The lunacy of Silicon Valley is no secret. But Dan Lyons's Disrupted goes deeper than foosball tables and free beer.

I stopped reading stories about the excess of Silicon Valley when I realized that even the most cartoonishly vile characters of the genre are just rich, boring assholes.

A 29-year-old millionaire who finds San Francisco's Market Street "grotesque." A company that fires long-time employees via iOS notification. A young CEO who looks around San Francisco, a city he "loves," and calls for the mayor to help him protect his lovely parents from the traumatizing sight of a homeless man. I’ve heard more deplorable things in a dive bar, and more creative things, too. I have no objection to the ritual humiliation of the grotesquely wealthy. But after a time I could no longer love to hate the degenerate boy-king overlords of Silicon Valley. I was only bored to hate them.

I also began to worry there was something codependent about the whole "Silicon Valley jackass" subgenre. It happens to every class of beat reporter, but it's acute in the gossip columns: The rags need the marks they’re ragging on. The waggers need Silicon Valley. In the typical case it's just one genre of dull hipster making fun of a slightly worse one; the Bowdoin-to-Brooklyn type versus dropout-to-startup kind. In the worst, it is Aaron Sorkin capping off a career dedicated to valorizing a succession of increasingly pompous fictional assholes by writing "nonfiction" screenplays about real-life assholes, every one of which might well be titled You Jealous?

Even the best entries, like Andrew Marantz's profile of "internet-media entrepreneur" Emerson Spartz, The Virologist, may make their subjects appear preternaturally vapid ("Asked to name the most beautiful prose he had read, he said, 'A beautiful book? I don’t even know what that means. Impactful, sure.'") but they do not dismiss them completely. Even Marantz doesn’t want to rob Spartz of all of his mystique. Yeah, Spartz is eminently hateable, yeah he was raised on dime-store biographies of successful people, and sure, he thinks making garbage go viral is a superpower, but hey! He’s made money in new and exciting ways, so maybe it is a superpower, a bit. Maybe he's a genius, too.

I stopped because these stories are always the same story. They are always point-and-laugh — isn’t this awful? — but no further. Always, It’s kind of cool though, isn’t it? too. They roll their eyes at the brave new world, but always allow that it is the world, that it is inevitable, that it is brave in its own grotesque way.

All of this is to say that I did not know about Dan Lyons's Disrupted until after it was published earlier this month. I did not know that Lyons — the author of Fake Steve Jobs and a staff writer on HBO's Silicon Valley — was writing a memoir about his time at HubSpot, a real startup where he'd really worked, nor that HubSpot was forced to fire two executives in July 2015 after they allegedly attempted to steal an early draft of Disrupted, thereby confirming in advance that the worst allegations therein were likely to be true. I did not know that the theft triggered an FBI investigation, or that Lyons worries to this day what the alleged hackers managed to steal or whether they are still plotting against him.

I had not heard of it all until the New York Times ran an excerpt of Disrupted on April 10 and I managed a few paragraphs before I realized what I was reading and was by then too entertained to quit. Then, halfway in, I found a sentence I never expected the New York Times would print. Speaking of Silicon Valley’s self-regard as a "model of enlightenment," Lyons wrote: "This 'new' way of working is actually the oldest game in the world: the exploitation of labor by capital."

There was maybe something more to this book than its blurbs — "a savage burn!" — suggested. I ordered a copy. It did not let me down: While Lyons engages in quite a lot of the usual Look at these lunatics scoffing, he does it as well as I’ve ever seen. He does something else, too. Disrupted begins to chip away, a bit, at the superficial gawking I'd grown bored with and to argue that the trouble with Silicon Valley isn't the excesses of companies-as-adult-frat-houses — not really. It's the excess of capitalism, shredding a century of labor security and calling it a cutting-edge disruption.

Disrupted's blistering approach to Silicon Valley excess doesn't reveal anything new, but it's a shining example of the form

The first half of Disrupted is pure Valley wagging. Lyons, fired at 50 from his position as Newsweek's technology editor, decides that he will not sit out the second tech bubble: He’s going to cash in.

"The tech market is going crazy again, and this time I’m not going to sit on the sidelines and write about it," Lyons writes, "I'm going to work at a start-up. I am going to feed the ducks, or surf the tsunami, and maybe I will fall off my surfboard and drown, or maybe, I don’t know, I’ll get eaten by ducks, but to hell with it — I’m going to try."

The try takes the form of a job at HubSpot, an "inbound marketing" startup in Boston. He interviews with the company's founders and they seem like smart guys. Their company is growing — they have a "really hot" IPO coming in the next couple of years. The founders offer Lyons what sounds like a great gig: He'll be a senior journalist coming in to remake the company's in-house blog into something cutting-edge and professional. He's excited.

Conditions rapidly deteriorate.

