Voices from the Valley Read online

  Maybe. But we’re going to get there with the data.

  The Future

  If you had to give a nontechnical layperson one piece of advice for thinking about these questions, what would it be? Is it to be more skeptical? Is it to be less credulous when confronted with hype? Because it seems like there’s a fairly small number of people who understand these technologies well, and yet they appear to have the potential to make a pretty big impact on a lot of people’s lives.

  I think the most realistic way of looking at it is that it’s not all hype. The technical advances are real—and even if they’re not real today, the relentless drumbeat of progress on hardware and algorithms will make them real eventually. It will take longer than you think—potentially a lot longer than you think—but it will happen. So everything you’re hearing is an early warning sign of what the future is going to look like. Maybe not even in our lifetimes, but yeah, it’ll get there. And the questions that we’re going over, they’re going to be real. It’s just not there yet.

  So yeah, I would recommend some skepticism, but not complete skepticism. Because the advances underlying this are real. And the rate of progress has kept up, and I don’t see a reason why it’s going to stop.

  It’s funny, because I think the biggest concern that I have for the future is that a bunch of people like me are going to make a bunch of money. And a bunch of people are going to lose their jobs. And a bunch of people are going to get new jobs that are crazy and cool. But I don’t know on net how great it’s going to be for society moving forward, though I want to be optimistic about it.

  I often have this kind of discussion with people who are algorithmically minded, and they view capitalism as an optimizing function. And all questions about technological change go through this filter of, well, we’re glad we have cars instead of horses and buggies. And everything else will sort itself out. But everything else doesn’t just “sort itself out.”

  I mean, I try to not fall into the Y Combinator/Stanford guy thing, but I actually do think that universal basic income is going to be the endgame.16 I think that is what society will look like long-term, because I think universal basic income is the welfare that everyone can get behind.

  But it’s such a weighty question, and technology’s impact on the economy changes so quickly that I don’t know if any of us have ever really had the chance to take a breath. You look at some of the strikes a hundred years ago, like at the Homestead plant, where the workers held out and had fucking gunboats come down the river with Pinkertons and shoot the shit out of people.17 There’s a Costco there now, and a bunch of smokestacks where the plant used to be. And it’s like, was that whole thing just this ridiculous farce? I don’t even know.

  I feel like it’s always a question of, what are you optimizing for?

  I think the strangest thing about being out here in the Bay Area is that the worldview has just completely saturated everything to the point that people think that everything is a technical problem that should be solved technologically. It’s a very privileged view of very smart people. It’s troubling.

  On the one hand, there’s no better shepherd for the economy than an engineer; on the other hand, there’s no worse shepherd for the economy than an engineer. Because that kind of machine thinking is very good at producing some things, and very, very bad at producing other things.

  On the one hand, I don’t view any of the Silicon Valley startup economies as producing any kind of sustainable growth or ways of employing all these people. On the other hand, I do think that the basic income idea eventually will be the future. One of the most interesting things is the amount of leverage that individual people in Silicon Valley are getting—you look at the WhatsApp acquisition or whatever, with so few people being worth so much money.

  That may have been a little bit irrational, but longer term, it’s hard to argue against. And I don’t see another endgame other than pretty high taxes plus basic income as the way of making that okay, because I don’t think that’s going to go away. I’m not even totally sure that we should discourage it from happening.

  This may be a tangent, but I think the technical mindset is very compatible with the technocratic mindset. In both cases, it’s an evasion of politics, because just as the person who designs the racist algorithm presumably does not think of what they’re doing as political, neither does the technocrat who crafts the free trade agreement because all the mainstream economists in the room told him it would be good for the economy, full stop.

  I think both approaches are connected to this overwhelming need to see political problems as technical ones, whether from an engineering perspective or from a technocratic governance perspective. To me those feel totally compatible. What you’re describing—the Silicon Valley view of the world—feels to me like a very technocratic view of the world, where if you can just solve certain problems, then it will benefit everyone.

  In defense of it, it’s also a hopeful view of the world, because you’re at least trying to describe problems that you can solve. It’s a very optimistic way of looking at things, and I’m hesitant to abandon that, because I think ultimately … it’s hard, grappling with this idea of the enormous amount of individual leverage and the crazy rate of change.

  On the other hand, it’s hard not to be a kind of technical utopian. It’s hard to bet against the innovation that this country has produced, and maybe that’s a function of survivorship bias or looking back and saying we just happened to get lucky. But you know, airplanes, the elevator—we just invented that stuff, and that’s kind of cool. And so it seems sort of melancholy—or maybe this is my own limitation as a technical thinker to see it as melancholy—to be like, “Yeah, there’s some stuff we can’t solve.”

