Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 219 of 253 · 20 per page

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  They use the word awesome incessantly, usually to describe themselves or each other. That’s awesome! You’re awesome! No, you’re awesome for saying that I’m awesome! They pepper their communication with exclamation points, often in clusters, like this!!! They are constantly sending around emails praising someone who is totally crushing it and doing something awesome and being a total team player!!! These emails are cc’d to everyone in the department. The protocol seems to be for every recipient to issue his or her own reply-to-all email joining in on the cheer, writing things like “You go, girl!!” and “Go, HubSpot, go!!!!” and “Ashley for president!!!” Every day my inbox fills up with these little orgasmic spasms of praise. At first I ignore them, but then I feel like a grump and decide I should join in the fun. I start writing things like, “Jan is the best!!! Her can-do attitude and big smile cheer me up every morning!!!!!!!” (Jan is the grumpy woman who runs the blog; she scowls a lot.) Sometimes I just write something with lots of exclamation points, like, “Woo-hoo!!!!!!! Congratulations!!!!!!! You totally rock!!!!!!!!!!!!” Eventually someone suspects that I am taking the piss, and I am told to cut that shit out. The cheerleading and delusions of grandeur are staggering. At one point HubSpot posts a job listing on LinkedIn, searching for a new PR flack. But because this is HubSpot, the advertisement says we are looking for a “Media Relations Superstar .” The implication is that the person conducting the job search, our head of public relations, is herself a superstar and thus needs someone who can keep up with her. What she is actually looking for is an entry-level person, probably someone right out of college or with a couple years of experience, who will work for low pay, believing that time spent at HubSpot will look good on a resume. The advertisement challenges potential candidates: “Think you can get HubSpot on the cover of Time magazine or featured on 60 Minutes?” Take it from someone who worked at Time ’s primary competitor—the only way a company like HubSpot will ever merit that kind of coverage is if an employee brings in a bag of guns and shoots the place up. The question is nuts, and any experienced PR person—any actual “media relations superstar”—would know that. The only person who could answer yes to that question and then apply for the job is by definition someone with very little experience. Like the person who posted the advertisement. This is the peppy, effervescent, relentlessly positive, incredibly hubristic and overconfident attitude that everyone in the HubSpot marketing department exudes from Cranium on down. These people are super cheery cheerleaders. The whole world of online sales and marketing is filled with people who listen to Tony Robbins audiobooks on their way to work and dream of unleashing the power within themselves, people who love schmaltzy, smarmy motivational-speaker guff about being passionate, following your dreams, and conquering fear. Conquering fear!

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  It’s the American dream.” —Chris Taylor, Mashable (“Geek Book of the Week”) “Read this book if you work or invest in tech and, in particular, tech startups. And not just for the tales of corporate intrigue, hypocrisy, and ridiculousness that have caused HubSpot and its allies to get so hot under their collective collar… [Lyons] makes a strong case for how all of that young labor, when increasingly wrapped up into an over-arching ‘corporate culture,’ creates subtle age discrimination that these employees won’t recognize for years to come..” —Dan Primack, Fortune.com “Using his trademark wit and clear-eyed analysis, Dan Lyons has delivered a much-needed referendum on the current state of Silicon Valley. In wildly entertaining fashion, Disrupted explores the ways in which many technology companies have come to fool the public and themselves. Lyons has injected a dose of sanity into a world gone mad.” —Ashlee Vance, New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk “Dan ‘Fake Steve’ Lyons runs such a savage burn on his ex-employer, HubSpot, that the smoke can be seen clear across the country in Silicon Valley. Disrupted is fun, compulsively readable, and just might tell us something important about the hypocrisy and cult-like fervor inside today’s technology giants.” —Brad Stone, New York Times bestselling author of The Everything Store “Dan Lyons goes deep inside a company that uses terms like ‘world class marketing thought leaders’ to show us how ridiculous, wasteful, and infantile tech start-ups like this can be. And best of all, Lyons does this with his trademark pejorative and hilarious tone.” —Nick Bilton, New York Times technology columnist “Hilarious and unsettling… An exacting, excoriating takedown of the current startup ‘bubble’ and the juvenile corporate culture it engenders.” —Kirkus Reviews “Disrupted provides an eye-opening and gut-busting account of the maddening world of startup excess, hubris and groupthink from the unique perspective of a prominent technology reporter and satirist who was inexplicably hired and given a front row seat to the lunacy.” —Mashable “A juicy read… The book made me fearful of the fact that startup culture—from Google-style perks and zero work-life balance to corporate cheerleading and a cult-like devotion to the ‘mission’—has become aspirational to many corporations. The ways in which the worst parts of startup culture benefit managers and investors while making workers disposable are particularly scary, and Lyons attacks that issue in a compelling way.” —Erin Griffith, Fortune.com “Lyons finds the right company, if only for the raw material that he, a seasoned satirist, spins into gold… But the book is not just a chronicle of the tech bubble’s silly quirks… Lyons uses the lens of his growing disillusionment to focus a broader critique of Silicon Valley.” —Financial Times “This humorous and well-crafted memoir is part of a proud literary tradition: the disgruntled ex-employee tell-all.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  (Jan is the grumpy woman who runs the blog; she scowls a lot.) Sometimes I just write something with lots of exclamation points, like, “Woo-hoo!!!!!!! Congratulations!!!!!!! You totally rock!!!!!!!!!!!!” Eventually someone suspects that I am taking the piss, and I am told to cut that shit out. The cheerleading and delusions of grandeur are staggering. At one point HubSpot posts a job listing on LinkedIn, searching for a new PR flack. But because this is HubSpot, the advertisement says we are looking for a “Media Relations Superstar.” The implication is that the person conducting the job search, our head of public relations, is herself a superstar and thus needs someone who can keep up with her. What she is actually looking for is an entry- level person, probably someone right out of college or with a couple years of experience, who will work for low pay, believing that time spent at HubSpot will look good on a resume. The advertisement challenges potential candidates: “Think you can get HubSpot on the cover of Time magazine or featured on 60 Minutes?” Take it from someone who worked at Time’s primary competitor—the only way a company like HubSpot will ever merit that kind of coverage is if an employee brings in a bag of guns and shoots the place up. The question is nuts, and any experienced PR person—any actual “media relations superstar”—would know that. The only person who could answer yes to that question and then apply for the job is by definition someone with very little experience. Like the person who posted the advertisement. This is the peppy, effervescent, relentlessly positive, incredibly hubristic and overconfident attitude that everyone in the HubSpot marketing department exudes from Cranium on down. These people are super cheery cheerleaders. The whole world of online sales and marketing is filled with people who listen to Tony Robbins audiobooks on their way to work and dream of unleashing the power within themselves, people who love schmaltzy, smarmy motivational- speaker guff about being passionate, following your dreams, and conquering fear. Conquering fear! I have no idea what all of these people are afraid of, but to marketers, the world is filled with fears that must be conquered. Maybe they like this rhetoric because it makes online sales and marketing seem like some kind of epic adventure rather than the drab, soul-destroying job that it actually is. Marketing conferences are filled with wannabe gurus and thought leaders who work themselves up into a revival-show lather about connecting with customers and engaging in holistic, heart-based marketing, which sounds like something I made up but is actually a real thing that really exists and is taken seriously by actual adult human beings, which makes me want to cry. Except I’m also fascinated by this world. Part of me fantasizes about becoming one of these phony gurus. Some of these people make a lot of money, and all they do is fly around the world giving speeches.

