Afp / AFP / Getty Images

When Kink.com severed ties with adult film star James Deen, the company’s disavowal was swift and unwavering. Two days after Deen’s ex-girlfriend, Stoya, alleged on Twitter that he had raped her, the San Francisco-based BDSM and fetish porn studio said it would cease all ties with Deen, who had appeared in more than 250 of its films, effective immediately. “Consent and respect are sacrosanct,” the company said in a public statement. “Our performers deserve not only safe sets, but the ability to work without fear of assault. Rape or sexual assault, with or without a safe-word, off-set or on, should never be accepted as a hazard of adult production.”

What has not been previously reported, however, is that Kink is at the center of four lawsuits filed this year that each allege unsafe working conditions with consequences ranging from retaliation to HIV transmission.

The company's name also came up repeatedly as more women came forward with allegations against Deen. Adult film performer Ashley Fires told the Daily Beast that Deen had assaulted her a communal bathroom at Kink.com. A few days after that, another porn actor, Nicki Blue, told the Daily Mail Online that when she complained on a Kink.com forum about being brutally raped by Deen at a party, her post was deleted. “There's a lot [Kink] could have done so that it didn't happen, so that people don't end up getting raped,” Blue told the Mail. Last week another performer, Lily LaBeau, alleged that Deen assaulted her on a Kink set in 2012. Deen was not scheduled to film and was eventually “ejected” from the shoot. Michael Stabile, a spokesperson for Kink.com, said that as the news unfolded, the company discussed ways to improve its detection of seemingly isolated incidents. Kink.com needs to do a better job, he said, of making sure directors aren’t siloed and making sure that performers know exit interviews after a shoot are confidential and there won’t be any retribution. Stabile said the alleged assault against LaBeau was likely discussed with talent and booking, but “other directors continued to work with [Deen] and had good experiences.”

Of the four suits, three — filed by performers Cameron Adams, Joshua Rodgers, and an anonymous John Doe with the same lawyer, Sandra Ribera — allege that their respective plaintiffs contracted HIV on Kink sets as a result of negligence. (Kink.com maintains that neither Adams nor Rodgers, who were a couple at the time, performed with someone who was HIV-positive.) The fourth lawsuit, filed in June by a different lawyer, is from a former employee of Cybernet Entertainment, the company that operates Kink.com, who claims her managers did not protect her from assault while filming a public bondage segment, and then retaliated against her when she complained about unsafe working conditions.

All four lawsuits are still in the early stages. Kink.com has challeged the legal basis behind all three cases represented by Ribera. A hearing on Kink’s objections will be held in February. Last month, the company filed an answer to the complaint from the ex-employee denying all the allegations.

The courts, or a settlement, will decide the merits of each case. But the filings present a vivid depiction of what life inside the Armory — Kink’s 2.2-acre studio in San Francisco — can be like for some performers. The court documents also address the protocols for BDSM shoots put in place by an industry that has largely been left alone by regulators when it comes to sexual assault and allowed to police itself. Deen’s female accusers have tried to explain the hardships of speaking up when boundaries have been crossed. These cases speak to those challenges.

The complaints describe a working environment in which employees and contractors are pushed beyond their limits and on-set issues are dismissed — an image that’s quite contrary to the one that the company has projected in the wake of the allegations against James Deen. That image also runs counter to Kink.com’s longstanding reputation as the progressive man’s (or woman’s) BDSM site — a company with strong worker protections, and one that “upholds an ironclad set of values to foster an environment that is safe, sane, and consensual,” according to the official synopsis of Kink, a 2013 James Franco-produced, Sundance-approved documentary about the company.

BuzzFeed News contacted several Kink performers, and those who responded said that the allegations detailed in the suits don’t match their own experiences at the 18-year-old studio. Madelyn Monroe, who appears in several Kink videos, told BuzzFeed News that she was “shocked” by the lawsuits, and that Kink.com “follows protocol more than anybody. They’re really on their shit.” Another, Roxanne Rae, told BuzzFeed News in an email that Kink is “the best and most professional company I've ever worked for.”

Mona Wales, who has performed in more than a dozen videos for Kink’s Public Disgrace series — including one at the center of the ex-employee lawsuit — said the same. “People are not running around like maniacs raping each other,” she told BuzzFeed News. “That’s just not what goes down in my day-to-day existence. I would not be a part of that community.”

“Kink.com is about the safest place to make a BDSM porn,” she said.

In interviews with BuzzFeed News, Karen Tynan, the lawyer defending Kink.com in all four cases, characterized the lawsuits as frivolous and not reflective of the company’s record as an employer. The suits represented by Ribera were already dealt with as workers' compensation claims previously filed, said Tynan. “I think that having one employee sue you every 10 to 15 years is a pretty good batting average."

However, both Tynan and Stabile also expressed regret that Fires and Blue did not feel comfortable coming forward earlier. “We have quite a few cameras in the building,” said Tynan. “We have security in the building, and we would expect that if any model ever felt that they were criminally assaulted,” that Kink.com could help. The Armory deletes the footage from its indoor and outdoor cameras after seven days, unless the company is “notified of an issue” or receives a police request.

In the next few days, Kink.com plans on releasing new shooting guidelines as well as an update to its Model Bill of Rights, “establishing clearer, and perhaps anonymous, ways for performers to report incidents,” said Stabile.

He told BuzzFeed News that LaBeau did not use her safe word on the set where Deen was ejected. “Maybe because she was too scared, or she was stunned. That’s when we rely on the director or the crew to call the safe word for them.” Derek Pierce, an actor and director, told Vocativ that he asked Deen to leave the scene after he saw LaBeau mouth the words “Help me.”

“When you’re dealing with BDSM, you’re dealing with physical contact, pain, and violence and it can be difficult in the moment to say where does consensual activity turn into cruelty,” said Stabile. “One thing we talk about it all the time is how does commerce affect consent.”

Typically on a BDSM porn shoot, in addition to a safe word, models will fill out a checklist indicating which sex acts they’re comfortable with, sometimes referred to as a “no” list. Kink.com also conducts on-camera interviews after a shoot where performers can talk about the experience. There’s a financial incentive for exit interviews as well since credit card processors have restrictive rules for online porn, including concerns about consent.

Chris Hondros / Getty Images

Plush Talent, a New York City-based agency representing adult film stars, recently started giving new clients a welcome guide to the porn industry. Along with tips on social media (“Twitter is a must have for every porn star, period.”) and taking photos for producers (“Don’t use filters”) the guide has a section on “Reputation.” It begins: “The adult industry is a lot smaller than you think and everyone talks, especially if they run into a problem with someone. What I tell the girls is, they are to act like robots …. Little adorable performer robots.”

Telling women to be well-behaved may sound repressive, said Kelli Roberts, the 19-year industry veteran who wrote it, but her intention was to warn female performers to let their agents handle on-set issues. The guide even suggests that if an issue arises, they pretend to go to the bathroom to make the call.

Roberts, who serves as kind of den mother/advocate for young women in the industry, said on-set issues tend toward “jackass producers who try and change what they agreed to at the last minute,” like one director who booked a model for a blow job scene then asked her to perform in rape fantasy once she was on location, or adding new partners to a scene last minute.

Her advice is a reminder that on-set “issues” in the porn business are common enough that models literally need a guidebook to help navigate them, and that there’s a wide gulf between what happens on paper and what happens on set.

That ambiguity extends far beyond respecting agreements about what people are willing to do on camera. In interviews with dozens of performers, producers, directors, and agents, BuzzFeed News found that not only are avenues for reporting sexual assault on a porn set unclear — it’s even a point of contention whether such assaults are common. Many described the industry as a close-knit community that bands together to drive out bad actors, where assault is rare and consequences for it unforgiving.

Many also argued such an environment leaves performers, especially those new to the industry, vulnerable to abuse, with little formal recourse if something goes wrong. And the events of recent weeks have shone a harsh spotlight on the industry and one of porn’s few household names, who has been accused of — and vehemently denied — sexual assault against co-stars and fellow performers dating back years.

Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters

Since late November, nine women have claimed that James Deen sexually assaulted them, quickly elevating the issue from the insular porn community to the national stage.

Two of the allegations were related to incidents said to have occurred in his personal life, but the others allegedly took place in a professional context, at a shoot or in a porn studio — during and after a scene. None of Deen’s accusers formally reported the alleged assaults at the time; in the instances where the women did speak up in the moment, neither the studio nor the director investigated further.

The lack of reporting is a red flag, many believe. “The question I think our industry has to ask ourselves is why did the women feel that they wouldn’t be heard or why didn’t they feel safe coming forward?” Diane Duke, CEO of the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association for adult film producers, told BuzzFeed News. “The avenues are there,” she continued. “Why don’t people feel comfortable using them?”

In contrast, the industry’s response to the women going public — long after the fact and without the involvement of authorities — has been unequivocal. “He’s the biggest performer in the industry,” said Eric John, a longtime actor and producer. “And they blacklisted him.”

Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters

Mark Spiegler, a prominent adult film talent manager dubbed the “Ari Emanuel of porn” by The Hollywood Reporter, explained how agents and other non-performers (such as directors and studio owners) help protect actors from sexual predators and sexual exploitation.

Spiegler tells his clients, many of whom do hardcore and BDSM work, to contact the agency if they are asked to do anything on set not agreed upon beforehand. “I tell ‘em, if anything changes, call us,” he said. “We’re there to help you, and also we’re there to look out for you.”

While Spiegler has never had an incident where a performer required a trip to hospital or the involvement of police, there have been times when performers get bruised or visibly injured, despite a prior agreement that they wouldn’t be marked in any way.

“They try to adhere to the girls’ limits, but sometimes you might get a little mark and they can’t work the next day, because the director doesn’t want to shoot them,” Spiegler said. If a flogging scene, for example, leaves a girl marked and she loses work, the studio may compensate the performer upwards of a few hundred dollars for the loss, according to Spiegler.

