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.
6The 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
