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CHAPTER 1

Poor Winners

Within hours of my arrival in the gleaming consumer paradise of boom-time San Francisco, people started giving me free things. Free snacks, free liquor, free T-shirts, free tchotchkes, free personal brand-building buzz, free advice — it was all there for the taking, emblazoned with corporate logos and gifted, ultimately, by benefactors who rarely showed their faces. Not to us mortals, anyway. The quasimythical tech industry elite would never be expected to mingle with the rest of us; they inhabited a higher plane, one with robot servants and Bay views. I recognized the freebies for what they were — not simple acts of personal generosity, but manna from above, bestowed by the invisible hand of venture capital.

The first free thing I got was a bright pink coupon that I fished out of a basket next to a cash register. The coupon bestowed a free introductory taxi ride from the city's second-largest "app-based pickup service," Lyft. I found the corporate vowel swapping obnoxious. (Couldn't it just be Lift?) Ditto the twee mustache logo. But I was much too "frugal," as my wife put it, to refuse a $25 value on aesthetic grounds. So I installed the Lyft app on my phone, allowed the company to track my geospatial location and who knows what else, and then summoned a car to carry me and my luggage to my new digs across town.

When I looked up, there was a car puttering away by the curb. I'd never used an app like Lyft before, and it didn't seem possible that my ride had shown up so fast. I stood around futilely scanning the horizon for a few minutes. The driver didn't seem annoyed. She seemed happy for the break.

Simone was bone-tired. I didn't blame her. She was the model of a twenty-first- century microentrepreneur, which is to say she was a grossly exploited worker. She lived in Oakland but woke up early to drive to central San Francisco, where she picked up two shifts as a public school bus driver. She drove for Lyft on her lunch break and again after work until bedtime. Both employers classified Simone as a part-time independent contractor, and neither seemed at all concerned about her level of fatigue behind the wheel. She wasn't expecting a raise. "I want to wean away from Lyft," she told me. "I'm just making someone else rich. I know I could be putting that time into my own company."

In Hollywood, everybody has an unfinished script. In the Bay Area, everybody has a "pre–Series A" tech company running in "stealth mode" (meaning they have an idea without any money behind it that's ostensibly secret but in fact hungry for publicity). "What's your startup?" I asked.

She hesitated. Then she asked if I was religious or easily offended. "Not really," I said.

As the car rolled slowly through the Tenderloin — under freeways, past bustling homeless camps and twilight trash fires — Simone told me all about her company. It was called Racy Laydeez. She'd hired someone out of pocket to build the website. Racy Laydeez was a catalog of sex toys, featuring detailed instructions for newbies and ... "demonstrations." Naturally, I was intrigued. Yet I wasn't totally clear on what twist Simone brought to the saturated market for sexual accoutrements, except perhaps that working-class black women like her might be more comfortable ordering dildos from an online outfit than browsing the aisles at a downtown sex shop full of white yuppies. While there may have been holes in Simone's business plan, that hadn't stopped a thousand much stupider startups from attracting large investments. And I certainly couldn't fault her enthusiasm. "I know I can be a million-dollar baby!" she said as we pulled up to the curb. I wished her luck, waved goodbye, and took in my surroundings.

* * *

Amid the concrete spider's web of elevated highways and dingy warehouses stood a shining new multistory condo tower. Somewhere inside it was my new home. I carried my bags to the front door, which bore a curious inscription. LIVE/WORK, it said. Presumably this was an indication of progressive mixed-use urban zoning practices, or something, but it read more like a commandment. Live, work. What else can we do until death but work? Or perhaps the inscription offered a choice. You can live or you can work.

This place, which I called Hacker Condo, was the best deal I could find on short notice. Like most Bay Area newcomers, I was relying on the short-term apartment rental app Airbnb. At $85 per night, the place cost less than the market average, but still more than I could afford. On the upside, it was in what the real estate hucksters called SoMa — a trendy neighborhood well suited to my journalistic and entrepreneurial purposes. Once a low-rent manufacturing district, the South of Market Street area had become the go-to place for startups seeking industrial-chic open-plan offices, though the poor and homeless had not yet been fully purged. The ad for Hacker Condo stated an express preference for techies: "We would like to welcome motivated and serious entrepreneurs who are looking to expand their network," it said. Perfect. The best part: "No bunk beds." I told the hosts, Brody and Mike, that I was an "embryo-stage" startup founder and author. That, along with my smiling profile photograph and full upfront payment, was enough to sail me through the interview. Brody and Mike didn't own the place. I looked it up. The mortgage was held by some European guy who seemed to spend most of his time surfing at a resort and dabbled in the tech business as a hobby, as bored blue bloods were wont to do. The legal status of this rental arrangement was, let's say, unclear.