• From Cultish (2021)

  (I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when, a few months after our interview, Sparkie the SoulCycle instructor became a distributor for “nontoxic” skincare MLM Arbonne, #bossbabe Instagram posts and all.) The prosperity gospel says that if you don’t succeed in becoming the picture of flawless fitness—if you don’t acquire the six-pack and the inner peace (like if you are poor, marginalized, and can’t clear the structural hurdles keeping you from those things)—then you deserve to be unhappy and die early. You didn’t “manifest.” It’s Rich DeVos’s same message, just delivered in a slightly different dialect. It might sound cloyingly heartfelt to roar “I am powerful beyond measure” while punching the air as hard as you can, but it’s nowhere near as spooky as yoga studios full of rich white women wearing the same overpriced athleisure, possibly embellished with a bastardized Sanskrit pun—“Om is where the heart is,” “Namaslay,” “My chakras are aligned AF”—and calling themselves a “tribe.” Commodifying the language of Eastern and Indigenous spiritual practices for an elitist white audience while erasing and shutting out their originators might not seem “culty”—it might just seem commonplace, which is exactly the problem. For years, CrossFit HQ denied any suggestion that its culture was unwelcoming to Black members. But during the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020, Greg Glassman shot off a series of racist emails and tweets (in one, he responded to a post about racism as a public health crisis with “It’s FLOYD- 19”), prompting white CrossFitters to finally start coming around to what many Black folks had known for decades: The place was not really “for everyone.” And the linguistic red flags had always been there: By glorifying the police in the names of its Hero WoDs, CrossFit had been telling on itself all along. Hundreds of gyms disaffiliated with the brand, big activewear companies pulled their contracts, and Glassman stepped down as CEO. A few months after Glassman’s fall from grace, it was SoulCycle’s turn for a scandal. In late 2020, things were already going south for the company due to COVID-19 lockdowns forcing location closures left and right, when multiple damning exposés surfaced online: According to reporting from Vox, underneath all the motivational Soulspeak, studios across the country harbored long track records of toxicity. Cults of personality formed around certain “Master” instructors, who took advantage by creating hierarchies of favorite and least favorite clients, giving private “off-the-clock” rides, and allegedly sleeping with some students.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Spiritual influencers are sanctified by the apps for the same reason any other content creator is—because their posts are on-trend and hyper-engaging. They exchange regrammable quotegrams full of buzzy wellness vernacular for ego-boosting likes and ad dollars, profiting from Apple Pay–enabled seekers aiming to soothe the distress and ennui of contemporary existence. Because their actual beliefs take a back seat to the success of their brand, these gurus are willing to fudge them according to whatever the zeitgeist seems to want. If CBD supplements are all the rage, they’ll suddenly flood their feeds with affiliate posts and act like cannabis has been part of their ideology all along; if conspiracy theory–type content seems to be doing well, they’ll head in that direction, even if they don’t fully understand the volatile rhetoric they’re trafficking in. Spend a few minutes poking around the Bentinho Massaro borough of Instagram and you’ll find dozens upon dozens of similar accounts. In one corner, you’ll find “alternative healing” opportunists masquerading as benevolent medical professionals. Like . . . “Dr.” Joe Dispenza, a generic-looking middle- aged white guy who well over a million Instagram followers somehow trust as their New Age sage. Dispenza’s army of adoring acolytes claim he’s helped them manifest everything from their dream job to their spouse to their cancer remission. Dispenza shrewdly exploits SEO and other web-marketing strategies to make millions selling an extravagant emporium of self-help workshops and retreats, public speaking engagements, corporate consultations, guided meditations, CDs, gifts, and books like Becoming Supernatural and Evolve Your Brain. Branding himself as the ultimate “scientific” spiritual authority, Dispenza’s Instagram bio reads “Researcher of epigenetics, quantum physics & neuroscience,” and he proudly flaunts his studies in biochemical sciences at Rutgers University, as well as his “postgraduate training and continuing education”—whatever that means—“in neurology, neuroscience, brain function and chemistry, cellular biology, memory formation, and aging and longevity.” Taking a page out of L. Ron Hubbard’s playbook, Dispenza marries academic- sounding language with the paranormal. Examine, for instance, his definition of a quantum field: “an invisible field of energy and information—or you could say a field of intelligence or consciousness—that exists beyond space and time. Nothing physical or material exists there. It is beyond anything you can perceive with your senses.”

