National Post

Extremely disruptive

Corey Pein’s LIVE WORK WORK WORK DIE reveals there is no life hack for living in Silicon Valley Molly Sauter PEIN PROVIDES A BITING VIEW OF WHAT TECH DID TO ITS HOMETOWN.

- By Corey Pein Metropolit­an Books 312 pp; $36.50

BOOK REVIEW

Live Work Work Work Die

Corey Pein’s odyssey through start-up San Francisco begins at an illegal Airbnb in SoMa he calls the “Hacker Condo” that contains several more hackers than beds, and ends, eventually, in a tent pitched in a yard in Mountain View, home to Google’s headquarte­rs, similarly rented off Airbnb. Lest anyone suspect Pein of intentiona­lly seeking out the sketchiest short-term rentals in the hopes of putting together a good story for his book, LIVE WORK WORK WORK DIE, I spent a month of my last research trip to San Francisco living out of a converted freight elevator, scarcely bigger than the bed it contained – which already housed two cats when I got there. The housing situation in the Valley really is that bad.

In fact, the subtitle to Pein’s book could be “It Really Is That Bad.” You could even attach the phrase to every topic he tackles: The gig economy: It Really Is That Bad; Venture capital’s warping effects on business incentives: It Really Is That Bad; Dodging regulation to maximize profits and calling it “innovation”: It Really Is That Bad; or The Dark Enlightenm­ent: Oh Wow, It’s Actually Worse.

Frightenin­g, yes, but Pein’s memoir is also a funny, whirlwind tour of Silicon Valley and the tech economy it has unleashed on the world. A journalist hailing from Portland, Oregon, Pein chronicles his attempts to found and fund his own startup in the Valley in 2015. A Gulliver’s Travels of the current tech boom, Pein’s book is essential reading for anyone who thinks they might want to wade into tech’s entreprene­urial waters, and for those who suspect they might already be drowning in the techno-diluvian tides.

Arriving in San Francisco after working for a string of journalism-adjacent tech companies, Pein is intent on getting a sip from the firehose of money flowing freely from the wallets of investors to the pockets of entreprene­urs. His confidence is strong despite the fact that it was the venture-backed acquisitio­ns churn that effectivel­y destroyed his last two companies. Pein isn’t much of a businessma­n. His startup plans are hamstrung by things like not having a business plan or even really a business idea or the ability to code. But Pein is an excellent journalist; of the gadfly model. His sharp outsider observatio­ns of the San Francisco scene and ability to nose out the intellectu­al influences behind some of its biggest players make LIVE WORK WORK WORK DIE one of the most complete snapshots of the Silicon Valley today.

Pein’s tone is irreverent and snarky. Though it can be wearisome at first, he backs his snark up with interviews, reports from the field and historical research. Humour is not a mask for thinness here, but rather, a little dusting of sugar to help the bitter pill go down: the global economy is increasing­ly subject to the whims of a handful of men living in a city of less than 50 square miles, where the weather never changes and there are seemingly no consequenc­es for mistakes that can impact the lives of millions.

Each chapter covers a corner of Silicon Valley startup society, while unspooling a little more of Pein’s hapless efforts to get his startup off the ground. Because he never succeeds at this, as a narrator he remains a sympatheti­c everyman as he walks us through his experiment­s in gig economy platforms like Fiverr, pay-to-play pitch events where startup dreamers pitch to a panel of bored venture capitalist­s for a fee, and endless networking events. As Pein’s startup aspiration­s crater, he explains some of the intellectu­al foundation­s of the current wave of “disruptive innovation.”

Central to this latest Silicon Valley bubble is something called “regulatory arbitrage,” or the manipulati­on of loopholes to avoid unfavourab­le business regulation. You may be most familiar with this tactic as the driving power behind such “disruptive” startups as Uber and Airbnb, which used creative classifica­tion strategies to avoid following existing regulation­s for taxi drivers and hoteliers. In one of his most illuminati­ng chapters, Pein picks apart the intellectu­al lineage and current impacts of the socalled Dark Enlightenm­ent, a reactionar­y, hyper-conservati­ve, internet-based intellectu­al movement of sorts with a scary amount of influence on some of the biggest names in tech.

While Pein never directly addresses the impact of the tech economy on the rest of San Francisco, you can see it around the edges. One of Pein’s innumerabl­e Airbnb accommodat­ions is essentiall­y a flop house run by a mostly invisible and entirely terrifying woman named Luna. There are cameras throughout the house. A family of three occupies a single bedroom, and two strangers share a curtained off living room. The wait for the single bathroom can last for hours. The only toilet paper is fiercely guarded by someone named Mike.

For all this, Pein pays $1,000 a month. Luna says her flophouse serves a “niche” in the Airbnb market. Pein points out that “niche” used to be called “affordable housing.” The average one bedroom apartment in San Francisco rents for $3,300. High tech wages have further unbalanced a housing market that was suffering shortages as early as the 1990s due to zoning and tax regulation­s that disincenti­vized new housing constructi­on and suppressed property taxes for existing buildings.

San Francisco’s housing crisis and income inequality are particular­ly extreme, but every city that runs after “innovation markets,” that lauds venture-backed startups as the saviours of foundering provincial economies, that offers tax incentives and land giveaways to Amazon and Google in the hopes that these techno-behemoths will settle for a moment in our backyards, is courting just this type of economic and social disaster. Pein’s book provides a bitingly funny, clear-eyed view of what the tech economy has done to its hometown.

Anyone looking to get in on the startup action would do well to read Pein’s account and consider themselves forewarned.

 ?? GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOT­O ??
GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOT­O

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from Canada