Kink, a high-profile BDSM studio, confirmed it has paid compensation in the “rare instance” where a performer has lost work.

Occasionally, the industry’s attitude toward consent mirrors the mainstream reaction to intimate partner violence or sexual assault. Even advocates for performers sometimes place the burden on women to speak up in the moment.

“Unfortunately what a lot of girls do in the biz — a scene will get a bit too aggressive — instead of them vocalizing on the set, the girls keep their mouth shut, then they call the agent afterwards and I’m like, ‘Well did you ever use the safe word?’” said Shy Love, a performer and founder of the talent agency The VIP Connect.

“Then I have to curse out the director,” Love told BuzzFeed News, “but at the same time you have to yell at the girl. She had the opportunity to give the safe word.”

Young women who enter the industry are coming “into a different lifestyle,” said Love, and that can discourage speaking up. “They see a lot of money and they think if they say something, they’ll lose that money. In their head, they believe that.”

Mario Anzuoni / Reuters

Bad behavior can begin well before a model steps on set. In the past few weeks, Roberts said three actresses had called her to complain about a director for a major porn studio who is running a Los Angeles “model house” — the term for shared living quarters where performers stay while traveling for work — where “you have to sleep with the guy who runs it.”

Roberts mentioned the predatory director on an industry forum and was immediately threatened. In the online discussion about improving safeguards she was told to “shut the fuck up.” Later she received a message warning that someone was passing around her real name and address. “I’ve been in this business 19 years, [so] that doesn’t affect me as much, but I do think about the 18- or 19-year-old girls,” she said.

“Our industry loves to say we empower females,” said Roberts, “and then behind the scenes we have to keep them in line.”

Still, Roberts said assault was very rare. “In terms of society, we’re off the charts low.” In nearly two decades, she had only heard of three rapes. In one of those cases, Roberts said she made the mistake of telling the actress to go to the police rather than the hospital. Although the women was “brutally beaten, her face was bloody,” Roberts claims the officer listening to her report just stared at the victim’s breasts. A report was filed, but “she just kind of got laughed out of there.” Roberts declined to share the woman’s name because she quit the industry after this incident.

Tobias Schwarz / Reuters

The porn industry is in flux. The internet has had a staggering impact on performers’ earnings and companies’ bottom lines, and fueled demand for what some described as increasingly violent porn.

The industry’s new economics have also led to a consolidation of studios, and in many ways, the business has professionalized. Protocols have been introduced, like model releases in which performers can specify their boundaries, "no" lists where models can name people they don't want to work with, and on-camera exit interviews that formally codify consent. Such standards have been enough, at minimum, to placate the credit card processing companies that require proof of the matter from the studios they do business with.

But porn is still largely self-policed. Regulatory oversight is limited to narrow, sometimes legalistic details such as verifying a performer’s age or keeping proper records. Studios were nearly unanimous in fighting mandatory condom regulations, arguing that anti-porn advocates were behind the supposed health campaign. The years of federal obscenity prosecutions may be over, but the business is still resistant to outside efforts to reform its practices, arguing that government agencies are biased against porn.

Recent investigations into rape in the military, agricultural work, and night-shift janitorial work have demonstrated that sexual assaults in work environments are rarely reported. Across the country, an estimated 68% of sexual assault goes unreported.

Porn performers face added roadblocks. The small size of the community can hurt assault victims as much as it helps, with added pressure not to alienate a studio, director, or actor. If the community acknowledges the claim, however, the power dynamic can flip and alleged predators are sometimes shunned immediately, as was the case with Deen.

Claims seldom make it to the authorities, who have historically stigmatized sex workers. Actors told BuzzFeed News they are especially reluctant to come forward if it means facing the false notion that porn performers are “unrapeable.”

Self-policing means that standards vary. Models may have "no" lists with the names of performers they don't want to work with. Some studios, like Kink.com, have security guards present during the filming. Others rely on the production staff or talent department. Exit interviews also depend on the studio. Kink asks for feedback from performers on camera and off camera; others have a more informal approach. In a producer’s mind, those interviews are a safe space to air grievances.

Steven Hirsch, the founder of Vivid Entertainment, emphasized the distinction between “traditional” adult film studios and some of the more extreme, BDSM production houses. Eric John, who works almost exclusively works on “traditional” shoots, said that Kink shoots are simply “higher stakes” — a lot more can go wrong when chains and whips are involved. “The likelihood of a limit being pushed on a normal boy/girl shoot is so much less.”

Dee Severe, founder of the fetish production company Severe Sex, sees things differently. She was appalled by the stories she heard voiced in the wake of Deen allegations, but said the type of pornography was not the problem. “All anyone on our set has to do is say ‘hold,’” said Severe. “It would make me horrified to think that someone was having a bad time.” Her studio produces instructional DVDs where consent is a central theme. “It’s kind of an easy answer to blame the BDSM community,” she said.

Both Severe and John, however, stressed that shoots were “a very structured environment,” as he put it. “I have never been on a set where someone said a specific thing and the person did a thing anyway. It wouldn’t happen.” According to John, what’s more common are “self-corrections” like “That’s too rough," or "That’s the wrong angle.”

Michaela Rehle / Reuters

Studios and directors are quick to bring up the model releases and exit interviews as proof of the industry’s progressiveness. However, those safeguards were initially designed to protect producers, not performers.

Lawrence G. Walters, a First Amendment lawyer and longtime counsel for adult film studios, said release forms were created 20 years go to help clients comply with the law. There has been “substantial litigation” around the forms, he said, but most cases were about enforceability — where a model argued she was intoxicated when she signed the document or that English was not her first language — or privacy and publicity rights.

In a similar vein, on-camera exit interviews became more prevalent during “the reality porn phenomenon” in the late '90s, said Walters. He pointed to a series called Bang Bus, shot by a large production company called BangBros. The films showed “a bus going around to pick up neighborhood girls,” said Walters, and “the public believed it hook, line, and sinker, and thought these things were really happening.”

It was around that time that companies became “motivated to make sure that they retained evidence” that the shoots were staged and the performers consenting. The exit interviews, he said, had “the side effect of protecting performers who had an issue or concern.”

But Roberts was dubious about a performer’s ability to speak freely during an exit interview, even when they’re not on camera. “If some guy sat in front of you with a paycheck,” she said, “how honest do you think that off-camera interview is?”

In addition to the release, federal regulations state that models have to fill out a 2257 form, which requires producers of sexually explicit material to get proof of age. Kink.com’s version of the form (embedded below) also requires models to sign a number of wide-ranging waivers, including releasing the producer and his employer from sexual harassment claims and “injuries (both physical and emotional).”

The nature of the porn industry influences what types of legal claims can be made, attorney Sonia L. Smallets told BuzzFeed. Smallets is representing the plaintiff in a harassment and wrongful termination lawsuit against Kink.com. “There’s no legit reason for your co-worker to be naked if you’re working in a bank,” she explained, but just because the bar may be higher in porn, “it doesn’t mean than an entire industry gets a free pass.”

Harassment issues are more “difficult to sort out,” in sex work, said Smallets, “but a sexual assault is, by definition, an act done without your consent. Nobody consents to being sexually assaulted.”

Michaela Rehle / Reuters

David Ramos / Getty Images

Neighbors near Mark Zuckerberg's $10 million San Francisco pied-à-terre say the billionaire's security detail is parking illegally, and have circulated a letter — obtained by BuzzFeed News — urging residents to report the vehicles to the local parking authority.

Nitasha Tiku

The letter was distributed this weekend to some residents of Liberty Hill, a neighborhood adjacent to Dolores Park. It claims that Zuckerberg's security team has two silver SUVs "permanently" and "illegally" occupying "desirable parking spots" in the area. It urges neighbors to complain to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) and to contact Tim Wenzel, Zuckerberg's "residential security manager." The letter provides Wenzel's corporate email address with Facebook as well as a mobile number.

A spokesperson for Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed News: "The security team’s cars are parked in accordance with local parking laws. The team strives to be sensitive to neighbors’ concerns and regrets any inconvenience."

The note (embedded above and reprinted in full below) begins by describing the burden of living near a billionaire, and referencing the project's years-long construction process. (San Francisco city records show 16 building permits for alterations to the property since the deed changed hands in 2012).

"I’m sure you all agree that it can be cumbersome living next to Zuck. I think we’ve all tried to be as patient and civil as possible during the very long construction, the noise, the trash, the blocking of streets, etc. Now that all that circus is done, we are left with 2 silver SUV’s permanently occupying desirable parking spots. It goes without saying that living close to Dolores Park and the awesome neighboring districts already creates a challenge when it comes to street parking, so the 2 spots that are illegally being held for Zuck only makes matters worse."

The author or authors of the letter claim to have spoken with Zuckerberg's security guards. The guards allegedly admitted that the SUVs were parked illegally — and pointed out that parking illegally doesn't necessarily offer Zuckerberg better security.

"We’ve spoken to the security guards and they were cordial but ultimately have been instructed by their supervisors to not move the cars under any circumstances. They acknowledge that they are occupying the space with no turnover and illegally. ... One of the guards mentioned that she agreed that even from a security standpoint, where the cars are parked don’t give the best vantage points and that she thinks they should be driving around and having a guard posted on both sides of [the street]. All and all, none of this makes any sense."

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed

This wouldn't be the first scuffle between Zuckerberg and his neighbors. In 2014, locals complained to the press that the billionaire was tearing up the neighborhood with renovation construction and paying people to sit in parked cars overnight in order to save the spots for construction vehicles. Then, last summer, the local blog Capp Street Crap reported that Zuckerberg's security detail filed a temporary restraining order against a 62-year-old local man, allegedly leaving him homeless, although the exact version of those events are in dispute.