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  In addition, Holly has put herself in charge of making parody videos that are meant to promote the HubSpot brand but don’t always help the company. “Watching this video gave me cancer” is how one commenter reviews one of Holly’s productions, a parody of “What Does the Fox Say?” called “What Does the Web Say?” Says another: “After watching this video I gouged out my eyes and shoved knitting needles in my ears so I would never have to endure it again.” The video is so bad that one of HubSpot’s engineers posts a question on the corporate wiki asking why the video was even created in the first place. Cranium defends Holly, and insists the video was a brilliant piece of marketing. A few months later, Holly strikes again, recording a video that takes “All I Want for Christmas Is You” and changes it to “All I Want for Christmas Is Leads,” with lyrics about sales and marketing. Everyone tells her it’s great. Beneath these people lies another layer of fortified bozofication, which consists of people like Sharon, a forty-something woman who describes herself on Twitter as a “manic pixie dream girl” and calls herself a member of the management team even though she has no one reporting to her. “I manage a team of one,” she tells us one day in a department meeting, and by one she is referring to herself. She runs “influencer relations,” which means she’s supposed to identify people who influence corporate software buying decisions, and become friendly with them. One year at Halloween she gives a speech at a marketing conference while wearing a witch costume, with sparkly shoes, a broom and a big pointy black hat. She posts pictures of herself doing this on Twitter. Marcia from the blog team, who has been at HubSpot since 2008, discovers that by changing the date or byline or some of the information in an old blog post she can trick Google into thinking the post is new, which boosts its rank in search results so it gets more traffic. She starts changing the dates on old blog posts, and writes a blog post teaching Marketing Mary how to do the same. “Historical Blog Search Engine Optimization,” she calls it. Ashley, the youngest blogger, publishes a post titled, “Fifteen Common Grammar Mistakes We All Need to Stop Making,” in which she (a) suggests the passive voice is grammatically incorrect, and (b) claims that “e.g.” stands for “example given.” Ashley also dreams up a solution to one of Marketing Mary’s problems, which is how to come up with ideas for new blog posts. Ashley’s solution is a sort of Mad Libs generator, which she calls the Blog Topic Generator. Type in three keywords, and the BTG will spit out three headlines.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  You make up a culture code and talk about creating a company that everyone can love. You dangle the prospect that some might get rich. But Silicon Valley has a dark side. To be sure, there are plenty of shiny, happy people working in tech. But this is also a world where wealth is distributed unevenly and benefits accrue mostly to investors and founders, who have rigged the game in their favor. It’s a world where older workers are not wanted, where people get tossed aside when they turn forty. It’s a world where employers discriminate on the basis of race and gender, where founders sometimes turn out to be sociopathic monsters, where poorly trained (or completely untrained) managers abuse employees and fire people with impunity, and where workers have little recourse and no job security. In December 2014 Nicholas Lemann published an essay in the New Yorker contrasting the vision of work that Alfred P. Sloan, the legendary CEO of General Motors, described in his 1964 memoir, My Years with General Motors , with the vision laid out in a series of books published by executives from Google. In the twentieth-century model under which Sloan’s GM operated, companies “were heavily unionized, and offered their white-collar employees de-facto lifetime tenure. Employees got steady raises during their working years and pensions after retirement,” Lemann writes. Things changed with the emergence of the Internet and in particular with Google, the first successful Internet company with a large workforce. Google succeeded, Lemann writes, by “breaking the rules about how to run a business.” The biggest rupture involves the social compact that once existed between companies and workers, and between companies and society at large. There was a time, not so long ago, when companies felt obliged to look after their employees and to be good corporate citizens. Today that social compact has been thrown out. In the New Work, employers may expect loyalty from workers but owe no loyalty to them in return. Instead of being offered secure jobs that can last a lifetime, people are treated as disposable widgets that can be plugged into a company for a year or two, then unplugged and sent packing. In this model, we are basically freelancers, selling our services in short-term engagements. We may have dozens of jobs over the course of our careers. “Your company is not your family” is how LinkedIn’s multibillionaire cofounder and chairman Reid Hoffman puts it in his book The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age . Hoffman says employees should think of a job as a “tour of duty” and not expect to stay for too long. In his view, a job is a transaction, one in which an employee provides a service, gets paid, and moves on. In addition to his duties at LinkedIn, Hoffman works as a partner at Greylock Capital, a top venture capital firm.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Spam is what the bad guys send, but we are the good guys. HubSpot has even created a promotional campaign, with T-shirts that say MAKE LOVE NOT SPAM . This is breathtaking and brazen. This is pure Orwellian doublespeak. Night is day, black is white, bad is good. Our spam is not spam. In fact it is the opposite of spam. It’s anti-spam. It’s a shield against spam—a spam condom. To me this seems like complete bullshit. Of course we’re creating spam. What else can you call it when you blast out email messages to millions of people? For years after I leave HubSpot I will continue to receive “lovable marketing content” from HubSpot marketing people. The messages are addressed “Dear Marketing Fellow” and offer a free software download or invite me to check out an e-book. Some are addressed to Heinz Doofensmirtz, the CEO of Doofensmirtz Evil, Inc., because I once filled out a form using that name, too. “Hi Heinz,” says a note from my good friend and former manager, Wingman. “Do you know the ROI on Doofensmirtz Evil, Inc.’s marketing efforts?” In