Chapter 4
God Mode: The Unchecked Power of Data Access
To properly troubleshoot customer issues, I needed access to their code and dashboards. The company granted Solutions team members "God Mode"-complete visibility into all customer data sets. This privileged vantage point revealed the true stories behind tech startups: supposed rocket ships sputtering, gaming apps spiking then flaming out, all cushioned by venture capital despite clear trajectories toward obsolescence.
We operated on good faith, with the assumption we wouldn't pry into data sets out of curiosity, track celebrities through ride-sharing histories, or exploit our insights for stock trading. Though an audit log tracked our activities, no one mentioned "insider trading" or created policies against leaks. We were all, as the CEO reminded us, "Down for the Cause."
The office fostered intense camaraderie through proximity and shared experience. Everyone knew each other's personal struggles and celebrated the freedom from corporate formality. Work became identity-"We were the company; the company was us"-with personal worth tied directly to professional performance. Success felt genuinely meaningful, creating a sense of pride whenever the company received recognition.
I embraced the tech culture aesthetic-flannel shirts, work boots, vitamin supplements-and developed an affinity for EDM music while working. The pulsing electronic beats gave me a sense of momentum and confidence that made mundane tasks feel significant. It created a sensation of power that made me wonder, "was this what it was like to be a man?"
Every Tuesday at noon, San Francisco's emergency sirens coincided with the analytics startup's all-hands meeting, where employees gathered around the CEO "like children at a progressive kindergarten." The company shared detailed metrics and updates with everyone, creating a sense of transparency and impact. The CEO, though not physically imposing, commanded respect and instilled both fear and desire for approval, frequently invoking military metaphors about being "at war" with competitors.
Chapter 5
The Transformation of San Francisco Under Tech's Influence
San Francisco strained under tech's invasion-a historically bohemian haven for hippies, queers, artists and activists now infiltrated by "capital, power, and a bland, overcorrected, heterosexual masculinity." The city's cultural fabric, once woven with the threads of counterculture movements, underground art scenes, and radical political activism, began fraying under the weight of Silicon Valley's expansion. The newcomers dressed for work as if mountain-bound, sporting $700 Patagonia jackets and decorative carabiners while heading to climate-controlled offices with cold brew on tap. They engaged with the city by rating it on apps, pursuing "authenticity" in carefully curated experiences, without recognizing they themselves had become San Francisco's most authentic feature - the very embodiment of its rapid transformation.
While major tech companies built sprawling suburban campuses complete with gourmet cafeterias, yoga studios, and game rooms eliminating any need to leave, private shuttles - gleaming white buses with tinted windows - ferried badge-wearing workers through residential neighborhoods like a daily reminder of the city's growing divide. These corporate compounds created invisible walls between tech workers and the communities they inhabited, with employees spending their days in carefully controlled environments that bore little resemblance to the city beyond their walls.
The city's stark inequality manifested in increasingly jarring ways - homeless encampments spread beneath the shadows of luxury high-rises where one-bedroom apartments rented for $4,000 monthly. People suffering from mental illness and addiction struggled on streets directly beneath billboards advertising productivity apps and startup IPOs. In the Mission District, historic taquerias and Latino businesses shuttered beside artisanal coffee shops charging $6 for pour-overs. This shameful juxtaposition of suffering and affluence left me feeling guilty with each passing day.
With my improved financial situation, I left my shared apartment in the Castro for a tiny but private studio in northern San Francisco. Despite its modest 400 square feet and barred windows, the apartment had undeniable character with its bay window, shared garden access, and view of a gnarled Australian tea tree. At $1,800 monthly (consuming 40% of my take-home pay), it offered privacy I'd never experienced before, though the neighborhood revealed its true nature after sunset-a strange ecosystem of homeless individuals, drug activity, and wide-eyed tourists seeking remnants of sixties counterculture in the Haight-Ashbury district.
My solitary weekends brought both liberating freedom and crushing loneliness. I'd spend hours lying in Golden Gate Park's hidden meadows listening to electronic music, take solo bike rides along the Embarcadero, dine alone with my phone as companion at neighborhood restaurants, and walk coastal paths feeling sorry for myself. The city's parks overflowed with wholesome couples doing partner yoga and jogging together, making my isolation feel more acute. Though well-meaning coworkers constantly encouraged dating apps as the solution, I grew increasingly paranoid about sharing personal data after witnessing the surveillance capabilities of God Mode, retreating further into my solitary routine in a city teeming with people yet somehow feeling emptier by the day.
Chapter 6
The Undervaluing of Non-Technical Skills in a Technical World
In Silicon Valley's hierarchy, non-engineers constantly had to prove their worth. We were seen as necessary evils who bloated payroll, created bureaucracy, and diluted technical conversations-though we did improve diversity metrics. Despite emotional intelligence being nearly impossible to teach (unlike coding), soft skills were systematically undervalued. Our operations manager exemplified this disparity-a former public defender who quietly ran the entire company's operations, from HR to board meetings to facilities management, yet received less cultural and monetary recognition than anyone who could write a Rails app.
