companies. Some commentators said
that tech companies had, essentially,
collaborated, by creating back doors
that the government could access. Oth-
ers defended the tech companies’ inno-
cence. In the office, we never talked
about the whistle-blower—not even
during happy hour.
I
was making seventy-five thousand
dollars a year. It felt like getting away
with something. Even so, when I ran
out of work to do on nights and week-
ends, I felt free, invisible, and lonely. The
city’s green spaces overflowed with cou-
ples jogging next to each other and
cycling on bikes with matching pan-
niers. I spent hours in bed, drinking
coffee and thumbing my phone. On a
dating app, I made plans with two men,
both of whom seemed boring and be-
nign, before deciding that I couldn’t go
through with it. I deleted the app. A
few days later, one of them messaged
me on a social network everyone hated.
I tried to reverse engineer how he’d iden-
tified me, but couldn’t.
Noah took me under his wing. He
had grown up in Marin, and had moved
back to California after college, hoping
to live a bohemian life. Meeting his
friends was like swinging open the gate
to a version of the Bay Area I thought
no longer existed: Here were chefs and
social workers, academics and musicians,
dancers and poets. Everyone was in-
venting a way to live. Some women in-
stituted gender reparations with their
partners, redistributing the housework
to compensate for decades of patriar-
chal control. Atheists bought tarot decks
and went to outposts in Mendocino to
supervise one another through sustained,
high-dose LSD trips. They went on
retreats to technology-liberation sum-
mer camps, where they locked up their
smartphones and traded their legal
names for pseudonyms evoking berries
and meteorological phenomena. I at-
tended a spa-themed party at a com-
munal house and wandered the grounds
in a robe, avoiding the hot tub—a sous-
vide bath of genitalia.
At a birthday party north of the Pan-
handle, Noah’s roommate, Ian, sat down
beside me and struck up a conversa-
tion. Ian was soft-spoken and whistled
slightly when he pronounced the let-
ter “s.” He had static-electricity hair
and a sweet, narrow smile. He asked
questions and then follow-up ques-
tions, a novelty. It took a while for me
to steer the conversation to him. He
worked in robotics, I eventually learned,
programming robotic arms to do cam-
erawork for films and commercials. The
studio where he worked had recently
been acquired by the search-engine
giant down in Mountain View. One of
the founders had been sent a set of
three-hundred-thousand-dollar speak-
ers as a welcome gift; when a pallet of
electric skateboards arrived at the stu-
dio, Ian and his co-workers knew that
the deal had closed.
N
oah had been with the startup for
a year, and was preparing for his
annual review. Before the meeting, he
sent me his self-assessment and a memo
he had written, asking what I thought.
As an early employee, Noah was often
the recipient of grievances and con-
cerns from teammates and customers.
In the memo, he pushed for changes
to the product and in the company cul-
ture. He asked for a title change, more
autonomy, a raise, and an increase in
stock options. He presented the num-
ber of hires he’d referred, the profits of
the accounts he and his referrals had
acquired and nurtured, the amount of
money he calculated he had generated
for the company. He wanted to become
a product manager and run his own
team. He wanted equity commensu-
rate with his contributions, about one
per cent of the company. He framed it
as an ultimatum.
Giving the chief executive an ulti-
matum was unprofessional, crazy, even
for one of the best employees at the
company. On the other hand, it was a
company of twentysomethings run by
twentysomethings. I read Noah’s memo
twice, then I wrote and said it was risky
but not unreasonable. I hoped they would
give him everything he wanted. A few
days later, on my way to work, I got a
text message from Noah telling me that
he had been fired.
At the office, the cluster felt like a
funeral home. “They didn’t even try to
negotiate with him,” a sales engineer
said. “They just let one of our best peo-
ple go, all because nobody here has any
management experience.”
The early members of the Solutions
team were corralled into an unscheduled
meeting with the C.E.O. He told us to
sit down, standing at the front of the
room, arms folded. “If you disagree with
my decision to fire him, I’m inviting you
to hand in your resignation,” he said,
speaking slowly. He looked around the
table, addressing each of us individually.
“Do you disagree with my decision?”
he asked the account manager.
“No,” the account manager said, rais-
ing his palms as if at gunpoint.
“ Yes, this was a crime of passion—a passion for premeditated murder.” “Do you disagree with my decision?”
