Please Report Your Bug Here: A Novel

My former employer made me sign a nondisclosure agreement. Once you sign an NDA it’s good for life. Meaning legally, I shouldn’t tell you this story. But I have to. I need you to understand when I say I know how to disappear.

Let me back up.

When I was twenty-four years old, I signed a contract to work at DateDate, a new dating app that promised to change the course of love. I worked for DateDate from September 2010 until July 2011. The startup was based in San Francisco and employed a total of four people before it was acquired by the Corporation. My friends and family read about the billion-dollar deal in the news and assumed my work was done. Congrats! they texted. So proud. You struck gold in Silicon Valley! But that was nowhere close to true. My work had only just begun.

If you’ve paid attention to the tech industry, you no doubt know what came next, or at least have heard the rumors about what came next. The strange glitches, the secretive tests, the cover-ups. But the news only captured snapshots of what happened, never the full picture.

I have attempted to recount in as much detail as possible the events surrounding my discovery. I read through old emails, revisited calendars, and fished to-do lists jotted on the back of faded MUNI bus tickets out of books I hadn’t opened in years. I hope that by laying out what I know, and piecing it together across these pages, I might shed light on the actions of the Corporation and how companies like it have grown in its shadow.

But I’ll admit that writing this hasn’t come easily. So many years have passed. Each time I reread this account, I remember something I left out, some detail I must include. And with every addition, the story becomes more fabricated, as if these new facts steer the story closer to fiction. But it’s not imagined, I promise you that—at least not to me. All that’s changed are the names. Everything else is true.

ETHAN BLOCK

San Francisco, January 2023

1

STARTUP DAYS

MISSION STATEMENT

If I timed it right, I’d make all the lights and speed down Folsom with no hands, the city a foggy blur I glided through on my commute into the office. But such mornings were rare. San Francisco is full of so much I didn’t want to miss. A freshly painted mural outside Philz Coffee on the corner of 24th Street; a mother zipping up her daughter’s purple jacket on the porch of a remodeled Victorian duplex; a bearded man singing a song I couldn’t catch into a glass-bottle microphone. I’d take in all I could as the tunnel of Chinese elms along the southern stretch of the street thinned out and I approached the 101 underpass. With cars rumbling overhead, I’d fix my gaze straight, toward the glass high-rises, and grip my handlebars tight as Folsom arced into SoMa.

It was late October 2010. Those first weeks after launch. Our office was in a windowless room that we sublet from a solar panel company. As hundreds of thousands of eligible singles downloaded our app in search of love, we remained three: the Founder, the engineer, and me. We worked sixteen-hour days, leaving the glow of our Apple displays only to refuel on Red Bull and Nature Valley granola bars. We fixed bugs, wrote code, answered support emails. The mundane essentials of invention.

I arrived at the office to find the Founder and the engineer at their computers, headphones on. The engineer was sporting a San Francisco Giants jersey. The team was in the World Series, but I never heard the engineer talk about baseball, even though sometimes in the evenings we heard fans cheering at the stadium, only blocks from the office. He never talked about anything outside of server errors and software bugs and CrossFit. Maybe he was wearing the jersey for Halloween, I wasn’t sure. I leaned my bike against the IKEA couch, sat down at my IKEA desk, and set to work on the content review queue.

Good morning, the Founder messaged. Can we chat in a few?

Sure, I responded. Just working through the queue.

An app’s success hinges on a combination of luck and product–market fit. One week after we launched, a B-list celebrity tweeted about us. An A-list celebrity retweeted her, and our downloads spiked. We were the App of the Week and gained a quarter million users overnight. TechCrunch wrote of our rocketship growth. VCs walked into our office unannounced, desperate for a stake in our success.

We had our secrets. There’s always more going on under the hood of an app than its creators care to admit. And I felt protective of this system I’d helped create. Especially when my so-called college friends—strivers and ladder-climbers, hoping to reconnect after a couple years of silence—flooded me with texts. Is the desperate quotient real? Is it true [celebrity’s name redacted] uses it under an alias? Inevitably, they would become upset by my lack of response, as though my silence conveyed something important about our friendship. And maybe it did. So what do you do there, Ethan? one guy from my freshman dorm asked, after I’d ignored three or four of his texts. Aside from look at porn, I mean.

