During my 20+ years in Silicon Valley and since, I've often pondered the impact of the Internet on social life. As an exploration of this for a broad audience, I think The Social Dilemma is excellent. It captures, if a bit luridly, the largely amoral nature of the hyper-capitalist creativity of Silicon Valley—and its bad consequences. Watch it!
Technology, says the film, ought to be a tool that serves us. But interactive social media works differently from its earlier "broadcast" counterparts. It streams 24x7 personalized news, opinion, gossip, ads, propaganda, pop culture—all competing for our attention. The film shows how we pay for it, how it spies and uses algorithmic wizardry to mine our tastes and behaviors without our consent, how it hacks our attention span and exploits our psychology to benefit private and state interests, how it further polarizes and divides us. It artfully manipulates us with dopamine hits and facilitates the spread of fake news like never before. All this, argues the film, harms mental health and raises social strife. We've ceded too much privacy and power to a few tech corporations that are de facto monopolies, whose understanding of us is "the product" that's monetized—as part of "surveillance capitalism". It’s a Faustian bargain, the film suggests, and calls for sensible regulation before things get much worse. You may not agree with all of the opinions in the film but it'll make you think.
Anyhow, today is one year since my first novel appeared in the world. Among its themes is the culture and inner life of Silicon Valley, revealed via office events and interactions between the protagonist, Ved, and his coworkers. The Social Dilemma reminded me of those parts, so to mark its first anniversary, I've published below one such excerpt from my novel. Go buy it for juicier bits about a 36-year-old who, in an era after the dot-com crash and 9/11, stumbles and ripens through messy experiences in sex, love, work, family, friendship, and cultural belonging. I should add that the novel is a story drawn from life, not a story of my life. Full disclosure: it has dopamine hits galore!
An excerpt from chapter four of A California Story | Love and Loathing in Silicon Valley (click for reviews and more)
Monday morning at work, Ved walks past Omnicon’s new poster art in the corridors: a lone bald eagle in flight, muscular rowers in a longboat, lean multicultural climbers scaling snowy peaks. Each has a hokey inspirational message below. There’s also art that was once anti-establishment but has long been defanged and made chic: a Diego Rivera mural; a wall-sized woodcarving of Ché Guevara’s shaggy face—presumably to inspire ‘the rebels’ in their ranks, rebels, who like him, work in identical beige cubicles in a large carpeted hall to raise Omnicon’s profits.
In his first meeting, he endures a visiting British colleague who spouts jargon with possessed élan. He speaks fast: ‘My charter is risk management, knowledge extension, empowering feet on the street … competition is intense … we are in daily dogfights … the European theatre needs better products faster.’ His body language is aggressive, he is clearly used to dominating conversations. Ved is mildly repelled by the man.
In his second meeting, a woman from Operations addresses a group of marketers about proactive cost management. Ved’s eyes roam her curvy body. In a reverie, he imagines her naked on his Moroccan carpet, legs spread, yielding to his touch. Might this serious, bookish transplant from Middle America turn into a hot little siren in bed? Snapping out of his daydream, he chides himself. It has again been too long since he got laid, he thinks. So ridiculous, his wayward libido, always making an ass of him. Good thing he can often laugh at it too.
Ved has lunch at his desk. He prefers the quiet of his office to the desultory cafeteria talk on weather, weekend plans, blockbuster movies, the stock market, office politics, and the like. Nothing more personal or substantial is ever discussed, such as sex, death, religion, literature, or geopolitics. In a competitive arena that hires people based on narrow skills, revealing more about oneself risked exposing one’s vulnerabilities too. To be professional is to be discreet and formal, to operate from behind a mask. So the private lives and beliefs of even the colleagues he interacts with daily are opaque to him. Who knows what secrets lurk within the hearts of his co-workers? Of course, sometimes it is better not to know.
Many times each day, he detaches himself from the present. Watching from above, so to speak, he sees the panorama of his theatre: Has blind evolution really led to all this, all this, in the deafening silence of the cosmos? So ephemeral, yet we live as if we were eternal: consumed with trivialities, infatuated with false gods and vain totems of power—none too different from the ancient Egyptians labouring to raise an obelisk. At times, this unsparing view of life provokes a quiet, brooding sorrow. How beautiful, he thinks nevertheless, this theatre-watching ability.
[...]
After lunch, Ved meets Roger, his manager, for a weekly update. He sees Roger as a shrewd and pragmatic man who, unlike himself, takes a keen interest in company politics and is a charming extrovert. A self-avowed ‘Euro-mutt’, Roger once claimed that his paternal ancestry—‘the scum of Irish society’—even includes a convicted horse thief. He is pale and stocky, with a receding hairline, a thick brown moustache, blue eyes, and a loud infectious laugh.
