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In 2010, I had coffee with a bookish entrepreneur who believed that writers and founders were essentially kindred spirits. “We’re creatives,” he said, toggling his index finger back and forth between us to illustrate the bond. “We build our own private worlds and sell them in the marketplace.” This was at Stanford University’s Coupa Café, an outdoor kiosk near the entrance to Green Library. Students on bikes were streaming by, greeting each other, ringing their bells, veering off to fill their heads with twenty-first-century learning.
At the time, I was a student too, of the graduate variety, and this meeting was my introduction to the so-called gig economy. The entrepreneur, whom I’d met through a friend, had hired me to revise a talk on innovation and literature he was scheduled to give later that month. He was paying for my coffee, and the fee was very generous, so of course I let him blather on. The writer has his “drafts,” he said, the founder his “iterations,” but their innovative natures share the same artistic, heroic source. Even their lairs look similar: the startup’s garage, the novelist’s shed. The difference was that a founder can actually realize his vision, whereas writers merely live on the page. Founders, then, and not poets, were the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” he said, showing off his knowledge of Shelley’s famous “Defence of Poetry.” Writers had no effect on life beyond college campuses. “It’s like that Auden line,” he said. “‘Poetry makes nothing happen.’”
Here I felt I had to intervene. Gingerly, I suggested that it made no sense to quote this line, which “belongs too much to the poem itself.” I regretted these words immediately—they were moony and pretentious—but the entrepreneur now looked intrigued. He took out his iPhone, a novelty then, and googled “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” the poem in which the line appears. Enhancing the screen, he read aloud: “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper.” What a lovely exchange, I thought, between management and labor, or, in the parlance of Stanford undergrads, a “techie” and a “fuzzy.” Maybe the world these startups had envisioned wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe Amazon’s Kindle was a catalyst, not a vampire. Maybe Google’s digitization plan would lead to a blossoming of empathy through literature. This warm spell of optimism lasted three, maybe four seconds. The entrepreneur laughed in my face. “Oh, but I do want to tamper,” he said. “I’m absolutely tampering.”
As the punchline to a cocktail-party anecdote, this was funny enough, but it also revealed something about the Silicon Valley ethos that has baffled me for fifteen years. The question I had at the time—the question I still have—is why pretend? Why do startup bros need the alibi of poetry to launch their great extraction machines? Why does every chapter of a self-help-style business book require pretentious epigraphs from Woolf or Beckett or Kafka? Why do corporations even need mission statements? Why is there a magazine popular with MBAs called Poets&Quants? Why does Ezra Pound’s modernist manifesto (“Make it new!”) have to appear on PowerPoint slides at “design thinking” conferences? Why do all of these business schools feel the need to siphon off the wisdom of the humanities, even as their graduates plunder the arts-and-culture budget?
There was something curious going on. I knew I wasn’t the only writer suffering this irony. Social-media companies had ruined journalism as a viable career, and the STEM fetish had overtaken academia: at Stanford, there were professors using big data to map trends in nineteenth-century literature—a form of institutional suicide called the “digital humanities.”
Given all this, I eventually resigned myself to the melancholic fate of the wandering content scribe, producing “thought leadership” for pseudointellectuals in the afternoons and evenings so that I could spend my mornings filling notebooks with whatever I pleased—a sad bargain, in retrospect, but it seemed the only available choice. I wrote mostly for business schools, startups, and market-research firms. I spent two years in Kuala Lumpur indentured to a strategy-professor-turned-consultant; another two in Chicago, where I wrote speeches and video scripts for the former dean of a business school; and another five working remotely from Iowa City, Manila, Hong Kong, Houston, and Greater Los Angeles.
Wherever I went, I encountered the same MBA false consciousness. Founders, consultants, and marketing people calling themselves “creatives.” Executive education programs assigning poems and novels to bedazzle their pedagogy with a cheap artsy varnish. I was tickled, then depressed, to see that Donald Barthelme’s essay “Not-Knowing” appeared on a reading list for a class on innovation and that W.E.B. Du Bois was quoted in a textbook on behavioral economics. Arianna Huffington’s Thrive took this snackable humanism to new heights of absurdity. Having “burned out” while achieving wealth and power, this famous media baron was now promoting mindfulness via warmed-over summaries of Rumi, Rilke, Pascal, Thomas Merton, and Anne Lamott. I suppose I should have been pleased to see these writers getting airtime, but the recasting of wisdom as competitive advantage only curdled my disposition.
Still, maybe the entrepreneur had a point. Maybe founders and writers are more alike than I wanted to believe at the time. Startups are legal fictions, just as novels and short stories are, and writers and CEOs both have dictatorial instincts, shaping events according to their own obscure desires. The economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote that people become entrepreneurs to possess a “private kingdom,” and this also describes most writers I know. If you close your eyes at a startup accelerator event, you can easily imagine you are listening to a “craft talk” at an MFA program or a writer’s retreat, where treacly maxims rule the day. Both workshops and incubators are filled with slightly messianic, self-indulgent people (including myself) who would like to be their own boss and who’ve learned to promote their personal ambition as a moral quest for empathy and connection. (Microsoft’s CEO likes to claim that empathy represents a core business practice; you will hear this from English professors, too, as they clamber up the tenure pole.) When I learned that Dale Carnegie, self-help guru extraordinaire, had written a failed novel, The Blizzard, I had to admit the link was there somewhere. There’s certainly some overlap in “hero’s journey” jargon, where Jungian psychoanalysis is watered down to inspire artists and entrepreneurs alike.