On Lyons's first day, neither of the men who hired him, nor the senior manager he believes he was working for, are even there to greet him. Lyons is shown around by a 20-something who, it turns out, is his boss. His job is not remaking HubSpot's blog, it is generating "content" for it, content, it turns out, that is largely designed to convince inexperienced small business owners to fill out a form thereby allowing HubSpot to spam them with advertising. Lyons is twice HubSpot's average age. His peer coworkers are fresh out of college. Nobody likes him, and he doesn't like them.

The following hundred pages are a catalogue of what might be called "bad culture fit" by way of Lyons savaging his co-workers, his company, and the entire Silicon Valley mentality. HubSpot employees are clowns, they speak in incomprehensible acronyms. They don’t seem bothered when employees are suddenly fired (perversely called "graduation") and disappear without another word. They believe HubSpot's ownership when it tells them they are "rock stars," "super stars with super powers" who are "inspiring people" and "changing the world." The bosses themselves are mendacious, self-deluded megalomaniacs so thoroughly proficient at their line of bullshit that Lyons cannot tell if they're running a racket or if they really do believe themselves to be revolutionary marketing geniuses.

"Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language — even, to some extent, inventing their own reality," Lyons writes, noting that "…every tech start-up seems to be like this. Believing that your company is not just about making money, that there is a meaning and purpose to what you do, that your company has a mission and that you want to be part of that mission — that is a big prerequisite for working at one of these places. How that differs from joining what might otherwise be called a cult is not entirely clear."

The inanity extends beyond HubSpot itself. "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," he says, "Marketing conferences are filled with wannabe gurus and thought leaders working 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," he adds.

We later learn that it's all a lie, anyway: HubSpot's real core is a factory of telemarketers brute-forcing sales in precisely the "outbound" manner that HubSpot's disruptive "inbound marketing" software is meant to replace.

The sheer volume of lunacy abounding at HubSpot consumes roughly half of Disrupted’s 258 pages. If you still have an appetite for such things, I can't recommend Lyons's book more: It is the funniest and most relentless iteration of the form, madcap and darker than I'd expected. Speaking of a job posting seeking a media relations superstar capable of landing HubSpot on the cover of Time, Lyons writes: "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 a bag of guns and shoots the place up." This is not the typical humor of a man who characterizes himself the way Lyons does, as a goofy, out-of-touch dad.

But it is difficult, in the book's early sections, not to feel a kind of weariness. Ludicrous as HubSpot is, nothing in Lyons's account is revelatory. The lid isn't blown off anything. The depths of Silicon Valley are not more depraved than you imagined. They are precisely as depraved as you've heard.

Even in the most savage moments — "Dreamforce [a marketing conference] turns out to be a four-day orgy worthy of Caligula, a triumph of vulgarity and wasteful spending, with free booze and endless shrimp cocktail and a rate of STD transmission that probably rivals Fleet Week" — we have only the consummation of the expected. Yes: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is the Michelangelo of Silicon Valley horseshit. Deepak Chopra is a "noted charlatan and hack." Netscape co-founder and venture capitalist giant Marc Andreessen is probably corrupt and certainly a narcissist. Yes, all of them are served by legions of white college grads too distracted by free beer and Awesome Culture!! to notice they're overpraised mediocrities. But didn't we know this already?

"Give millions of dollars to young entitled assholes, provide no adult supervision, and what happens next is predictable," Lyons writes. He's right. It is.

The book rises above the typical Silicon Valley rant by examining the tech industry's unfair labor practices

There is, however, a deeper current to Disrupted, one that begins over 100 pages in and fulfills the promise made by Lyons's New York Times essay: Companies like HubSpots are not just crazy bins. They're avaricious financial rackets — barely about technology at all — dedicated to the eradication of even modest labor protections and the cynical exploitation of workers.

"HubSpot's offices are in an old furniture factory, built in the middle of the nineteenth century," Lyons writes, "Except for the free beer, the job of a HubSpot BDR [a "business development rep, i.e., a sales monkey] doesn't seem much better than the job his great-grandfather might have had in this same room a hundred years ago. The old sweatshop has just been turned into a new sweatshop. In some ways, the new one is worse."

He goes on:

It turns out I’ve been naïve. I’ve spent twenty-five years writing about technology companies, and I thought I understood this industry. But at HubSpot, I’m discovering that a lot of what I believed is wrong. I thought, for example, that tech companies began with great inventions…Engineering came first, and sales came later.

But HubSpot did the opposite … HubSpot started out as a sales operation in search of a product … while people still refer to this business as "the tech industry," in truth it is no longer really about technology at all. You don’t get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore, says a friend of mine who has worked in tech since the 1980s … It’s all about the business model. The market pays you to have a company that scales quickly. It’s all about getting big fast. Don’t be profitable, just get big.

The beer, the foosball tables, the corporate cult: These aren't the silly consequences of a self-important industry drenched in cash; they're a con. "How can you get hundreds of people to work in sales and marketing for the lowest possible wages?" Lyons asks, "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 create a company where employees have few benefits and less job security. Where termination can occur at any time. Where stake-price stock options — the great payout if you stick around through an IPO — take longer to meaningfully accrue than the average tenure of an employee.

