Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Behind (and beneath) every Internet gazillionaire is an army of downtrodden "NetSlaves."
Nov 11, 1999 | It is about time someone wrote an antidote to the books of Po Bronson. That's not to suggest that Bronson's writings -- depicting a Silicon Valley of hopeful high-powered geek geniuses whose achievements have industry-wide repercussions -- aren't enjoyable; but anyone who has spent some serious time in the Valley knows that the Net biz ain't all it's cracked up to be.
In fact, most literature covering the Net industry, from the happy-happy joy-joy profiles of Wired magazine to the nasty nonfiction tomes like Burn Rate, predominantly focuses on the wealthy, powerful, creative and successful. It should be self-evident that any industry has its share of underlings, but if you read half of the purple prose that's out there, you'd justly think that everyone associated with a dot-com is en route to fame, fortune and eternal self-satisfaction. No wonder there's a housing shortage in Silicon Valley.
Fortunately, we now have "NetSlaves," a bitter little pill of a book that champions those pathetic losers who aren't rich, well-rested or at all happy with their lot in life. Produced by the disgruntled duo of Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin, "NetSlaves: True Tales of Working the Web" surveys the nocturnal and underpaid: the customer support crews that slog through ever-growing piles of e-mail queries; the night-shift manager in charge of monitoring smutty chats; the product manager who loses it after one insane deadline and bullying boss too many.
"I'm a living testament to the fact that more Internet careers are nasty, brutish and short, and I'm not alone," writes Lessard, himself a veteran of seven tech companies. "Let's face it, it's a lot sexier to talk about the American-
"NetSlaves" is based on the Web site by the same name, an online community at large for those who feel betrayed by their jobs. Here you can post your own horror stories and read the warnings of others; if your story is pathetic enough, you may even get profiled as the "NetSlave of the Week," an interesting twist that encourages sob stories over achievements. In the year of its existence, the NetSlaves site has become a bit of a legend, providing a somewhat high-profile outlet for all kinds of complaints.
The book, on the other hand, posits itself as a kind of anthropological study of the various genera of digital slave laborers. Lessard and Baldwin divide the general group of "NetSlaves" into 11 subcategories, affixing each with a cute little moniker that reflects the generic characteristics of the humans that toil within. There are Garbagemen, Cops and Streetwalkers, Gold Diggers and Gigolos, Cab Drivers and Mole People, all the way up to the evil Robber Baron.
Although the tags that Lessard and Baldwin use are toothache cute -- the pair has a painful practice of taking metaphors to the extreme and beyond -- they do rather aptly capture the nature of the jobs. "Cops and Streetwalkers," for example, are, respectively, those who are paid to monitor online communities and purge smut, and the pornographers and leches who lurk within. "Cab Drivers" are the "itinerant, faceless drones who code Web sites for a living," often on a temp basis. The "Garbageman" is the lowly underpaid tech-support staffer who lives by his beeper. "Fry Cooks" are the project managers who sweat over deadlines and are held ultimately responsible for all failures.
The book is stuffed with charts explaining how you can identify these different species (as well as a quiz in the beginning to test whether or not you have been exploited enough to quality as a NetSlave yourself), using such criteria as age, income, hours worked per week, mode of dress, recurring nightmares and favorite offline activities (if they have any).
The real meat of the book, however, is in the "true tales" of the NetSlaves; each category is graced with one horrifying tale to demonstrate just how bad that job can get.
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