My esteemed colleague (and mother) Jan English-Lueck and I have officially been published in the most recent issue of the Anthropology of Work Review. There you can find our article, sadly behind a pay wall.
We ask: is the vaguely California-Buddhist (but mostly utilitarian) “caring” of Silicon Valley corporations a good thing? We answer, very academically: maybe, sometimes, someday. But today, it mostly stands in agonizing juxtaposition with horrendous inequality. If some by long-shot thoughtful stars align…yes someday it could be some definition of good. We are trying to force some alignment from our humble positions. Join us?
If you think that seems interesting, this article is worth a read.
Here’s the abstract:
The struggle for labor rights is often one of asserting embodied care. Workers negotiate for rest and safe physical conditions. In the United States, further embodied care is translated into health care and family leave benefits. In Silicon Valley, while labor still struggles in the service and manufacturing sectors, professional high-tech work constitutes another set of challenges and expectations. Startup culture draws on the university-student lifestyle—where institutionalized care includes a broad palette of wellness care, cafeterias, and structured recreation. So it is not surprising that yoga, massage, food, and managed fun made their way into high-tech workplaces of the late twentieth century. Increasingly, however, that corporate care is a requirement, not a perquisite, of progressive companies recruiting elite workers.
Effective care requires personal awareness and corporate surveillance in order to be effective. Corporate responsibility in Silicon Valley workplaces embraces discourses in which worker productivity and care intertwine. This care is not evenly distributed or available to all workers, but still points to an emerging set of corporate care practices. Knowledge workers are expected to work more intensively, and employers sustain them by providing care. That logic of care shaped the social experience of both care providers, such as chefs and concierges, and workers, who learn to be the subjects of such care. Based on two decades of fieldwork in companies from Apple to Yahoo, this article outlines the uneven evolution of Silicon Valley’s corporate care.
And here’s an excerpt, which I think is within the limits of what I’m allowed to post here. Specifically, the prologue, which I wrote based on field notes from one of the more surreal experiences of my entire life.
A deep bell sounds at the hands of a brown-robed monk as hundreds of people bow their heads over trays carefully balanced on their laps. It is the fall of 2013 and the corporate dining room of an iconic Silicon Valley company is transformed as rows of workers, vendors, and guests sit in silent contemplation. Thich Nhat Hanh, renowned mindfulness teacher, leads the room in a guided meditation over the vegan lunch of subtly spiced Southeast Asian vegetables and rice. We are participants attending a workshop designed to cultivate a wonder of food in the larger ecosystem and an awareness of the act of eating.
The teacher asks us to savor each bite. He asks us to contemplate how dietary choices like these can heal a climate-disturbed planet. He asks us to consider the life of these plants, and all the human hands—farmers, cooks, and workers—who made it possible for us to eat the plants in that moment. Thousands more watch this performance through cameras placed around the room, possibly eating on their own, in homes and offices around the world. The organizers, chefs, and workers convinced that technology and compassion could do more together than apart, invited the monks to give their peers a transformative experience and to enlist allies.
Four months later, presenters from that same corporation, while reporting on that experience and the larger effort around mindfulness at the Wisdom 2.0 conference, were interrupted by an onstage protest. Local San Francisco activists waved signs reading, “Wisdom Means Stop Displacement” and “Wisdom Means Stop Surveillance.” The company’s efforts to care for its own workers and the planet, though literally fashioned on “noble intentions” drawn from Buddhist and secular compassionate practice, are mired in an inescapable context of a system that produces economic inequality and unequal access to physical resources. Diverse stakeholders contest the values around information flows and privacy. The ubiquitous computing that fuels the Silicon Valley economy also produces a panopticon of available information, which changes the lives of its workers and the communities in which they live. Those care practices also require a degree of self-disclosure and behavioral observation to be effective. If an employer wants its workers to be at “peak performance,” it needs to know how to promote that productivity year after year, and how to help its workers attain it for themselves.
A while back I spent 15 minutes staring at this thing trying to figure out what it was. I was on a hike at Uvas Falls, an obscure park outside Morgan Hill with great bugs. (The trail is also home to one of those fantastic ladybug orgies.) But it was a wet spring, and the waterfalls covered the trail in places, so it was all about the water bugs. It’s not a waterbug.
