Corey Pein - Live Work Work Work Die: a Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

Vom Affen zum Roboter

If its true that suffering builds character, I owe many thanks to Airbnb. In the same spirit, I must thank those who declined to be interviewed, especially Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, and Curtis Yarvinmy three muses. Im genuinely grateful to everyone who was interviewed, as well as all those pseudonymous peopleroommates, conferencegoers, barflieswhose stories were included in this book. Thanks to my shrink, to my wife, Patricia Sauthoff, and to the voters of Oregon, whose wise passage of Measure 91 ensured the timely and relatively painless completion of this book. Thanks to my agent, William Callahan at Inkwell; to my editor at Metropolitan, Connor Guy; and to publisher Sara Bershtel, who read the six-hundred-page first draft. I owe everyone at the Baffler a bottle of champagne; good thing for me its such a small staff. Salud to Dave Denison, Lauren Kirchner, Chris Lehmann, Noah McCormack, and John Summers. Cheers to Willamette Week and its diaspora, especially Aaron Mesh, Mark Zusman, James Pitkin, Beth Slovic, and Nick Budnick, who all saved my ass again in 2017. A number of couches were dented in the production of this book. Thanks to P. J. Tobia and Heather Courtney; Dave Maass and Megan OConnor; and Dan and Ploy Ten Kate. Dianne Conrad, Mark Higginson, Young Misions, Erica Nelson, Chloe Peacock, Daniel Simpson, Hank Stern, and Adam Weinstein provided moral support and security consultation. Thanks, finally, to Ziggy, and to David Solomon: rest in peace, friend.

Modern man never asks himself what he will have to pay for his power. This is the question we ought to be asking.

Jacques Ellul,
The Technological Society , 1954

Nave believers make the loudest heretics. Thats me. As a kid, I taught myself to code on a dusty old Commodore 64. By rights, I should have been a billionaire wunderkind before my sophomore year of college. But I screwed up. Instead of skipping class to build a world-changing website in a dorm room, I succumbed to the temptations of music, books, and girls. How shortsighted I was! How far astray Id wandered! My earnings potential plummeted when I stopped writing software and started writing for newspapers. In the years to come, as my ill-chosen trade succumbed to digital disruption, I looked with envy at the techies, the winners, the pioneers. They had ideas. They had momentum. Most important, they had money. Why not me?

In 2010, my girlfriend and I quit our newspaper jobs and eloped to England, where I launched my first startup. It was a niche news website. Earnestly following the example of the gung-ho journopreneurs who had preceded me, I powered my startup with cheap labormy own. After two years working twelve-hour days as publisher, developer, editor, and reporter, I hit a wall. I let the site go dormant and took another job. My first startup had failed. Thus I had failed. What other explanation could there be? As everyone knew, the internet was a level playing field, a free and frictionless medium for exchange, where the best ideas would inevitably rise to the top. Such was the foundational rhetoric of the internet, repeated like scripture, questioned only by cranks and cynics. It was also a load of crap, though I didnt yet recognize it as such.

Throughout my career change, I became a religious follower of tech blogs. At first I visited them for help solving esoteric coding problems. But they soon became a habit, and in a misguided effort to become more productive, I devoured page after page of the self-help and motivational material these websites featured, most of it directed at startup wannabes like me. Lying awake in bed, arm stiff from holding my smartphone aloft, I sought solace in the sanguine stream of updates on Hacker News, a techie discussion forum run by a venture capital fund and startup incubator called Y Combinator. This outfit seemed vaguely prestigious, the commenters knowledgeable.

The titles of the inspirational homilies on Hacker News reassured me that I was not alone: Fail Fast, Fail Often, and Fail by Design, Failing Fast Means Failing a Lot, and, most succinctly, Success Through Failure. I took it all to heart. I reinterpreted my failure as a character-building experience. But something else was going on with this self-guided tutelage. I wasnt just changing careers and jumping on the learn to code bandwagon. I was being steadily indoctrinated in a specious ideology. As proud as I was of having learned valuable new skillsI could deploy a Ruby on Rails application! I could manage a virtual server!I didnt understand that the only way to turn those skills into a livelihood was to embrace the economy of the digital world, where giant corporations wrote the rules. As an eager website proprietor and aspiring journopreneur, I was like a stockyard calf who thought he owned the farm.

In 2012, I went to work for an avant-garde online news service called Demotix, which sold the work of freelance photographers around the world to news outlets. When I joined as editor in chief, Demotix had already signed up thirty thousand photographers plus a small full-time staff. The open-plan office, furnished with beanbag chairs and an espresso machine, felt like a proper tech startup. It was tucked within the London branch of its largest investor, the Seattle-based Corbis Corporation that belonged to Bill Gates.

Just as I took the job, Corbis bought Demotix outright. The founderswho meant well, I thinkexited permanently. Everyone was told this was great news. The acquisition represents an enormous step towards our goal, the official announcement said. It went on to promise that Corbis would maintain our values of supporting free speech and covering the under-reported. I wondered how big my editorial budget would be with the Gates windfallfive figures or six?

The horrible truth emerged when a Corbis manager from New York flew over for a visit. I called him the Drone. Although he bragged about not reading newspapersour main clientshe had somehow wound up in charge of news, sports and entertainment. The Drone greeted us with a PowerPoint presentation, which I supposed was how they said hello back at the mothership in Seattle. Then, turn by turn in small groups, we joined the Drone on the offices twin red loveseats. Grinning nefariously, he explained the new reality. There are two things Corbis cares about, he said. The first is making money. The second is innovation and disruption. I think Bill is especially interested in that second piece, innovation and disruption.

We stared at him, mute. I knew that my English colleagues would sit in awkward silence forever, but I also knew that the Drone expected a response. Since he had already raised the subject of money, I explained that many of our photographers were going into debtnot to mention risking arrest, abduction, and deathto go into war zones for the purpose of sending pictures to our little startup. With the vast resources of Corbis behind us, perhaps we could begin to pay these photographers a base ratesay, $100 per day? Thats never going to happen, the Drone said. Ditto health insurance.