Just because it’s trendy doesn’t mean it’s a nice place to work
LIVE WORK WORK WORK DIE by Corey Pein (Scribe £9.99)
For what’s essentially a hothouse of techies, Silicon Valley in California has excellent Pr. We’re always hearing about these wonderful, benevolent companies, with their lavish headquarters in leafy suburbia, their games rooms, their casual clothes and their fridges full of beer.
Corey Pein is a young American journalist of humorous inclinations who decided he wanted a piece of this particular pie. So he dropped everything and went to California, joining thousands of other mainly white, mainly male computer nerds who all want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg.
Needless to say, he discovered the picture is not quite as rosy and sweetsmelling as it’s made out to be. His first discovery was that San Francisco has been changed utterly by the influx of nerds. once a beautiful city full of hippies and bohemians, San Francisco is now an overpriced hell-hole geared entirely to rackety commerce. There is all-out war between the older generations and the newbie dweebs, who get drunk on public transport and have put up the price of accommodation by a factor of ten.
‘Systematically and faster than anyone expected, the city was being remade to cater to the tastes and prejudices of these callow child princes.’ Everywhere Pein goes he finds the same atmosphere of fear, desperation and overwhelming greed.
Silicon Valley, he realises, is the new gold rush. But the people making the money are not the poor saps looking for the gold. They’re the people selling you remarkably expensive shovels.
Gradually, it dawns on Pein that these companies, and the people who work for them, are not benign pioneers of the new and shiny, but predatory capitalists of a very old-fashioned stripe. Very few of their ‘products’ are actually new in any sense.
All everyone is out to do is fashion a monopoly that eventually can’t be challenged by anyone. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, Uber: all have become ‘too big to fail’.
Pein lists the extraordinary illegal scams and bits of crookery that these and other companies have carried out to reach the top. Amazon has avoided billions of dollars in taxes, has faced allegations of
abuse of employment laws, and in Germany hired leather-clad thugs to police its warehouse workers.
Google, as it has grown, has also shrunk, ‘small enough to fit inside a mailbox in Bermuda, where it funnelled $14 billion in annual profits via an intricate series of transatlantic shell companies that allowed it to avoid an estimated $2 billion in taxes every year.’ When asked about this, Google chairman Eric Schmidt said: ‘It’s called capitalism.’
As for the cab company Uber, Pein describes its general policy as ‘break laws first, buy influence later’.
The list of its alleged dubious activities (which Uber deny) is staggering. ‘Teaming up with the lobbying industry was only one aspect of Uber’s expansion strategy. It also plotted skulduggery such as covertly tracking the movements of suspect journalists as well as digging up dirt on the personal lives of known critics and their family members,’ claims the book. Classy.
Pein is a fluent writer who knows not to over-egg the jokes and sometimes let the material speak for itself. And that material, both researched and experienced, is magnificent. Without the humour, the book would be utterly depressing, for it paints a picture that would make a saint blush, although not the CEOs of these companies.
Many of them are very strange men indeed. One bloke Pein met had got a job at Google, and on his first day he received a one-page document from Larry and Sergey, the two men who founded the company. All it said was ‘What would it take to get Google inside your brain?’
He left soon afterwards.