The letter argues that Zuckerberg's security guards could park in or in front of his driveway without incident, and argues that by refusing to do so, Zuckerberg's detail has caused a chain reaction of illegal parking.

A source familiar with Zuckerberg's security detail told BuzzFeed News that the two SUVs were parked on separate blocks in accordance with local parking requirements. The source claimed that parking in Zuckerberg's driveway would violate parking rules because the car would block the sidewalk.

During a visit to Zuckerberg's home earlier this week, two security guards were taking up two parking spots with their sliver SUVs. The guards, both pleasant middle-aged men, directed all inquires to Wenzel. One was using his foot to measure the length of his SUV to see if it would fit in a garage, he said. The other guard said that Zuckerberg's security team was aware of the complaints and "very attuned to the needs of the neighbors."

BuzzFeed News has reached out to Wenzel and the SFMTA about the neighborhood note but did not receive a response from either. In the meantime, the letter's author has taken to Twitter, Facebook, and Nextdoor, a private social networking app designed to function like a digital neighborhood watch, in order to "raise visibility to this issue."

"We’ve already spoken to both guards currently on duty, they spoke to their offsite supervisor and I’ve also called [sic] left a message Tim Wenzel (he has yet to call back), the “Residential Security Manager” for Zuck’s ... home. We’ve also taken pictures of both cars and posted it on SFMTA’s twitter page, along with the local news stations Twitter accounts, our personal facebook accounts and have also created an account and shared this on Nextdoor."

BuzzFeed received this screenshot of a conversation that allegedly took place on Nextdoor on Jan. 10 where at least one neighbor expressed a warmer sentiment toward Zuckerberg's security detail. A representative for Nextdoor told BuzzFeed that the social network could not verify the authenticity of the conversation because Nextdoor “does not monitor any of the content” and cannot make an inquiry “without a member’s consent.” Multiple requests to contact the poster were not returned.

In the screenshot, the resident says both he and his dog consider the billionaire an excellent addition to the neighborhood. "I think having the guards is a gigantic plus. I think having Zuck as a neighbor is a gigantic plus. The guards are a plus. My dog Oscar Wild thinks they are great."

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed

Here is the full text of the letter:

Hi Neighbors,

I’m sure you all agree that it can be cumbersome living next to Zuck. I think we’ve all tried to be as patient and civil as possible during the very long construction, the noise, the trash, the blocking of streets, etc. Now that all that circus is done, we are left with 2 silver SUV’s permanently occupying desirable parking spots. It goes without saying that living close to Dolores Park and the awesome neighboring districts already creates a challenge when it comes to street parking, so the 2 spots that are illegally being held for Zuck only makes matters worse. We’ve spoken to the security guards and they were cordial but ultimately have been instructed by their supervisors to not move the cars under any circumstances. They acknowledge that they are occupying the space with no turnover and illegally. So, on weekends such as this, I have to park illegally in front of the apartment that I live in full-time and risk the chance of getting an expensive ticket by MTA. Can you all help me raise visibility to this issue? We’ve already spoken to both guards currently on duty, they spoke to their offsite supervisor and I’ve also called [sic] left a message Tim Wenzel (he has yet to call back), the “Residential Security Manager” for Zuck’s ... home. We’ve also taken pictures of both cars and posted it on SFMTA’s twitter page, along with the local news stations Twitter accounts, our personal facebook accounts and have also created an account and shared this on Nextdoor.

I want to add that Zuck’s guards could park in his driveway or in front of his driveway with no issue but refuse to do so as that is not what they are instructed to do. One of the guards mentioned that she agreed that even from a security standpoint, where the cars are parked don’t give the best vantage points and that she thinks they should be driving around and having a guard posted on both sides of [the street]. All and all, none of this makes any sense. SFMTA requires ALL cars to be moved after 72 hours’ time, and in all residential areas, if cars don’t have parking permits (which currently the guards do not have) and they need to be moved every 2 hours (M-F) within the listed time. When they do move the car is [sic] has to be at least a block away, ensuring turnover. Clearly, none of this is happening.

And, although I do feel bad for the guards when it gets cold or hot, they tend to leave their car engines on day and night which is wasteful and horrible for the environment not to mention noisy in an otherwise quiet neighborhood.

Please report this issue to SFMTA by calling 415-553-1200 (Press 1 for English) (Press option 6 for illegal parking) or tweeting them @SFMTA_MUNI

Also, please contact:
Tim Wenzel (Residential Security Manager)
mobile- [REDACTED]
email: tjwenzel@fb.com

I think if enough people contact them a permanent solution will surely follow. Thank you in advance for any help.

Your neighbors in [REDACTED]

San Franciscans may have noticed a familiar pastry face cropping up in advertisements for UberEATs, the transportation behemoth’s first foray into food delivery. Above the intoxicating slogan — “From Tap to Table in 10 minutes” — is the image of what appears to be a muffin with an egg inside of it. But locals will tell you that muffin has a name and, what’s more, that muffin is kind of a scone.

They call her The Rebel Within.

For $7.25, you’ll find her at Craftsman & Wolves, a chain of tony pastry shops with outposts on Valencia Street, Russian Hill, and Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market. Those who can afford a premium, order her on-demand from apps like UberEATS, Caviar, or Postmates for a mere $2 - $7 additional delivery fee.

How does the city’s most Instagrammable carb body stay true to her mutinous roots? What does having it all mean for a baked good? BuzzFeed News caught up with Rebel at the Craftsman’s Valencia Street location to find out.

“Don't come at me with your faux populist bullshit,” the pastry said, kicking off our conversation on a salty note. “I am worth every fucking penny. Just look at me,” she purred, slowly gliding her hands down her thick, buttery, sausage-flecked exterior.

Reader, I looked.

Mostly because there is no Wifi at Craftsman & Wolves so there was nothing else to do. Despite the shop’s tech-heavy crowd of venture capitalists and startup founders, Craftsman & Wolves eschews contemporary amenities — forcing the architects of our mobile future to sit down and truly contemplate who is the craftsman and where is he hiding his wolves.

Via craftsman-wolves.com

“A-listers don’t need to name drop,” Rebel said, swiveling around to make sure no one was listening and then ticking off a litany of the bold-faced names that had consumed her. Bakery ingenues come and go, but Rebel considers herself more of a contemporary classic, effortlessly exuding an ageless decadence. Other “it” breads have suffered from public backlash. When I brought up The Mill’s $4 toast, Rebel’s craggy scone face went still. She fidgeted with the dainty vial of Tabasco-flavored salt that often accompanies her. “Let’s move on, shall we?” she whispered, brushing imaginary crumbs off her no legs.

Craftsman’s Valencia Street location is nestled in the apex of gentrification in the Mission, one door up from Dandelion Chocolate, the small-batch chocolatier, and two doors from Mission Cheese, which exclusively traffics in domestic cheese, and just down the block from Betabrand, the venture-capital backed clothing company responsible for the Bay Area’s bastardized take on athleisure.

Via Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News

Finally, I just had to ask. How does Rebel maintain that dense, carb-heavy figure? The kind of density you wake up craving. The kind of density that makes grown men and women groan because they are still digesting what is really a very filling breakfast treat. Rebel got up, picked up her Céline Trapeze bag, put on her Karen Walker sunnies, pivoted towards the door, and uttered two words: “Truffle fries.”

Via Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Facebook is embroiled in a highly charged debate over net neutrality in India because of Free Basics, a controversial program that the social network claims will bring digital connectivity to the developing world — but which critics say might hurt more than it helps. Free Basics is a partnership between Facebook and telecom providers that offers people free Internet access, but only to a limited number of websites and with traffic routed through Facebook's servers.

Indian regulators temporarily banned Free Basics just before Christmas, asking Reliance Communications (the only carrier in India offering Free Basics) to halt support while the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) determined whether telecoms should be allowed to offer differential pricing for different types of content. And based on a scorching missive sent this week from TRAI to Facebook, the regulatory body's patience appears to be running out.

In a letter released Monday, TRAI said that it is concerned about Facebook's "self-appointed spokesmanship" on behalf of millions of Indians. TRAI's frustration is largely with Facebook’s automated lobbying campaign in support of Free Basics, which urged users to send a form-letter-style response to TRAI, and which the regulatory authority' said "has the flavor of reducing this meaningful consultative exercise" into "a crudely majoritarian and orchestrated opinion poll.”

In Monday's letter, TRAI called Facebook's actions "dangerous":

"(9) TRAI fully subscribes to this view when engaging in public consultations. However your urging has the flavor of reducing this meaningful consultative exercise designed to produce informed decisions in a transparent manner into a crudely majoritarian and orchestrated opinion poll.

(10) Neither the spirit nor the letter of a consultative process warrants such an interpretation which, if accepted, has dangerous ramifications for policy-making in India."

TRAI also said that Facebook impeded the agency's ability to get valuable "input from industry members and stakeholders." Public consultations, TRAI said, are designed to "help regulators to make informed decisions" and "foster a transparent regulatory environment.”

The automated campaign is a perfect example of the kind of clicktivism that has come to dominate digital activism (i.e. "click here to send a message . . .") The problem, as TRAI has pointed out repeatedly, is that the agency has not asked for people's opinions in support of or opposition to Free Basics. Rather, the questions it released on December 9 sought to establish whether or not mobile plans charging different rates for certain apps and forms of data should be blocked or regulated, and if differential pricing plans should be allowed in the marketplace. Another question invited the public to propose alternative schemes that might increase internet access without placing restrictions on content.

"It is crucial to underline that your continued assertion that the initial template responses sent by users through Facebook in support of ‘digital equality’ and ‘Free Basics,’ are appropriate responses to the consultation paper, is wholly misplaced," the letter says.

This is hardly the first time TRAI has tried to shake some straight talk out of Facebook. On January 12, TRAI released to the public three recent letters between the social network and the regulatory authority. In an accompanying press release at the time, TRAI secretary Sudhir Gupta said the correspondence was being released in part because "there was no clarity on whether Facebook has conveyed TRAI’s message to their users," despite repeated requests.