Content review, I corrected, a term that cast the work as more professional, at least in my eyes. I added that I also helped implement clever in-app solutions for users struggling with serious issues: cutters and anorexics, the depressed and the bullied. If you included suicidal in your dating profile, for instance, a pop-up appeared with a link to a website of helpful resources. Out of twenty thousand users who typed suicidal, five percent tapped the link. That’s one thousand lives I may have saved. Incredible scale.

DateDate had just hit 1,000,000 users. The Founder liked us to write out the number like that, 1,000,000 instead of one million. It was a marketing thing. He said the zeros would help people see the magnitude of our community, though honestly one million looked equally impressive to me.

1,000,000 is when I started to feel totally exposed. I couldn’t work on another project for more than fifteen minutes before I was shuttled back to the world of content review. It had only been a couple of weeks, but I was drowning.

I navigated to a webpage called Flagged Photos, an admin-only site that showed a 7x7 grid of images reported by our users. We couldn’t automatically remove photos, because many users reported images that didn’t violate our guidelines. Someone needed to review them. Alongside dick pics and zoomed-in screenshots of porn clips were photos of family reunions, weddings, company softball games. In the grid, I selected the photos that needed to be removed—a racist meme, a snapshot of a woman with SLUT photoshopped across her forehead—and hit Submit. The selected photos disappeared from the app, while the others were allowed to stay. The webpage reloaded to display a new grid of photos.

About thirty refreshes later, I finished. Until another warning appeared in my inbox: Content Review Queue Full.

I made mistakes. With that many photos, they blur together. You see things that aren’t there. Users would email to appeal the removal of their photos, and I’d open a new window to review their deletion. Oftentimes I’d see a photo removed correctly, but sometimes the photos were entirely innocent, not a violation of our guidelines at all: the skyline of some unrecognizable city; a wiry-haired dog running on the beach; a tourist posing at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, pretending to hold it up. In re-reviewing the photos, I wondered how I ever thought they were violations. Were these honest mistakes, a mis-click of my mouse? Or had I seen something then that I couldn’t see now?

You ready? the Founder messaged. I paused clearing out the queue. He rolled his chair over and set his laptop down next to my keyboard. I want to show you the pitch deck. The deck was for our Series A investment, the first major infusion of capital into DateDate since our launch. While the angel investors from our pre-launch seed round had contributed money on the basis of their faith in the Founder’s idea, the venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road expected a plan.

The Founder scrolled through slides too fast for me to analyze, but slow enough for me to see that he was proposing several options for monetization. Advertisements, premium accounts, paid add-ons. Regardless of the method, user growth was paramount. The Founder paused on a slide titled Our Growing Community. In the slide, he estimated our community would swell to 10,000,000 by the end of the following year. If I’m doing six hours of content review per day now, I calculated, I’d be doing sixty hours per day then.

Please, I begged. Let me hire someone.

He cracked open a Red Bull. The VCs want us to hire more engineers, maybe a designer. But we might be able to bring on a contractor to help you for a few months. He took a swig and switched into his friend voice, the looser cadence I remembered from our early days together, right out of college, before he’d written a line of code for DateDate. A new roastery just opened on 7th and Folsom. A kiosk out of a garage, nothing flashy, but the coffee is superb.

We’d met in a café in Palo Alto, where the owner, an old man from Trieste, introduced us as espresso purists. No nonsense with the two of you, he’d said, waving a hand at the flavored syrups that lined his bar, a compromise he made to compete with the Starbucks down the street. When I learned that the Founder dropped out of Stanford as a junior, I immediately respected him. He had edge. It was one thing to find success as a Stanford grad, and another thing entirely to find success as a dropout. Plus, I was excited that I finally had someone to talk coffee with, even if I was ashamed of my bougie interest.