The outcome is always the same: Investors get rich. Owners get rich. Managers get by. "Who does that leave to get hurt?" a friend asks Lyons. I'm not sure, he says. "Jesus, dumbass. The employees!"

"Silicon Valley has a dark side," Lyons writes, "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 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."

He goes on:

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.

It may be the New Work to those who woke up at the end of the last century and realized there was a lot of money to be saved by brutalizing cheap labor, but as Lyons well knows, it isn't new at all. The time "not long ago" when companies cared about their employees was brief, a blessed period between the end of the Second World War and the Reagan Revolution, when American workers enjoyed the most equitable labor relations hitherto achieved in their country. But disposability? Job insecurity? The virtue of avarice, at the total expense of labor? Like Lyons said: It's the oldest game in the world. The "New Work" disrupters have only included free dry cleaning.

The chapter is called "The New Work: Employees as Widgets," but it might as well be called "80 Percent of the World Is Explained by Vulgar Marxism," and if you read nothing else in Disrupted, it alone is worth the cover price.

The one aspect of Silicon Valley's long con that Lyons fails to address is that which perpetuates the genre of writing about it

HBO

The second half of Disrupted dovetails neatly, Lyons keeps up the economic argument, diving into the particularly inept financial management of HubSpot (one that nonetheless yields a successful IPO). He riffs, at length, on ageism in tech. He tells more stories about wild parties and abusive managers, about how he took a leave of absence to join the writing staff of Silicon Valley and returned to find his sole former friend at the office had been (possibly) tasked with harassing him out of the company.

The story has a happy ending: Lyons becomes a TV writer, departs HubSpot for Gawker, and sells a book about his experiences. He's no longer a humiliated boomer, working alongside idiots half his age. He's a success. He even clears about $60,000 when HubSpot goes public.

All of this works, so far as Disrupted goes. But I finished it wondering if there wasn't something Lyons missed. For all the time he devotes to the con that companies like HubSpot run on their employees, the con they run on public investors and — when the bubble bursts again — the con they'll have run on the whole of the American economy, Lyons does not touch on the con closest to his own task: the one Silicon Valley runs on journalists and authors who write about what maniac bastards they all are.

That, at bottom, is why I stopped reading about Silicon Valley. People like (former) HubSpot executive Mike Volpe, entrepreneurs like Andreessen and Spartz, even elites like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, seem happy enough to be called lunatics and cultists. It may not be their first choice, but it is better than nothing. As reviled "pharma bro" and Wu-Tang fan Martin Shkreli knows, if you can’t convince everyone you're Awesome, then let the cynics cast you as special kind of villain. An asshole, but a bit of a badass, too.

"In the World According to Start-Ups," Lyons writes, "when tech companies cut corners it is for the greater good. These start-up founders are not like Gordon Gekko or Bernie Madoff, driven by greed and avarice; they are Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., engaging in civil disobedience."

Perhaps that's true, and among the ranks of the Valley there really are 25-year-olds lamenting the visible existence of poor people just like Rosa Parks. But truthfully, they aren't even Gekko. They're not nearly so special, unless we paint them that way. They're mundane people making mundane money and selling their greed with a new flavor of old hype. They're not cool, even in a bad way. They're just rich. They're the latest adepts in the ancient art of rigging a financial system and throwing yourself a wild party with the profits. The nicest thing you could say about them is that some are no doubt very talented and very smart and very sadly dedicated to the grotesque accumulation of capital.

Late in Disrupted, Lyons talks about conspiring with a co-worker to keep his job. The co-worker makes things exciting in a pathetic way, forwarding Lyons a clip from Donnie Brasco that reminds him of the petty corporate intrigue they’re pulling.

But, Lyons says, "maybe we are just two dickheads working in a marketing department, and one of us wants that to seem a little less banal than it really is."

I am proposing that the same is true of the whole industry. That there is not even novel villainy in hurting people to make money.

It is not enough, then, to mock Silicon Valley. The whole enterprise distracts. If the conmen in the Valley can convince you that they are a new and exceptional kind of evil, you will spend time thinking up new and exceptional ways to fight back, intimidated and a little bit in awe of their bravado. It isn't necessary.

The rigged contracts, the job insecurity, the abusive management, the racism, the harassment, the investment scamming and hardball, the criminal reaction to dissent — these are old monsters, to be slain with old weapons. They are the same weapons needed across the whole of the economy: regulation, labor laws, newly robust unions, a political apparatus dedicated to questions beyond the fairest way to grow GDP.

If there is to be a rhetorical component, wagging to be done and a book to be written, so be it. Dedicate the wagging and the book to the proposition that there are interests not only outside of but contradictory to the pursuit of wealth, the fastest possible growth of the market. If we have to call it a disruption, fine, but don't let the cult-talk and the frat parties and the mystique of these new assholes fool you. We've beaten them before. We know how.

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