Storytelling as a change catalyst
Former Big Tech employees are turning to websites and books to share their insider accounts of work and life at these companies. The public — especially creators — is better served because of it.
Jennifer Elias published a story to CNBC yesterday about the swell of women-authored books on Big Tech’s downside:
Several former tech workers are releasing non-fiction accounts about their experiences in Silicon Valley and one of them says it’s largely because tech companies have fed women a story that, itself, is fictional.
Anna Wiener wrote “Uncanny Valley” as a memoir that recounts her personal experiences of ambivalence and disillusionment working in San Francisco start-ups in her early twenties during the last decade. That often included being the only person who identified as female in a room. She’s one of a cohort of women in their early thirties who are now recounting their stories about working in the tech industry.
The long-form testimonies come as tech workers arise in spurts, protesting how their companies are handling government contracts, climate action and sexual misconduct.
“I think we’re seeing narratives of disillusionment now because we were sold this story about Silicon Valley, all of us were very respondent to it and we have seen, in recent years, this story start to fall apart,” Wiener told CNBC. That story includes promises of identity, security, and value for the workers who help companies succeed.
I picked up Wiener’s book after reading a publisher’s excerpt and watching a replay of an appearance at New York’s Strand Book Store last month. Wiener writes:
My parents had always hoped that I would professionalize in medicine or law, immerse myself in something stable and safe. They were comfortable—my mother was a writer, and worked with nonprofits, and my father was in financial services—but they emphasized independence. My brother, who had graduated pre-recession, already had a successful career by the time he was my age. None of them understood the slow burn of the publishing hierarchy or the industry’s shabby, nostalgic glamour. My mother often asked, gently, why I was still an assistant—making coffee, taking coats—at twenty-five. She wasn’t asking for a structural explanation.
My desires were generic. I wanted to find my place in the world, and be independent, useful, and good. I wanted to make money, because I wanted to feel affirmed, confident, and valued. I wanted to be taken seriously. Mostly, I didn’t want anyone to worry about me.
Though I had the nagging suspicion that the e-book startup’s cofounders might be jockeying for a place on the wrong side of the issues I cared about—the side of the online superstore, the side that was already winning—at the expense of publishers, authors, and agents, I envied their sense of entitlement to the future. There was something unusual and attractive about people who had a vision for how the industry could evolve and a green light to get it done. I didn’t know that three million dollars was considered a modest fund-raising round. I didn’t know that most startups raised money more than once, and three million dollars was experimental, pocket change. To me, that amount of money was a flag in the ground, an indication of permanence, as good as a blank check to go forth and take over. The future of publishing was here, I assumed. I wanted in.
In another powerful narrative published by ELLE, Clare Stapleton, a former YouTube marketer, recounted her experience as the leader of last year’s highly publicized Walkout after being embraced by Google as one of its brightest stars:
Within a few months of the Walkout, there were new “community guidelines” meant to limit people discussing politics on internal groups, and accessing “need to know” documents—like those that, in 2018, revealed Google was bidding on a military contract and developing a censored search engine for China—was made a fireable offense. (The Chinese search engine project, codenamed Project Dragonfly, has since been terminated.) And it was starting to look like management’s outward support for the Walkout hadn’t been all that genuine after all: press reported that in November, days after the Walkout, they had quietly petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to limit legal protections for activist workers.
In the meantime, Google found other ways to crack down. “What the hell is going on over there?” an old coworker texted as headlines like “Google Walkout Organizer Accuses Company of Retaliation” rippled through the Internet. “I guess I struck the Empire, and the Empire is striking back...hard,” I replied. Eight weeks after the Walkout, I was demoted by my manager, setting into motion a bewildering, isolating, eye-opening couple of months. It was so swift and brazen I was sure I had to be missing something. But every week got weirder and worse, until the message from the top was finally clear—my time was up.
My corporate self-image had yet to catch up with the past six months in which I’d become, I supposed, a labor organizer. I’m a good Googler, a team player, I thought. Someone the old guard knows and trusts. Two years earlier, the day before I left for my first maternity leave, I received a glowing performance review from the head of my department. “When you come back, Claire, you can really do anything here,” she said, in that kind of arm-around-the-shoulder way important people use to make younger people feel good, but also indebted. “You’re coming into your power as a leader.” I guess that turned out to be true—though surely not in the way she intended.