December 2015, as I write this, I am still receiving them. Just this morning I got one from a “senior growth marketing manager,” offering me a six-hour course about inbound marketing and a certification. Once I pass an exam, I will get a “personalized badge and certificate.” I can add this to my LinkedIn profile, or even “proudly hang it on your desk,” my friend from HubSpot writes. I get loads of these emails, all sent under the names of real people at HubSpot, often from people I know and worked with, including Wingman. The emails are set up to look like actual personal email messages. Instead of coming from a generic address like offers@hubspot.com, they come from an individual’s HubSpot email address and include a sign-off with that person’s name and title and Twitter handle at the bottom, under a closing like, “All the best,” or “For the love of marketing.” This is what we learn in our training sessions. This is what we’re taught how to do. I can’t tell if the people around me actually believe this rubbish we’re being fed. They seem to, but maybe they’re just playing along. As for me, I am completely transfixed. I’ve never seen or heard anything like this. Have you ever received a call from one of those annoying telemarketers and wondered what it must be like on his end of the phone? How many people are in the room where he is sitting? How does he talk people into buying whatever he’s selling? How did he learn how to do this? How does he rationalize what he does? The online version of that telemarketer’s world is the one that I’ve now entered.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  I am asked whether I know how to use Facebook. Penny, the receptionist, tells me she wants to get off the reception desk and do something else, but she doesn’t know what. What do I think? I suggest a few roles—PR, HR, recruiting—but she doesn’t like those. “What else?” she asks. I tell her I don’t know. “Well what’s the point of having an old guy friend if you’re not going to give me any ideas?” she says. Spinner at one point comes up with an idea to get some publicity. “We should pitch a story about you working here at HubSpot, and how you’re learning a whole new thing,” she says. “We can call it ‘Old Dog, New Tricks.’” I look at her as if to say, You must be kidding. She tries to backpedal, saying she didn’t mean it as an insult. She thinks it’s really cool that I’ve joined this company with such a young culture and I’ve done such an awesome job of fitting in. I want to believe she means well. I tell her I’ll think about it. One day the women on the blog team spot an article by an “old guy” (Mark Duffy, age fifty-three) who works at BuzzFeed. WHAT IT’S LIKE BEING THE OLDEST BUZZFEED EMPLOYEE is the headline. Duffy depicts himself as a clueless doofus and illustrates the article with pictures of Benjamin Button, Grampa Simpson, and the crazy bald senior citizen from the Six Flags commercials, the one who wears a tuxedo and giant eyeglasses and dances around like a halfwit. The blog women think this BuzzFeed article is hilarious. “Dan, you should write something like that for us,” Jan says. “Yeah!” Ashley says. “Like, ‘What It’s Like Being the Token Old Guy at HubSpot.’ You’d be totes awesome at that!” “I hope you die a hundred pounds overweight, surrounded by cats that feast on your corpse”—is not what I say. What I do say is, “Wow, cool idea. That’s something to think about.” I smile. I laugh along with the joke. I’m old! I’m so goddamn old! I should totally write something funny about what it’s like to be this old! At one point I’m working on a project in the brand and buzz department, and one of the twenty-something bros coins a new nickname for me: “I’m going to call you Grandpa Buzz,” he says. Everyone laughs. I laugh too, because why not? Grandpa Buzz! It’s hilarious!

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  The Moth Bay dogs ceaselessly hump each other, copulating though they’re nothing but sacks of ribs and mange, as if they had no choice but to mate, a last ditch effort at immortality. A spastic, robotic rutting lacking in joy — like me and my hand and my photo collage. The proprietress warned me the townsfolk will set out poisoned meat tonight, as they do every year at this time, a ritual cleansing before the pilgrimage and influx of tourists. Tomorrow, before dawn, a noose of dead dogs will be tossed into the ocean. Tied tail to neck, in a distended necklace of bloated corpses, surreal killick that anchors this town to a medieval notion of purging its incestuous plague. The lariat of carrion will rock gently beneath the surface, so easy to tangle an ankle and be sucked down to doom. The water will turn filthy with jellyfish, feeding on the swollen bait. But no matter what the town does to eradicate the dogs, the proprietress says, they return and multiply, a virus. They reincarnate themselves, refusing to be exterminated. Like them, we paparazzi exist on the margins, fighting each other over scraps of humanity. We’re punched and kicked, flipped off, wished dead. The masses spit on us but buy the snaps we take, starving for more. We hound the perimeters, hated, but without us, the fiction falls apart. The spool of film crackles in my hand. I stumble from the closet and bump into Malele, the maid’s toddler. She follows me everywhere. Malele’s dress is dirty, her upper lip encrusted with dried snot. Her mother trails me through the house, sweeping after me, making me uneasy. She leaves cleanliness in her wake, silent except for the flap flap of her rubber slippers and the swish swish of her broom. The Strangler Fig 95 Malele and I have been teaching each other the names of colors. We point to the deadly oleander: pink. To the sleeping grass that snaps its leaves shut when touched: verde. To the prickly guanabana fruit that looks like an angry blowfish: green. To the bumblebee drowned in the pool: negro. To the poisonous angel’s trumpet flower: amarillo. We argue over the ocean’s color: Azul, she says. No, not blue, gray. To my hair: blanco. It turned white overnight, when I saw the faces — not from horror, but with terror that we would grow further apart as I aged while Kiara remained unchanged. A gecko click, click, clicks at us: brown. Malele stomps upon it with her bare foot. It scampers away, leaving its tail, and she runs after it. I pick up the gecko tail and carry it outside, flinging it on to the sand, where the rich insect life will make short work of it. The gecko will grow another tail, a nifty trick of rebirth.