“The fact that I need to spend more time scheduling lunch than actually eating it seems insane to me!” my lunch date said.
I frowned back. It was a pleasant day in northern San Jose. The late afternoon was filled with the light of the mild Californian sun, warm and crisp; the air was still, the sky was blue, and a floral garden stretched beside where we sat and talked. My companion, smartly dressed in business casual with long, loose hair, had been in the tech industry for over 15 years and didn’t want to be identified for this story as she hoped to continue working a few more years. I’ll call her Valerie.
I was a novice and an outsider, an academic working on a research project. I had spent my career working with groups on the other side of the Pacific, from tribes off the coast of New Guinea to Japanese salarymen in the ultra-chic fashion world of Shibuya. Silicon Valley was something new to me. I was fumbling to understand the behaviors and norms Valerie described. “Isn’t there . . . I don’t know. Isn’t there something like a lunch hour? Isn’t that standard business practice?” I asked, still frowning, trying to remember what I had read in school about U.S. labor laws.
Valerie shook her head, clearly exasperated. “Of course there is a lunch hour! But . . .” here she paused, steeling herself, before she spat out the caveat, “they schedule you!”
Her tone conveyed a sense of outrage and resignation simultaneously, and her eyes bored into mine. There was meaning here, but I was not getting it. Valerie must have read the incomprehension on my face, for once more with a shake of her head, she continued. “People schedule you. It’s always like that. I could run inside and grab a planner. Or call it up on my email. And there it is — people scheduling you for meetings. Constantly! And everyone else is like that too! I could call up a half-dozen people now and they would show you the same thing — meeting after meeting, always coming up, always moving around!”
“But a lunch hour?” I protested.
“Has no meaning. It’s not set,” Valerie countered. “Unless you actually take the time to schedule it in advance, there is no lunch hour. You just are eating on the run. Eating on the way to your next meeting. It’s a permanent working lunch!”
Valerie began to describe her first forays into the world of tech in 2003 at Microsoft’s corporate campus in Seattle. All these diverse buildings were spread about a sprawling acreage in the Pacific Northwest — so large as to be serviced by shuttle buses between them — with every floor, every building having different needs, different responsibilities: administrative, research and development, marketing, etc., etc. However, there was one universal: On every floor there was a vending machine, a large double-door soda fridge, a Starbucks automatic coffee machine, a microwave and a household fridge. These kitchenettes were packed to the gills with candy, sodas, potato chips — all the sugar and fat a hurrying worker could need.
“But that was 15 years ago. Now there are these . . . racks with baskets, filled with fruit. They are there near the entrances when you badge in and on every floor!”
“Every floor?” I asked wondering at the sheer logistics of providing so much fresh fruit for so many. It brought to mind a coordinated effort just shy of preparing to land on Omaha Beach.
“Yes! Every single floor. And even at the airport. At the entrance to the private shuttle to the private jet. The same setup!” she said with a laugh. “It’s like a pit stop on a race track. Except a food stop. Food and fuel to keep the body running. It used to be chips and whatnot, but now it's fresh fruit, mini-bottled water and kitchenettes.”
I thought about that. “Well, that sounds better than junk food.” Which was most of what I found in the universities I had worked at: old vending machines packed with M&Ms that were possibly older than the machine itself.
“Sure. It’s supposed to be a health perk. At least that’s the way it comes across. ‘We care about your health’,” Valerie said with a shake of her head. “But the way it’s spread about. The way it’s positioned. It’s a pit stop. It’s all about making sure everyone is moving!”
It was “the death of the lunch break,” Valerie pronounced ominously. Not through legislation. Not through actual company policy. But a death of a thousand tiny cuts, carried out by the twin blades of the electronic scheduler and the convenient food stand. The idea of the worker’s break, that seminal product of the counter-revolution to the Industrial Revolution, and a core principle of workers’ movements throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, had been replaced with a new ideology: the working break.
An oxymoron if ever one was written. And yet the more I spoke with people throughout the tech world of Silicon Valley, the more the same refrain was uttered: We don’t take breaks; we have working breaks. Food is on the go. You grab some fresh fruit and run to the next meeting, the next office. You schedule this, you schedule that (before they can schedule you!), and you hurry and hope that the time is available to execute a percentage of your commitments.