The Trichoptera have been known to fishermen since they advent of fly-fishing and to the entomological for a longer time. Mouffet the author of the first English book on entomology (the ‘Theatrum Insectorum’) writes in 1658 of the great variety of ‘cados worms’ to be found in rivers and streams. The name possibly arises from the ancient name for a travelling cloth salesmen who pinned samples of their wares to their coat, they were known as ‘cadice men’ and it is possible the name ‘Caddis fly’ is a reference to the cases many Caddis-fly larvae build from bits of debris. The Latin name ‘Trichoptera’ comes from the Greek ‘Trichos’ = a hair and ‘Pteron’ = a wing, meaning hairy winged which is a good description of the adult or imago forms.
Also that
There are about 7 000 named species world-wide of which over 400 occur in Europe and about 190 in Britain. Fossil Caddis flies have been found as far back as the Cretaceous.
There are dozens of those species in California, but my best guess based on fish and wildlife maps is Diplectrona californica. This nerd’s curiosity is sated.
The re-telling below is a Chinese fairy tale I loved when I was a child, filtered through my California lens of Steinbeck, and my transcendentalist lens via Thoreau. More on that after the story. The divergent palates of the Diablo Hills, and the steep Chinese landscapes that the original story canvases inspired this story. I was driving across the Dumbarton Bridge at dawn. You know how hard it is to behold something that beautiful while driving? So I backed into describing from my observations. And that lead to this. Enjoy.
Thistle Fairy and the Seven Jewels
It was very dark. Only a few isolated cones of brightness punctuated the black. Slowly, edges started creeping into the world. Things remembered their shapes as the night faded. The world saw itself for the first time since yesterday, and it was all painted in shades of gray.
Sunrise Fairy stretched languorously in her resting place behind the gray hills. Another morning, another long journey across the world returning color to all the shapes and beings. Why couldn’t everything remember its own color overnight? Why did she always have to make the rounds, whispering and tapping with her kit of colored stones? Surely someone could share the load a bit. She needed help, she realized. Her job required wonder, and she was all out of it.
She cast about, and she smelled, and then saw a tangle of jasmine filling out a hedge.
“Jasmine Fairy,” she said, “do you remember the colors of things in the world?”
Dainty Jasmine Fairy quivered fragrantly, but remained silent.
Sunrise Fairy went then to Crane, perching in the marsh on one long leg. “Crane, you are very tall and fly very fast, do you remember the colors of the world? Would you help me remind things of their colors?”
Crane blinked slowly, and returned his head to its resting place beneath his wing.
Irritated, Sunrise Fairy went to Black Oak. One look at his gnarled silhouette, and she didn’t even bother asking.
As she stomped away, something stung her leg, just a little. She looked down.
“I’m sorry, I was just trying to get your attention. I remember the colors of things in the world. I can help get things going.”
Sunrise Fairy regarded the squat little weed fairy at her feet, barely reaching her knee, a tangle of jagged edges with a mop of deceptively soft-looking pale fur atop her head. “What are the seven true colors?” she demanded.
“Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet,” Thistle fairy responded, without missing a beat.
“What is the difference between inspecting and beholding?” Sunrise Fairy persisted.
“Beholding is to see with awe. And, um… seeing not only what is but also what could be?”
“Alright, Thistle Fairy. I think I can trust you with my jewels. But remember, they must be given without reservation, in awe, or they won’t work right. Got it?”
“Got it,” Thistle Fairy answered solemnly. Sunrise Fairy turned away, enjoying the luxury of focusing on just one bright tile mosaic, rather than the whole world.
Thistle Fairy hefted the bag reverently. She turned and trotted down the hill, keeping her eyes open. Wonder can come from anywhere, she reminded herself.
She was so busy looking about that she didn’t see a big hunk of granite in her path until she tripped on it. She tumbled head over heels, and found herself staring up at the sky. Then she saw it–there above her in the sky where it met the hills. It wasn’t a color. It wanted to be a color. She reached into the bad and pulled out the first stone, a bright fiery red. She threw it up into the sky, and color blossomed.
It wasn’t exactly red. It was more like mauve. But it was beautiful, and not bad for a first try, Thistle Fairy told herself, smiling with awe.
She continued on down the hill, and soon spied a line of poppies just starting to open. “Orange!” she said aloud in her excitement. “Here, here, take the orange stone,” she offered the poppies.
“Oh no,” said the poppies, opening hastily in the growing light. “We’re already quite orange, we remember just fine. You should give that orange to someone else.”
Just then she saw a garter snake twist from behind a hunk of serpentine. The black and gray stripes from his head to his tail looked terribly plain. She offered him the orange jewel. He flicked his tail amicably, and when she had tossed it to him, he curled his long narrow body around it. The dull spots between his dark stripes became a brilliant orange. The scales gleamed. He hissed his thanks, and slithered away.