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Glass Explorers, they called themselves. Everyone else called them Glassholes. One thing I noticed during that day at Google was that none of our hosts—a bunch of executives from Google’s mobile phone division—wore Glass. That’s when I knew the gizmo was doomed. The suckers who plunked down good money for Glass can perhaps be forgiven for being naïve, but Andreessen and Doerr have no such excuse. They manage billions of dollars and are paid enormous sums of money because supposedly they know what they’re doing. Not coincidentally, Andreessen and Doerr also played leading roles in creating the new tech bubble, by (a) paying too much for investments, forcing other investors to overpay in order to keep up, and (b) investing huge resources into generating hype. Stock market manias are heaven for venture capitalists. Eugene Kleiner, a co-founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the legendary VC firm where Doerr works, once said: “Even turkeys can fly in a strong wind.” Kleiner Perkins was founded in 1972 and is one of the oldest, most respected VC firms in Silicon Valley. Kleiner’s maxim about flying turkeys is one of ten “Kleiner’s Laws,” a set of rules that people all over Silicon Valley still live by. Pump money into sales and marketing, generate enough hype, and you can sell almost anything if the market gets frothy enough. “I love bubbles,” Tom Perkins, another co-founder of Kleiner Perkins, once declared. “We made a lot of money in bubbles.” You can’t blame VCs for feeling this way. They are in the business of making money. Most, however, at least try to play the game with a certain amount of subtlety. Not so Andreessen and Doerr. Doerr joined Kleiner Perkins in 1980 and has been called “the Michael Jordan of venture capital,” a hall-of-fame moneyman, one of the best ever to play the game. Doerr’s big hits include Sun Microsystems, Amazon, Netscape, and Google. But somewhere in the 2000s he seemed to lose his touch, making bad bets on so-called cleantech (renewable energy) start-ups while missing out on big hits like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tesla. “Doerr made (Kleiner) the gold standard of venture firms” but he “is also largely responsible for the firm’s fall,” tech blog Pando wrote in 2013. Doerr has a degree in electrical engineering from Rice University and an MBA from Harvard. My theory is that when investing in start-ups required the ability to understand technology, he was without peer, but when the Valley turned its attention to social networks, photo filters, and games for teenagers, Doerr was out of his element, and so he started chasing fads. In 2008, when the iPhone became the cool new thing, he announced the iFund, to invest in app makers. In 2010, when Facebook got hot, he announced the sFund, to invest in social media companies. Doerr even started wearing a T-shirt and hoodie, just like Mark Zuckerberg. Forming the Glass Collective in 2013 was just another attempt to latch on to something trendy.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  All of the stuff about hospitals and Haitians and Huey Lewis is meant to distract us from noticing that Benioff doesn’t really have much to talk about other than warmed-over versions of old products. The misdirection works. People whoop and clap. They nod their heads as if they totally understand phrases like the Internet of customers , where people make decisions at superhuman speeds , and companies operate at the speed of now , as well as at the speed of sales . What sales and marketing people must do, someone informs us with great urgency, is race into the future a little faster than our customers, and get to the future first, and be ready to greet them when they arrive . Before you can try to figure out what that means, Dreamforce rolls on. Over the next few days the show features some of the biggest names in tech, like Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, HP CEO Meg Whitman, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Benioff has latched on to the “Women in Tech” crusade and made it his cause célèbre. “Powerful women” is a theme of the conference—yet oddly enough only four members of Benioff’s twenty-two member management team and only one member of his board of directors are female. Salesforce.com is run almost entirely by white men. But look—over there! It’s the prime minister of Haiti! And wait, hold on—is that thunder and lightning? Indoors? Is that a Tesla? From the future? On stage? Green Day plays a concert in AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants. Alec Baldwin gives a talk. Tony Bennett and Jerry Seinfeld make appearances. It’s all part of what Salesforce.com describes as “dynamic programming to exhilarate the Dreamforce community.” Cavernous halls are lined with countless booths rented out by software makers hawking programs that work with Salesforce: add-ons, plug-ins, mobile apps. There’s a “connected devices playground” and a “Dreamforce hackathon.” There are more than a thousand breakout sessions and “success clinics,” where people can learn how to sell stuff. Two people dressed up in foam balls—the Salesforce.com mascots, SaaSy and Chatty—bounce around the conference, dancing awkwardly with legions of mostly white people. The final day features a speech by Deepak Chopra, noted charlatan and quack. He and Benioff are friends. Chopra rambles on about joy and meaning and interconnectedness and the importance of loving yourself. The old W. C. Fields line “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit” seems like the motto not just for Chopra but for the entire conference. Benioff and his philanthropy, the dry ice and fog machines, the concerts and comedians: None of this has anything to do with software or technology. It’s a show, created to entertain people, boost sales, and fluff a stock price. I roam the show floor, gazing at middle-aged salespeople in suits who sit on beanbag chairs staring at their phones, and tech bros in T-shirts and man buns playing Ping-Pong.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Mary Kay’s Career Conferences are known for their masterfully orchestrated recognition ceremonies. Recruits don’t just go for fun; these conventions are advertised as compulsory if a recruit really wants to “succeed.” Though rest assured the point isn’t to provide serviceable selling advice. It’s to paint the most extravagantly flattering portrait of the company possible, to lure already-committed recruits deeper in. The average Amway event reads like a cross between a Christian tent revival, a political rally, a football game, and a supersized family reunion. Some Amway conferences are literally called family reunions. More than any other MLM family, Amway wields unbelievable power—not just over people directly involved with the company, but over the entire American political system. Founded in 1959, Amway operates in a hundred countries and rakes in $9 billion a year, thanks to its network of four million distributors, called International Business Owners (IBOs). Amway is a Christian company whose fundamental message is that Americans have lost touch with the qualities that once made us great: individual freedom to achieve, traditional “American family values,” and unswerving devotion to God’s blessed America.