This week's letter is addressed to Ankhi Das, Facebook's director of public policy in India. Facebook sent the following statement about the letter to BuzzFeed News:

In response to TRAI's consultation paper, Facebook enabled 11.7 million citizens to file comments in support of the Free Basics program, asking TRAI to allow the program under any rules adopted. TRAI requested that we reach out to these Free Basics supporters to ask them to also answer the specific questions raised by the consultative paper. We are not aware of a similar request having been made to any of the other commenters who did not answer these specific questions. Nevertheless, we attempted to cooperate with their request. While we did not include all of the specific language drafted by TRAI, we did deliver a request for additional information and included in the draft email the exact language from the four specific questions posed in the consultation paper. More than 1.4 million Indians responded by submitting revised comments that addressed these questions.

Vishal Misra — a Columbia University professor and expert on net neutrality who testified about net neutrality last year before India's Parliament — described TRAI's letter as a "devastating" blow to Facebook. He told BuzzFeed News that Facebook also testified. "Right before the parliamentary testimony Ankhi Das of Facebook introduced herself to everyone (including me) as 'we are a startup.' Maybe the gross incompetence shown here proves her statement," he said.

Manjunath Kiran / AFP / Getty Images

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has released their long-anticipated ruling on net neutrality in India. The regulators have ruled against differential and discriminatory pricing of mobile data on the basis of content.

This ruling will affect Free Basics — Facebook’s controversial plan to offer free, but limited Internet access — in India. Mark Zuckerberg has been campaigning to bring increased digital connectivity to the developing world. Free Basics, which claims to have 15 million users in more than 35 countries around the globe, is part of Facebook’s quasi-philanthropic efforts. India is the second largest market for Facebook users after the United States and considered vital to its continued growth.

Today’s much-anticipated ruling by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) was not about Free Basics per se. Rather, regulators were reviewing pricing schemes like “zero-rating,” where mobile operators offer access to some websites and services for free, while charging for others. Advocates for digital equality argue that zero-rating gives an unfair advantage to subsidized content, distorts the market for smaller players, and squashes innovation. Supporters of Free Basics, on the other hand, counter that urban elites who already have Internet access should not deny access to the poor, even if more equitable methods exist.

According to the Press Trust of India, TRAI will charge a penalty fee of ₹50,000 a day, and capped at ₹50 lakhs for any discriminatory tariffs charged by service providers. TRAI's decision will be reviewed after two years from the date of issue of the order, February 8, 2016. Service providers have been granted six months to comply with the new rules.

Free Basics was temporarily banned in December until TRAI made its decision. TRAI was supposed to rule last week and rumors have been swirling about the reason for the delay.

In India cheap cellphones have helped make mobile usage common, but only about 20 percent of the population is online. Low Internet penetration is blamed, in part, on prohibitive data charges, which is why prepaid data plans (where consumers know what they're getting into) are ubiquitous. Meanwhile, the country’s telecom market is highly competitive. As a result, telecom providers started offering data packs that promise free or reduced charges to widely popular services like WhatsApp or Facebook long before Free Basics launched in India.

Facebook does not pay for Free Basics, although it does collect data from users. The social network partners with regional telecom operators, who offer the free service as a growth strategy to get customers to start paying for data. In India, Free Basics partnered with Reliance Communications, a telco founded by Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in India.

Hours after the decision, Zuckerberg expressed his disappointment in a Facebook post, vowing not to "give up on" connecting India because "more than a billion people in India don't have access to the internet," he claimed. "While we're disappointed with today's decision," he wrote, "I want to personally communicate that we are committed to keep working to break down barriers to connectivity in India and around the world."

Free Basics was ostensibly targeted at Indians who had never experienced the Internet or could not pay for data plans. However, Facebook recently struggled to provide a reporter with the name of a single Free Basics user in India who had never been online before. Free Basics allows users free access to limited resources including Wikipedia, Bing search, and the weather, as well as a lightweight version of Facebook. Yet normal data charges apply for outside websites, like Google search results, for example.

Facebook's promotion of Free Basics has been orchestrated like a political campaign. In December, Zuckerberg published an op-ed in the Times of India defending Free Basics. In it, he repeated Facebook’s claim that half of the people who go online through Free Basics end up paying for access to “the full Internet” within 30 days, but offered no further details about the study. “Who could possibly be against this?” Zuckerberg asked. “Surprisingly, over the last year there’s been a big debate about this in India.” Other countries have prohibited Free Basics. It is not offered in Chile, for example, because the government banned zero-rating in 2014.

Danish Siddiqui / Reuters

TRAI's ruling (embedded below) says the case-by-case approach used in the United States and European Union “may seem reasonable,” however it comes with “substantial costs,” such as failure to provide certainty, the high cost of regulation, as well as an unfair advantage to "well-financed actors" that will "tilt the playing field."

Here are some highlights from TRAI's ruling:

"A suitable regulatory framework for India, therefore, must necessarily be based on our country-specific factors, the need to equitably increase internet usage and penetration, foster competition, allow start-ups to flourish and uphold the law of the land [...]

... [The] Authority has concluded that a clear rule should be formulated—the practice of offering or charging discriminatory tariffs for data services based on content, is to be prohibited. Therefore, [telecom service providers] are prohibited from offering different tariffs based on the content, service, application or other data that a user is accessing or transmitting on the internet. Tariff for data services cannot vary on the basis of the website/application/platform/or type of content being accessed. For example, a consumer cannot be charged differently based on whether she is browsing social media site A or B, or on whether she is watching streaming videos or shopping on the internet."

The ruling also explained that in order to "strike a balance and in view of the need to bring more users on the internet," the prohibition will not apply to "providing limited free data that enables a user to access the entire internet."

Public outcry over zero-rating did not begin with Facebook. Last spring, Indian consumers protested Airtel Zero, a data plan that would have given preferential treatment to popular services like Flipkart, one of the country’s largest e-commerce providers. Free Basics eventually supplanted Airtel as the focal point for opponents, in part because Facebook framed Free Basics as a purely altruistic gesture for India’s poor. Indian startup entrepreneurs and professors alike objected to the business model. Facebook countered with an aggressive advertising onslaught of billboards and full-page newspaper ads, but its tone-deaf crusade was brutally spoofed on Reddit.

No one wants to cut off access to the disenfranchised and the vitriol flowed both ways. Net neutrality advocates were accused of being "internet mullahs" who denied access to the poor over their inflexible beliefs.

As an independent government authority, TRAI opted to exercise its power and stepped in to the debate. Helani Galpaya, the CEO of the think tank LIRNEasia, described TRAI as a “thoughtful regulator” during an interview with BuzzFeed News in January. The agency's initial request for feedback emphasized that the "laudable goal" of connecting the unconnected "must not be forgotten.” One of the questions TRAI asked was whether alternative business models, such as offering free data limited by time or volume, rather than content, could offer a less discriminatory alternative.

TRAI has repeatedly called out Facebook for intruding on its regulatory process, which the agency said could have “dangerous ramifications for policy-making in India.” The tension centered around Facebook’s click-to-protest campaign which deluged TRAI with 11.7 million automated comments, when none of the questions asked about Free Basics.

Facebook has updated Free Basics to better serve its intended users before, when prodded. The zero-rated offering was initially called Internet.org — the umbrella organization for its other efforts to bring connectivity to the developing world. Facebook changed the misleading name, made the platform more easily accessible to outside websites and services, and added more security protections for users in response to criticism from net neutrality activists.

Given that Facebook’s future is dependent on growth from emerging markets, India’s debate over Free Basics is far from over. Last week while awaiting TRAI’s decision, Mishi Choudhary, legal director at Software Freedom Law Center, told BuzzFeed News that other areas of the globe including Kenya, Latin America, and Southeast Asia were eagerly anticipating the regulator’s response. “That’s where the moolah is and that’s where the next billion users are,” she said.

BuzzFeed News will update this story with more information as we receive it.

Texas A&M University / Via Flickr: tamuengineering

In the summer of 2013, billionaire Elon Musk posted a 58-page “alpha paper” introducing a futuristic “fifth mode of transportation” beyond planes, train, cars, or boats, which he called Hyperloop. The system would whisk passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 35 minutes using magnetically levitating pods that traveled at high subsonic velocity in a steel tube. It was the engineering equivalent of rough draft, but the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla was too busy to build it himself. The whole point of publishing the document, he explained, was to open source Hyperloop, solicit suggestions, and “correct any mistakes.”

Legends do not typically start with a smart dude giving away a half-cooked idea for free on his company blog. Now, however, much like Musk’s other gambits, Hyperloop seems to be hovering (sorta) close to (the outskirts of) the realm of possibility.

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News

Late last month, it got even realer, as U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx gave the concept his blessing during the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition, a two-day event hosted at Texas A&M University during the last weekend in January. A pod contest probably conjures images of Jetsons-esque vessels slapped together using space age polymers and Scotch tape. In practice, it was more like a highbrow science fair that doubled as a recruiting event for all things Elon. (When you’ve made yourself synonymous with colonizing Mars, you only need one name.)

The competition was organized by SpaceX and geared toward university students and independent engineers. The assignment was to submit detailed technical proposals for a pod that could withstand the 700 mile per hour trip. The weekend’s lucky winners were invited to build and race their designs this summer on a one-mile test track being built at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. More than 120 teams participated, comprised mostly of undergraduate and graduate students in their late teens and early twenties from more than 100 universities around the world. A couple of high schools competed, as did a team assembled on Reddit that live-streamed their journey on Periscope, Twitter’s real-time video app.

The first thing contestants saw outside the stadium was a red canopy with the Tesla logo next to a Model X, the company’s newest electric vehicle. Teams who wanted to advance had to break down the cost of a pod and raise the funds to build it from sponsors or their school. Hence most seemed to come in well-under the Model X’s $80,000 retail price.

