Live Work Work Work Die

February 26, 2018
Journalist Pein travels to San Francisco to expose the seedy underbelly of Silicon Valley culture with its overworked and underpaid drones toiling in a gig-based economy, nightmarish Airbnb rentals, and false narrative of meritocracy. His hunt for affordable housing provokes a discussion of gentrification and exorbitant rents (Pein ends up paying $35/night to sleep in a tent in someone’s yard). For employment, he experiments with Fiverr, a directory platform where freelancers offer up their services at $5 per task, before attempting to sell his doomed start-up idea, an app for organizing labor unions. Along the way, Pein examines the unethical and often illegal practices of tech industry giants, from Yelp extorting cash from businesses in exchange for the removal of bad reviews to Groupon’s “dubious” accounting practices in the weeks leading up to its IPO. He also directs his ire at the tech press, referring to it as “an interchangeable assortment of sycophantic blogs, gee-whiz podcasts, and thinly veiled advertising supplements.” Pein’s analysis of this toxic culture culminates in a trip to Holland for a conference on technological singularity, the “physical and metaphysical merger of humanity and computers” believed by many to be in the near future, which, by this point in the book, will strike many readers as a terrifying prospect. Both entertaining and damning, Pein’s book unmasks the shell game being run by venture capitalists in an industry that is not nearly as benign as it claims to be.