* “I’m going to tell you what’s wrong with this country,” bellowed Dave Severn, one of the company’s unicorn-rare Executive Diamonds, at a 1991 rally. (Amway’s top titles are all named after precious gems and other treasures: Ruby, Pearl, Emerald, Diamond, Double Diamond, Triple Diamond, Crown, Crown Ambassador.) “They have allowed everything we stand for . . . to simply go down the tubes by hiring UN-CHRISTIAN PEOPLE to try and run a Christian-based society. . . . The Amway business is built on God’s laws .” Amway’s two deeply conservative founders were Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos, who died in 2004 and 2018, respectively. That second name should sound familiar: The DeVoses are a Michigan-based family of politically influential billionaires; Rich was the father-in-law of Donald Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy. With a personal net worth of over $5 billion, Rich DeVos served as the finance chair of the Republican National Committee, was BFFs with Gerald Ford, secured special Amway tax breaks for hundreds of millions of dollars, and funneled prodigious sums into Republican presidential candidates’ coffers. Amway funded the campaigns of Ronald Reagan, both George Bushes, and, naturally, the most direct-sales-friendly president of all time, Donald Trump. Throughout the 2010s, Trump made a killing from his endorsements of several MLMs . These included a vitamin company and a seminar company, both of which paid him seven figures for permission to use his likeness as a mascot and to rebrand as the Trump Network and Trump Institute. (In 2019, a federal judge ruled that Trump and his three children could be sued for frau d in connection with these organizations.) To return DeVos’s favors, these presidents all publicly lauded Amway and the Direct Selling Association in general as a commendable, profoundly patriotic enterprise.* Rich DeVos’s seventeenth-century interpretation of prosperity theology suggests that if you are not rich, then God does not love you.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  As with my first score, I don’t argue with Trotsky or try to haggle or negotiate. I just listen. The third category is VORP, the scoring system that Halligan borrowed from Major League Baseball. VORP stands for value over replacement player. VORP is a cruel, heartless metric, and it’s weird to set it right alongside HEART. It’s like putting a photo of Gordon Gekko next to a photo of the Dalai Lama. VORP is the opposite of HEART. It’s the anti-HEART. It’s HEART-less. In this category I figure I will get a one, or a zero, or even a negative number, if that’s possible. I’m being paid a lot of money to do a job that a summer intern could do, a job that originally was created as a part-time assignment for Cranium’s administrative assistant. Scheduling people for a podcast and fetching glasses of water for Cranium and his guests in the studio are not challenging tasks. My salary is pretty high. It’s actually higher than Trotsky’s, because he was clever enough to take a small salary in exchange for getting more stock options. Anyway, I’m getting paid like a top executive, and I’m doing secretarial work. My VORP must be the lowest of any employee in the history of the company. But Trotsky is benevolent. In VORP, he gives me a two. He shuts his MacBook Air. He looks at me. “So,” he says, “what do you think?” I think that I want to burst out laughing. Who can take this rubbish seriously? HEART? Really? I feel like I’ve fallen into a scene from Office Space . How can it be that the two of us are sitting in this ridiculous orange broom closet and talking about such risible bullshit? There is no data behind these scores. Trotsky is just pulling numbers out of his ass. Maybe he thinks that my feelings will be hurt. But I’ve just spent four months in Hollywood working with some of the best writers in TV, and I’ve been asked to come back for next season. In a few hours I’m going get an offer letter to write for one of the best-known tech blogs in the world. Trotsky can give me a score of negative one zillion and I won’t care. “Well,” I say, “those scores all sound very fair.” I’d really like to leave now, but the scores are only the beginning. Trotsky has a few more tricks up his sleeve. I’m starting to feel as if I am being detained by the police and subjected to interrogation without legal representation. Shouldn’t I get one phone call? Or something? In his very solemn voice, the one he uses when he’s really going to say something mean, and when he wants me to know that he really feels sorry that he has to tell me something so terrible about my character, Trotsky says there is another part to the performance review.

• From Cultish (2021)

  “Clean beauty” MLMs with chicer, updated packaging pivoted to populating their seller bases with “micro-influencers”—women with small blogs and a few thousand social media followers who could be tempted by an unctuous DM about how their feed is amazinggg and would they like to add a second stream of income while becoming part of the clean beauty “movement”?! Pairing deliciously with the glamorous image of a self-employed influencer, this hipper generation of MLMs pitched itself as the perfect side hustle. The nimble direct sales industry always finds a way to reinvent itself—the capitalist cockroach that just won’t stop reincarnating. iii.Hey lady! Just wanted to send a reminder that we’re in the business of changing lives here!! Yes, we’re making money, but it’s so much bigger than that . . . it’s a MOVEMENT. People deserve to be a part of it, they just don’t know it yet, so it’s up to you to show them the light!! You need to be reaching out to EVERYBODY . . . family, friends, Insta followers, the person behind you in line at Starbucks. Start up a conversation, and meet them where they’re at. Our products basically sell themselves, so if you’re not meeting your goals, you need to work HARDER and SMARTER like the boss babe you are. You have such potential. Don’t let me down, but more importantly, don’t let YOURSELF down!! xoxo * * * When my middle school friend Becca and I finally got on a call to talk about her MLM experience, it had been a decade since I’d last heard her