The science fair vibe came courtesy of rows of booths with as many poster boards as computer visualizations. Presentations covered topics like propulsion, aerodynamics, and braking. Tables featured props that ranged from Lego-like cranes (for loading pods onto the track) to 3-D printed pods to demonstrate magnetic levitation. The teams set up in the Hall of Champions, a 100-yard football-shaped atrium that ordinarily functioned as a “virtual museum” (i.e., a big room with lots of screens) celebrating the school’s athletic prowess. At the SpaceX table, located smack dab at the entrance, employees milled about in “Occupy Mars” hoodies and tees.

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News

It was a tight squeeze for Foxx’s security detail, but he and the attendant camera crews toured the floor talking to the kids before taking the stage Friday evening. In front of a crowd of 1,000 engineering students, Foxx called Hyperloop the kind of breakthrough project that our ailing infrastructure system desperately needs, if not for the tubes, then at least for the tubespo. According to a Department of Transportation study, by 2045 there will be 70 million more Americans and a 45% increase in freight demand, so the federal government should consider backing big ideas that make young people want to fix our D+ transit system, he argued. “When Kennedy announced that we were going to the moon, that pushed American innovation a long way and I think you have the potential for a similar moonshot, if you will, here,” Foxx said.

Foxx wasn’t the only adult onstage that weekend who ascribed historical significance to the event. Dr. Gregory Chamitoff, a former NASA astronaut, compared it to watching the Apollo 11 landing. Professors told students that they could say they were here when it all began.

Turning a concept that looked, at first, like a nootropics fever dream into a Kennedyesque rallying cry to get the world’s best and brightest to care about congested roads is quite a coup. It’s also a trick that Musk has tried before. He revived '90s-era interest in electric cars (in the name of clean energy). He hit refresh on our 1950s fantasy of outer space (in the name of saving the human race). Rebooting American dreams left for dead seems to be his sweet spot. And Foxx’s imprimatur made it sound like Musk might be able pull it off again, this time with a sexless task-like infrastructure.

Whether you believe Musk’s messianic ambitions or call it personal branding for billionaires, there’s an incredible efficiency to his methods. He managed to associate SpaceX with Mars when the company was still struggling just to make cheaper commercial rockets. As the weekend progressed, it became clear that Musk doesn’t need to figure out a viable design for Hyperloop or watch a single pod bloom to reap the benefits.

All around him, motivated engineers were swapping ideas and dropping their resume at the SpaceX booth. No matter what, Elon wins.

Texas A&M University / Via Flickr: tamuengineering

For many contestants, Hyperloop weekend represented a modern alternative to Formula SAE, a popular international competition where students develop race cars for a fictional manufacturing company. Formula SAE has traditionally been “a great feeder system” for Musk, said Brogan BamBrogan, an early SpaceX engineer who launched his own commercial Hyperloop company. He said the track at SpaceX HQ was set up “with the specific intention of building a student interest competition around it.” For the students who made it College Park, the choice was a no-brainer.

“It’s a pretty easy sell: ‘Hey, who wants to make something levitate and propel itself down a giant tube?” Paul Orozco, a 23-year-old student from Florida, told BuzzFeed News. If that didn’t work, he said, “you could go on about how you’re creating a fifth mode of transportation in a totally different way...”

There were 80 judges for the event, including engineers from SpaceX and Tesla as well as faculty members from different universities, in order to vet the technically rigorous proposals. Orozco was joined by his alumni adviser Capt. Curt Taras, an Air Force veteran and civil engineer. Orozco said he was “pretty giddy” after two judges came by his booth. “He was jumping up and down when Tesla asked for his resume,” Taras confirmed.

In the middle of America and far from the app incubator that is the Bay Area, Hyperloop’s potential seemed less foolhardy and more feasible. After all, these kids probably have a better sense of whether this is doable than your average venture capitalist. They were wide-eyed, but practical, eager to explain impossibilities from Musk’s white paper and fixes they found after months of sleepless nights.

The scale of Hyperloop was a contrast to the modesty of the surrounding city with its one-story strip malls and clusters of housing developments in different shades of beige. All three UberX drivers I hailed knew about the competition. Even the fact one could summon an UberX in College Station in eight minutes or less seemed like a sign that the future was coming — and that it would be owned by technocrats.

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News

Some of the college teams had names like GatorLoop team from the University of Florida or the RIT Pod Squad from the Rochester Institute of Technology, but others included students from a cross section of schools, who spent months communicating from afar.

Jordan Kabyemela, a 16-year-old high school student from England, was on the Istanbul Technical University’s team, which also had members from Mexico and South Africa. Kabyemela, self-assured and dry, explained that the team communicates “through this website called Slack.” The group Slack is divided into channels on aerodynamics, analysis, and renders. There was also a general one about movies, where tastes diverged from “people who like Dark Knight Rises to Bratz: The movie.”

Joseph Stanek’s team was made up of students from three community colleges in suburban Illinois. “We didn’t expect it to be this awesome,” said Stanek, who is studying automotive engineering. “It’s just so surreal being down here and competing against MIT and big state universities.”

When I asked Stanek whether he follows Musk's exploits, he pointed me to the silver Tesla pin on the lapel of his sports coat from his part-time job as Tesla product specialist, the company’s term for salespeople, at its retail store in the Oakbrook Mall.

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News

From almost any vantage point in the Hall of Champions, one could spot members from Open Loop, a 100 or so person team, half of whom were in attendance, all sporting T-shirts with the group’s swirly honeycomb logo. In fact, most of team wore matching gear. Hawaiian shirts for the Panther Pod team from Florida Tech; whereas the team to beat, Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, wore stiff toothpaste-colored button-downs with the logos of their many sponsors printed on the back. Delft made their very professionalized presence known with huge fin-shaped signage that gave their booth twice the height.

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Nova’s booth, in contrast, was in the same hallway as the concession stand, through a set of double doors and about as far as one could get from the stage. Twenty-two-year-old Cairo University student Samar Abdelfattah was the only representative of her team who could make it because her three teammates couldn’t get visas in time. Abdelfattah, whose headscarf matched her pink sneakers, said she learned about the competition from SpaceX, “mainly because we keep checking the website.”

Both Nova and the Reddit team, called rLoop, won awards that weekend. An rLooper named Eric Matzner was easy to spot because of the smartphone harness over his shoulder, which looked like an exoskeleton and made satisfying crunching sounds when he adjusted it. Matzner, the one live-streaming on Periscope, asked one of the reporters to type quieter during the opening ceremony.

A representative for SpaceX told BuzzFeed News that the competition did not track gender, but that roughly 10 to 15 percent of the team captains were women.

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Hundreds of student proposals, even wickedly innovative ones, does not a “fifth mode of transport” make, but the weight of private funding and big brands buttressed the sense of optimism. There was a Lockheed Martin booth with an F-22 Raptor simulator (no real relation) and a whiz-bang set up from Arx Pax which makes the magnetic field architecture used by some of the teams, and used it to build the Hendo Hoverboard, which actually hovers. In fact, the most evocative rendering of Hyperloop came fromAECOM, the $4 billion corporation building SpaceX’s test track. Visitors who dropped by their booth could watch it through VR headsets.

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News

Hours before the judging hall was opened to “the public,” which turned out to mean kids — actual kids, intensely curious ones — and their parents, who braved whatever space was left in the hall and in some cases traveled from Dallas or Austin for a glimpse. Near the Arx Pax area, one dad was trying to explain coefficient friction to his tweens. The 2 p.m. demo for hoverboard was crowded with children. “We put a baby on it before,” one of the demonstrators told a girl in the front row as they waited to get things started. “Whoa I’m 6! I’m 6!” she said, possibly to imply she’d be a much better passenger.

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News

The best indicator of the burgeoning economy around Musk’s alpha paper is Hyperloop Technologies, one of two companies trying to commercialize the idea and arguably the farthest along. It was co-founded by Musk’s friend, early Uber investor and Obama bundler Shervin Pishevar, and Musk’s former employer, BamBrogan. Musk has said he will wait and see before backing any one company, which leads to a lot of people wanting to make “super clear” declarations about Musk’s lack of involvement that ending up coming out sort of hazy.

But in an interview with the co-founders and their new CEO, Cisco veteran Rob Lloyd, two themes came up that also put the concept (if not their implementation of it) closer to reality.

Nitasha Tiku/ BuzzFeeds News

Lloyd repeatedly mentioned Hyperloop as a method of transporting cargo. While armchair industrialists worry about whether Hyperloop passengers will be able to pee, behind the scenes, well-funded folks are working on something your senator might want to stamp through. According to Lloyd, “U.S. regulators would love to see us solve freight and cargo problems” and would “be comfortable if that was the first commercial use cases” — pitched to, say, the same lawmakers who are looking into driverless cars. Once the cargo scenario is proven out, it would bring the company “just a step closer” to using Hyperloop for passengers.

Just like SpaceX was associated with colonizing Mars while its rockets were only traveling as far as the International Space Station, perhaps Hyperloop could symbolize exponential leaps in infrastructure, while the bulk of profits came from hauling cargo.

Hyperloop Technologies has already secured investment from China, Europe, and Russia and interest from regions contemplating high-speed rail projects that might be willing to move quicker, said Lloyd. Those “global” implications got more specific listening to Bambrogan talk about his schedule in the media room. Bambrogan is the archetypal badass engineer and wore red suede high-tops that fit the part. From Texas, he was going to Moscow and then Dubai, “where I’ll be meeting with his excellency Sheikh Mohammed.” There was something about Hyperloop Technologies working with Deutsche Bank and SNCF. “If the Sheikh decides —” he said, just before the conversation got drowned out by a camera crew.

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News

Crunchies host Chelsea Peretti.