Thistle Fairy then offered the serpentine the green jewel. [no thank you,] the rock rumbled. [i do green rock well enough on my own. you should give that to someone else.]
She continued on until she came to a great stand of wild mustard alongside a winding black road. She scrutinized the riot of tiny blossoms. She liked them–they were overgrown and rambunctious, like her. She offered them the yellow stone.
“Oh, we’re already quite yellow! See? Fit for a painting. You should give that to someone else,” the wild mustard assured her.
Thistle Fairy perched at the edge of the road. It smelled of tar, fresh and black. A shimmering line ran down it in ghostly silver. She wondered where the road went. She had never been this far away from her patches of thistles in the hills. On a whim, she rolled the yellow stone down the line. It became a shockingly gold ribbon, winding with the road around the hills. Thistle fairy smiled, and followed it.
Soon she found herself in the marshes. Well, above the marshes! Her road had become a bridge, her shining yellow line stretching across the whole bay. She looked down at the swamps, crisscrossed with low levees. She spied a frog singing under the bridge. “Good morning! Would you like this green jewel?”
“Hehe, I’m already green sweetie. You oughta give that jewel to someone else,” the frog replied.
Thistle Fairy shrugged and gazed across the swamp, muddy and crusted with salt. It didn’t look quite right. In fact, it was downright ugly. She threw the green stone out into the water–and it turned a beautiful jade color.
As she looked between the jade water and the mauve sky, she saw her home, those rolling hills, from a distance for the first time. She knew that they would be greening soon, and later they would be gold and brown. Now they were just another shade of gray. But she also knew she could change that this morning. With all her might, she pitched the indigo stone to the hills. There. Now that was fit for a painting: mauve sky, indigo foothills, jade marsh, yellow striped road.
Caught up with the scene, she was nearly back to the hills before she noticed moving at all. She stopped short against a plant that was almost as spiny as she was, but much, much taller. Agave, she thought. She looked in the Sunrise Fairy’s bag. She drew the blue stone, and the agave, now a subtle blue, smiled quietly.
Thistle Fairy was heading up the hill when Sunrise Fairy caught up with her. “How are you doing? I can take over soon, I feel so much better! What do you have left there?”
“Just violet,” said Thistle Fairy, holding up the stone. “I just haven’t seen anything that needed to be violet.”
“Why don’t you keep that one for yourself?”
Photo: Flickr CC/blueturbanphoto
Thistle Fairy shrugged bashfully, and stared at the ground around her. The she saw the most familiar thing in her world. “You know, I would rather give it to these Thistles. After all, we have the same name.” She tossed the stone down into the patch of thistles, and their pale choking blossoms became a stunning violet. Thistle Fairy’s own shock of fluff reflected them.
Sunrise Fairy nodded. “It suits you both. Thank you for helping me this morning. You payed close attention, and colored the world in a good light. I hope all little children and seedlings can grow to be a little more like you.”
And as the Sunrise Fairy sped off, coloring the rest of the world as the sun rose, and everything else regained color for another day.
THE END
The original story centered on Rainbow Fairy and Morning Glory Fairy, with very blatant moral lessons: modesty, generosity, piety, and intelligence. I think I kept most of those, with the addition of mindfulness, spunkiness, and renewal. And the violet transformation was in the original: there is absolutely nothing autobiographical about the purple hair. Really.
So, why Steinbeck and Thoreau?
Steinbeck taught me to see California. When I travel I bring a section of East of Eden with me. It’s near the beginning: the hills, the droughts, the rivers and their floodplains, the rhythm of the brown hills and the green hills across the years and across the decades. I attribute the fact that I identify as a Californian to Steinbeck, for although I was born and partially raised around the Puget Sound, no writer from that area has instilled such a vivid and nostalgia-inducing picture in my mind of Washington, or taught me to truly see the land anew. (With the possible exception of Tom Robbins, and the house consumed by blackberry brambles.) I also love Steinbeck’s voice: I learned a lot from the solemn realism of his writing, and the painful empathy his era wrought in him.
Thoreau is another matter, not California related. From him I get sheer transcendental awe. I can’t really describe how important a force this is in my life. To behold nature, to fully participate in perceiving the natural world, is to be more conscious; in other words, to see more perfectly.
*embarassingly, I had to change the title and character of this story when I realized my botanical confusion between thistles and nettles. Thistles are the pretty ones. Drat.