I rang the buzzer for a unit labeled TENANT. A man answered right away. He'd been waiting. After a moment, the door opened, and I met my new roommate, a gangly Kiwi named Liam. We took the elevator three floors up and entered a silent, beige-carpeted hallway. "Have you met the neighbors?" I asked. "I've never seen anyone else," he said. "There was a party the other night in no. 14. We knocked, but no one opened the door." Our unit was no. 16. The first thing I noticed inside was a small mountain of men's shoes. The view got better from there. Hacker Condo was modern and more spacious than seemed possible from the outside. The unit was spread out over three floors — a humdrum lower level that might've been intended as a den or exercise room, a main-floor studio comprising a kitchen, living room, and dining area, and a master bedroom hanging over everything, designed as a sort of interior balcony. The ceilings rose twenty feet or more over dark hardwood floors, with spectacular paned windows soaring all the way up. The furniture consisted of a picnic bench and a sectional couch spanning the width of the living room. Not bad! "What's the key situation?" I asked.

"There's one key," Liam said.

"One key?" I said. "For everybody?"

A voice called out from across the room: "You have twenty-four hours to tell Airbnb the place isn't as advertised." Uh-oh. What else was wrong with it?

Liam showed me the wall-mounted light in the hallway where they stashed the interior door key. To reach it required long arms or a leap. There were more tricks to learn, as a consequence of the possibly illicit nature of this type of rental arrangement and the evident stinginess of our Airbnb hosts. The Condo Hackers never came in through the front door, Liam explained. It was too conspicuous. I followed Liam down to the ground-floor garage, then outside to the rear of the building. He showed me how to slide my hand along a grate to locate the tiny combination safe that contained the exterior door key. It was best to do this when no one was looking.

We returned upstairs to meet the roomies. I knew not to spend too much time getting to know them, for we were all rootless high-tech transients, our relationships temporary, our status revocable. The room I'd booked was available for only two weeks. As soon as I connected to the WiFi network, I would need to start looking for another place with new furnishings, new cupboard layouts to learn, new passwords to memorize, and new roommates to meet and forget.

By the window, at the only proper desk: Raj, a brawny coder who affected a halfhearted machismo. He was the one who had shouted across the room. He was helpful like that.

On the middle of the couch, hunched over his laptop and radiating nervousness: Arun, a waifish intern, born in Bangalore and enrolled as an undergrad at Dartmouth.

At the far end of the couch, with tiny headphones in his ears: Yuri, from Norway. "Yuri is half Russian and half Arab. He drinks every day," Raj said. Yuri nodded austerely.

Alone at the kitchen table: Diego. He, like the others, was a software guy, but his unique after-hours passion was "hardware hacking." In a less pretentious time he might've been described simply as an electronics enthusiast, or a humble Radio Shack customer. Diego was an oddity. I wondered if the fumes from his soldering iron hadn't somehow affected his mind. I was partly right.

I asked Liam to show me my room. A puzzled look crossed his face, then he motioned for me to follow him to the lower floor of the condo. I cursed when I reached the landing. "My" room had five beds in it. I thought I had paid for a private space. "I thought so, too," Liam said. "The ad was vague." I double-checked. The listing clearly stated "no bunk beds," but down in the fine print I finally found the words "shared room." "It's sneaky that way," Yuri concurred.

Dinnertime looming, I ascended to the kitchen on the main floor. "Is there anything to boil water in?" I asked.

"No. Welcome to the house," Diego said.

The Condo Hackers were all immigrants or the children of immigrants, and therefore accustomed to getting jerked around. They were also too busy to raise a fuss. They rarely stopped working, even when drinking. The office always followed them home. They fancied themselves budding entrepreneurs, but they were chiefly migrant laborers with MacBook Pros. Like thousands of other tech workers, the foreign-born among them had entered the country on H-1B "specialty occupation" work visas conditional upon their continued employment. Like me, they each had a startup idea. Unlike me, they had professional training, exceptional in-demand skills, and the potential to one day earn a living wage.

I plopped down on an empty couch cushion. Everyone typed silently for a while. Then Raj stood up and stared at me. "This is a frat house," he said. I had gathered as much. In two hours I'd heard two rape jokes. "You're going to be hazed," Raj went on. I stared back at him. He was bigger than me, but perhaps if I hit him first, hard, in the nose, I could save myself from whatever ritualized debasement he had in mind.

Liam emerged from downstairs and stood at Raj's shoulder. "Do you smoke?" Liam said.

"What?" I said.

"That's the right answer," Raj said.

As hazings went, a shared spliff on the rooftop wasn't terrible. We talked about computers and took in the view as the sun sank behind the Bay — not that we could see it. In one direction were the Hall of Justice, the county jail, and a row of shingles for bail bondsmen. In the other, a freeway overpass, under which tarpaulin blankets and cardboard mattresses appeared nightly and vanished in the daylight. "Don't walk that way," Liam said.

Someone proposed ordering a pizza. The nearby restaurants catering to cops and lawyers were all closed for dinner. "No one lives here," Yuri said. "Except us."

