Tales from the Underpaid: Jumper Window
Recently, while I was reading Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’ tell-all about her time as a nanny to the billionaire manbaby who runs Meta, I found myself laughing out loud at one moment in particular. (Most of the time, that book made me physically ill, so this stands out.)
Giving a tour of Meta headquarters to visiting Europeans, Sarah has to excuse the bachelor-pad-no-bed-frame aesthetic of Meta headquarters to people who are accustomed to working in spaces designed and decorated for and by adults. When the visitors ask whether the office will be finished at some point; exposed ducting and conduits enclosed, concrete floors covered in some manner, juvenile names on conference rooms replaced, she has to cringingly explain that they made it this way on purpose. Yes, Zuck could afford a bookcase, but you see these cinderblocks and two-by-sixes make him feel cool.
Vaulted back through time to my own stint in the San Francisco tech boom, I thought of the office where I used to market cryptocurrency and its underlying infrastructure to the bankers (and the suckers) of the world. The company I worked for was (and still is) in a precarious position. They want to look like an agile new-money solution to a logy old-money problem. So we had the same exposed ducting and conduits, concrete floors, an open concept office (gods preserve me from ever seeing another one of those and listening to a Wharton grad lie through his cocaine-dusted teeth on the phone for 60 hours a week). But we made certain concessions, like naming the conference rooms after famous economists instead of Epic Bacon #3.
We added three insulated phone booths to quarantine Wharton and other vectors of infectious disease about a year into my tenure. These smaller units were all named for women economists. Lean in, ladies!
But three phone booths weren’t enough, and we expanded into a larger startup that included such novel and forward-thinking departments as Compliance and Legal, and we added an additional floor of offices in the same building, moving on up from 12 to 13 in an old bank building.
Thirteen had not yet been stripped to the studs by the minimalist fascists who believed that carpets make us appear weak, decadent and gay. When we had our first conference room meeting on the new floor, the marketing and design teams looked around at the beautiful wood paneling, the original casement windows, the subtle dark carpets and the shining antique brass fixtures, it stirred our lust for beauty and our dismay that it would all be torn out soon. The 55-year-old CEO in a hoodie downstairs would banish these accoutrements, demanding that we revert to the frosted-glass zoo cage that means the old ways are dead and a whole new generation of white men who were born rich are about to show you how it’s done.
Someone rose from that table and swung open a ten-foot-tall window, its sturdy wood still in excellent shape, the concrete ledge wide beneath it. The sounds of the financial district and the smell of the sea a half mile away drifted in. We were, for a moment, perched in the crow’s nest of civilization, seeing to the horizon, comfortable on all that had come before and confident about all that would follow.
Standing, I took it all in. “Those are jumper windows,” I said, glancing at the street a lethal distance below. “You know, in 1929?”
Nobody wanted to look back. Nobody wants to look down.
It is easy to believe that the moneymaking enterprise you’re elbow-deep in can really change the world. Sarah Wynn-Williams believed it, even as Facebook was trying to kill her, and successfully killing thousands around the world. I believed it about cryptocurrency for almost six months, as I questioned for the first time why fiat currency exists, why world banking is so slow and so inaccessible, why it might be better to let the people and their distributed nodes handle the money instead of the small number of crooks doing it now.
The window closed. The market crashed, and it will crash again. I believe we will escape this cycle someday, but the tools will not be frosted glass or polished brass. We’ll have to brave enough to face the music instead of jumping.
(Ripple Labs/Ripple Inc, still extant. 2015-2017)