At the heart of the various company campuses typically is the company cafeteria. That word tends to call to mind for people of my generation lunch ladies and Sloppy Joes. Not so the cafeterias of the Big Five: These are creatures sprung fully formed from the brow of the postwar shopping mall culture. In short, they are eclectic food courts with top-of-the-line produce alongside ethnic cuisines garnered from around the globe. The ersatz Japanese sushi is in a stall right next to the strong scent of curries of the Punjab. A plethora of fruit waits past the stalls in baskets and crates ready to be claimed. Along with an assortment of caffeine providers -- Peet’s, Tully’s, Starbucks — it’s all there, and all competing for cafeteria real estate. Sprawling open-aired glass ceiling dining halls, rumbling with conversation and the electronic beeps of devices, lay around the fast-tracked registers. For added convenience, some of the companies have even enabled employees to add a portion of their paycheck to their employee badge as a meal card so you can simply swipe/tap and be on your way. And beyond that, more seating and gentle shade trees of the interior gardens and courtyard, with plenty of spots to rest and respite, dine and discuss.
Except no one is doing much resting. At a glance you can make out the working groups, huddled around the lunch tables, fervent discussions with those present as well as those on the phone. And the solo diners have their laptops out and are busy checking email, typing responses, gathering data, scheduling.
“People schedule you?”
It is a curious phenomenon. In this realm of apparent plenty and luxury, the workers I spoke to shared in lamenting the loss of the idea of the break. It died an invisible death, and now the repeated concern was that there was absolutely no entitlement for breaks in the tech world. It struck me as counterintuitive.
One veteran programmer told me that they “carry their regime in their device.” That it was the laptop, then the smartphone, that had proved the death of the break in the Big Five. That once the planner and the communication (at the speed of light — or at least the speed of the data carrier) were a permanent part of their corporate apparel, that the need to check, identify and keep up with the schedule became omnipresent. Every break, every lunch, became a working break, because there was always so much to do. Always someone that needed to be talked to, work that needed to be discussed. And the prevalence of food, nutritious and otherwise, helped facilitate that.
Lunch is disruptive to the efficiency of the workplace. Going out to lunch even more so. If some medley of Marx, Adam Smith and Polanyi had to be distilled into a quintessence of the meaning of labor it would be that it was a systemic regimentation of human bodies moving in space to an X-axis measured in time. From Taylor, to Heidegger’s studies of the machine, this thought has persisted that the key to an effective labor arrangement was to be found in the managing of bodies in space. Efficiency, in a word. One that reduced human life and its multivaried needs — hunger, sex, air, light and so on — into its most simplified forms, eliminating or reducing what it could, in favor of mechanisms of pure motion; a sort of tool-conscious Vitruvian man. And from this thinking sprung the notion of the externality — that which was beyond the purity of the labor; the purity of the production system — which in a different day and age constituted the broad experience of being human: passion, lust, laughter, criticism, discourse.
And yet . . . lunch . . . there is the rub. The body, mechanism or human agent, whatever the perspective, needs food.
Still, in this day riven with famine and want it seems churlish to complain when surrounded by abundance. Like the dog that bit the cornucopia that fed it. Plentiful food for plentiful worker energy seems a fair bargain. And perhaps if food in Big Tech is just used to move the bodies of workers through the space of the office with alacrity — efficiently — then it would be. However, that is only one aspect of the use of food in Silicon Valley’s new Faustian bargain with its employees.
The evolution of corporate life
To observe that corporations of the 21st century seek to establish what they freely describe as a collective identity — a set of shared beliefs, values, behaviors and objectives — is nothing new. With corpus (from the Latin for the body), the corporation has been about creating a collective identity as a unified personage since Innocent IV first tried to solve the dilemma of how monasteries could profit from wine making: monks having renounced worldly goods, and yet the Church still wanted to make coin off their labors. Hence a papal edict and the creation of a new personage: the monastery as single corpus, an entity of the many made one, the root of the modern corporation. A corporation embodies a legal individual composed of the multitude that is granted rights of property, endowments before the courts, etc. In the U.S. cultural tradition, the development of the corporation is often associated with a model that emerged early in the 20th century, but was most fully expressed following the Second World War. Often called the Japanese Model, due to Japanese adoption and transformation of it, the stereotypical story is that the young man (deliberately gendered) joins the company, becomes a company man, shares in the identity, achievements and responsibilities, and in exchange the corporation has a sense of duty to him and his well-being. A graduation-to-grave compact, as it was once widely referred to in Japan. Both share in the sense of meaning of self; both have obligations to each other.