Steve Jennings / Getty Images

The tech industry was on its best dang behavior last night at the Crunchies, an annual awards show hosted by the blog TechCrunch. Better than its best, even. Everyone was humbled; everyone was grateful. Investors told startup CEOs that this award was really for them. Uber was a “human logistics” company. The venture capitalist giving out an award to another venture capitalist pointed out that his national reality show got canceled. “Fuck my life,” he said — VCs: They're just like us! Industry insiders had the script and they mostly stuck to it. Before you could take a jab at them, they jumped right in and slapped themselves.

Who could blame them? Facebook just got smacked down in India, AOL is sifting through Yahoo’s carcass, the business world's passive-aggressive PR machine got real-talked down to size, and that’s not even getting into the stock prices. The tech stories dominating the news this week would chasten even Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who didn’t show up to get his award for startup of the year. Perhaps that’s the best explanation for the existence of the Crunchies. It’s the kind of safe space you want when you’re only Silicon Valley famous, and leave behind once you're actually famous. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t show up; neither did Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel or Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield.

This was the Crunchies' ninth year, but the mystery around why profit-driven companies need awards is still unsolved. The show is often referred to as "the Oscars of tech," but it’s so much screwier than that. Imagine handing out a trophy for Best Derivatives Trader or nominating Goldman Sachs’s lucrative securities division for a special shout-out. (Late in the night, a scrappy little bit of software called Facebook Messenger would take home the trophy for Best Mobile App.)

The event took place at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House. Floodlights led the way to the theater, where the arches lit up in traditional tech-blog green. Outside, a police officer stood guard over a promotional white Prius parked on AstroTurf. Not long before the show began, a luxury Apple shuttle bus pulled up to the Muni stop with an ad for taking photos on an iPhone 6s. San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza was empty at that hour, except for the occasional jogger and the homeless men and women settling in the outdoor walkways of the municipal buildings for the night.

Instagram: @owenthomas

The evening opened with a tech-themed rendition of “La Donna E Mobile.” (Presumably the “mobile” homonym was too tempting to resist.) The customized ditty had a line about Zenefits, the human resources company whose CEO, Parker Conrad, resigned mere hours before the show began. The company blamed Conrad’s abrupt departure on using unlicensed brokers to sell health insurance in multiple states. Zenefits was also a finalist for last night’s Fastest Rising Startup award. In 2015, Zenefits had been a finalist for Best Health Startup. (Theranos won.)

In fact, this year's Crunchies were perhaps most notable for how far they diverged from last year's. In 2015, the crude comedy stylings of T.J. Miller were so offensive that executives at AOL (which owns TechCrunch) had to issue an apology. This time they tapped Chelsea Peretti (sister of BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti), who walked the tightrope of comeuppance and coddling perfectly. At the start of the monologue, Peretti mentioned that she grew up in the Bay Area. “It’s great to be back,” she told the crowd. “This city looks amazing — I love what you did with the poor people.”

Steve Jennings / Getty Images

Straight out of the gate, reporter Josh Constine, who was presenting the award for Fastest Rising Startup, pointed out that past winners like Snapchat (2013) and Yik Yak (2015) were both sued “by former friends who wanted a piece of the company,” so the category may as well be called “Hire a Damn Lawyer.” The Crunchies were clearly trying harder than one might expect from the home of Titstare.

And there were women. They were onstage! They were accepting awards! Their headshots showed up among the men's as lists of finalists flashed on the venue's massive screen. In 2015, there was only one female finalist for each of these categories: Founder of the Year, Angel of the Year, VC of the Year, and CEO of the Year. This year, the odds shifted. Three women were up for founder of the year; the angel investor and venture capital categories had two women apiece. (Across all four categories, Cyan Banister was the only woman who won, taking the prize along with her husband, Scott Banister.)

All told, it was reminiscent of another tech trend. Ever since Google showed the world its demographic pie charts, with tiny slivers representing the black employees and female managers, tech companies have cottoned to the idea of transparency as a talisman to ward off criticism. Last summer, reporters were suddenly inundated with press releases about rinky-dink startups offering up an interview with the CEO so that he (it was all he’s) could discuss the breakdown of his 20-person staff. Last night’s Crunchies were the awards-show equivalent of a diversity report: It looks like progress, it sounds like progress, but nothing has really changed. There may have been women of color onstage, but the deal-makers are still über-white.

The gulf between wanting to appear woke and still being asleep was not lost on Peretti. For example, this year TechCrunch added a new category and called it the “Include Diversity” award. “Was that a literal note on your to-do list last year?” she asked. “Did you jot that down and forget to name it? Someone has to put that award on their mantle; give it a little pizazz. It sounds more like a threat than a prize.”

Matt Haughey / Via techcrunch.com

Whether or not the Crunchies crowd came to the opera hall caring about diversity, speakers like Kimberly Bryant from Black Girls Code, who won that oddly named award, and the four black female engineers who accepted the Fastest Growing Startup award for Slack made excellent use of the platform.

Slack engineer Kiné Camara started with a DJ Khaled reference to the keys of success and gave a nod to Beyoncé about getting into “formation” before ending the 30-second speech with a sort of IRL group shruggie. Bryant used her time to shout out all the other nominees, and to tip her hat to Tristan Walker, CEO of the consumer goods startup Walker and Co., whom Bryant called “the living embodiment of the dream that the work that we all do is pushing forward because what we’re trying to find is the next black Bill Gates.”

Ultimately, TechCrunch’s attempt to erase unconscious bias came off more like hyper-self-conscious atonement. It seemed like there were two different awards shows, one for the good guys and one for the killer instincts. Bryant drove the point home. The work the nominees are doing to “create opportunity” is so that “in a few years there won’t be a need for this award.”

Steve Jennings / Getty Images

Peretti addressed it more bluntly during her monologue. “I was seriously asked to speak on the issue of diversity in the tech world tonight,” she said. “Uhhh, lemme float out a kooky idea: Hire a nonwhite host?”

Then Peretti changed her tune. “This audience does look really diverse as I’m looking around.” The crowd swiveled their head to scan the seats and see if they had missed something. “I’m starting to be impressed that the Bay Area has become such an inclusive place for both millionaires and billionaires. That’s so beautiful to see.”

Toward the end of the program, Peretti introduced a prerecorded Saturday Night Live ad to “mobilize people” about “an issue that is really tearing me apart right now”: the potential death of Twitter. Various comedians made pleas directly to the camera in a Verified Twitter Lounge encouraging hedge funds, mutual funds, and institutional funds to “please make a generous allocation” of Twitter stock so that actors and comedians can self-promote or “use more urban slang” than they would feel comfortable doing in person. “A small allocation of Twitter shares, even as little as $100 million,” could help.

It was a telling interlude. Hollywood may be mocking Twitter’s descent, but it still cares enough to study its stock fluctuations.

One of the high-profile founders who didn't show up was Elon Musk. “I’m not Elon Musk, but I wish I was,” said the man who came up to accept the award for Best Technology Achievement, which went to the reusable booster of the Falcon 9 spacecraft. It was Steve Jurvetson, a managing partner with the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, who looks sort of like Steve Buscemi as imagined by Norman Rockwell. He was an early believer in Musk and is a board member on Tesla and SpaceX. The reach of Musk’s ambitions and accomplishments extend so far that Jurvetson kept referencing science fiction; as he said, the booster lands “the way we expected like in comic books — you know, with rocket engines on other worlds.”

Steve Jennings / Getty Images

While the investor was lost in a reverie about Musk, Bastian Lehmann, the CEO of Postmates, who'd presented the award, started taking selfies next to the statue of a giant monkey, a larger-than-life version of the trophy itself. Jurvetson pressed forward with a shrug. “Anyways, I think it’s more important to think about the big things. And Elon wants to change other worlds, right? He thinks Mars is a fixer-upper planet.”

Peretti came back on the stage after that, but Jurvetson couldn’t seem to leave the podium. A TechCrunch employee had to march out, grab his arm, and escort the investor backstage. Peretti was characteristically chill. “I would luxuriate in the moment if I could build a spaceship with my bare hands...which is what I’m assuming that young man did,” she said. “Guys, take your time, you own this world.”

Tom Kubik / Via tomkubikphoto.com

The lobby of the WeWork on San Francisco’s Market Street looks like The Truman Show, but for startups: It’s the middle of the afternoon, and people are actually playing ping pong. The jug of complimentary “fresh fruit water” is icy and glistening. Stay in the same place long enough and the same Macbook-toting twentysomething is bound to loop by again.

On a sunny day in late January, Nootrobox co-founder Michael Brandt ventured onto this soundstage for startup utopia to talk about his company’s newest product: a line of chewable coffee-flavored gummy bites called Go Cubes. They, like all of Nootrobox’s wares, are nootropics: substances designed to make you think harder, better, and faster, also known as smart drugs. (Nootropics are typically marketed as dietary supplements, which are not reviewed by the FDA, although the agency has issued warning letters. Nootrobox says it only uses ingredients that the FDA has classified as generally safe.) Brandt strode into the lobby wearing a neon baseball hat that said “THINKING CAP.” See? It's unnerving when reality is too on the nose.

Go Cubes represent a big departure from Nootrobox’s other products, a trifecta of pills called Rise, Sprint, and Yawn, which are supposed to help you start the day alert, conquer deadlines, and ease into sleep, respectively, and come in spartan glass containers. The cubes, on the other hand, come in bright packaging that Brandt told BuzzFeed News was inspired by Winnie the Pooh’s honey pot and Keith Haring. Nootrobox raised the money for Go Cubes through an Indiegogo campaign and also has funding from Andreessen Horowitz. The geometric treats begin selling online today.

Each Go Cube contains as much caffeine as half a cup of coffee, as well as six grams of sugar. The nootropic elements are B-complex vitamins and l-theanine, an amino acid found in green tea. (L-theanine plus caffeine is a popular pairing to start with because the combination reduces jitters.)

