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 221 of 253 · 20 per page

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

  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. It’s a genre that includes classic nonfiction accounts such as John DeLorean’s On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors... and Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker.” —Harvard Business Review “[Lyons’s] artful reporting from the inside makes for a funny and thoughtful account of the current culture surrounding technology startups. But in addition to entertainment, Lyons’s book is also flush with analysis of those the entrepreneurs that founded these companies and the myriad firms that fund them.” —The Atlantic Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Hachette Digital. To receive special offers, bonus content, and news about our latest ebooks and apps, sign up for our newsletters. Sign Up Or visit us at hachettebookgroup.com/newsletters Copyright Copyright © 2016 by Dan Lyons Unicorn illustration by Samuel Bennett Cover design by Christopher Lin Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc. All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

• 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 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.

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

  HubSpot’s official response to the book was an essay called “Undisrupted,” attributed to Halligan and Shah. They admitted that claims in my book were accurate. Yes, HubSpot had diversity issues. Yes, they did call it “graduation” when they fired people—but they were going to stop doing that. Yes, Shah did bring a teddy bear to meetings, but he was going to continue the practice. The problem, however, was that the essay did not mention the hacking scandal or FBI investigation. Apparently someone had decided they could simply leave that out and no one would notice. Of course everyone noticed. “It is HubSpot’s response to the book that suggests it is as clueless as Lyons portrays it,” was how the Financial Times put it in its review of the book. The book hasn’t hurt HubSpot’s business or its stock price. Many HubSpot customers truly love the company and feel an almost religious devotion to Inbound marketing. They’ve been swept up in HubSpot’s narrative about being lovable and magical and making the world a better place. In September 2015, just weeks after the scandal broke, and at a time when he was still being sanctioned by the directors and investigated by the FBI, Halligan gave a keynote speech at the Inbound conference in front of thousands of adoring customers. Those people knew about the scandal, and didn’t care. HubSpot’s employees remain equally loyal. In December 2015 HubSpot was ranked fourth on a list of the top fifty places to work in the United States, based on an employee survey conducted by Glassdoor. Also near the top of the list was Zillow, the real estate website that has been sued by women claiming the company had an abusive, ageist, frat house culture. HubSpot scored higher than even Facebook and Google. A lot of its employees really, truly love the company and are happy there. I understand why. For the right kind of person, it’s a great place, with nice perks and a fun culture. Even former employees remain loyal to HubSpot and still love the company. I had a different experience. Where others saw a fun place to work, I saw a place where “old people”—those over forty, and certainly people over fifty— were largely unwanted, and the company made no secret of it. I saw astonishing uniformity and groupthink, and an incredible lack of diversity, based not just on age but also on race, euphemized as “culture fit.” I saw poorly trained managers, haphazard oversight, and an organization that was out of control. I know that HubSpot can be a fun place to work, that they put on an entertaining show at Inbound, and that at least some customers, maybe a lot of customers, derive real value from HubSpot’s software. But I fear that customers and employees are being naïve about the people they’re working for and doing business with. HubSpot has nineteen thousand customers.

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

  The problem is that the headline ideas come from Ashley, whose preferences lean toward BuzzFeed-style lists (“15 Reasons,” “7 Ways”) and Miley Cyrus. The idea is obviously cockeyed. A child could see that. Nevertheless, Zack allows Ashley to proceed. Zack believes that computers one day will do the work of content generation instead of humans. The BTG is just a first step, ushering in this brave new world. Ashley schedules countless meetings to “brainstorm” ideas and give us progress reports. At last, with great fanfare, Marcia, Jan, and Ashley launch the BTG. The project immediately blows up in their faces, because the BTG produces ridiculous, pointless results. A woman who runs a blog for a hospital complains in the comment section that she tried to use the BTG to generate ideas for Cervical Cancer Awareness Month and received the following: WHY WE LOVE CERVICAL CANCER (AND YOU SHOULD TOO!) and MILEY CYRUS AND CERVICAL CANCER: 10 THINGS THEY HAVE IN COMMON Those headlines are so good that I want to print them out in seventy-two- point headline typeface and paste them on the wall. The BTG is never spoken of again. But it remains online, because, as one manager tells me, if they take it down that might hurt Ashley’s feelings. Six months later, Ashley gets a promotion. These are the bozos. They are graspers and self-promoters, shameless resume padders, people who describe themselves as “product marketing professionals,” “growth hackers,” “creative rockstar interns,” and “public speakers.” They create websites to build their “personal brands,” with huge photos of themselves and lists of their accomplishments. They have a Toastmasters club, where they take turns giving presentations and sharing tips on the art of making PowerPoint slide decks. They dream up ridiculous activities, like having a scavenger hunt in Kendall Square or going kayaking on the Charles River. Marcia and Jan, who run the blog, decide to have a “content hackathon,” where they will round up a bunch of people and work late into the evening, brainstorming ideas for blog posts. On the day of the hackathon I’m packing my bag to go home when Olivia, an intern, asks why I’m leaving. I tell her I have two kids at home and dinner waiting for me, but in addition to that, I don’t see the point of pulling an all-nighter just to write some blog posts. She looks at me as if I’m an imbecile. “It’s a hackathon,” she says. “I know,” I say, “but why have a hackathon? If we need more blog posts, why can’t we just write a few extra posts over the next few weeks and bank them up?” She pauses.

