Please Report Your Bug Here

Begin Reading Table of Contents About the Author Copyright Page 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