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A review by mattycakesbooks
Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons
4.0
When this is journalism, it's brilliant and terrifying. When it's a tell-all memoir, it's funny. The latter part can occasionally get catty -- which I understand, he had a terrible experience working with terrible people, but there are times where it's not much more than gossip (for example, he mocks a disliked coworker's "vocal fry," which is just... come on, man, you can aim higher than that).
But the writing (the actual journalism) on the second bubble in Silicon Valley was spectacular. So much of the writing around the tech industry is dazzled by the "visionary" billionaires who cloak themselves in faux-progressivism, but Lyons cuts right through that, saying it's just the same old story of capital exploiting labor. Ageism and sexism are necessary extensions of that -- why worry about a lawsuit when firing someone who has a family or who can get pregnant when you can just attribute it to a vague "culture fit"? Why fire someone, for that matter, when you can just make their life hell by abusing them and gaslighting the shit out of them? There are a billion scrappy millennials who don't know any better who are willing to take their place.
Lyons is occasionally a bit of a curmudgeon, which is fair, considering what happened to him. But it's nice to see a journalist going into the bullshit factory and calling it out for what it is.
But the writing (the actual journalism) on the second bubble in Silicon Valley was spectacular. So much of the writing around the tech industry is dazzled by the "visionary" billionaires who cloak themselves in faux-progressivism, but Lyons cuts right through that, saying it's just the same old story of capital exploiting labor. Ageism and sexism are necessary extensions of that -- why worry about a lawsuit when firing someone who has a family or who can get pregnant when you can just attribute it to a vague "culture fit"? Why fire someone, for that matter, when you can just make their life hell by abusing them and gaslighting the shit out of them? There are a billion scrappy millennials who don't know any better who are willing to take their place.
Lyons is occasionally a bit of a curmudgeon, which is fair, considering what happened to him. But it's nice to see a journalist going into the bullshit factory and calling it out for what it is.