the C.E.O. asked the sales engineer.
“No,” the sales engineer said. His eye-
lids fluttered. He looked ill.
“Do you disagree with my decision?”
the C.E.O. asked me. I shook my head,
face hot. Of course not, I lied.
Later, the C.E.O. denied that this
meeting had taken place—it wasn’t some-
thing he would do, he said. At the time,
it had seemed perfectly in character.
I
an and I biked through the city, drink-
ing seltzer and eating avocado sand-
wiches on the seawall. We walked to the
top of Bernal Hill and watched the fog
curl around Sutro Tower; we skinny-
dipped in Tomales Bay. In the winter of
2013, Ian took me to a party at the offices
of a hardware startup operating out of
an ivy-clad brick warehouse in Berke-
ley. Drones buzzed over a crowd of young
professionals wearing sensible footwear.
Ian disappeared with a co-worker to in-
vestigate a prototype line of self-assem-
bling modular furniture, leaving me in
a circle with a half-dozen other roboticists.
The men discussed their research. One
was trying to teach robots to tie different
kinds of knots, like Boy Scouts. I asked
if he was a graduate student. No, he said,
squinting at me. He was a professor.
Talk turned to self-driving cars. How
plausible were they, really? I asked. I
had finished my beer, and I was bored.
I also wanted to make sure everyone
knew that I wasn’t just an engineer’s
girlfriend who stood around at parties
waiting for him to finish geeking out—
though that’s exactly what I was doing.
The group turned toward me, the Scout
leader looking amused.
“What did you say you do?” one of
them asked.
I said that I worked at a mobile-
analytics company, hoping they would
assume I was an engineer.
“Ah,” he said. “And what do you do
there?”
Customer support, I said. He
glanced at the others and resumed
the conversation.
On the train home, I leaned into Ian
and recounted the interaction. What
sexists, I said. How dare they be so dis-
missive, just because I was a woman—
just because I did customer support and
was considered nontechnical. Ian
cringed and pulled me closer. “You’re
not going to like this,” he said. “But you
were trying to talk shit about self-driv-
ing cars with some of the first engi-
neers ever to build one.”
I
n the spring of 2014, the analytics
startup released a new feature, a chart
called Addiction. It displayed the fre-
quency with which individual users en-
gaged, synthesized on an hourly basis.
Every company wanted to build an app
that users were looking at
throughout the day. Addic-
tion, which quantified this
obsession, was an inspired
product decision by the
C.E.O., executed brilliantly
by the C.T.O.
Our communications di-
rector had left for a larger
tech company with family-
friendly benefits and poli-
cies, and was not replaced.
With her departure, I became the de-
facto copywriter. To promote Addiction,
I ghostwrote an opinion piece for the
C.E.O., published on a highly trafficked
tech blog, that described the desirability
of having people constantly returning to
the same apps. “If you work for a SaaS”—
software as a service—“company and
most users are lighting up your Addic-
tion report by using your app for 10 hours
every day, you’re doing something very,
very right,” I wrote, like the careerist I
had become.
The novelty of the product was ex-
citing, but the premise and the name
made me uneasy. We all treated tech-
nology addiction as though it were in-
evitable. The branding vexed me, as I
told a friend. It was as if substance abuse
were an abstract concept, something
that people had only read about in the
papers. The friend listened while I
ranted. “I hear you,” he said. The ques-
tion of addiction, he told me, was al-
ready a big thing in gaming: “It’s noth-
ing new. But I don’t see any incentive
for it to change. We already call cus-
tomers ‘users.’”
O
ne evening, a group of us stayed
late at work to watch a science-
fiction movie about hackers who dis-
cover that society is a simulated reality.
It was the C.E.O.’s favorite film, re-
leased the year he turned eleven. The
movie didn’t just make the hackers look
sexy—it glamorized circumvention, the
outcast’s superiority, and omniscience.
The C.E.O. sat with his laptop open,
working as he watched.
At the beginning of my tenure—a
decade earlier, in startup time—the
C.E.O. had invited me and an entre-
preneur friend of his for late-night pizza
in North Beach. The walls of the piz-
zeria were covered in stickers, like a lap-
top. We ordered grandma slices and cups
of water, and perched on
stools in the back, chatting,
almost like friends. The men
insisted on getting me home
safely, and hailed a cab. I
started saying my goodbyes,
but they got into the back
seat. Seeing me home would
add another hour to their
trip, I protested. They buck-
led their seat belts. As we
glided through the city, I
wondered if the cab ride was an act of
chivalry or a test. I felt like a prop in
their inside joke. At my apartment steps,
I turned back to wave, but the car was
already gone.
The employees tried to be the C.E.O’s
friends, but we were not his friends. He
shut down our ideas and belittled us in
private meetings; he dangled responsi-
bility and prestige, only to retract them
inexplicably. We regularly brought him
customer feedback, like dogs mouthing
tennis balls, and he regularly ignored us.
He was expensive to work for: at least
two of my co-workers met with thera-
pists to talk through their relationship
with him.
Still, I was reluctant to entertain the
idea that the C.E.O., who’d been under
scrutiny from venture capitalists and
journalists for years, was egomaniacal
or vindictive. I was always looking for
some exculpatory story on which to
train my sympathy. By the time I started
looking for other jobs, I considered my
blind faith in ambitious, aggressive, ar-
rogant young men from America’s soft
suburbs a personal pathology. But it
wasn’t personal at all; it had become a
global affliction.
I
n the summer of 2014, I went for an
interview at a startup that hosted a
platform for open-source software de-
velopment, housed in a former dried-
fruit factory by the ballpark. A security
guard wearing a shirt with the company
THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019 61
