At the LA Review of Books, historian Justin Tyler Clark reviews Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein. The book is a funny and searing exposé of the half-baked business ideas that receive millions in venture capital funding in Silicon Valley. Pein also uncovers the strange and troubling ideologies that drive some of the most wealthy and powerful leaders in the tech sector. As Clark writes, Pein’s book pulls back the curtain on the sinister side of an industry that presents itself as a benign, helpful presence in our daily lives. Here’s an excerpt from the review:
Live Work Work Work Die begins by showing us the lower end of the food chain, which lives in conditions at once brutal and self-inflicted. Shifting between shabbily rehabilitated former crack houses, enjoying the freebies and fun at mandatorily attended start-up parties, and spending money to attend humiliating idea-pitching competitions, Pein encounters the weird, aspiring proletariat of the tech universe: a social spectrum of “clowns” (would-be entrepreneurs who adopt garish clothing and stupid gimmicks to gain attention), “drones” (industrious, earnest, and utterly uncreative), and “bullies” who emulate the “performative, coked-up machismo of their overlords in the finance sector” so as “to avoid the old stigma of the computer nerd as a simpering eunuch.”
One of the narrative’s necessary insights is that the first patsy of Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley. Few of the tech bros Pein meets seem aware of, much less daunted by, the astonishing failure rate of start-ups (95 percent, according to one Harvard study); one Silicon Valley veteran takes Pein aside to share his pity for the “‘fresh-off-the-boat’ entrepreneurs who lacked elite connections and still believed the hype about meritocracy, opportunity, collaboration, and geek camaraderie.” It isn’t just the freshly arrived tech bros who are clueless, but the investors who throw money at start-ups that frequently don’t even have an idea, let alone a plan to profit from it. Such was the case with Elizabeth Holmes, the Stanford dropout founder of the aforementioned Theranos. In Pein’s tellings, it was Holmes’s university connections and excellent branding (included adopting Jobs’s trademark black turtlenecks) that helped her bilk hundreds of millions in investment capital for a machine that didn’t work.
Image of Peter Thiel via CNN Money.