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

  How can you get hundreds of people to work in sales and marketing for the lowest possible wages? One way is to hire people who are right out of college and make work seem fun. You give them free beer and foosball tables. You decorate the place like a cross between a kindergarten and a frat house. You throw parties. Do that, and you can find an endless supply of bros who will toil away in the spider monkey room, under constant, tremendous psychological pressure, for $35,000 a year. You can save even more money by packing these people into cavernous rooms, shoulder to shoulder, as densely as you can. You tell them that you’re doing this not because you want to save money on office space but because this is how their generation likes to work. On top of the fun stuff you create a mythology that attempts to make the work seem meaningful. Supposedly, Millennials don’t care so much about money, but they’re very motivated by a sense of mission. So, you give them a mission. You tell your employees how special they are, and how lucky they are to be here. You tell them that it’s harder to get a job here than to get into Harvard, and that because of their superpowers they have been selected to work on a very important mission to change the world. You make the company a team, with a team color and a team logo. You give everyone a hat and a T-shirt. 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.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The Venetian Grand Council agreed to provide ships for 9000 esquires, 4500 knights, 20,000 foot-soldiers, and 4500 horses, and to furnish provisions for nine months for the sum of 85,000 marks, or about $1,000,000 in present money.440 The agreement stated the design of the enterprise to be "the deliverance of the Holy Land." The doge, Henry Dandolo, who had already passed the limit of ninety years, was in spite of his age and blindness full of vigor and decision.441 The crusading forces mustered at Venice. The fleet was ready, but the Crusaders were short of funds, and able to pay only 50,000 marks of the stipulated sum. Dandolo took advantage of these straits to advance the selfish aims of Venice, and proposed, as an equivalent for the balance of the passage money, that the Crusaders aid in capturing Zara.442 The offer was accepted. Zara, the capital of Dalmatia and the chief market on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, belonged to the Christian king of Hungary. Its predatory attacks upon Venetian vessels formed the pretext for its reduction.443 The threat of papal excommunication, presented by the papal legate, did not check the preparations; and after the solemn celebration of the mass, the fleet set sail, with Dandolo as virtual commander. The departure of four hundred and eighty gayly rigged vessels is described by several eye-witnesses444 and constitutes one of the most important scenes in the naval enterprise of the queen of the Adriatic. Zara was taken Nov. 24, 1202, given over to plunder, and razed to the ground. No wonder Innocent wrote that Satan had been the instigator of this destructive raid upon a Christian people and excommunicated the participants in it.445 Organized to dislodge the Saracens and reduced to a filibustering expedition, the Crusade was now to be directed against Constantinople. The rightful emperor, Isaac Angelus, was languishing in prison with his eyes put out by the hand of the usurper, Alexius III., his own brother. Isaac’s son, Alexius, had visited Innocent III. and Philip of Swabia, appealing for aid in behalf of his father. Philip, claimant to the German throne, had married the prince’s sister. Greek messengers appeared at Zara to appeal to Dandolo and the Crusaders to take up Isaac’s cause. The proposal suited the ambition of Venice, which could not have wished for a more favorable opportunity to confirm her superiority over the Pisans and Genoans, which had been threatened, if not impaired, on the Bosphorus.

• From Cultish (2021)

  In the 1980s, it reeked of the stock exchang e: “buy-in,” “leverage,” “volatility.” The ’90s brought computer imagery: “bandwidth,” “ping me,” “let’s take this offline.” In the twenty-first century, with start-up culture and the dissolution of work-life separation (the Google ball pits and in-office massage therapists) in combination with movements toward “transparency” and “inclusion,” we got mystical, politically correct, self-empowerment language: “holistic,” “actualize,” “alignment.” This jargon isn’t damaging in and of itself. As always, words need context. And when used in competitive start-up environments, those in power can easily take advantage of staffers’ eagerness to achieve (and basic need for employment). Excessive “garbage language” may signal that upper management is suppressing individuality, putting employees in a headspace where their entire reality is governed by the company’s rules, which likely weren’t created with much compassion or fairness in mind. (Research consistently shows that something like one in five CEOs has psychopathic tendencie s.) “All companies have special terms, and sometimes they make sense, but sometimes they’re nonsense,” said Kets de Vries. “As a consultant, sometimes I enter an organization where people use code names and acronyms, but they don’t actually know what they’re talking about. They’re just imitating what top management says.” At Amazon, for instance, Jeff Bezos’s ideals are strikingly similar to those of MLM leaders: disdain for bureaucracy, fixation on hierarchies, incentives to rise to the top no matter who gets thrown under the bus, and a juxtaposition of lofty motivational-speak with metaphors of defeat. Bezos created his own version of the Ten Commandments called the Leadership Principle s. It’s a code for how Amazonians should think, behave, and speak. There are fourteen of these principles—all vague platitudes, like “think big,” “dive deep,” “have backbone,” and “deliver results.” Employees recite them like mantras. According to an explosive 2015 New York Times Amazon exposé, these rules are part of the company’s “daily language . . . used in hiring, cited at meetings, and quoted in food-truck lines at lunchtime. Some Amazonians say they teach them to their children.” After an Amazon employee is hired, they are assigned to commit all 511 words of the Leadership Principles to memory. They are quizzed a few days later, and those who recite the principles perfectly receive a symbolic award: permission to proclaim “I’m Peculiar,” Amazon’s catchphrase for those who admirably push workplace boundaries. From then on, employees are expected to tear each other’s ideas apart in meetings (similar to the vicious confrontations of the Synanon Game), “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting” (that’s according to Leadership Principle #13). If an underling gives an opinion or responds to a question in a way their manager doesn’t like, they can expect to be called stupid or interrupted midsentence and told to stop speaking.