Brandt hopes that Go Cubes will introduce consumers to the idea that “your smartness is something to be optimized,” he said. “Own the fact that when you’re going to get coffee, 80% of the time you’re doing it to enhance your work abilities somehow.” And if coffee drinkers are trying to “modulate” performance, “Wouldn’t you want something more precise than coffee?” he said. “That’s our whole hypothesis there.”

He opened up a fat jar of cubes before we made our way to a conference room, so that I could try one. It tasted sweetly dank, like the first sip of a cold brew coffee, but with a Haribo mouthfeel and no hint of bitterness. My editor later described the taste as “synthetic,” but said she loved it.

Michelle Rial / BuzzFeed News

Brandt believes that Go Cubes could be a breakthrough product. “We’re just trying to take over the world so that this is an iconic logo before anyone else can follow us,” he said. “For every Coca-Cola, there’s a Pepsi and a bunch of others. That’s OK as long as we’re the Coca-Cola.”

Brandt was an associate product manager for YouTube, and his co-founder Geoff Woo is a former product manager at Groupon. Although Nootrobox’s line of pills is taking off, Brandt said he recognizes the limits of the company’s reach. “Ninety-nine percent of the world has never tried a nootropics in general, hasn’t heard about Nootrobox.” Chewable coffee seemed like a good gateway food. It looks approachable, and it’s portable so you can take it “on a long road trip or when you’re going hiking or into outer space,” he explained, but didn’t specify the planet.

Later this week, Go Cubes will be available on Amazon Launchpad, a portal for all things startup or crowdfunded. Brandt said he got the Amazon introduction through Andreessen Horowitz, which has also invested in BuzzFeed. The most popular items on the launchpad right now include Sphero’s app-controlled BB-8 robot and FitBark, a dog activity monitor.

Nootrobox co-founder Michael Brandt at WeWork

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News

Roughly two minutes after we moved from the lobby to a conference room, I asked Brandt if it was possible to feel the effects already. I had walked into WeWork groggy, but suddenly found myself on a higher plane of mental acuity. Shit was coming together. Ideas were ~~~~connecting~~~~. Brandt and I had a sharp-angled conversation about unexplored corners of human physiology, the earliest uses of caffeine in Ethiopia, how to achieve peak cognitive performance, and Elon Musk’s theory about first principles. I felt like I was on office Molly.

Half an hour later, I started to crash. Brandt’s and my conversation grew sluggish. Overall, it felt like good part of a caffeine high, but a little higher, a little more focused, and without the dehydration. After a week or so of eating cubes, my peaks and valleys flattened somewhat, but I still felt like the cubes were effective.

My colleagues’ reactions were mixed. The same editor said the cubes “were like Adderall but less sweaty.” Another co-worker who had two cups of coffee before trying the Go Cube said: “OK, very suddenly, I’m jacked,” adding, “I kind of think I may need to go for a run.” One writer said she had been “depending on them to get over the 1pm lunch slump” and may be addicted. “WHAT SORCERY IS IN THOSE WEIRD CUBES ON THE TABLE. I’M SO AWAKE AFTER BEING SO TIRED,” said one of the journalism lab fellows, while another called the gummy bites sugar bombs of evil.

Go Cubes capitalize on a few shifting trends among tech workers, as well as widespread changes in workplace culture and health. That may sound highfalutin’ for a sugar-coated pick-me-up. But marketing and pedigree mean something in tech — otherwise columnists for top newspapers wouldn’t keep reviewing Soylent, earnestly asking each time if a venture-backed beverage could “replace” or “end” food.

Among Silicon Valley locals, the idea of smart coffee plays into the idealization of the hacker lifestyle and the drive to self-optimize — both of which tie into the industry’s insistence that personal fulfillment comes from work, rather than out-of-office pursuits. In terms of more mainstream phenomenons, Go Cubes fits thematically into Americans working longer hours and the growing anxiety around productivity, whether that’s keeping up with the pace of news and technology, or just one’s inbox. Oh, and our coffee addiction.

“Humans are the next platform,” Brandt explained. “Five or six years ago if someone was measuring their footsteps, they were a crazy person, right? That wasn’t a normal thing. But now your aunt or your cousin can have a Fitbit and they don’t consider themselves a biohacker, they just have an Apple Watch.” Brandt sees an increasing interest in treating ourselves like machines. “We want better insight into how our body is performing and we want better ability to affect it,” he said. “We want to be able to pull the levers.”

Tom Kubik / Via tomkubikphoto.com

Venture capitalists and founders sometimes make analogies to computing in order to justify funding low-tech small businesses — perhaps because tech startups command higher valuations than, say, a power bar company.

People in the nootropics or quantified self “movement” use the word “stack” to describe their regimen of pills. Bodybuilders use supplement stacks, but in software, a stack is a set of applications or subsystems needed to build platforms or websites. (Rumor has it that Facebook prefers to hire “full-stack” engineers.) Nootrobox sells all three pills together in a package called the Full Stack.

Another way to align your company with Silicon Valley is by having the same heroes. Brandt told me Nootrobox has modeled its approach after what Elon Musk calls "first principles" — in other words, stripping something down to the basics so you can be truly innovative. When it comes to coffee, Brandt said, that means: “What do people want? What actually works? What are the intended effects?”

The on-the-nose vibe around Nootrobox comes from the prevalence of all these startup tropes: for example, the tech industry’s infatuation with new entrants over experience and expertise. “We’re both pretty young, we’re 27, so for better or for worse, I think mainly for better, we don’t have huge decades of experience in supplements,” said Brandt. Consumers have found Nootrobox “refreshing,” he said, compared with the supplements industry, where companies tout proprietary blends that turn out to contain “whatever happens to be on deck.”

Then again, if channeling Elon Musk is what it takes to get to chewable coffee, more power to them. Whether Go Cubes goes mainstream or only lasts a month, it made me more aware of how mindless it is to reach for a cup of coffee when I just want to feel smarter.

Tom Kubik / Via tomkubikphoto.com

Nootrobox rejected 200 other ideas — including selling Sprint as an energy shot and making a chewable version in fruit flavors — before arriving at the obvious conclusion of chewable coffee: “Coffee connotes a performance aspect that lemon just doesn’t,” said Brandt. He and Woo made a down payment for R&D with a factory in Los Angeles that does “truckloads a day of jellybeans, gummy multi-vites, and things like that,” Brandt said. They opted to coat the cubes in a fine layer of sugar so they don’t stick together, he said, spinning the jar around.

To make Go Cubes more mainstream, Nootrobox also changed the tone of its advertising. The commercial for the gummy bites is loud, friendly, and “super hammed up," whereas the commercial for the pills (above) was designed to talk to “our tribe,” Brandt told me. “There’s something really fascinating when you look at a computer programmer or a really elite day trader — someone that’s really good at the work they do, that busts their butt, that puts in super long hours, like a Ph.D. in a science lab — and when you look at a person like that through the lens of how you would look at a professional athlete.” These elite workers are achieving the same marvelous levels of proficiency “as your Super Bowl athletes, but they’re doing it in Node.js and they work at some startup,” he said, referring to a popular tool for JavaScript developers.

Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk may be international idols, but the universal need for validation persists.

The Nootrobox team “likes to think” that they're good at brain sports too, said Brandt. “No one has really talked to nerds like they’re Nike athletes, right? But I would like to be talked to like that.”

WeWork / Via wework.com

WeWork, a co-working startup recently valued at $15 billion, is being sued by an ex-employee in California for unpaid overtime, wrongful termination, and retaliation. The suit was filed by Tara Zoumer, an associate community manager who supported some of WeWork’s Bay Area locations, including its 91,000-square-foot space in downtown San Francisco. Zoumer alleges that WeWork fired her because she spoke to other employees about alleged violations of California’s Labor Code and because she refused to sign a new arbitration agreement passed out to all WeWork employees last fall.

In the complaint, Zoumer claims signing the agreement would have "waived her jury trial rights to her pending disputes with WeWork."

Zoumer worked for WeWork from March 2015 to November 2015 for an annual salary of $42,000, plus benefits and some stock options. Salaried employees, especially those making a decent wage, sometimes assume that they are not eligible for overtime. But Zoumer, whose previous job was as a public relations coordinator with the human resources company TriNet, believed she was misclassified and entitled to overtime, meal breaks, and rest breaks because she worked 50 to 60 hours per week. The complaint says that Zoumer’s West Coast manager told her to stop talking to other employees about alleged labor violations three weeks before she was fired. According to the complaint, Zoumer is seeking more than $25,000 in damages.

Zoumer’s lawyer, Ramsey Hanafi, told BuzzFeed News that community managers and other nontechnical startup employees are particularly vulnerable to being misclassified as exempt from overtime and other protections. “Since so many tech jobs are ‘office jobs’ or have higher salaries, or fancy meaningless titles, a lot of employees get misclassified,” Hanafi explained in an email. As an associate community manager, for example, Zoumer replaced kegs of free beer in the communal lounge, threw parties, worked the front desk, and gave office tours. “These companies are making a lot of money on the backs of misclassified workers who are often underpaid for their long hours, and that isn’t fair,” said Hanafi.

This week, WeWork filed for a new stock offering, which could put its estimated value to closer $17 billion. To defend itself against Zoumer, WeWork hired Boies, Schiller & Flexner, a law firm founded by famed and feared litigator David Boies. WeWork has more than 50 shared office space locations around the world and a swiftly growing presence in the Bay Area.

Zoumer filed her lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court just before Christmas, but WeWork successfully moved the case to California federal court. Zoumer’s offer letter from WeWork included a clause saying that employees have to arbitrate disputes rather than go to court. WeWork used that clause to file a petition in New York court related to the California lawsuit. The petition asks for the judge to compel Zoumer to go to private arbitration in New York rather than a jury trial in California. (Although Zoumer was fired over not signing WeWork’s new arbitration agreement, the clause in her contract may have been enough.) The New York judge is expected to rule in the next week or so.