Before I could suggest we go to the new roastery together sometime, he transitioned back to business. The investors want a mission statement. Can you take that on?

It was odd that the Founder hadn’t come up with a mission statement before we launched. When I’d asked before our app went live, he explained that mission statements are always written post hoc. You build a product, see how people use it, and write a mission statement that reflects that. I’d assumed mission statements were the proclamations of visionaries, ambitious goals to work toward. But they were the opposite of that, a calculated reframing, a looking-back.

Happy to, I replied, slotting the task beneath the urgent support emails I was behind on.

Great, he said, taking a final swig of Red Bull. We can review on Monday. He left the empty can on my desk.

In my apartment on the north slope of Bernal Heights, as karaoke from Nap’s filtered in through the open kitchen window, I texted friends to say I couldn’t make it out. We were supposed to meet up at the Roxie for Exit Through the Gift Shop, a documentary that had been in theaters forever but which I still hadn’t seen. Afterward, we planned to drop in on a Halloween party someone from college was throwing on a rooftop in North Beach. My plan was to wear a Patagonia vest with a set of glow-in-the-dark vampire fangs and say I was a venture capitalist.

I opened an Anchor Steam at the kitchen table and texted my friends to cancel. I owed the Founder everything. He brought me on as his first employee before he hired the engineer. Unheard-of in the Valley. He never doubted me, and I aspired to live up to his expectations.

A mission statement seems easy to write until you try. It needs to be direct and simple, but also inevitable, like a poem. I took a swig of beer and drafted a few possibilities:

To find your perfect match. Not ambitious enough.

To bring humans into more perfect union. Too marriage-y.

To help you hook up with your algorithm-approved maybe-soulmate. Too honest.

Shrill shouts of encouragement from the karaoke scene at Nap’s distracted me. The boisterous crowd joined in on the chorus. Oh-oo-oh, you think you’re special / Oh-oo-oh, you think you’re something else.

I didn’t mind the karaoke. The music made the apartment less empty. My ex, Isabel, moved out in September after I started full-time at DateDate. She and I were in what we identified at the time as love: we cared deeply about each other; we had sex regularly (at least until the final weeks, when the content review queue started to mess with my head); and we were even great housemates, as compatible domestically as we were romantically. And yet, I began to wonder, Is this all love is? I talked with her about this idea of missing out on some undefined person, and, predictably, she was understanding. She admitted she entertained similar thoughts. We were so young. I couldn’t decide if the path to a more fulfilling love necessitated a new partner, or if we were simply too inexperienced to recognize love, to know what love is and how to nurture it. Isabel had no issue choosing, though.

I missed her presence, especially on Friday nights, when we’d cook together and mix Prohibition-era cocktails. I missed her artwork, too, those mazelike colored-pencil drawings that filled our walls. When she left, I printed out photos of famous works I liked—by Joan Miró, Hilma af Klint, Hiroshi Sugimoto—but it wasn’t the same. To fill up space, I began keeping my bike in the apartment rather than locked up in the basement. My Intro Humanities books stood as knee-high towers against the wall where Isabel’s West Elm shelf used to be.

She let me keep her charcoal portraits of me, my hair darker in the drawings, my eyes slightly closed, looking elsewhere, as though unaware of her. She also let me keep the orange desk lamp we kept on the kitchen table and the set of Danish silverware we scored for cheap at an estate sale in the Berkeley Hills. Our tote bags from Rainbow Grocery, too, not that I made regular trips to the grocery store anymore. I’d tried to cook without Isabel, but I always ended up with too much food, and the next day I’d eat the same meal again, a replay of the night before. Now I picked up dinner on my bike ride home from the office. The fridge housed an eclectic collection of leftovers from every restaurant within a three-block radius of our apartment. My apartment.

At the bar, someone was singing Robyn’s Dancing on My Own, a song I would never stream on Rdio because it wasn’t compatible with my publicly visible aesthetic preferences, but which I secretly loved. The mood of the song made me feel expansive.

I finished my beer, pushed aside my notebook—half scribbles and doodles—opened the window wider, and sang along.