Over the past several decades the Japanese Model has broken down due to well-documented transformations in the global labor market (if it ever actually truly functioned). Yet in the 21st century what interests my investigation into corporations is what is emerging from this breakdown culturally. In particular, the question that directed me the past few years is whether the way in which the corporation was being remade in Silicon Valley is the often heralded new future of capitalism. In the new corporate worldview there seems to be a sense of shared identity without the mutual sense of fidelity.
The corporations of Big Tech — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, among others — strive to create a collective identity with deliberately disposable assets (the workers) who are eager to work longer and harder for the company not just for pay, but for the team (and the dream). How this is done is remarkable. For entangled in this larger social matrix of duties and relations, Silicon Valley employees need to make a choice concerning time — time spent with workers and office mates versus time devoted to fostering relations and families outside that world. Unfortunately, one result of these choices becomes an astronomical level of divorce (coupled with alarming rates of suicide among employees and their family members). Which brings us to food. How food is used to create a sense of identity and belonging has been well documented by anthropology for over a century. Change how a people eat -- or what they eat -- and you change the people, is the anthropological axiom at hand. So, how is food being used to create a culture of belonging coupled with extremes of self-sacrifice in Silicon Valley?
Thinking Food
“Food is far too interesting to just be about eating.” Those were the words a friend of mine uttered years ago when we were working on a project examining dietary practices of various groups in the greater D.C. area. The idea has become something of a refrain in the sub-discipline of the anthropology of food: Food is so much more than consumption and nutrition. Food is preparation, ritual, conversation, power, status and a host of other relational forms. Food, its production and distribution, tells one about values and social order, attitudes toward the individual body and the collective one. In short, food is culture, rich with symbolic and structural meaning.
Thoughts of culture and its construction were flitting through my head when I made my first visit to the Apple corporate offices. Once past the exterior of the building, a welcoming, if sterile, set of glass and concrete barriers, and through the cordon of uniformed guards at high-tech stations (that almost mimicked science fiction decontamination rooms), the building opened up onto interior grounds. There were well-manicured lawns dotted with lush shade-giving trees, what must have been a designed natural respite within the corporate walls that conjured images of Persian artesian gardens, or of well-lit atria of Roman domus. As I walked across the lawn I wondered at the spectacle laid before me: the garden sculpting and airy open space. The walls of light-loving glass.
Another thought came: Has this business modality somehow managed to capture the universe and universalism that was the origin-concept for my own home-world of academia, the university? A sort of singularity of vision of the world — one brand, one model, one customer, one need, one phone? After all, Apple, like others among the Tech world, preferred to call its corporate home not a headquarters — a military term — but a campus, conjuring idealized images of quiet reflection and dignified remove of the world of scholarship. Thus also invoking a long history of thought to the Universal, which is, of course, the root notion of the University. Universal knowledge. Universal culture. Universal behavior. Universal people. And the type of place and atmosphere best suited for its realization.
Perhaps, far from Aquinas’ strolls about his lecture hall, a new form of the Universal had been birthed in the suburbs of Northern California? One in which a multiplicity of backgrounds came together to become One?
There was another thought as I walked across that interior lawn. Surrounding and fronting the quiet manicured lawns were the towering glass-faced office buildings within which the personnel walked, argued, sat, stared — in a word, worked. In that, with the glass facing, and the contained geometry of corridors and cubicles, symmetrically laid out about the lawn’s enclosure, thoughts turned to the English philosopher and founder of Utilitarianism Jeremy Bentham and his classic design of the prison of the future, a panopticon, in which visibility of the incarcerated would be the ever-present goal of the correctional model.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault famously transformed this into a study of forms of power relations in modernity — that of surveillance as a form of biopower; literally, the use of visibility as a means of regulating life. Foucault wondered at the extensions and applications of Bentham’s prison system, in which the inmates not only had to be observed, but must feel like they are being observed — at all times — in order for the surveillance to become internalized. The inmates then would behave as if being watched, whether they were being watched or not, and they would adjust their actions accordingly. Foucault considered this approach a discipline of the body as a means of power of modern institutions — to create the feeling of surveillance thus to instill a sense of self-awareness, of reflexivity of being observed, in the bodies of the modern actors.
