’t stop using the word “paranoid.” Our primary investor had funded a direct competitor. This was what investors did, but it still felt personal: Daddy loved us, he just loved us less. We feared it was slash-and-burn season. We feared we’d been hiring our own replacements all along. There was the sense of something looming.
Still, the weeks ticked past without incident. Every Tuesday afternoon, the emergency-warning siren heralded good news: for our revenue, our investors, our valuation, and, ostensibly, for us.
My meeting had no calendar invite, no warning. On a Friday afternoon, as I was packing up to leave, the CEO summoned me into a conference room.
“I thought you were an amazing worker at first,” he said, palms on the table, voice slow. “Working late every night, last out of the office. But now I wonder if the work was just too hard for you to begin with.”
He wanted to know: Was I Down for the Cause? Because if I wasn’t Down for the Cause, then it was time. We could do this amicably. I stared at the four sculptural metal letters perched on a ledge at the end of the conference room: D, F, T, C.
I told him I was down—of course I was down. I tried not to swivel in my ergonomic chair. I cared deeply about the company, I said. I meant it. It did not occur to me to defend myself, to point out that the quality of my work had not changed. I was good at my job. The meeting was a hit—something to scare me. It worked.
If I didn’t want to stay at the company, the CEO said, he would personally help me find a new job. Either way, I would not be leading the Support Engineering team. “I’ve decided you aren’t analytical,” he said. “I don’t think we have the same values. I don’t even know what your values are.”
Of course I’m analytical, I thought. I might not have been a systems thinker, but I could deconstruct to death. I had thought we shared some of the same values, at least on their face: we were similarly disenchanted by corporate hierarchies, we liked underdogs, we both called ourselves feminists. We liked winning.
Despite my best efforts, I cried twice in the meeting, leaving in the middle to grab tissues from the bathroom, dodging looks of concern from the Engineering cluster. I leaned against the sink and wiped my face with a paper towel, as I had seen every other woman at the company do at one point or another. I thought about my friends back in New York. I thought about how hard I’d worked and how demoralizing it was to be told I had failed. I thought about my values, and I cried even more.
Back in the conference room, the CEO waited patiently. His face was unchanged when I returned.
In pursuit of higher truths, Ian and I drove up to Mendocino to do ecstasy. Using the home-sharing platform, we booked a guest suite in the home of an older couple who seemed to spend their days shouting at each other across the gulf of their gigantic sunken living room. The suite looked out across a valley: a bowl of fog. The landscape dripped.
While neither of us had much experience with controlled substances, Ian at least trusted the process. I trusted nothing. I sat on the bathroom sink and read pages of user-generated comments on a web forum dedicated to trip documentation. I looked up the location of the nearest hospital. Then I removed work email from my phone, making it impossible to reach the CEO or anyone else I might regret contacting while artificially flooded with serotonin.
We took the drugs and drank orange juice. We lay on a couch and listened to the cottony echoes of the older couple in the main house. We put on a Karen Dalton album and rubbed each other’s backs and shared revelations about our families. I told Ian my worst secrets and felt content. I didn’t feel high, or ecstatic—just like myself, but the good parts. Myself, but less anxious, less afraid. I wanted to replicate the experience with everyone I loved. This was my higher calling, I thought: sitting in a beautiful place, talking. I wanted to video-chat all my friends at once.
Life shone in its simplicity. I thought about the sweep of history, the improbability of convergence. Nothing seemed impossible. I had moved to California to accelerate my career, and now I was living through a historical inflection point, I effused—we were living through a historical inflection point. Ian had put on sweatpants and was stretching, happily, in front of a mirror. This was the new economy, the new way to live, I said—we were on the glimmering edge of a brand-new world, and we were among the people building it. Well, he was among the people building it. But I was helping.
I didn’t know if I believed everything I was saying, but it felt so good to say it. “Very inspiring,” Ian said, beaming. “You should give a keynote. New career: futurist.”
The next morning, we drove to a hot spring and floated naked in a sulfuric pool with people whose bodies had begun to betray them. A wooden sauna vibrated with white-haired white people singing Native American folk songs. I wanted to live forever. I wanted to see what happened.