The next morning I brewed a Chemex of Ritual coffee and worked through my routine: check for bug reports, respond to important emails, clear out the content review queue. I rewarded myself with five minutes on social media every time I cleared out five hundred reported photos. Navigating to my personal feeds, I was hyperaware of the internet’s invisible curation; whatever content my friends may have shared that violated the site’s guidelines would have been reported and removed by the time I logged in, or at least algorithmically deprioritized in my feed. I doubted my friends shared unacceptable content, but how would I know? The internet makes you feel like you’re seeing everything when you’re not.

Halloween photos dominated my timeline, high school classmates standing around bonfires in Missouri dressed as Neytiri and Snooki, a couple of Stanford friends on a rooftop in North Beach, at the party I was supposed to attend, posed as Lady Gaga and zombie Sarah Palin. Distant relatives continued to comment on photos of my younger sister Cat’s wedding; she’d married her college boyfriend, both now graduated, in a small affair held on a ranch outside her new hometown of Denver. I missed the wedding because of work. Both my mom and my dad offered to pay for my plane ticket, but money, for once, wasn’t the problem. I have my own life to live, I wanted to tell them. Instead, I blamed work, stringing together terms I knew they wouldn’t get. I had tremendous responsibility. Every support email I answered brought us closer to changing the world. And if DateDate changed the world, I changed the world. I would be more than Missouri, more than Stanford. I would be part of the team that changed the course of love. Still, at the sight of the wedding album a fresh dose of guilt shot through me. I navigated back to my work tabs, finished clearing out the queue, and dragged myself up, out of my apartment, en route to the museum.

Engaging your passions is even more important when you’re newly single, I’d seen someone tweet. Become your full self before your next relationship begins. I didn’t not feel like my full self, but how could I be sure? I was waiting out the aftershocks of my breakup. Nothing was stable.

I aimed to keep up my interest in art, I decided. At Stanford, I’d studied modern and contemporary American art. I was a mediocre critic as a student, never comfortable assuming authority over someone else’s work, fearing my critique would fail to understand the work’s essence, that I’d come off as some poseur. But I loved spending time around art, seeing up close how the work was crafted. I walked around museums all day admiring small details: the thick, swirling brushstrokes of Van Gogh, the luminosity of Vermeer’s glazes, how the shadow of leaves in the background of an Arbus photograph directs the gaze. If I could, I’d do nothing but wander through museums, slowly and silently convincing the guards I myself am part of the installation, a living artwork.

At SFMOMA, I took the elevator to the third floor, where a sign informed me the photography exhibits were in transition. I’d seen photos here by Edward Weston and Garry Winogrand, Carrie Mae Weems and Rinko Kawauchi. But last month’s exhibit, a retrospective of Stephen Shore’s work, stuck with me the most. American surfaces, landscapes. Road trips. The sense of being free. Such a beautiful sensation to evoke through photographs, similar to the one I have scrolling through my favorite apps, the feeling that I could go anywhere.

The new exhibit wouldn’t open for another month. Thank you for your patience and for being a patron of the arts. I ducked the rope barrier and went inside.

Two blue-gloved museum workers lifted a photograph from the wall. It was a black-and-white photo of three women on the deck of a ferry, facing slightly away from the camera, toward the sea. The photo, Seikan Ferryboat, was from the series Ravens, by the Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase. I’d spent time looking at that particular photograph, thinking how the eye is drawn not to the women’s faces (what little of them you see), but to their hair, lifted and tangled in the wind. It wasn’t until the museum workers shuffled past, on their way to the archives, that I realized what I’d missed in previous viewings: the raven. The windblown hair swooping across the canvas resembled a raven. Of course. Why else would the photo be included in the series? I lingered by the blank walls and googled the other photos in Ravens: mostly birds, predictably. Ashamed at having taken so long to make the connection, I convinced myself that my preoccupation with DateDate wasn’t to blame. It was the lack of context in the exhibit. If one other photo from Ravens had been included, I would’ve immediately made the connection, definitely.

