I have lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than a decade, and yet I know only a couple of people who work in the tech industry. That might sound perplexing to you — after all, isn’t San Francisco the capital of Silicon Valley? That's certainly true enough: From the billboards advertising obscure cloud computing “solutions” to the reclaimed-wood “co-working spaces” that line Market Street to the employee badges that dangle from tech workers like Tiffany bracelets, the Bay Area Brahmins make themselves conspicuous. Yet while this is an exceedingly tech-obsessed place to live, the Bay Area is also bifurcated — and the gulf between Silicon Valley and me is as vast as our salary differential.
As the tech industry expanded out from the peninsula like an untreated infection, it did not move as a rising tide; all boats were not lifted. Rather, some sunk completely, while the yachts commissioned additional rooms and bulkheads. The sunk included many of my family and friends; if you’ve not had the pain of watching a grandparent forced to abandon his or her homeland after 90 years of residency, it is not pleasant, to say the least. Only slightly less painful is the experience of watching a city die. Only recently have I finally come to terms with the fact that my freewheeling San Francisco of yesteryear is not only dead, but rolling in its grave. I used to joke that the charm of San Francisco was that it was the city that never wakes up. No longer — now, it's the city that can't look up from its smartphone.
These experiences — of watching the culture sapped from my family’s ancestral home, and observing the echoes of San Francisco’s hippie-liberalism strangled by the overworked protestant culture of Silicon Valley — were enough to permanently sour my ability to interact with the screen-addled invaders. So the fact that I don’t have many friends in tech isn’t really surprising: I hardly know how to communicate with them, and our income gap tends to mean we have little in common. Still, I have an admiration for those, like Corey Pein, who share my lefty politics yet can hobnob with the perky acolytes of tech without feeling physically ill. Which is why Pein’s new book, “Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley,” is all the more impressive: Pein, perhaps by virtue of being an outsider, is able to penetrate the techie nest in a way that locals can’t.
Reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson’s “Hell’s Angels” in both style and conceit, “Live Work Work Work Die” is a combination of New Journalism and muckraking told with an anthropological eye. In the beginning, Pein sets out to Silicon Valley to observe the nerds up close and penetrate their inner sanctum. He is not shy about his ulterior motive — to strike it rich — and openly admits that he fits the bill as a “white techie colonizer.” But he is also, unlike just about everyone else in the industry, explicitly aware of the absurd and Orwellian techno-utopian fantasies that undergird tech culture.
Part cultural criticism and part hero's journey, Pein’s work is at its strongest when it engages with locals' quotidian struggles. In the most harrowing and outrageous chapter, the cash-strapped author finds affordable (I use that term loosely) housing in an over-capacity Airbnb apartment in the Excelsior District, called “Excelsior House.” To Pein, $1,000 a month seems like a decent deal; yet upon his arrival he finds the house ruled by a vicious landlord named Luna who has surveillance cameras set on the residents to monitor behavior and a list of rules that recall Dolores Umbridge's petty "educational decrees" that line the wall of Hogwarts. Pein’s new roommates include two people in cots in the living room and a family of three sharing a single bedroom, and the house is so crowded the wait for the bathroom can be hours. And about that bathroom: Pein describes it as "filthy," and notes that the only roll of toilet paper has "MIKE" written on it in Sharpie.
Pein's experience in Excelsior House is part of a familiar social pattern in the Bay Area, that of downwardly mobile housing. The upper classes now live in what was once middle-class housing, middle-class people live in housing that was once the realm of the working class, and working-class people have been reduced to slums, penury or homelessness. Pein muses over how his landlord, Luna, claims that the deplorable living conditions "serve a niche in the airbnb community." "It was the niche once known as ‘affordable housing,’ now 'Slums as a Service,'" Pein writes.
Contrast this with Airbnb's mission statement: "Belong anywhere." "For so long, people thought Airbnb was about renting houses. But really, we’re about home," the company explains. "You see, a house is just a space, but a home is where you belong. And what makes this global community so special is that for the very first time, you can belong anywhere. That is the idea at the core of our company: belonging." Tell that to the residents of Luna's micro-surveillance state.
The gap between Airbnb’s feel-good mission statement and the reality of its “Slums as a Service” offerings speak to a persistent theme in the book: the anti-humanism and anomie at the heart of Silicon Valley, which is particularly ironic given the industry’s aspirational marketing apparatus. It’s more than a few outliers: Facebook claims its goal is to connect people, but profits off making its users addicted to its “spyware as a service”; Uber claims its goal is to get you from A to B, but it has cultivated a massive network of exploited contract labor. Silicon Valley is a place that converts people to drones while convincing them it’s doing the opposite.
Alternately amusing and horrifying, the book’s denouement arrives when Pein ties together the techno-utopian mind-set with a burgeoning “tech fascist” movement, something that Pein previously detailed in his brilliant Baffler article “Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich.” Indeed, like any group of supremacists, those who believe that coders are innately superior will eventually find themselves browsing brown T-shirts on Amazon. Here's hoping we can debug the Valley before it's too late.
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"Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley," by Corey Pein, will be released on April 24, 2018, from Metropolitan Books.
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