Two Tech Books; One Clear Winner

In addition to reading sea tales this summer, I've made a brief venture into tech reads with Antonio Garcia Martinez's Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley and Dan Lyon's Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble.

image via Amazon

Chaos Monkeys is about Martinez's experiences getting into advertisement strategy and working in Silicon Valley. He switches his career as a quantitative analyst at Goldman Sachs for at a stint at Adchemy. He later forms a start-up called AdGrok, sells it to Twitter, and then works for Facebook before getting fired.

Disrupted retells Lyons' venture into Hubspot after getting laid off from Newsweek. For a self-styled cynical journalist, the inbound-advertising company is part nightmare, part bizarre anthropological expedition. He navigates an unfriendly office culture that's completely different from the journalism field and which favors youth over experience because of costs. Eventually, he gets a job as a screenwriter for HBO's Silicon Valley and later leaves Hubspot for the now-defunct ValleyWag. He also becomes the intended victim of cybercrime when his Hubspot boss attempts to get hold of the manuscript before publication; Lyons discusses this at the end of the book.

The reactions I had to the books were polar opposites. Disrupted I thoroughly enjoyed; Chaos Monkeys I loathed. But why?

Chaos Monkeys' narration is so repulsive. Martinez insists on adopting a smug, bitter persona throughout the entire book. Reviewers on other platforms have referred to it as imitating gonzo-style journalism (I can't weigh in, as I know little about that writing style). At any rate, he routinely rips down other people and their accomplishments in Chaos Monkeys. He's an insufferable pseudo-intellectual and makes a point to throw in as many references and quotes from philosophical texts and world history as possible, even when it adds no value to his work. (Note: I'm a total tool when it comes to this sort of thing, and even I'm not as obnoxious as Martinez.)

We also get to see him show off what a terrible parent he is; after fathering two children, he decides to walk out of their lives because the idea of having a normal relationship with his family is too bourgeois for him to consider (why would you flaunt your personal failings and the sad details of your children's private lives like that??).

But the worst part of Chaos Monkeys is the rampant sexism. Descriptions of women that don't reduce them to sex objects or completely belittle them are the exception, not the rule.

For example, take the following passage:

"Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of ****. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they'd become precisely the sort of useless baggage you'd trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel."

He dismisses the former Business Insider editor and UPenn-educated Courtney Comstock as a reporter with a "porn star name." In discussing Tech Crunch's legitimate concern about sexism in Silicon Valley, he smirks about how they're always "agonizing" over it. He can't even simply concede the fact that a woman came up with a better idea for putting ads on Facebook than he did; he has to spend time describing her wardrobe (I guess because French women who dress fashionably aren't supposed to be as competent?), accuse her of being a social climber at Facebook, and hint that her ideas weren't valid.

Of course, his miserable persona was a deliberate choice. It's meant to create buzz about his book that otherwise might not exist.

image via Amazon

My take on Disrupted was much different. I found some fault with his attitude; he does sound rather arrogant time to time (especially in regards to going from respected journalist to tech newcomer), and his inability to grasp the consequences of what one posts on social media is baffling. But overall, the narrative is an entertaining one. He finds a lot to criticize at Hubspot, but the tone is less one of Olympian disdain and more that of genuine shock and confusion. In particular, his allegations of age discrimination are kind of horrifying, such as coworkers calling him "Grandpa Buzz" and the company's CEO saying in a New York Times interview that Hubspot actively prioritizes hiring young people and thinks work experience is overrated.

I may also be biased. I'm a young curmudgeon who generally eyes everything targeting the youth demographic with suspicion, and Silicon Valley is one of my favorite TV shows.

I'm pretty disappointed that Chaos Monkeys was so foul. It was more informative about the tech start-up world and its players than Disrupted. Had it been written by someone other than Martinez, it probably would have been a much better book. Disrupted is an actual story; Chaos Monkeys comes across as the literary equivalent of this Onion article.

Epilogue

 and I only am escaped alone to tell thee -- Job

 The drama's done. Why then here does anyone step forth? -- Because one did survive the wreck. It so chanced that after the Parsee's disappearance, I was he whom the fates ordained to take the place of Ahab's bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same who, when on the last day the three men were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the half-spent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now liberated by reason if its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin lifebuoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising 'Rachel', that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

-- Herman Melville, Moby Dick