Outside the museum, I stared at the artificial waterfalls in Yerba Buena Gardens and thought about who I might bring on as a contractor to help with content review. It wouldn’t be hard to find someone. I knew dozens of liberal arts majors like me who’d delayed law school or PhDs to stay in San Francisco and work in tech. I messaged a brief job description to a couple of well-connected friends.

Allie, a friend from college, responded within minutes to invite me to a Fuzzies in Tech Meetup that evening at her place. An excellent place to recruit new talent, she insisted. I despised the term fuzzies as a label for those of us who’d studied the humanities and social sciences, not computer science or engineering. To classify everyone as either a fuzzy or a techie was to create a false divide. I couldn’t code in Python, but I knew enough to identify bugs, and I was proficient in HTML and CSS. And I knew lots of techies who could talk about art and poetry. Okay, not lots, but some. I thought to bring this up with Allie, but I had to prioritize.

I’ll be there, I replied.

I didn’t recognize anyone. I lingered in Allie’s kitchen, dipping a Tazo orange-chiffon tea bag into a paper cup, still too hot to hold. Two people near me exchanged apartment-hunting tips (offer to pay a full year’s rent in advance). Others debated where to find the city’s best pastries (Tartine or Arizmendi?). I scanned the items displayed on Allie’s fridge: a membership invitation from Scribe Winery, a Save the Date for a wedding in Monterey, a newsletter from Farm Fresh to You CSA.

When Allie walked into the kitchen, I instinctively asked for milk. I didn’t want her to know I’d been studying the items on her fridge. It was better for her to assume I’d been staring at her fridge longingly, wondering if milk was inside.

There’s whole, almond, soy, she said.

I chose whole, a preference that made me feel rooted to the Midwest, though I’d now lived in California for over six years.

You’re doing lots of moderation these days, I take it, she said. Creeps into your head, doesn’t it?

It’s a little numbing. The milk made the tea orange-creamsicley.

Totally, Allie said. When I did moderation as an intern one summer, I couldn’t even think about sex. The residual effects, that ‘numbing,’ stayed with me for months.

She and Isabel took the same spin class at Equinox. Had they talked? I snatched a prosciutto-wrapped date from the table of snacks and stuffed it into my mouth.

Anyway, what else are you guys working on? Allie asked.

I hesitated to disclose the details of our project roadmap. I wasn’t sure whether the people around me worked for competitors, or, worse, at the Corporation, the one company too large to have any competitors. Even Allie, having sold the analytics firm she cofounded, was advising early-stage startups. Potential competitors. I finished chewing, deciding this might be a good time to try out mission statements. We’re working on new ways to bring humankind closer to perfection.

Honestly, Ethan, I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.

What I mean is, we want to bring you into more perfect union—

Listen to yourself, man.

Look, there’s paid add-ons that can boost your profile views, but we’re not sure we’ll release those yet.

Such a bullshit response, Allie said, pushing her glasses up. So, you’re hiring?

You wouldn’t believe how fast we’re growing.

You need to meet Noma. She swiveled back out across the apartment but couldn’t spot whoever it was she mentioned. She must have left.

It seemed Allie didn’t know many people at the meetup, either. Her roommates were alums of Ivy League universities, and most of the people here were recent transplants from back East, thrilled to be in San Fran. Allie suggested we take a walk. On our way out of the apartment, I overheard one guy attempting to impress someone by explaining that he’d passed on an offer from McKinsey in order to come out west and risk everything. The company he named employed more than five hundred people, hardly a startup.

Noma has made a career out of dealing with content review issues for high-growth startups, Allie explained as we walked out of her building, into the Mission. Across the street, an ivory shuttle with deep-tinted windows dropped off a gang of corporate techies returning to the city from a team offsite in Napa. Clutching wine totes, they scattered in different directions, eyes glued to their phones. She’s seen everything.

She should write a book, I said.

Noma would never.

Why not?

We’ve all backed ourselves into the same corner, right? Allie said. "We’ve built careers out of handling sensitive information, and if we were to rat out a company we once worked for, nobody in the Valley would hire