#anna weiner

What were we doing anyway, helping people become billionaires? Billionaires were the mark of a sick society, they shouldn’t exist. There was no moral structure in which such a vast accumulation of wealth should be acceptable.

I knew, from visiting my accounts, that startup offices tended to look the same—faux-midcentury-modern furniture, brick walls, snack bar, bar cart. When tech products were projected into the physical world, they became aesthetics unto themselves, as if to insist on their own reality: the office belonging to the home-sharing website was decorated like rooms in its customers’ pool houses and pieds-à-terre; the foyer of a hotel-booking startup had a concierge desk replete with bell (but no concierge); the headquarters of a ride-sharing app gleamed in the same colors as the app itself, down to the sleek elevator bank.

I read the online archives of literary magazines that no longer existed, digitally window-shopped for clothing I could not afford, and created and abandoned private, aspirational blogs with names like A Meaningful Life, in the vain hope that they might push me closer to leading one.

Engineers I knew talked about how the world had opened up to them the first time they wrote a functional line of code. The system belonged to them; the computer would do their bidding. They were in control. They could build everything they'd ever imagined. They talked about achieving flow, a sustained state of mental absorption and joyful focus, like a runner's high obtained without having to exercise. I loved that they used this terminology. It sounded so menstrual. Working in tech without a technical background felt like moving to a foreign country without knowing the language. I didn't mind trying. Programming was tedious, but it wasn't hard. I found some enjoyment in its clarity: it was like math, or copyediting. When I had edited or vetted manuscripts at the literary agency, I moved primarily on instinct and feeling, with the constant terror that I would ruin someone else's creative work. Code, by contrast, was responsive and uncaring. Like nothing else in my life, when I made a mistake, it let me know immediately.