  I’m not sure I want to live in that world. I always want to live in a world where we’re at least trying. But we’ll see.

  6

  The Massage Therapist

  Janitors are on their feet all day. Engineers are at their computers all day. What does Silicon Valley do to the body? Nobody knows better than a massage therapist.

  We spoke to someone who was paid to pummel and pry open the knotted muscles of tech’s more privileged workers. Massage gave her an unusual window into the dynamics of the company where she worked, and those of the industry as a whole. She saw some people at their most vulnerable, others at their most insufferable. We talked about what tension feels like, and the various tensions of her own job. We talked about tech’s unspoken hierarchies, and whether stress makes you a better worker.

  * * *

  How did you come to be a massage therapist in tech?

  I trained in massage in my mid-forties. Soon after I graduated, I was recruited over LinkedIn by a wellness startup that had a contract to provide services to a large tech company. That company was our only client.

  The model was data-driven wellness. Our startup was trying to provide meaningful metrics to the company to demonstrate that we were saving them money by preventing illness through offering massage, chiropractic, acupuncture, training, exercise, yoga—that sort of thing. Employees could come to us and pay only a dollar to get a service.

  How did you feel about working in tech?

  My husband is a San Francisco native. Nobody in our family is in the tech industry. But we lived in Noe Valley. So I saw the Google bus phenomenon when it was just starting to happen. And I had read about Twitter getting a tax break from our city while I was pressured to raise inordinate amounts of money for my children’s public school education.1 So let’s just say I had mixed feelings.

  But when I was hired, I decided to set all that aside and try to take people as they were. When you’re massaging somebody, you really don’t care if they’re rich or poor or anything like that. You just deal with the body in front of you.

  Tell us about the bodies.

  People worked long hours. They had postural problems, the sort you get from sitting at a desk all day. Many of them did not exercise or strengthen their bo
dy, so the wear and tear of being on a computer for ten to twelve hours straight was even worse because they had muscle weakness. We also had people who would go home and game all night long and get three hours of sleep and come back to work and then wonder why they hurt all the time.

  Mostly, though, people were just stressed out. So they had the muscle tension that comes with that.

  What kind of tension is that?

  Somebody might come in and say, “Oh, my shoulders feel a bit tight.” And then as you start to work on their shoulders, it feels completely solid. Like their back is a single slab of marble. You cannot differentiate the different muscles from each other or even from the bones of the spine. Everything is tense in equal measure and everything feels the same.

  Of course, it’s incredibly tiring to apply pressure to a body like that. It’s not so different from trying to soften up old meat. So you end up worrying about your hands. I have arthritis developing in a couple of my joints.

  Tell us about the people who came in for massages. What were your interactions like?

  Only direct employees of the company could use the service. I voiced a desire many times to work on the kitchen staff, who were contract workers like us. There was a young woman in the cafeteria who had lymphedema. It was congenital; she’d had it since she was a child. Her legs were huge. And I wanted to work on her because she had to stand or lean on a stool all day. Having a little bit of massage would have helped her tremendously. But she wasn’t allowed.

  So were most of the people you saw software engineers?

  It was a mix. There were some difficult young men who came in and wanted to express their dominance. They were almost exclusively engineers. They would ask me a lot of questions about how I was trained and what I knew about the body. Quizzing me on my job while receiving a massage.

  How would you respond?

  I usually tried to rebalance things by answering their questions about my background and my training matter-of-factly, and then just stop talking. So they would realize that quizzing me was not the point of the massage. Sometimes I would just lean on the sore parts of their body. That’s one fail-safe trick to get someone out of their head and back into the present.

  One guy in particular stood out to me because he always insisted on taking off his shirt to get a massage. He was very hairy, and he seemed unaware that back hair is difficult to massage. He had just gone to his first Burning Man right around the time he joined the company, and he had just discovered CrossFit. He liked to talk about both. I remember him to this day. You never forget a hairy back.

  What about the women?

  There were a lot of female administrative staff. They tended to be physically fit, trim, attractive younger women.

  Many of them seemed stressed and sad. It sent my antennae up. I felt protective. The vibe was that they always had to have a smile on their face. They had to joke along with the guys. They had to be smart and funny. They had to be entertaining. I worried about them.

  All of the executives at the company had their own administrative assistants. I remember one woman in particular. She was gorgeous. She was in her twenties, twenty-eight at the most. She wasn’t the assistant to the CEO, but to someone right below him. One day, she came in incredibly stressed. She had scheduled a thirty-minute massage for herself. She came in holding her phone, which was how her executive communicated with her. And when she lay down on the table, she wouldn’t let go of it.

  I don’t just mean the phone was on the massage table with her. Plenty of other people did that, which was fine with me. I mean she was literally holding it during her session.