On the other hand, startup culture is stupid and parasitical. So of course I came to resent the fact that, even as they lay waste to humanities curricula and hijack “creativity” as a concept and a practice, business schools still pay lip service to valuable literary and philosophical principles. Beckett’s “fail better” as a motto for startup CEOs is a typical example of this dispiriting cooption. Just as our photos and messages were being plucked from our accounts and harvested by social-media companies, our literature was likewise being hoovered up and freeze-dried for the dimmer sensibilities of the ski-lodge intellectual.
As Lewis Lapham phrases it in Money and Class in America, writers have always considered themselves to be lowly “guests of the management.” Of course, even the guest of the management receives some perks—I enjoyed plenty of free meals and excellent library access—but overall, our status has become even lowlier and harder to accept. In the early days of the new ideas industry, the writer became a concept wallah, an underpaid grammarian. And the wisdom on offer was subprime. Tolstoy and Plato were bundled together with boardroom sociology to yield a toxic cultural asset. And this all happened before large language models became large enough to replace the writer entirely.
I couldn’t help but note the contradictions in the culture of my MBA overlords, who were often condescending toward the ink-stained wretches they employed but more than a little curious when it came to the “tools and frameworks” one encounters in the humanities: freewriting, brainstorming, “thick description,” the workshop and the seminar. As an art form to engage with, literature was frivolous; as a referent and a marketing prop, it was absolutely essential. There’s a note of this tension in Anna Wiener’s memoir Uncanny Valley, in which the entrepreneurs cannibalizing the publishing industry have the good sense to hire the comically literary Anna to disguise their corporate piracy as innovation and progress. It didn’t seem like a bad gig; I probably would have taken it. Writers, in my experience, had a kind of jester’s privilege in the MBA and startup worlds: we could poke fun at the obvious hypocrisies inherent to the managerial class, probably because it wouldn’t change a thing. The emperor wasn’t naked, exactly, but he was wearing borrowed clothes and passing them off as the new style.
Once, in Chicago, I went to a talk by Paul Bennett, CCO of the consulting firm IDEO, who discussed the applications of “design thinking” for funerals. “Designing Death,” the talk was called, its messianic tone reminiscent of the late Steve Jobs, whose posthumous reputation was a blight on the culture. (To quote the comedian Bill Burr: “New iPhone doesn’t fit the old charger: This is your hero?”) Dissolving urns, custom prayers, religion as a “powerful tool.” “We craft our own rituals,” Bennett proclaimed, looking far too pleased, as if he’d invented the term himself. The audience purred, nodding along.
Years later, I saw this style of performance gently parodied by the HBO sitcom Silicon Valley, but the satire didn’t land for me; it was far too affectionate. A more subversive response was the Finnish artist Pilvi Takala’s video of her time at Deloitte, where she filmed herself doing nothing at all, to the growing consternation of her temporary office mates. I sent this video, The Trainee, to a friend of mine who worked for Deloitte. She loved it, of course, just as every startup bro loves Silicon Valley. There was no acid the system couldn’t cheerfully digest, no value it couldn’t pull into its overwhelming orbit. Writers and artists were harmless scolds, mascots, adolescents, fools—unless they were on the festival circuit, in which case they were gurus.
I once attended a writers’ conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, a resort town that also hosts an annual business conference nicknamed “summer camp for billionaires.” I was the least important guest (an “emerging” fiction writer), but they let me attend all the events—hikes and dinners, readings and brunches—and one afternoon I found myself on a walking tour of Hemingway’s house in the nearby town of Ketchum. A popular business journalist told me about his research into the life of Alfred Marshall, the famous English economist I knew absolutely nothing about. The journalist laughed at my ignorance. He said more fiction writers should know about marginal utility, price theory, supply and demand. Neoclassical economics, according to Alfred Marshall, was “the study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.” No, I thought. That’s fiction. That’s the whole project of literature. “Man’s life is not a business,” I countered, quoting Saul Bellow. The journalist, walking faster, struck up a conversation with someone else, leaving me with the tour guide in the house’s main entryway. “This is where Hemingway shot himself,” the tour guide said. “This very spot.”