Of course, as I stood in those gardens there was one thing critically missing in the Bentham analogy: the central tower from which the prison officials were to observe the inmates in their surrounding cells. There was no tower, or prison guards, and no outward signs of authority within those calm, reflective gardens.
Instead at the heart of the campus lay the food court.
The Brand
“Kinship is easy!” So said one of my first instructors in anthropological theory. I didn’t believe him at the time. In fact I found everything about kinship difficult, from the arcane diagramming of kinship systems that so much early anthropology was obsessed with, to the proposition that certain egos would feel more fidelity for their mother’s brother than their own father. All of that was something I struggled with in my first semester. However, the professor’s central assertion remains strong: that the solidarity of kinship is a stacked deck.
For in all the human diversity anthropology has encountered, kinship as the world the infant human being is brought into remains by and large in place. And it is this world, its relations and affections, that the growing human being sees replicated in a thousand acts every day. The end is the rather banal observation that it is natural to feel solidarity with one’s kin. To feel care, affection, loyalty, similitude, etc. Solidarity of being and goal with those (however the system) one considers relations.
However, this proves to be a problem for associations beyond the kin, in particular in industrial and post-industrial societies. There specialized vocation is king (or tends to be) — it determines everything from class to social affiliation to education of the next generation. And a great deal of effort historically has been put into breaking down those rather powerful kinship bonds and replacing them with other forms of solidarity. For example, in the militaries of modern Europe, brought into being from the creativity of Napoleon and Frederick, there was the practice of recruiting by age.
Cohorts of similar age were trained together (a Spartan and Roman practice admittedly, revived) to create shared experiences and a shared identity. These military practices were exported into the industrialization of education in the North American early 20th century when the private tutors of the wealthy or the mixed schoolrooms of the rest (in which children of different ages sat, studied, played and bickered together) were replaced by a cohort grade system in which children passed through a standardized education system with fellows that shared a birth year. Regimented not by ability or background, but by age. Which would then reinforce the nature of the shared experiences the youths found in the classroom and schoolyard. Solidarity on order.
And there is food. The anthropology of food has shown us that those who eat together learn to feel together. That the way they eat, and what they eat (from elaborate ceremonies to restricted diets), is one surefire way of crafting a sense of identity and togetherness. From eating on the square in the military to the elaborateness of the Bushido tea ceremony, food and its preparation is used to foster a sense of community.
The world of Tech then utilizes this in two ways. The first and perhaps most powerful is simply a question of time. As people I spoke with observed over and over, the system within the campuses is geared toward providing easy and plentiful food that can be consumed while working/moving. However, this is not just munchies at a desk, but running here, lounging there, in the cafeteria, in a conference room, in a meeting, a planning board, food is ready, available and shared. And, once more according to almost one dozen sources, the food is prepared and available in such a way (i.e., for free in some companies) that it encourages workers to come early and stay late to enjoy the meals, and share them with their fellow employees.
And why not? Why not share the meal with those whom you're working on a project with? So that you can spend additional time discussing details, making arrangements, or just socializing — asking about their days or weekends. Did they see this movie? Go hiking? Make any plans? What about that trip to Europe? You think we can go together? All of this seems, once again, natural and hardly destructive to anything; simply good social skills, or in the vernacular of business jargon, team building.
