Review: Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In this book, Lyons introduces us to the tech guru’s world. Wow. It sounds practically pornographic in its exploitation of its workforce and its astounding, short-sighted greed. The stories of employee humiliation, degradation, and abuse are intended to shock the reader. They do.

According to Mr. Lyons, tech bosses have recast the workforce, placing clever but morally incomplete children at the helm. What do you have at the end of the day? A playground for spoiled, self-important, Silicon Valley techsperts, but a soul-crushing purgatory for employees.

Mr. Lyons is angry at the tech tyrants and the awful legacy they are creating. There is more than a hint of sour grapes in his rant-stoked stories, and this does detract somewhat from his central message. Yet, the stories are deeply disturbing. We have conferred unimaginable wealth on the tech movers and shakers. We have concentrated unprecedented power in one discipline – technology – and, according to Dan Lyons, these fascists of the IT business world are not people-persons. They are not nice.

He has true contempt for the smash-and-grab-get-rich-quick-and-to-hell-with-everyone-else technology leaders. He believes they lack vision and character and that they have no respect for the human beings working for them. He does a good job comparing current-day business moguls with the empire-builders of history and through this comparison the trajectory toward avarice and despotism in the present-day big tech startup world becomes evident.

However, he seems to cast all employees as good, hard-working people who are treated unkindly and unfairly. This can’t be so. Many of the young people who flock to the brutal environments of promising startup companies are just as half-formed as those who run the show. I think it would have been useful to devote a few paragraphs to this reality and acknowledge that some employees are intending to be disloyal users and abusers themselves. They want training, in fact.

And, boy, Lyons sure does hate Milton Friedman, at one point bemoaning the Milton Friedman “brainwashing” that has (apparently?) been inflicted on American students of economics. This is really weird. I can’t think of a single university which actually teaches Friedman’s economic theories. (Well, maybe Hillsdale?) Having the business and econ textbooks of a handful of recent college grads on my shelves, I looked over the tables of contents. Keynes is king. Keynesian economics is what American universities serve up and plenty of it. Friedman’s monetarism is the antithesis of Keynesianism and our current day IT wizards and technology entrepreneurs were almost certainly fed a steady diet of Keynesian econ. My best guess would be that they realized it was bunk.

And the continual virtue-signaling got tiresome. Given the revelations of the past two years, few can now tolerate the pretense of this. Admirably, Mr. Lyons talks about a few companies who are working to close the “access gap” in the gig economy …. there are not enough women and not enough people of color. Good call. But, when describing one company’s efforts he actually counts up the number of women and minorities in leadership, and then breaks it down by exactly how many Hispanics and exactly how many African Americans. I found this extremely awkward and a little creepy. An image of Madam Defarge from Tale of Two Cities sprung to mind, her knitting and counting and watching and plotting.

Absent was any discussion of startups companies who are reaching out to the very poor white population in Appalachia, for example, where people have been hopeless for many generations. BitSource, Interapt, Dirty Girl Coffee – there are many valiant efforts underway to lift the non-coastal, marginalized, ignored, and forgotten … out of chronic poverty. To the extent that Mr. Lyons is championing the needs of the working class, I just think he ought to include all members of this class – all of the people who struggle to gain access and to earn a living.

His overall presentation was lopsided.

By the time I got to the chapter on Social Entrepreneurship and the Social Enterprise Movement, I wasn’t sure whose ideas sounded more dangerous – those of the greedy, crazed, workaholic, technocrats or those of this author. Somehow, we went from contempt, derision and deep suspicion of the oligarch tech bosses … to actively promoting the idea that tech companies should be socially active and change the world with their ideas. Wait a minute. All previous chapters of this book told me why this is bad. Now, I guess we will magically find startups manned only by virtue-filled children. Whose virtues will they reflect, I wonder. Had this discussion been tempered with the more current research on diversity delusions and how social justice enterprises are devouring themselves, it might have been a better one.

Social entrepreneurship sounds like other people telling me what I should believe, how I should vote, where I should spend my money. Stuff like this. No thank you. The virtue-signaling propaganda from businesses in the past two years is now the downright scary stuff of group-think madness or worse – corporate greed. When Gillette tells men to be better for the sake of all womankind, while they charge women more for the exact same piece of plastic razor just because it is pink…well, no one who can read takes this (or them) seriously. Consumers know that businesses that jump on the virtue bandwagon are merely exploiting for the sake of their bottom line. I think Mr. Lyons doesn’t want this to be true, but that doesn’t make it untrue.

Lyons says the goal and responsibility of big business should be to pull people out of poverty, to share their great profits with them, and thus provide better futures for all. It is hard to argue against this. Some businesses will do this. Some won’t. I am glad he has called out the greediest profit-hogs.

A fact on which Lyons sheds light and with which we need to grapple is this: In the tech startup world, the leaders have demonstrated again and again that knowing what needs to be done is not enough to make themselves want to do it. This is a human problem and one which needs further unpacking and ongoing, apolitical analyses.

As an exposé on what the tech oligarchs are getting away with as they make millions or even billions off us, this is a very good book. As advice on how we should move forward, not so much.

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