James' World 2

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In 2016, I interviewed an entrepreneur named Sean who had co-founded a small technology startup based in London. As with many organizations at that time, Sean and his team relied on e-mail as their primary collaboration tool. “We used to have our Gmail constantly opened,” he said. Then they heard about a slick new instant-messenger service named Slack that promised to streamline office communication: “There was this hype, so we decided to try it.” Once the team switched to the tool, the rate of back-and-forth messaging intensified, eventually reaching a stressful peak when a demanding client insisted on the ability to directly communicate with Sean’s employees using Slack. The team soon burned out, and two engineers quit. In desperation, Sean moved the company off Slack. When I spoke with him, some time had passed since this incident, but the memory of the service’s omnipresent notification ping remained strong. “I hear that sound, it gives me the shivers,” he said.

I thought about Sean when I heard about Salesforce’s proposed acquisition of Slack for close to twenty-eight billion dollars. From a financial perspective, the deal probably makes sense. Sean’s company was one of many to embrace this platform when it arrived on the knowledge-work scene. Today, Slack has millions of users and reported more than six hundred million dollars in revenue for the last fiscal year. The shift toward remote work during the pandemic only reinforces the company’s value to the marketplace. But a lot of us share Sean’s fatigue with Slack. Writing in The New Republic, Timothy Noah laments that the platform transformed the American workplace into a “dystopian micro-Twitterverse,” while the technology journalist Casey Newton tweeted, “Salesforce is paying $28 billion for an app that people shut down when they need to get things done.” Slack is both absolutely necessary and absolutely aggravating; we rely on it, but we also can’t stand it. To dismiss this confused reaction as the usual grumbling about new forms of communication, however, would be a mistake. A closer look at Slack reveals an underlying dynamic with potential economic ramifications that make twenty-eight billion dollars seem paltry.

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Slack is both absolutely necessary and absolutely aggravating: we rely on it, but we also can’t stand it. Photograph from Panther Media GmbH / Alamy

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Credit…Glenn Harvey

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Jack Dorsey doesn’t eat anything in the morning. Instead, he meditates for two hours, takes an ice bath, and drinks a lot of water. He doesn’t eat anything for lunch, either. After subsisting on water all day, Dorsey consumes a dinner of proteins, greens, and mixed berries between 6:30-8:30pm, as the Twitter CEO explained on the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast in April 2019.

If Dorsey were a woman, we might call this disordered eating. But because he’s a man—and a powerful one in the tech industry—we call it “optimizing.”

For decades, women, especially those in the public eye, bore the brunt of unrealistic beauty standards, which caused many to develop or exacerbated unhealthy relationships with food. Actress and Goop founder Gwenyth Paltrow reportedly ate 300 calories a day during a January 2018 detox regimen; reality TV star Nicole Richie admitted that she “liv[es] on a diet of sunflower seeds, celery juice, and chewing gum.” Just this week, Today Show hosts Jenna Bush Hager and Hoda Kotb weighed themselves on live television after spending a week only eating between 10am and 6pm, with the intention of losing weight and improving “brain health, and energy and skin.”

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Jack Dorsey has been a vocal proponent of intermittent fasting. Photo by David Becker/Getty Images

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A few years ago on a gorgeous June day, I found myself in a windowless bathroom with forget-me-not wallpaper, my butt on a toilet, without any good reason to be there. It was a standard mothering move. Beyond the door, I could hear my two small kids laughing and eating cereal, so I stayed in this little space, smartphone in hand. In an hour, I was headed to a bowling alley with my kids, both of whom could now walk through a doorway on their own. And this was a brilliant new development, not just for the 2-year-old who’d learned to walk at the standard age, but for the 4-year-old, Fiona, who’d spent the past three and a half years in physical therapy striving toward this lofty goal. Forty-five percent of people with Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome walk, said the report when I first got her diagnosis. Her ability to walk meant I no longer had to consider wheelchair or stroller accessibility. Her ability to walk independently meant she could navigate the tight turns around a bowling ball return without having to steer a clunky walker. So I was taking my kids’ bowling, as soon as I stopped pretend-peeing and reading on my phone.

I was reading a friend’s blog post about a recent appointment with her counselor. As soon as she mentioned her son, who has the same chromosomal syndrome as my daughter, she began to cry. 

The therapist asked, “Why do you always cry when you talk about him in here?” 

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Illustration by Ashanti Fortson

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