* * *

I was only beginning to get acquainted with the infinite solipsism of my new milieu. This was a world where scoring points on social media mattered more than getting to know the people you shared a bathroom with, where fulfillment in life was seen as the culmination of a simple, replicable process, like the instructions on the back of a box of macaroni and cheese. We were grown men who lived like captive gerbils, pressing one lever to make food appear and another for some fleeting entertainment — everything on demand. Airbnb and Foodpanda served the flesh, Netflix and Lifehacker nourished the soul.

This is not to say the techies lacked all personality. Yuri, for instance, was clearly a jerk. I liked him anyway. I invited Yuri out to join me at a party celebrating "girl developers." He assumed I had some inside source, which made me feel pretty savvy, but like most of the freebies around town, the party was openly advertised online. I relied on sites like like Eventbrite and Meetup.com to keep my social calendar full and my expenses down. Yuri was grateful for the invitation. He offered to order an Uber for us, even though the party was less than a mile away. I goaded him into walking. Just as I predicted, we traversed the homeless encampments around Hacker Condo without incident. Contrary to local law and custom, they were poor people, not cannibals.

The venue was a forbidding Gothamesque Art Deco tower — the old PacBell building, constructed for the California branch of the national telephone monopoly in its heyday. Now the tower's largest tenant was Yelp, a website that allows anonymous semiliterates to post critiques of grocers, doctors, restaurants, bars, and other local establishments. The reviews aren't much to read, and the dominant tone is one of petty disgruntlement, but in a sense that's the point. Yelp makes money by calling the owners of businesses named in the reviews and selling advertising. Some of the businesses have claimed that salespeople, who are under immense quota pressure, have sometimes promised to make negative comments "go away," or to suppress listings for competing businesses, in exchange for a monthly ad buy amounting to several thousand dollars per year. Yelp, founded in 2004, began reporting $370 million in annual revenue within a decade. Yelp's practices sounded to some businesses like an "extortion" racket. But Yelp had prevailed in lawsuits attacking its practices. Per Vanity Fair, Yelp's leaders were accredited members of "the new establishment." Fortysomething CEO Jeremy Stoppelman had personally donated $125,000 to the Democratic Party and its candidates. So when Yelp moved into its new global headquarters in 2013, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi of Pacific Heights, the most ostentatiously wealthy neighborhood in the city, cut the ribbon. Pelosi praised Yelp as "a model of good business" and an exemplar of the "social and economic engines that drive the American dream" — a dream "built on faith in the future, faith in the entrepreneurial spirit, faith in innovation, faith in technology, and really faith in community, because community is what Yelp is all about." Even better, unlike the local newspapers that Stoppelman and his fellow tech execs helped to drive out of business, Yelp didn't subsidize a small army of journalists to pester politicians like Pelosi with questions about her coziness with campaign donors, or to write honest, competent restaurant reviews.

Yuri and I stood outside the reinforced doors of the tower and peered into the imposing lobby with its black marble walls and an intricately painted ceiling in the style of a Chinese tapestry. We had a problem. The party was overbooked. Yuri offered the steely doorman an insouciant shrug and, to my surprise, we were waved on toward the golden elevator. I noticed it had no buttons. This was my first experience with a "smart elevator," a devious device that furnished an additional line of defense against external rabble, whether dodgy moochers like us or restaurateurs driven to violent extremism by moronic Yelp reviews.

The doors opened to a beer-soaked huddle of coeds in matching T-shirts standing rigidly around a deejay booth. Pandora, the online radio service that seems to have a passion for putting musicians out of business, had ironically sent a live human to supply muffled musical accompaniment to the pulsing backbeat of shop talk. Above the crowd, in lights, was the name of the great benefactor: Yelp.

As advertised, the party boasted more "girls" than the usual tech soiree, although they were mostly segregated in defensive circles. I spoke to the eminently well-intentioned organizer and heard about the abuse, derision, rejection, and condescension faced by women in the technical professions, which the party was part of a larger effort to remedy. I couldn't honestly say I was doing my best to help, as I'd brought along someone who was just cruising for a hookup. Over by the deejay booth, a big blond oafish boy on crutches stumbled through a circle of women in company T-shirts, seized the mic, and began rapping, horribly. Time to move on.

I zigzagged through the opulent throng, confronted at every turn with bizarre juxtapositions of pleasure and toil. What was the point of it all? Networking, of course. To get a better job, and then a better one, and so on until you earned your "fuck you" money — as in "Fuck you, boss, I quit." Everyone had a different idea what sort of sum qualified as "fuck you" money, but it was generally understood to mean enough money that you wouldn't need to work anymore and could skip these stupid fake parties. Most of the crowd seemed to work at Yelp, and being far from having earned their "fuck you" money, felt obliged to stick around for the event. But there was something else keeping these people here — an overriding anxiety toward unfamiliar spaces.

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Excerpted from "Live Work Work Work Die"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Corey Pein.
Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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