THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019 65
never know. I searched for answers, ex-
cuses, context, conclusions: “Text neck.”
“Vitamin D deficiency.” “Rent calculator.”
“What is mukbang?” Time passed, inev-
itably and unmemorably, in this manner.
B
y the beginning of 2016, corners of
the open-source platform had be-
come increasingly vicious and bizarre.
People posted content claiming to be
members of a terrorist organization; peo-
ple posted content to dox government
employees and stalk our staff. The com-
pany received a note so menacing that
the office closed for a day.
A far-right publication ran a blog
post about our V.P. of social impact––
the woman responsible for managing
diversity and inclusion programs—ze-
roing in on her critique of initiatives that
tended to disproportionately benefit
white women. The post was accompa-
nied by a collage of octopus-cats, under
the headline “ANTI-WHITE AGENDA
REVEALED.” The article sparked a furor
in the comments section, which filled
up with conspiratorial statements about
Marxism and Hollywood, liberal vic-
timhood, reverse racism, and the globalist
agenda. The comments snowballed into
threats. Some of the threats were specific
enough that the company hired security
escorts for the targeted employees.
Later, I mentioned to a co-worker that
all Internet harassment now seemed to
follow the same playbook: the methods
of the far-right commenters were remark-
ably similar to those of the troll bloc that,
eighteen months earlier, had targeted
women in gaming. It was bizarre to me
that the two groups would have the same
rhetorical and tactical strategies. My co-
worker, a connoisseur of online forums
and bulletin boards, looked at me askance.
“Oh, my sweet summer child,” he said.
“Those groups are not different. They
are absolutely the same people.”
S
an Francisco was tipping into a full-
blown housing crisis. Real-estate
brochures offered building owners en-
ticements to flip. “Hi, neighbor!” they
chirped. “We have considered and ready
buyers eager to invest in your neighbor-
hood.” There was a lot of discussion,
particularly among the entrepreneurial
class, about city-building. Everyone was
reading “The Power Broker”—or, at
least, reading summaries of it. Armchair
urbanists blogged about Jane Jacobs and
discovered Haussmann and Le Cor-
busier. They fantasized about special
economic zones. An augmented-real-
ity engineer proposed a design to com-
bat homelessness which looked strik-
ingly like doghouses. Multiple startups
raised money to build communal living
spaces in neighborhoods where people
were getting evicted for living in com-
munal living spaces.
There was a running joke that the
tech industry was simply reinventing
commodities and services that had long
existed. Cities everywhere were absorb-
ing these first-principles experiments.
An online-only retailer of eyeglasses
found that shoppers appreciated getting
their eyes checked; a startup selling
luxury stationary bicycles found that
its customers liked to cycle alongside
other people. The online superstore
opened a bookstore, the shelves adorned
with printed customer reviews and data-
driven signage: “Highly rated: 4.8 stars
& above.” Stores like these shared a
certain ephemerality, a certain snap-to-
grid style. They seemed to emerge over-
night: white walls and rounded fonts
and bleacher seating, matte simulacra
of a world they had replaced.
Scale bred homogeneity. Half the
knowledge workers I encountered had
the same thin cashmere sweaters I did,
and the same lightweight eyeglasses. Some
of us had the same skin tints, from the
same foundation. We complained of the
same back problems, induced by the same
memory-foam mattresses. In apartments
decorated with the same furniture and
painted the same shades of security-de-
posit white, we placed the same ceramic
planters, creating photogenic vignettes
with the same low-maintenance plants.
I
n the late fall, I went home to Brooklyn,
reporting into work from my child-
hood bedroom, making myself available
between six in the morning and early
afternoon. New York held my life, but
the city I had grown up in no longer
existed. I had been gone for almost four
years, and there were now so many
co-working spaces and upscale salad
shops; so many anemic new buildings
with narrow balconies. I wondered if
anyone actually wanted these things,
and, if so, who they were. Whenever I
asked, friends gave the same answer:
finance guys, tech bros. It was the first
time I had heard the two groups referred
to in the same breath, not to mention
with such frequency.
Being in New York compounded a
feeling I had been experiencing, of pro-
found dissociation from my own life. I
knew, as I wandered through museums
with friends and video-chatted with Ian,
that I needed to leave the tech indus-
try. I was no longer high on the energy
of being around people who so easily
satisfied their desires––on the feeling
that everything was just within reach.
The industry’s hubris and naïveté were
beginning to grate; I had moral, polit-
ical, and personal misgivings about Sil-
icon Valley’s accelerating colonization
of art, work, everyday life. I could not
have anticipated––three weeks before a
Presidential election that would con-
vince me it was safer to have a foothold,
however small and tenuous, inside the
walls of power––that leaving would take
me more than a year.
I went with my friends to see a per-
formance in Fort Greene by a musician
and choreographer we knew. I had met
him shortly after my college graduation;
he was the first person I knew who was
building an artistic life from scratch. The
show, years in the making, had a four-
night run. Onstage, dancers and musi-
cians guided large slabs of foam into ar-
chitectural arrangements, surrounded by
instruments, pedals, and wires. The cho-
reographer slipped an electric guitar over
his shoulder. Light followed him as he
stepped delicately across the stage, sing-
ing—hair flopping across his brow, con-
centration and joy all over his face. I had
forgotten what it felt like to want some-
thing; to feel that what I had, or was,
mattered. I cried a little, wiping my nose
on the program, stung by an old loss
that suddenly felt fresh.
Afterward, the performers stood in
the theatre lobby, radiant, receiving bou-
quets wrapped in butcher paper. Peo-
ple in structurally inventive clothing
lingered over plastic cups of wine. We
offered our congratulations, then shuffled
past to let in other friends who had been
waiting on the periphery. Outside, we
flagged a taxi. It rumbled across the
Brooklyn Bridge, toward a restaurant
where others were waiting. The city
streaked past, the bridge cables flicker-
ing like a delay, or a glitch.