However, this then leads to the second observation and the purpose of "time." All of this time spent at the campus, reinforced with plentiful and cheap food, is being taken from somewhere. As the days spent in the offices grow more and more (coming in for the weekend project is becoming the norm not the exception), and the hours per day spent working, eating, talking in the crunch of getting the job (usually a discrete project on a tight deadline) done lengthen as well, the simple mathematical proposition is that this time spent in one form of solidarity is being taken from another. The world outside of the company. Family. Friends. Hobbies. Life. The world — or at least the people in it — become oddly convergent. The people you encounter at the meals are from similar backgrounds, with similar means and similar ambitions. The diversity of the world outside of the campus is limited and regimented by the similitude of the vocation. As one engineer once said, “It’s a monoculture, just as with agriculture. Fifty years ago it was all diversified. But now its mono-crops. Just corn. Just barley. Just wheat. That’s how I feel when I eat on campus. We are supposed to be so diverse — from all around the globe! But everyone is obsessed over the same things. The same problems. The same conversations.” Time spent in the company then is time spent reinforcing the company’s demands and values. And time lost looking at other points of views.
Instead you have baskets of free apples at Apple or Coke cans emblazoned with the Windows logo at Microsoft: a tangible manifestation of the corporate brand. Branding, that very American practice of putting hot iron to cattle to make it yours, might be the most appropriate metaphor for what is happening here. The uses of food, all this time spent socializing with one’s co-workers to craft solidarity, with the familial full-course turkey dinners, to the plentiful beer gardens, wine tastings and drinking hours in company offices, doesn’t just keep the workers there and working, but socializes them into a particular environment and community. Table fellowship helps to foster attitudes and identities. In-work meals replace the bonds of traditional fidelity with new organizations, and harness that very human desire to work for the collective, and sacrifice so much, for the good of the many. However, the many in this case being the brand.
It is worth noting here that these techniques of food and fellowship were not pioneered by Big Tech. In fact they are a common element in another modern institution, the millenarian cult. It is a typical feature of modern cults to utilize elements of what is termed fictive kinship, from founding fathers to shared dining experiences, to create the sense of family and solidarity. (Another similarity between Big Tech and cults is the position of the near mythic founding personality for many of these corporations, for instance The House that Jobs built.)
For the purpose of collective action, and more to the point, sacrifice. The sacrifice of the self for the community in order to realize the future vision — recall the infamous method of mass death at Jonestown was the seemingly innocuous Kool-Aid sharing. These techniques that Silicon Valley is crafting into its new corporate model share more in common with cults than with Fordism. An honest day's wage for honest labor and the family outside the factory were integral for Henry Ford. The Big Five seeks to replace these ideas with a culture of solidarity so powerful that people willingly work long hours and sacrifice of their personal lives, not just for the pay, but for the community. For the collective. For the team. For the future.
“We are building the future,” was one of the most common expressions from people who I spoke with within Big Tech, and the one said earnestly. They weren’t manufacturing simply phones, or gadgets, they were crafting tomorrow. And this futurism separated their work from the other companies operating at the time. It demanded more of them. More of their time. More of their lives. Personal sacrifices. Marriages. Pressures to compete and remain. The solidarity of the group was depending on them. Not an exchange of money for labor that Ford imagined, but of life for the collective.
Cult capitalism. Because building a better tomorrow always demands sacrifice.
Home wrecker
That image of Bentham’s panopticon still lingers these months later. Those beautiful clear glass walls with their clean lines of offices and cubicles, surrounding that open garden and grassy-way, all about a cafeteria. That image of the panopticon sans tower — its most central if not most important element — brings to mind something else Michel Foucault said. Much later in life the French philosopher pondered if the days of what is commonly called the discipline institution, like the panopticon, were numbered (or at least reduced in application). It takes a great deal of effort to maintain a disciplinary system, and is vulnerable to opposition or corruption within, and thus what worked well a few centuries ago may no longer be feasible, or cost-effective, in modern practices of surveillance.
Yet societies want to survey; it is a desperate need of the bureaucratic governance — the operation of modern power cannot take place without information, ready and as up-to-date as possible. Consequently, Foucault proposed that a new form of surveillance may be coming into existence, something he called securité (Foucault 2007). This form of surveillance power would be less concerned with absolute ever-present forms of observation; instead it would be merely satisfied to maintain or "sample" events within certain established parameters.
A thermostatic form of control in which the operations of human actors would be left to their own devices, encouraging individual agency and creativity, but with motivations established by the system, and with power being exerted when actions fell beyond acceptable mediations. There, authority would not have to actively intervene except in certain cases, and would maintain a submerged profile to measure the activities within the system. In a sense, securité would be less of a thermostat on a boiler and more of a quantum box wrapped within a Faraday Cage: At any given moment the actions of the agents within are not known, and yet they are contained and regulated.