Writers, both suicidal and not, have always engaged in hackwork. Thomas Pynchon wrote for Boeing and other major companies. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, and Joseph Heller all worked as copywriters early in their careers. So did Joshua Cohen, at least until he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Netanyahus. Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, which skewers the entrepreneurial spirit applied to the Global South, was chief storytelling officer for a London-based consulting firm (he’s also a McKinsey alum). Merve Emre, before she became a literary critic, was a junior analyst at Bain. (The experience led to her first book, The Personality Brokers, a history of the Myers-Briggs test and its role in the corporate world.) Joshua Ferris wrote a great novel, Then We Came to the End, based on his years working for a Chicago advertising firm. It’s hardly a new phenomenon. And in fact, I preferred the indignity of writing business articles for TED Talkers and thought leaders to the Faustian bargain of screenwriting or the self-exploitation of the personal-essay industry. Or, for that matter, the bland jargon of most English departments.
Still, it was disturbing to watch these MBA types traipse around in the china shop of literature, in particular the psychologists, who all began working for business schools. Adam Grant of Wharton was especially ubiquitous. “There’s a word for that,” he would always say, foisting another faddish term on the anxious upper-middle class. (His latest buzzword, “empathic distress,” reminds me of Molière’s doctor in The Imaginary Invalid, who “explains” sleep by referring to what he calls the “dormitive principle.”) Carol Dweck, author of Mindset, a megahit, and Angela Duckworth, author of Grit, were similarly adept at reintroducing common sense to the world with superficial allusions. CEOs were writing little prose poems on LinkedIn; Buddhism and Stoicism were rebranded as “life hacks.” I once wrote an article for a business professor who had spent time at Amazon and was blown away by their meeting style. Instead of PowerPoint presentations, he said, they all draft memos for which the other meeting attendees provide “synchronous feedback.” That’s a writing workshop, I tried to explain. The professor didn’t seem to care. He was happy to claim novelty for something that wasn’t novel at all.
The same shamelessness has powered some of the highest-valued companies. Meta, WeWork, and SoulCycle purport to sell “community,” as if that weren’t the basic value proposition of life itself. Apple sells us “memories.” In my grumpiness, the entire field of behavioral economics seemed like nothing but a giant hoax. But who was I? Just a wordsmith, a weary sentence-monger. My clients loved to “discipline my thinking” on these matters. A few of them even accused me of disrespecting social science, which I tried to explain was the natural stance of the literary snob. In the end, we agreed to disagree. As it turns out, my impatience with received wisdom and business-speak was useful: it helped sharpen their prose. From the ideology’s point of view, I was easily digestible.
I would have despaired if not for the gift of literature, which ruined my life but saved my soul. At first, I drew solace from the darkest, funniest satires of our unrelentingly corporate world: Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods, which imagines a workplace prostitution scheme with a perfectly straight face; or William Gaddis’s J R, a novel in which an eleven-year-old boy runs an empire from a payphone in his Massapequa elementary school; or Tony Tulathimutte’s hilarious novel Private Citizens, a scathing account of Bay Area millennials in the heady aughts; or Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers, a wry, angry takedown of “the prevailing techsperanto”; or Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island, a novel in which a corporate anthropologist seeks patterns in the entropy of modern life for the benefit of a secret client.
But satire only goes so far. For a more tempered view of the era, I turned to books like How to Speak Money, John Lanchester’s charming guide to the post-recession economic lexicon we live and breathe; The Firm and The Golden Passport, Duff McDonald’s histories of McKinsey and Harvard Business School; Anand Giridharadas’s Winners Take All, a polemic against the “elite charade” of “doing well while doing good,” and the work of Gideon Lewis-Kraus, who writes about Silicon Valley with a genuine literary flair. (To these I would now add Erik Baker’s Make Your Own Job, an essential work of history that explains why the call to imbue our careers with “meaning” is often insidious.) One of my favorite pieces from this time of lonely reading was “The Disruption Machine,” Jill Lepore’s account of the year she worked for Michael Porter, bestselling author of Competitive Strategy. Amazing, I thought. She, too, had once been a guest of the management.
Guests are often envious of hosts, especially wealthy hosts who travel the world in business class and do not have to spend their lives defending a ruined enterprise. This was certainly true for me: my contempt for all the thought leaders who hired me to think for them was laced with envy and self-doubt. I would call to mind that coffee date with the entrepreneur to punish myself. Eventually, though, I came to see that the envy actually cuts both ways. The more conversations I had with clients about my reading and writing life, the more I began to sense that they were jealous of something ineffable. They knew, at some level, that their books and talks were fraudulent. They may have been creative but they knew they weren’t artists, which is why they tried to appropriate the language of art whenever they could. It’s also why the curricula of “executive” education tends to exude a faint pastoral tone: when elites forgo the pursuit of wisdom to focus on worldly achievement, they are eager to make their cringeworthy amends later on.
Despite the debasement of literature, I try to be an optimist about its future. Just because people don’t read poems doesn’t mean they don’t still feel the mysterious longing all great poems rely on for their full effect. And although it’s important to satirize these spiritual executives, it’s also worth acknowledging that occulted within the appropriation of literature by the business world lies a perverse respect. For a long time, I asked myself why I ever agreed to meet that entrepreneur in the first place, since all it did was set me on a path of humiliation. But the answer to that question is obvious and not all that interesting. More recently, I’ve begun to ask myself a different question: Why did he invite me?