Roger says he believes in personal responsibility, minimal gun control (he owns three guns), and a strong national defense. The liberal tones of National Public Radio send his blood pressure soaring. When he became Ved’s manager last year, he told Ved, ‘I like to work hard and play hard.’ With Roger, the equation seems simple: make me look good and I’ll look out for you. He describes his management style as hands-off, which it indeed is. On many days, they don’t make contact at all. Ved largely manages his own time, an aspect of his job he loves.
A few cubicles down from Ved is a web marketeer, a tall, bubbly blonde with an exuberant laugh. Trying to be friendly, she once asked him the name of Hinduism’s founder and the age of the Hindu Bible. Her clothes appear two sizes too small and she seems to enjoy her idle banter with all sorts of men who stop by her desk. Ved mostly avoids her.
One of Ved’s neighbours is a soft-spoken older man in business development. He is very fond of saying ‘partner or perish.’ Among the books on his shelf are The Tao of Business, Ten Laws of Leadership, Spiritual America (on Native American shamans), and one that he insisted Ved must read: The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. Ved began reading it but thought it was painfully misguided. His troubles began with the title itself. Why did the monk have a Ferrari at all? What exactly is so great about selling a Ferrari? Anyone can sell his frickin’ Ferrari. Why didn’t the monk just give it away? The rest of the book went steeply downhill from there.
Ved works in Omnicon’s Business Security Division (or BS Division). His product line protects networked computers from viruses and worms, and he participates in dense debates on its evolution. His colleagues exhibit an entire gamut of instincts. From conservative advocates of incremental change to radicals inclined to ruffle things up. He can spot the ones addicted to the thrill of change and disruption as an end in itself—from smooth-talking executives to longhaired technocratic hipsters who sound deep, dream of changing the world through hi-tech, and love sci-fi flicks in which the hero, usually a white American man, saves the day for planet earth. Most of them see the world through the fog of trendy ideas and management theories du jour, attend workshops on leadership skills, build political factions and pour massive energy into life at work.
Ved is no fan of those who act irresponsibly or shirk commitments, but he has mixed feelings about such folks who take their jobs too seriously. On the one hand, he relies on their diligence and sincerity, and for this, he is grateful, but whenever he tries to enter their minds to see the world from within, he is invariably disenchanted. They may be the most analytical, ambitious, results-oriented people wrought by the churn of the corporate ocean, but they seem so naively optimistic about history and society, and they see technology as an uncomplicated force for good. Consumed by their daily exercises of petty egos and ambitions, do they ever wonder how ephemeral their lives are, how marginal to the blind will of the cosmos? Some surely must, but they hide themselves from him well enough.
They love to carry on about changing the world. But what sort of change? Indeed, what do they even know about the world that they want to change? Nothing Ved has learned about his colleagues gives him much confidence. So many live in a bubble, complacent in the belief that their way of life will be the one to prevail in the world.
One thing Ved likes about the system he is part of is that it creates new vocations, conveniences, and leisure through advances in technology, a quest as old as humankind. Yes, on a macro level, Silicon Valley is indeed advancing technology, even though it’s organized to do so mainly for its own sake—by chasing money-making opportunities wherever they lead, rather than trying to solve the pressing problems of humanity. Yet, even when, despite itself, Silicon Valley helps solve the pressing problems of humanity, at a micro level Ved sees it brimming with un-heroic, pompous and self-centred gold-diggers. They are all around him, and they come from all over the world. Even the most articulate industry leaders, he finds, have remarkably naive views of the human material, laced with a self-serving techno-utopian optimism. That social good can result from their collective exertions is indeed a paradox of sorts.
And doesn’t Silicon Valley amplify social inequalities? Doesn’t it run on a libertarian ethos that justifies the rich getting richer, based on abstract technical skills like his own, which didn’t even exist two decades ago? Nowhere else are there so many brattish billionaires. Through Omnicon, is he not helping a small class of techno-elites expand its power to shape the rest of humanity—how they socialize, learn and amuse themselves? What behaviours and values are their seductive innovations silently advancing? Haven’t they made the pace of social change and dislocation faster than ever before? God knows what these gizmos and games are doing to our psyches. What ideas of ‘us’ and ‘them’, self and other, and habits of mind will they fortify? Is there anything more than a tenuous relationship between material and moral progress? Such thoughts come to him often and unbidden.
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Here is a shorter excerpt and the first 20 pages.
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