Working as the only woman on a team supporting male software developers became an exercise in internalized misogyny. I found myself constantly deferring to male egos-affirming them, cheering them up, advocating for their advancement. Though women in the office occasionally gathered for drinks, these felt more like duty than genuine support. I envied our communications director, who maintained strict professionalism and left promptly at 5:00 for her children.
Despite trying not to be "the feminist killjoy," I found myself speaking up against sexist language and behavior that permeated the office like wallpaper. One particularly jarring incident involved a middle-aged "influencer" who approached my desk to tell me he loved dating Jewish women because we're "so sensual"-when I reported this unwanted comment, my manager merely shrugged it off as "just who he is."
As my annual review approached, I debated whether to mention the casual sexism permeating our workplace of sixty employees, only eight of whom were women. I'd experienced colleagues with animated breast GIFs on smartwatches, comments about my appearance, and an influencer's "bangable women" ranking list. While I liked my coworkers and gave back as good as I got, the environment remained problematic. When I emailed my mother about these issues, expecting support, she immediately warned me not to put complaints about sexism in writing unless I had a lawyer ready.
Chapter 7
The Moral Ambiguity of Building Surveillance Technology
When news broke about an NSA contractor leaking classified information about government surveillance programs, my coworkers and I barely acknowledged it, continuing our discussions about takeout options and TV shows. The revelation that the NSA was reading private communications and tracking citizens' internet activity using cookies-technology central to our analytics software-went undiscussed. Most disturbing to me was that lower-level NSA employees could access the same databases as their superiors, using them to spy on loved ones and enemies alike. Yet we never discussed these parallels to our own work, comforting ourselves that we weren't "data brokers" and were "the good guys."
I reunited with Noah, a former colleague who had been fired, at a bar near our old office. He looked happier since being fired, considering opening a worker-owned bagel shop and consciously avoiding tech terminology. More disturbingly, Noah described our former employer as "a surveillance company," drawing parallels between ad tech and government surveillance. He argued we were "one subpoena away from collaborating with intelligence agencies." His perspective troubled me, highlighting my myopia-despite all the industry talk about changing the world, I hadn't considered the moral implications of our data collection practices.
Our company released a new feature called "Addiction" that graphed how frequently users engaged with apps on an hourly basis. As the de facto copywriter, I ghostwrote promotional pieces for the CEO celebrating how companies could measure their "embeddedness" in users' daily lives. Though the feature was technically impressive, I felt deeply uneasy about both the concept and the branding. Having witnessed real addiction devastate lives and communities, I found the terminology offensive and sheltered. When I voiced my concerns to Kyle, he simply responded, "We already call our customers 'users.'"
I questioned what "the cause" truly meant at our company. Behind our noble-sounding mission of "helping people make better decisions" lay more cynical goals: increasing engagement, reducing friction, enabling digital dependency. We helped marketers optimize click-throughs, made shopping carts harder to abandon, and tightened addictive feedback loops. The endgame was always growth at any cost, scale above all, disrupt then dominate. The vision was a frictionless world where everything could be optimized, prioritized, monetized and controlled-yet I preferred my inefficient life with its human messiness and unproductive pleasures.
Chapter 8
Seeking Meaning in a Culture of Optimization
Despite accepting a ten-thousand-dollar pay cut and title demotion to "Supportocat," I took a job at an open-source startup. The offer included excellent benefits, but I was primarily seeking a healthier workplace: fair compensation, trustworthy management, and accountability systems. When I called Parker for advice, he expressed reservations about the company's "dark specter of centralization" but acknowledged that finding truly ethical employment in tech was nearly impossible-"nothing you do is going to be more pernicious than the background radiation of SoMa."
The open-source startup had revolutionized collaborative programming, creating a platform beloved by developers that had been profitable from the beginning. Founded by four twenty-something programmers with techno-utopian ideals, the company initially operated without hierarchy-employees named their compensation, determined priorities, and made decisions by consensus. The founders rejected management in favor of meritocracy. Employees worked whenever and wherever they chose with unlimited, untracked vacation. Users displayed fanatical brand loyalty, even tattooing the octopus-cat mascot on their bodies.
Despite HQ's ten-million-dollar opulence, the company's true headquarters existed in the cloud. As a remote-first organization, most business occurred in text on a private version of their own platform. Employees obsessively documented everything, making all internal communications visible across the organization. The chat software contained channels for every conceivable interest-from science fiction to ergonomic keyboards-with emoji usage that made my work screen look "like a video game for children."
The company gave new employees fitness wristbands, reflecting tech's obsession with optimization. Silicon Valley's productivity hacking had expanded into "biohacking"-people optimizing their bodies with everything from butter-laced coffee to electric shock wristbands to unregulated "nootropics." Despite my skepticism, I ordered cognitive enhancement capsules from a startup funded by my company's investors. I recognized the appeal of quantification as control, but this wasn't self-knowledge-just metadata. The pursuit seemed sad, serving productivity rather than pleasure.