As we slid back into the city, the afterglow fading into a comedown, we talked about what came next. Ian encouraged me to quit my job. I gave the analytics startup as much space in my life as it asked for, and then some, he said. Work was making me miserable. He reminded me that it wasn’t normal to cry in the office bathroom.
I explained that I felt a sense of loyalty. I wanted to prove myself to the CEO. I wanted to prove him wrong.
“He doesn’t care about you,” Ian said. “You’re the smallest problem in his life. You’re allowed to quit. He’ll be fine.”
It wasn’t the first time Ian had initiated this conversation. It was always well-intentioned, but the unsolicited advice made me bristle, and not only because I refused to admit that he might be right.
As a software engineer, Ian had never encountered a job market with no space for him; he didn’t know what it felt like not to have mobility, options, not to be desired. He loved what he did and could easily command three times my salary. No company would ever neglect to offer him equity. He was his own safety net.
I was perhaps still afflicted by the shortsightedness of someone whose skill set was neither unique nor in high demand. A sense of my own disposability had been ingrained since working in the publishing industry, and quitting without a plan was unfathomable. Every month since graduation was accounted for on my résumé. Sabbaticals, for anyone other than a college professor, were a novel concept, and one I could not trust.
Ian loved me in the way you love someone at the very beginning: he still believed I was the sort of person who wouldn’t allow herself to be treated badly, to be made to feel like shit. Someone righteous, moral. Someone who valued herself. I empathized with his disappointment. I wanted to be that person, too.
Down for the Cause—what was the cause? Our cause was the company, but the company had causes, too. Driving engagement; improving the user experience; reducing friction; enabling digital dependency. We were helping marketing managers A/B test subject-line copy to increase click-throughs from mass emails; helping developers at e-commerce platforms make it harder for users to abandon shopping carts; helping designers tighten the endorphin feedback loop.
Helping people make better decisions, we had always said. Helping people test their assumptions. Answer tough questions. Eliminate bias. Develop best-of-breed message targeting. Increase conversions. Improve key business metrics. Measure user-adoption strategy. Prioritize impact. Drive ROI. Growth-hack. What gets measured gets managed, I sometimes told customers, quoting a management guru whose writing I had never read.
The endgame was the same for everyone: Growth at any cost. Scale above all. Disrupt, then dominate.
At the end of the idea: A world improved by companies improved by data. A world of actionable metrics, in which developers would never stop optimizing and users would never stop looking at their screens. A world freed of decision-making, the unnecessary friction of human behavior, where everything—whittled down to the fastest, simplest, sleekest version of itself—could be optimized, prioritized, monetized, and controlled.
Unfortunately for me, I liked my inefficient life. I liked listening to the radio and cooking with excessive utensils; slivering onions, detangling wet herbs. Long showers and stoned museum-wandering. I liked riding public transportation: watching strangers talk to their children; watching strangers stare out the window at the sunset, and at photos of the sunset on their phones. I liked taking long walks to purchase onigiri in Japantown, or taking long walks with no destination at all. Folding the laundry. Copying keys. Filling out forms. Phone calls. I even liked the post office, the predictable discontent of bureaucracy. I liked full albums, flipping the record. Long novels with minimal plot; minimalist novels with minimal plot. Engaging with strangers. Getting into it. Closing down the restaurant, having one last drink. I liked grocery shopping: perusing the produce; watching everyone chew in the bulk aisle.
Warm laundry, radio, waiting for the bus. I could get frustrated, overextended, overwhelmed, uncomfortable. Sometimes I ran late. But these banal inefficiencies—I thought they were luxuries, the mark of the unencumbered. Time to do nothing, to let my mind run anywhere, to be in the world. At the very least, they made me feel human.
The fetishized life without friction: What was it like? An unending shuttle between meetings and bodily needs? A continuous, productive loop? Charts and data sets. It wasn’t, to me, an aspiration. It was not a prize.
Unwinding over wine and potato chips one evening, the CEO sat beside me at one of the office kitchen tables. “You’ve been with us for a year,” he said. “I ask everyone the same thing. Has this been the longest or the shortest year of your life?”
Longest, I said. It was knee-jerk, sincere. His eyes narrowed, and he half laughed. At the end of the table, the solutions manager visibly eavesdropped.
“It’s a trick question,” the CEO said. “The right answer is both.”