Corporatocracy

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. There used to be hippies, by the droves. Now? Drones. But dragons? Not a one. Unless you counted ‘Puff’ among them. The times of Haight-Ashbury and turning on, tuning in, an dropping out were all but over. Well, mostly anyway. It seems those in Silicon Valley happened to like the latter. Who knew you could convince the most discriminating palette to eat mushrooms, even if they knew they were grown in cow dung?

It still isn’t enough to make them tolerable. The dragons, I mean. Whether their morning cold brew is mixed with mycology or Vicodin, the result seems to be always the same. The only noticeable difference, of course, being that the highlighted notes I put on their desk seem to garner a bit more attention. I know they’ve opted to ‘Go Ask Alice’ when I see their eyes stay just a little too long on my bright pink underlines, and I watch their gaze move, as if the words are putting on a show.

You would think this would make them more endearing. It doesn’t.

Silicon Valley is full of dragons now. And they certainly know how to blow smoke. Mergers? Smoke. Q3 projections? Smoke. And when there’s smoke, there’s fire. I just don’t want to be the spark.

Whispers of layoffs started traveling fast after the last big update. Someone had leaked to the press that some of our site features could be considered “unscrupulous”, whatever that means. They certainly didn’t seem to care when those same features doled out their daily dose of cat memes…

Everyone’s perfectly fine to use our service for free, until they actually start to think about what that means. Hasn’t anyone ever told these people, “there’s no such thing as free lunch?!”

If you’re not paying for our service with your money, you’re going to pay with your data. Simple as that. And there’s no harm in that, right?! I mean, I always thought people liked cookies, but apparently not if they’re used for tracking. No matter how many chocolate chips you swear to add…

But the cookies were the least of our problems. I had no idea how deep the rabbit hole really went until I started digging. And if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance I’m buried in it. This is why I’m writing to you now. To tell my story before someone else ends up like me, too afraid to stay but even more afraid to go. I know too much, and I know they know it. The dragons are to be feared. And we are all the metaphorical princess who needs to be saved.

It may have started with “innocent” cookies, but our business model went beyond tracking our users to find out which ads to push them.

I knew something was wrong when I had my first meeting with a new “consultant” on our team. The day started like any other. My wake up cup of yerba mate delivered expertly by my bombilla and into my mouth. My supervisor had brought some tea back from his last trip to Argentina, and swore this was the stuff that miracles were made from. If it would help my coding sessions, I was certainly down to try it. So it became part of my morning ritual.

Mate supped and neurons alight, I was ready for our daily scrum, the standup meeting that found me and my team stood in front of a whiteboard with our to-dos, doings, and done list alongside many multicolored post-it notes. I was currently doing a rebuild of an algorithm to help increase engagement on our site. Simple enough stuff at first, but quickly complicated by the new “experts” added into the mix. Our “to-do” list went from quick bug fixes to complete overhauls.

The tallest of the new additions to our team approached me, bespectacled, clipboard in hand. A hammer and chisel sort of approach compared to the digital natives in her midst, but she either didn’t care or didn’t notice. It paired perfectly well with her charcoal pencil skirt and white collared blouse. Our meeting was over, so I took my time examining her gaze at the clipboard. Resolute.

“We need to make some adjustments,” she said. “Nothing major, just something to make your work more efficient.” She reached into her matching messenger bag, pulling a ream of paper from its charcoal confines before placing it on the table. A loud thud resounded at the impact. Something told me “nothing major” was not the whole truth, but perhaps a grain of it lay within the many pages that sat before me.

“We’ve tried to anticipate any questions you may have on our new approach, and have put the essentials here for some light reading.”

If this was the woman’s definition of light, I felt badly for her friends that had to help her move. One box would surely send anyone to the hospital with a hernia. The mass of pages with the “minor changes” was anything but, and to be sure, most of my colleagues would never read them. I was not one of them, but I wish I was.

I can’t unread the words no more than I can unbreathe the air that I am still lucky to be breathing at this very moment. A non-discriminating eye may not have noticed the lies between the lines on the carefully printed letterhead, but I was not among them. Some say the dragons had died in the fairy tales long ago, but that was a lie. They were very much alive. And I had to answer to them, or I would soon be dead.