voice. Becca, now twenty-eight, lives in a little white country house in Maryland with her husband, two dogs, and four cats. She works a nine-to-five and still plays the same local singing gig she did in high school—Friday nights at Backstage BBQ Cafe. She goes to AA several times a week and spends most evenings playing with her baby niece. “I know, look what’s become of me,” she quipped, sporting that old Becca sarcasm and the cozy fronted vowels of our hometown’s accent, which I never get to hear anymore. Becca knew from the jump that Optavia (formerly called Medifast) was a shifty venture. She could hear it. “All that marketing mumbo-jumbo? It was so cringe,” she affirmed. I guess I could have predicted Becca wouldn’t be one of those wide-eyed hopefuls who accidentally finds themselves at the bottom of a pyramid scheme. Becca was well aware of Optavia’s tricky setup, but she was also confident she could game it by tapping into her massive network of Facebook friends. “I one hundred percent knew it was a cult,” she said. “But I was like, ‘Whatever, I’ll jump on that wagon.’ Like, let’s scam, you know?” “Sure, sure.” I gulped. Optavia is a weight loss program that delivers prepackaged meals to consumers’ homes, like Nutrisystem or BistroMD. “They definitely try to reel you in by saying all that ‘Be your own boss.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  universities for ideas, and to encounter groups or therapy to emit any “primed scream” of our pent-up emotions. Yet if we are truly aware, we can hear the silent screams of denied feelings echoing off every classroom wall and university corridor. And if we are sensitive enough, we can hear the creative thoughts and ideas that often emerge during and from the open expression of our feelings. Most of us consist of two separated parts, trying desperately to bring themselves together into an integrated soma, where the distinctions between mind and body, feelings and intellect, would be obliterated. Who can bring into being this whole person? From my experience I would say that the least likely are university faculty members. Their traditionalism and smugness approach the incredible. I remember with something approaching horror the statement of a Columbia University professor shortly after buildings were seized and campus turmoil erupted among the students, who could not be heard in any other way. This professor told me, “There’s no problem of communication at Columbia. Why, I speak to students almost every day.” He sounded like a southern slaveowner in the 1850s. No, I think that if change is to come about in dealing with ourselves and others as complete somas with thought and feeling intertwined, it will be the younger generation who achieve it. They are throwing off the shackles of tradition. They have largely discarded the religious dogmas that proclaimed the body evil and only the mind and spirit capable of good. They are a strong hope against the dichotomized, dehumanized being who can drop bombs on Vietnamese civilians, and handle this quite comfortably at the intellectual level. (In his mind, he has not murdered people, or torn flesh from bone: he has only engaged in “a protective reaction strike.”) Only the younger generation, I believe, can help us to see the awful dehumanization we have bred in our educational system by separating thoughts, which are to be approved, from feelings, which are somehow seen as animal in origin. Perhaps the young can make us whole again. God knows we need once more to be unified organisms, responsive to all of ourselves and all of our environment.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Because they’re Andreessen Horowitz.” Andreessen is a physically imposing man: six feet, four inches tall and heavyset, with an enormous shaved head. He’s an avid Twitter user, sometimes posting more than one hundred tweets a day, pontificating and picking fights. When Warren Buffett expressed skepticism of Bitcoin, a technology in which Andreessen has invested heavily, Andreessen called Buffet “an old white man crapping on tech he doesn’t understand.” Andreessen was quite literally the poster boy for the first dotcom bubble, posing for a February 1996 Time cover sitting barefoot on a throne, a millionaire boy king, twenty-four years old. The first bubble, I believe, became a formative experience for Andreessen and shaped his behavior when he entered the venture capital business. As an entrepreneur, Andreessen had a mixed record. Netscape got crushed by Microsoft and started losing money but nevertheless was acquired by AOL for $10 billion. After Netscape, Andreessen founded Loudcloud, which went public when it was only eighteen months old and had barely any revenues. Later, Loudcloud became Opsware, was split into two pieces, and sold for $1.6 billion, despite never reporting an annual profit. In 2005 Andreessen co-founded Ning, a social network that fizzled out. At some point it seems to have dawned on Andreessen that the people who make the most money in Silicon Valley are not the ones who found companies or run them, but rather the ones who put up the capital. (At Netscape, he reportedly made as much as $100 million, while his investor and co-founder, Jim Clark, made $2 billion.) In 2009 Andreessen and his friend and former business partner Ben Horowitz launched Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, as it is known. (The name is a “numeronym,” a way of shortening a word or phrase by using a number to represent the number of letters that have been left out. A , then sixteen letters, then Z . Tech geeks love stuff like this.) Andreessen and Horowitz developed a reputation for overpaying to get into deals, offering valuations that I’ve been told were 30 percent higher than what other venture capitalists would pay. They also recognized the value of publicity. One of the first partners they hired was Margit Wennmachers, a veteran Silicon Valley public relations specialist known for her sharp elbows. They’ve since hired more PR people, as well as journalists and researchers who produce blog posts, podcasts, and market analysis reports—their own little content factory. Horowitz wrote a book about his experience as an entrepreneur and posed for a Fortune magazine cover with his hands wrapped like a boxer, though he apparently does not actually box. He hangs out with rappers and spouts rap lyrics, cultivating a streetwise image—though in fact he was born in London and grew up in Berkeley, and his father is David Horowitz, a well-known author and conservative commentator. As the tech blog Valleywag summed it up, “Ben Horowitz Is Desperate for You to Think He’s Cool.” Andreessen and Wennmachers assiduously court the press.