  I tried to take it out of her hand and we nearly had a fight. When I reached for it, she yanked it back. I wanted to be maternal and caring, but also assertive. Like, you’re not gonna get anything out of the massage if you’re on the phone. There was a back-and-forth there for a second, a real tug-of-war. Finally, I thought: The horse is out of the barn. I guess she needs this phone. So I let go.

  Feeling her body, I could tell that she was near some kind of break. Just physically and emotionally drained.

  A few minutes later, something happened on her phone and she got up and ran out.

  Invisible Lines

  What did people talk about during their massages? Would people tell you about their work? Did they see you as someone they could confide in?

  People almost never talked about work. I think they had all been told to be careful with the massage therapists for fear of spilling trade secrets. We were also all made to sign an NDA before working there. One of the conditions was that we couldn’t even reveal the name of the company. I mean, good Lord. My husband is a police detective. He has a top-secret clearance from the federal government, and he has more freedom to talk about where he worked and what he did than I did at that company at the very same time. He works on some sensitive stuff, like literal life-and-death stuff. The whole thing was kind of ridiculous.

  One time, there was a woman who came to see me for a massage who was extremely upset. I think she worked in HR. She just lay on the table and cried and cried. But she wouldn’t talk about whatever it was. The general rule in massage is that when somebody is crying and they don’t want to talk about it, you just let them. So I didn’t press it.

  Then there was the time that I saw one of my regulars in our area. So I came over with my breakfast tray and said hello. He was on his laptop working, and his screen was facing where I was standing. When he saw me, he quickly turned his laptop away and slammed the screen down. And I thought, Honey, nothing on that screen would mean a thing to me. I mean, I wouldn’t be able to understand what I was looking at, let alone interpret any of the code.

  What was “your area”? Was the place where the massage therapists worked cordoned off from the rest of the company?

  We were technically allowed to go anywhere. I had the badge to access all the different floors. But in practice, there was an unspoken, self-policed hierarchy of who was allowed to go where.

  How did you experience that hierarchy?

  There was a really incredible coffee bar on one of the floors. The executive chef at the company was the person who brought in our wellness startup. I think he had a personal connection to one of the founders. For him, his power base in the company lay in the food. So he told us to go to the coffee bar anytime we wanted.

  I went there a couple of times, but I never felt comfortable. No matter how many times they told us we could and should go anywhere, I felt like if I ever ventured beyond our little corner of the company, people would just start looking at me like, Who are you and why are you here? You obviously don’t fit. I remember feeling like there were eyes in my back, eyes boring a hole in my back. If I went too deep into a space, if I went over some invisible line, I was like, I’d better turn around and go.

  Did you and your fellow massage therapists eat at the company cafeteria?

  Yup. One of the perks of the job was that we got two free meals there per day.

  The galley where you would pick up your food was in the center of the cafeteria. In a U shape around that galley was the seating area. All of the contract workers tended to gather at one of the top ends of the U. Not an ideal place to sit, but that’s where we all felt safe. We could just kind of relax a little bit—the massage therapists, the kitchen staffers, the people who worked at the coffee bar and the juice bar. Not the janitorial staff, though, because they never got to sit down.

  Did you ever sit with the full-time employees?

  The massage therapists were sort of this in-between group in the office because we interfaced with a lot of engineers. They were mostly friendly to us. They treated us better than the kitchen staff, who definitely bore the brunt of the snobbish behavior. But they didn’t want us to sit with them. It felt like high school.

  Sometimes an engineer would drift too far into our part of the cafeteria and suddenly realize where he was and immediately pick up his tray and run back toward the other engineers.


  The most uncomfortable manifestation of these unwritten rules was what happened with my daughter.

  What happened?

  One day, for some reason, I can’t remember why, my daughter was at work with me. She was a fifth grader at the time and she had some interest in tech and computers and had learned to code over the summer. So I wanted to introduce her to a lovely young engineer, a woman, who I had gotten to know. That woman was brilliant. She had been homeschooled, but I think she was a better coder than all the guys who had gone to the fancy Ivy League schools.

  My daughter and I entered the engineering area. It was a big, open floor. There were maybe a hundred engineers at work. And I just remember feeling like I was walking through a fog of “No, get away.” I can’t totally explain it. There’s nothing specific I can point to. I just felt unwelcome. I felt people’s eyes on me. People looking at me like, Who is she and why is she here? And I had a child with me, which I’m sure was unusual.

  Anyway, we made it to the desk of this young woman and her male coworker. They were hard at work at their standing desks. They were both very nice, although he seemed a bit uncomfortable. It was awkward. It felt like I had done something wrong. It made me realize that people can be nice, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily want you in their space.