Desperate to belong, I claimed a standing desk, decorated my laptop with company stickers, got massages I couldn't enjoy from shame, drank scotch in the hidden Napoleon-themed room behind the library bookcases, played on the soccer team to help meet the "two-woman quota," and proudly wore my employee hoodie. As employee #230-something, I envied the early hires with their inside jokes and genuine pride. Reading their banter or seeing photos of their children dressed as the company mascot, I'd feel pangs of "corporate loneliness"-yearning for that all-consuming affiliation I'd once had at my previous job.
Chapter 9
The Dark Side of the Open Web
I joined the newly created Terms of Service team handling the platform's growing moderation challenges. We managed copyright claims, harassment, threats, pornography, malware, and various illegal content-becoming reluctant content moderators for nine million users. Despite wanting to uphold free speech while preventing abuse, we struggled with drawing consistent lines. Our team of four white North Americans in our twenties and thirties recognized our blind spots when making global content decisions. Most concerning was that the executive team seemed unaware of both our existence and how commonly their platform was being abused.
Back at headquarters after a business trip, we faced a disturbing situation: internet trolls had created a repository on our platform containing personal information about women in gaming they were targeting for harassment. After weeks of internal debate in an ad hoc "Hazmat" chat room, the company finally disabled the repository, triggering a flood of death threats to our support inbox. My coworkers downplayed the danger, insisting these were just "assholes" or bored students-"a bunch of dudes in their parents' basements." When I showed an engineer a particularly hostile message, he dismissed my concerns with crude jokes about the sender's probable lifestyle.
The social web promised connection and community while hiding its true nature as ad tech. Founders claimed social networks would make people kinder and redistribute power, even bring liberal democracy to authoritarian states. Yet these platforms were built by programmers with programmers in mind, systems thinkers who considered abuse an edge case rather than a structural inevitability. The software was transactional and optimized for engagement, where crowdfunding requests for insulin spread as efficiently as anti-vaccination propaganda.
Working in cloud software created a unique psychological burden-building lucrative tools that physically didn't exist and could be erased or replaced at any moment. Engineers poured years into programs that might never ship or would soon become obsolete. Meanwhile, I commanded a six-figure salary yet felt fundamentally useless, relying on online tutorials for basic life skills. Many programmers between 22 and 40 were desperately seeking tactile hobbies-woodworking, baking sourdough, sous vide cooking-documenting their creations online as if to prove they could still manipulate the physical world.
Chapter 10
The Reckoning: Tech's Political Awakening
As the 2016 presidential election approached, tech founders poured money into last-minute civic initiatives while I "turned inward," assuming Hillary Clinton would win. I had "bought into tech's self-flattering grandiosity" and trusted things would work in the industry's favor. When my Terms of Service team encountered content about an alleged sex-trafficking ring in a pizzeria-early signs of what would become the "Pizzagate" conspiracy-I disengaged, focusing on copyright takedowns instead. Later, I wondered if I missed the significance because I had become "more of a product of the tech industry-with its context aversion, and emphasis on speed and scale" than I wanted to admit.
The narrator realizes she's been suppressing her emotional, impractical side to fit into tech culture. She acknowledges these qualities aren't less valuable than what founders prioritize-just different. Her motivations for joining tech-money, affirmation, stability-stemmed from privilege and the belief that work should provide meaning. But the industry's idealism was fading; tech wasn't progress, just business.
After the election, the tech industry spiraled into anxiety and coping mechanisms-from vaping to sound baths to microdosing. Industry leaders positioned themselves as reluctant patriots while continuing to prioritize tech solutions. People bought weighted blankets marketed to them by the same algorithms that facilitated the spread of fascist ideology and misinformation. Those working in content moderation struggled with their new responsibility of adjudicating online speech. At an industry gathering, someone whispered: "There are no adults in the White House. We're the government now."
In early 2018, I left my job at the open-source startup, seeking change and wanting to write. Leaving a remote workplace proved anticlimactic-just a brief exit interview, a farewell message, and watching my access to platforms being revoked "like a light going out." Despite uncertainty, I used my savings to exercise my vested stock options before the deadline.
When news broke that the startup had been purchased for $7.5 billion, reactions ranged from celebration to ambivalence. The acquisition created millionaires and billionaires, with my modest shares worth about $200,000 before taxes. I felt "no pride, only relief and guilt," recognizing that many women in non-technical roles couldn't afford to exercise their options, missing the "once-in-a-lifetime bonanza."
I had long believed entrepreneurs harbored deeper spiritual yearnings beneath their startup fanaticism. I assumed these ambitious young men were driven by relatable desires for community and understanding. My search for emotional narratives behind Silicon Valley's leaders was partly an attempt to alleviate my guilt about participating in "a globally extractive project," but mostly projection. I wanted to believe the next generation of economic elites would build a better world. Eventually, I mourned these conceits, realizing I should have seen a system rather than looking for stories. The young men of Silicon Valley "had power, wealth, and control" and were "ecstatic about the future." The person with the yearning was myself.
