Wiener receives a step counter as an onboarding gift, and describes other trends of biohacking, now ubiquitous in San Francisco, that reflect the industry’s “fetish for optimization culture” (166). Reflecting on the meaning of these trends, the narration notes that the goal in self-optimization is “productivity, not pleasure” and that the ability to synthesize data on one’s biological cycles amounts not to self-knowledge, but only “metadata.” Wiener tries working at the startup’s headquarters (“HQ”), a casual, playful clubhouse, with no bosses and no one obeying a mandatory schedule. She notes the odd, unsettling presence of screens displaying heat maps to indicate where humans are throughout the building. She claims desk space—a “flag in the ground” (168)—and tries to adapt to the company’s anarchic environment, echoing of the assimilation process at her previous job. She describes the surprising intimacy of her team’s videoconference meetings, when she works from home. She enjoys the warmth of the team through the laptop until the meeting ends and the team disappears juxtaposing the virtual closeness with the silence of being physically alone in her room.

Wiener explores a message board frequented by many of her coworkers. There, developers and other industry types share work tips, experiment with ideologies, and pursue tone deaf debates about gender in the workplace, offering a window into the minds of men in her industry. She attends a conference in Phoenix for women in computing, where she learns that sexism and discrimination is even more severe on engineering teams than in the more naturally empathetic support department. She feels a maternal kinship and inspiration when meeting the younger female engineers who pass out resumes. The conference’s open discussions of discrimination make her hopeful that the industry may be at the start of a transformation. However, Wiener illustrates through anecdotes that many CEOs and founders invested in the status quo continue to resist change.

The open-source startup’s recovery process continues to impact its utopian atmosphere: “It was as if someone had switched on the lights at a party, and everyone was scrambling to tidy up, looking around for paper towels and trash bags, rubbing red eyes and scrounging for mints” (180). The company hires a management consultant to help the startup lead in the “diversity space.” The consultant strategically engages her mostly white and male audience by appealing to priorities of achievement and profit, rather than advocating empathy and ethical behavior for its own sake; a vocal minority of Wiener’s coworkers still resist these trainings. Wiener’s narration analyzes the tech industry’s dubious attachment to “meritocracy”—a concept originally coined in satire: “[T]he meritocracy narrative was cover for a lack of structural analysis” (182). The chapter closes on a jarring anecdote of Wiener seeing an injured, homeless black man wearing a hoodie with her company’s logo on it. She feels intense guilt but passes him quickly and continues to work.