• From Cultish (2021)

  “Can you imagine having to look up the word ‘of’?” Cathy asked me. (As a linguist, I actually could, yes, though certainly not on Scientology’s terms.) Graduating from Key to Life is considered extremely prestigious just because you’ve invested so many hours of tedium into the church. * MLMers are willing to turn any tragedy—from a cancer diagnosis to a worldwide pandemic—into an opportunity to sell and recruit. It didn’t take long after COVID-19 ravaged the US in early 2020 for MLM recruits to start making public claims that their products could protect against both the virus and financial insecurity. The Federal Trade Commission sent warnings to over fifteen direct sales companies, including Arbonne, dōTERRA, and Rodan + Fields, after their affiliates blew up social media with images of “immunity-boosting” essential oils, captioned with the hashtags “#covid #prevention,” and verbiage like “RODAN and FIELDS is always open for business even during quarantine! I’ve been working from home for over 3 years now and still making money when other people aren’t! Isn’t it about time you found out what it is I do and how this company really works? . . . #workfromhome #financialfreedom.” * The full quote from which this idiom purportedly derives reads, “This Text holdeth their noses so hard to the grindstone, that it clean disfigureth their faces,” a reference to working hard to avoid punishment. It was written in 1532 by John Frith, a Protestant priest who was burned at the stake a few months later for publicly questioning the English Catholic Church. Isn’t blending church and state fun? * “American family values” is a classic piece of loaded language weaponized by the political right to condemn abortion, gay marriage, and feminist politics as inherently anti-American. * Even Democrats have accepted DeVos money in exchange for public praise—Bill Clinton took home $700,000 in 2013 after speaking at an Amway conference in Osaka, Japan. * This is a real workout that exists in LA at a studio called Sandbox Fitness. In a room covered in actual sand, clients mount stationary surfboards and perform a variety of nearly impossible strength exercises aided by resistance bands dangling from the ceiling. I learned of this unusual torture from a modelesque action film star whom I interviewed for a magazine article in 2017. “You get so ripped,” she gushed, her pupils dilating. “I do it every morning. You have to try it.” * Then in 2016, an attendee got injured in Manuel-Davis’s class and filed a lawsuit. To the devastation of her many acolytes, Manuel-Davis resigned from SoulCycle in 2019 to launch a boutique fitness cult of her own called AARMY, in partnership with another former SoulCycle idol named Akin Akman, whose loyal gaggle of fiendish riders were known as “Akin’s Army.” * In some cases, getting “seriously ripped” can cost you your vital organs.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  I say hello when I come to work and goodbye when I’m leaving, and that’s about it. Trotsky’s trouble with Spinner is just beginning, however. For whatever reason, she has decided that she hates him, and she’s waiting for another reason to pounce. One night, foolishly, he gives her an opportunity. It starts when Trotsky writes a Facebook post about the Ban Bossy campaign that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is promoting. Sandberg wants everyone to stop using the word bossy to describe girls. Trotsky says that instead of using her bully pulpit to pursue something as trivial as the word bossy , Sandberg should dedicate herself to more important issues, like the plight of the African elephant, which is on the verge of extinction. Trotsky loves elephants. He’s always ranting about the awful poachers who kill them for their ivory. I have no idea how elephants became so dear to him, or how his mind makes the illogical leap from Sheryl Sandberg’s feminist crusade to the issue of elephant poaching. I also don’t care. Spinner, however, does. She goes ballistic. Instead of bringing the issue up at work and talking to Trotsky privately, she leaps into Trotsky’s Facebook post and starts adding comments bashing him for not taking women’s rights seriously enough. She says Trotsky needs to think about the message he is sending to the talented and intelligent women who work for him at HubSpot. What will they think when they read his post? They will feel neglected. They will feel that he cares more about elephants than he does about them. This is insane. It’s also a strange move for a PR person to make. We’re all supposed to be “solving for enterprise value” and protecting the brand at all costs. Why attack your company’s newest vice president, a guy who is two levels above you in the org chart, and do it in public, on Facebook? What is she thinking? I’m starting to suspect that Spinner might be a little bit unhinged. I definitely think Trotsky is unhinged. He gets into fights on Facebook, and goes on and on, like a dog with a bone. But this is even better, because just like Trotsky, Spinner loves to fight and will never back down. For two days they go back and forth, trading insults on Facebook. It’s like watching monkeys throw their shit at each other. It’s ugly, and stupid, and the best thing ever. Spinner lectures Trotsky about feminism, and Trotsky scolds Spinner about elephants. Soon other people—some from HubSpot, some just friends of Trotsky or Spinner—start chiming in, taking sides and egging them on. The argument degenerates to the level of seventh graders trading insults in the schoolyard. Neither one of them will give up. Every time you think it’s over, one of them lobs another grenade. Trotsky sends me email and tells me he’s done, he’s not going to take the bait anymore.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  38 In this arid region, Jericho’s ample food stores would have been a magnet for hungry nomads. Intensified agriculture, therefore, created conditions that could endanger everyone in this wealthy colony and transform its arable land into fields of blood. Jericho was unusual, however—a portent of the future. Warfare would not become endemic in the region for another five thousand years, but it was already a possibility, and from the first, it seems, large-scale organized violence was linked not with religion but with organized theft. 39 Agriculture had also introduced another type of aggression: an institutional or structural violence in which a society compels people to live in such wretchedness and subjection that they are unable to better their lot. This systemic oppression has been described as possibly “the most subtle form of violence,” 40 and, according to the World Council of Churches, it is present whenever “resources and powers are unequally distributed, concentrated in the hands of the few, who do not use them to achieve the possible self-realization of all members, but use parts of them for self-satisfaction or for purposes of dominance, oppression, and control of other societies or of the underprivileged in the same society.” 41 Agrarian civilization made this systemic violence a reality for the first time in human history. Paleolithic communities had probably been egalitarian because hunter-gatherers could not support a privileged class that did not share the hardship and danger of the hunt. 42 Because these small communities lived at near-subsistence level and produced no economic surplus, inequity of wealth was impossible. The tribe could survive only if everybody shared what food they had. Government by coercion was not feasible because all able-bodied males had exactly the same weapons and fighting skills. Anthropologists have noted that modern hunter-gatherer societies are classless, that their economy is “a sort of communism,” and that people are honored for skills and qualities, such as generosity, kindness, and even-temperedness, that benefit the community as a whole. 43 But in societies that produce more than they need, it is possible for a small group to exploit this surplus for its own enrichment, gain a monopoly of violence, and dominate the rest of the population. As we shall see in Part One, this systemic violence would prevail in all agrarian civilizations. In the empires of the Middle East, China, India, and Europe, which were economically dependent on agriculture, a small elite, comprising not more than 2 percent of the population, with the help of a small band of retainers, systematically robbed the masses of the produce they had grown in order to support their aristocratic lifestyle. Yet, social historians argue, without this iniquitous arrangement, human beings would probably never have advanced beyond subsistence level, because it created a nobility with the leisure to develop the civilized arts and sciences that made progress possible.