Bros to men
It’s sobering, if unsurprising, to learn that the way we the people communicate in the smartphone age springs from the mischief of privileged young men.
Before Facebook, Phillips Exeter-educated Mark Zuckerberg invited his Harvard classmates to rate each other “hot or not” on Facemash. Snapchat’s inception was no less socially rarefied, and dudely, according to Billy Gallagher’s “How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars.”
Reggie Brown’s eureka moment occurs as he kicks it with his ex-frat bros in a Stanford dorm:
“The subject of the conversation moved on to the girls. A dreamy expression appeared on Reggie’s face. ‘I wish I could send disappearing photos,’ he mused, almost absentmindedly.”
Brown vanishes with the celerity of one of his proposed racy images, jilted by fellow Stanford Kappa Sigman Evan Spiegel, in whom he confided his idea (Brown won a $157.5 million settlement in 2014), and Snapchat, like Facebook before it, takes off among America’s elite youth — albeit preppies instead of Ivy Leaguers. At “Startup Hau5,” Spiegel pere’s $4 million Pacific Palisades pad (décor by “the set designer from Friends,” meals by personal chef — it’s more “MTV Cribs” than skunkworks), Spiegel maniacally executes on an amorphous idea — evanescent messaging. He emulates Zuckerberg in dropping out and spurning a lucrative offer for his startup ($3 billion from Zuckerberg himself ), and, in short order, presides over a phenomenon. Thus, he confronts the quandary Zuckerberg faced years earlier: how to invest his enterprise with suitable gravitas.
The philosophizing crystallizes clashing visions that Gallagher deftly captures. Whereas Facebook elaborated a doctrine of “radical transparency,” as Franklin Foer has written, challenging us to put forth our best selves online, Snapchat articulates something more subversive: authenticity and liberation in our age of anxiety by shucking the oppressive “permanence” of Facebook, Gallagher writes — ephemera without reputational currency.
Gallagher was two years behind Spiegel at Stanford. This proximity lends an ethnographic feel to his account. But he fails to outgrow the awed posture of the freshman before the big man on campus.
The ardor scales neo-Trumpian heights:
“[Evan] doesn’t merely want Snap to be a great technology startup. Nor will being a great technology company satisfy his appetite. He simply wants to be great. Period. Take a moment and appreciate the full scale of this ambition.”
A balanced account awaits someone independently situated.
“You may think you’re Steve Jobs, but really you’re Roger Ailes or Bill O’Reilly with a Bernie Sanders tattoo.” Sociologist Elisabeth Sheff ’s putdown of tech’s rich male “sexual adventurers” in Emily Chang’s excellent “Brotopia” affixes an emblematic image to one of Silicon Valley’s “blind spot[s].”
Tech helped instigate the societal reckoning with workplace sexual misconduct. Susan Fowler’s February 2017 blog post about harassment at Uber roiled the alpha unicorn, prompted other women to come forward and anticipated the broader #MeToo movement.
Yet tech isn’t just another field with problems endemic to society. Women hold barely 1 in 5 engineering roles at marquee companies Google and Facebook. Female-run startups command 2.7 percent of venture capital. And female tech workers are inured to harassment, according to a 2016 Stanford poll — that’s if they stick around; women quit at two times the clip of men.
Beyond brazen misbehavior, Chang documents “ambient [discrimination]” — not least, a personality test used in recruitment that cemented the trope of the computer whiz as “nerd” — a questionable extrapolation from an overwhelmingly male sampling. The industry thus “select[ed] for antisocial” traits found disproportionately in men, she writes. Steve Jobs cemented another archetype — brash founder — that skewed male.
Jobs’ success also validated Silicon Valley as a “meritocracy.” This is a fraught concept, writes Chang:
“Many people in Silicon Valley are greatly invested in the ‘self-made great man’ story. But it is a story always told in retrospect, with little acknowledgment of all the factors that actually contribute to success. Personal connections, timing, and access to funding from influential backers can all make or break a start-up.”
She also explores tech’s hedonistic sex scene. Male participants style themselves as progenitors of new sex-positive social mores. Yet these loved-up libertines seem oblivious to the old-school power plays reprised by their post-monogamous coupling, while stigmatization of women evokes “Don Draper and Roger Sterling, sniggering over martinis about the secretaries they’ve shagged.”
What emerges is a Silicon Valley that for all its global reach is parochial.
Chang documents the insular network of the “PayPal Mafia,” the coterie of men instrumental in PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp and Facebook.
Change is imperative, she writes. The industry has a track record of releasing products that overlook the needs of half the human race — early versions of Siri and other “virtual assistants” could help if you were having a heart at---