Within the managing mechanisms that securité describes the role of the brick and mortar tower of Bentham’s panopticon is no longer required. The surveilling instrument is no longer the (imaginary) gaze of the warden, but is numerous metrics of time and space instantiated within the electronic devices carried by all employees in their apps. And beyond this, food most definitely plays a part. Food, that great human device of socialization and expression of care, the center of so much cultural experience, has been modified by the major companies of Silicon Valley to quietly direct workers and their efforts. Food allows for and represents a new lifestyle within the company. Food encourages position and motion: to be at work early, to keep moving within the office, to stay longer. And more than that, to identify with what we do, the brand. We are what we eat.
And so solidarity of the corpus is made sacrament in eating apples at Apple and its strange transubstantiation. However, what is different here, and arguably most tragic, is that the fidelity of this new corporate solidarity is becoming a one-way street. The surveillance model of power to emphasize collectiveness and efficiency within the institution applies to the workers, not the institution itself. And the workers are increasingly being treated less atomistically, as creative individuals to encourage maximum yield, but as fungible, nondescript individuals in an ever-replaceable pool of actors.
The modern corporate structure now exists within a financial world market that rewards "liquidation" of "human resources" as a form of what Karen Ho, an anthropologist who focuses her study on Wall Street, discovered is a new expression of efficiency and greater value. Gone are the age where a company is looked at askance for mass layoffs; in are the days in which this is lauded as "adaptability." So it is of little surprise to learn from people I spoke with in Silicon Valley administration of four-year packages, designed to sign up new employees with massive benefits tied to the completion of four years, under a logic that the first ideas that employees who have not yet entered the workforce have will be their best ideas (Einstein would agree) and squeeze them, sign them to the corporate brand, and when they dry up, quietly let them go. One source who has worked in human resources at a number of tech companies told me of one company’s strict policy for a percentage base of turnover, that a set number of people must be liquidated every year. All in the name of maximization, competition and building the better tomorrow.
Again, a far cry from the cradle to the grave model of the company man of much of the 20th century. Instead we have a social order that prizes the individual (as a creator), but leaves them without substance as an individual: a disposable asset. That strives for fidelity and identification with the group and its cause (profit, winning and tomorrow), but sees the group as superordinate and the membership as fluid. That wants a focus of identity — to work for more than just for pay — but the identity while presented as essential is fundamentally unstable to the system of people involved. Liquidation happens. And it happens often and regularly.
Anthropologically speaking, human beings are remarkably resilient creatures. Both as individuals and as cultural collectives, we have gone through so much historically, and wandered to the farthest corners of the globe (and beyond). However, in all that time an idea has remained a constant: home. Home, built around a physical and metaphoric hearth and the cooking that goes on there, is one of the few truly human universals (even when the home is mobile). The human animal, despite its resilience, craves constancy, and it seeks this constancy through rituals, collectivities and identity. Hearth and home.
The modern world of corporations originally saw their activities as extensions of that outside the home; that is what made the Fordist ideal of a wife and two kids emotionally and physically supporting the worker as so integral to the system, and which had to be supported in the calculation of the salary of the worker. Not so anymore. Multiple-income households are expected, and it is the individual worker and not the family that is the calculus of income.
What Silicon Valley appears to be doing is replacing that home with a new identity fixed upon the company and its goals, which in the short term creates a great deal of productivity and a willingness to sacrifice, but in the long term treats individuals as fungible assets ready to be replaced. As the company steps in and provides more and more services traditionally associated with the larger community — from health care to child planning, to vacations and hosting weddings — this fundamentally one-sided nature of the compact and commitment is something that modern workers and societies are going to have to face. Because it is unstable; and human beings need stability.
The symptoms of an unstable system of home and hearth are what we are already now witnessing in some quiet statistics of divorce and suicide that are coming out of corners of the so-called new economy of tech. Increasing despair and disconnect, families becoming replaceable in search of what is clearly a mission. Sacrifice of the self means service to the community, in this case, and yet the question we all must ask is — what community? And is it worth it?
The future can wait.
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