Curious about why so many colleagues joined her to organize the Walkout, Stapleton asked a simple question: Why are you walking out? From the 350 responses, she discovered:
he Walkout’s spark might have been Andy Rubin, and indeed there were plenty of other tales of harassment and coercion at Google. But it was broader, deeper than that; this was a monument to disillusionment, capturing all sorts of anecdotes and reflections on a culture of discrimination, gaslighting, retaliation, ethical breaches, punitive managers, bad HR. If I could boil all these responses down to a single question, it might be: when did you first notice the gap between what you believed Google to be—progressive, equitable, fair, good—and what you actually see and experience every day?
Generally speaking, Big Tech’s loudest critics — including myself — fall into one of three camps: academics, journalists and politicians. These companies, however, have been able to skirt accountability in part because they enjoy the support of a key constituency: the millions and billions of consumers who use their products and view banks and pharmaceutical companies as a larger threat than tech companies
History shows us though that when public opinion shifts, meaningful change soon follows. Women’s suffrage. Desegregation. Reproductive rights. Same-sex marriage. In each of these instances, progressive consensus was preceded by dissent (or apathy) that had to be transformed for change to be possible.
The same, I believe, holds true within the context of reigning in Big Tech’s monopoly power over our economy, politics and media. And all shifts start with awareness. That’s why stories about Big Tech from people who worked in Big Tech are a powerful contribution to the conversation.
In his 2013 best-selling book Contagious: Why Things Catch On, professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author Jonah Berger wrote about the impact of stories:
People don’t think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. But while people focus on the story itself, information comes along for the ride.
Narratives are inherently more engrossing than basic facts. They have a beginning, middle, and end. If people get sucked in early, they’ll stay for the conclusion. When you hear people tell a good story, you hang on every word.
Stories are an important source of cultural learning that help us make sense of the world. At a high level, this learning can be about the rules and standards of a group or society. How should a good employee behave? What does it mean to be a moral person? Or on a more basic level: who’s a good mechanic who won’t overcharge?
I don’t disagree that tech company executives seem earnest and their products they oversee feel harmless. Just last week at the Silicon Slopes Tech Summit in Salt Lake City, Utah, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said:
I didn’t get into this because I was trying to build a business or sell a bunch of ads or make money. I happen to think that advertising is a great model so we can offer our service for free.
These services, as you know, aren’t free. What you save in dollars is paid for with your personal data, which is translated into algorithms that are sold to businesses who advertise against content published by platforms like Facebook for free. Of course, advertising is a great model when you’re able to profit from two premium resources — data and content — for free.
Zuckerberg’s personal-data-based business model isn’t exclusive to Facebook. To rail against CEOs who are honoring their fiduciary obligation to deliver as much value to shareholders and executives without zooming out to critique Big Tech’s systemic failures doesn’t address its root causes. In an interview with Recode, Wiener added:
I tend to try to shift my blame toward the larger picture, toward the structure that’s in place that empowers certain types of people or has this mythology around a certain type of hardheaded college dropout with a technical background. But I don’t come at this from a place of contempt at all, especially not toward someone who I think really got wrapped up in a system that he was not entirely prepared to be a part of. I think looking at the systems view is a little bit a way of forgiveness in a way.
On top of all this, tech company executives see no benefit from answering questions about these issues. As Casey Newton wrote last month:
[I]t’s clear that as prevailing sentiment about big tech companies has darkened, tech CEOs see increasingly little value in having meaningful public conversations. Instead, they grit their teeth through every question, treating every encounter as something in between a legal deposition and a hostage negotiation.
We saw this in 2018, when the New Yorker profiled Mark Zuckerberg. We saw it again last year, when Jack Dorsey went on a podcast tour. At some point this year Tim Cook will probably give a zero-calorie interview to someone, and if it’s a slow-enough news day I’ll write this column for a fourth time.
To some extent, CEO’s reticence to engage is understandable. When you are effectively a head of state, and staring down the barrel of potentially company-ending regulation, you have strong incentives to do as little thinking in public as possible.
I’ll admit, investing the time to understand how these companies do business and the adverse effect they have on our democracy, economy and creativity is a low action item on most people’s to-do list. That’s why narratives from writers like Wiener and Stapleton are worth reading. They offer engaging first-person accounts into a universe that feels more empowering to users they rely on to fill and consume their news feeds than it really is.