A source close to the company told BuzzFeed News that WeWork has not yet filed to dismiss Zoumer's claims because WeWork wants all employee disputes to go to arbitration and be decided out of court.

Zoumer’s complaint alleges that in early October 2015, she began speaking with other members of WeWork’s community team about the possibility that they were wrongly classified and entitled to overtime wages, as well as reimbursement for cell phone expenses. In early November, all WeWork employees were asked to sign a new employment agreement that included a more detailed arbitration agreement, waiving a right to jury trial. Zoumer claims she refused to sign, telling WeWork “she had pending potential claims” against the company and “did not want to waive her rights” to resolve those disputes in court. In mid-November, Zoumer was told she was terminated for not signing the new agreement.

This isn't the first time WeWork has dealt with blowback for its labor practices: Last summer, CEO Adam Neumann came face to face with protesters for paying janitors $10 an hour with no benefits or paid time off. However, those were contract workers in New York, and Zoumer was a full-time employee.

In response to questions from BuzzFeed News, a spokesperson for WeWork offered the following statement: “Our employees are our lifeblood. Their commitment to our members and to each other is what helps make WeWork unique. This lawsuit is an unfortunate reaction by an employee who was terminated for failing to comply with company policies and procedures. We will contest this meritless lawsuit vigorously.”

California has different exemptions for overtime requirements depending on the category of employee. In January 2016, for example, California increased the threshold for exemptions of computer software workers. Employers now have to pay computer software staffers an hourly rate of $41.85 or an annual salary not less than $87,185.14 in order to exempt them from overtime requirements.

Hanafi, Zoumer’s lawyer, told BuzzFeed News that it will be “WeWork’s burden to prove” that his client is exempt from overtime. “The ‘default’ rule is no employee is exempt, and all are entitled to the benefits and protections,” Hanafi said. The source close to WeWork said that the defense will be arguing that Zoumer fell under the administrative exemption. In that category, one of the stipulations for exemption is that an employee “customarily and regularly exercises discretion and independent judgment.”

Regardless of the merits of Zoumer’s claims, her case touches on a number of issues that the tech industry has been forced to address recently. The treatment of nontechnical employees at large tech corporations, for instance, received a lot of attention last month after a former Yelp employee named Talia Jane wrote an open letter to Yelp’s CEO about struggling to get by as a customer service representative. The downside of arbitration has also come up repeatedly in recent widely covered lawsuits against tech companies, such as the ongoing class-action cases against Uber, Lyft, and Handy. A multipart New York Times investigation last fall said arbitration clauses were at the center of “a far-reaching power play orchestrated by American corporations.”

Although this was not included in her complaint, Zoumer sent BuzzFeed News a copy of an email that she claimed to have sent to a number of members on WeWork’s community team on Friday, Nov. 13, under the subject “Your Rights at WeWork.” According to her complaint, she was terminated the following Monday.

BuzzFeed News

Donald Trump onstage with his wife, Melania Trump; daughter Ivanka Trump; and son-in-law Jared Kushner at a campaign rally in February.

Brendan Hoffman / Getty Images

Donald Trump has called Obamacare “a horror,” “a big, fat, horrible lie,” and a “total catastrophe.” When the presidential candidate revealed his plan in March to repeal Obamacare, he began by saying that the American people have “[suffered] under the incredible economic burden” of the Affordable Care Act. But one of Trump’s in-laws has turned Obamacare into an economic boon for his multibillion-dollar health care startup, Oscar Health. Perhaps you’ve seen their cutesy subway ads, billboards, or TV commercial?

Trump’s daughter Ivanka is married to real estate scion Jared Kushner, who has been joining his father-in-law onstage at campaign events. “Jared is a very, very successful real estate entrepreneur in Manhattan,” Trump told supporters last month, during his victory party for the New Hampshire primary. Jared’s brother is venture capitalist Joshua Kushner, who co-founded Oscar Health, a health insurance company that describes itself as “the first health insurance company created for consumers in the new world of the Affordable Care Act.” The company launched in New York state in 2013 as a licensed health care provider selling to individuals and families in the marketplaces created by Obamacare.

“I don’t think we could do this without Obamacare,” Oscar co-founder and CEO Mario Schlosser told the Washington Post in 2013. “You’d have to break into a market that’s been pretty ‘oligopolized’ with big insurers catering to brokers, agency houses and big employers. But now we have a direct connection to the consumer.”

Forbes called Oscar the “Obamacare startup” in a headline about its $1.5 billion valuation last April. Since then, Oscar’s estimated value has almost doubled: A few weeks ago, the company got $400 million investment from Fidelity at a $2.7 billion valuation.

Instagram: @joshuakushner

Oscar claims to offer consumers a more accessible and user-friendly insurance option neatly packaged with a youthful and techie vibe. (Membership cards are mailed in the same kind of box as an iPhone.) The three-year-old company has raised more than $727 million in three years for the concept.

In interviews, Kushner has said he had the idea of tackling health care after he tried to decipher an insurance bill. “I'm overeducated and I had no idea what it all meant,” he told New York magazine in 2014. Kushner co-founded the company with two of his friends from Harvard Business School, and they timed Oscar’s launch so that it dovetailed with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. The magazine also reported that “a pair of Obama 2012 operatives were brought onboard to oversee” Oscar’s canvassing campaign before the open-enrollment deadline.

Oscar launched as more of a software layer, relying on other companies to process claims and set up provider networks. But Oscar has since expanded in Texas and California with a different model that narrows its network of doctors and hospitals in order to minimize losses and builds its process and systems from scratch.

An Oscar spokesperson declined to answer questions from BuzzFeed News about Kushner and his company’s political position. But in December, the same week that the GOP frontrunner bashed Obamacare in a town hall meeting, the White House announced that it was working with Oscar Health and one other startup (Zocdoc, a website for booking doctors’ appointments) to advertise Obamacare coverage. Oscar created a brief PSA targeted at the uninsured. “We are incredibly motivated by the support the White House has shown us today on this initiative and are proud to share this video we created on just how simple it is to sign up for an affordable plan through the ACA,” the company wrote on its blog.

Instagram: @joshuakushner

There are obviously a few degrees of remove between Trump and the tech company founder. There’s no easy shorthand to describe their connection, although both are listed as relatives on each other’s Wikipedia pages. But the Kushners — once high-profile Democratic donors — have become a source of fascination as Jared Kushner continues to join his wife on the Trump campaign trail.

Charles Kushner, father to Jared and Joshua, was one of the largest Democratic donors in America, before his notorious fall from grace after pleading guilty to illegal campaign donations and tax evasion. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who recently joined Trump onstage to endorse his candidacy, was the U.S. attorney prosecuting the case. Kushner had been the primary patron of New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey.

The elder Kushner paid about half million dollars in civil penalties for making contributions in the name of his real estate partnerships without permission. OpenSecrets showed more than 50 donations made in Joshua Kushner’s name, all to Democratic candidates and causes. The donations started in 1992 when Joshua was 7 years old. Twenty-one of the donations were made in Joshua’s name before he was old enough to vote.

Instagram: @karliekloss

Kushner’s political position is particularly interesting given Trump’s tirades against Silicon Valley executives, who have not made their feelings about the candidate known. Last month, Trump called for a boycott of Apple for its refusal to cooperate with the FBI over the San Bernardino killings. But the Verge pointed out today that the GOP frontrunner is back to tweeting from his iPhone. Earlier this week, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk dispelled reports of a “secretive meeting” between Republicans and tech CEOs at the American Enterprise Institute’s annual World Forum about how to stop Donald Trump. Musk tweeted that he was there to talk about Mars and sustainable energy, clarifying that it had “nothing to do with Trump,” but did he did not share his views about the candidate.

In his business dealings at least, Kushner seems to be party agnostic. One of the partners of Thrive Capital — which Joshua Kushner also founded, and which is an investor in Oscar — is Jared Weinstein, who served as a trusted personal aide or “body man” to President George W. Bush from 2006 to 2009.

Disclosure: The author of this post was previously employed as a reporter for the New York Observer, which is owned by Jared Kushner.

Illustration by BuzzFeed News / SuperStock / Alamy

Every Wednesday at 8 a.m., members of a group called WeFa.st gather at a casual order-at-the-counter kind of San Francisco cafe for what they call a biohacker breakfast. The restaurant varies, but the meal is always awash with the relief of finally being able to eat.

WeFa.st is an online community made up mostly of tech workers, all of whom share a fascination with intermittent fasting, which dictates a strict schedule for fasting and eating in exchange for a host of health benefits. These mostly young, mostly male, hype men for biohacking have built an ethos around the diet, which promises peak productivity and readiness for a future where technology is king and the smartest man wins. If tech is becoming a lifestyle brand, then intermittent fasting is its Master Cleanse, and these are its Gwyneths. Each regimen has its own name, like the Warrior Diet, wherein the faster abstains for 20 hours and eats one big meal at night, or the Monk Fast, which entails fasting continuously for 36 hours. For the X Games of caloric consumption, there is the Himalayan Fast, where you fast continuously for 60 hours. “This is difficult to sustain,” the website warns.

Fasters at a breakfast at Elmira Rosticceria on March 30.

Nitasha Tiku

The WeFa.st breakfast club’s members are on different regimens, but aim to end their fast in time for the group meal. Among intermittent fasters, the block of hours where you’re allowed to eat is called “a feeding window.” The term is better suited to farm animals or lab rats, but the vibe they’re going for is less mammal and more machine.

One of the biohackers at breakfast last week was Clinton Mielke, a data scientist working with MRI results from Alzheimer's patients at UCSF. Mielke also runs a startup called Infinome dedicated to increasing life expectancy. He predicts that the tech industry will shift away from software and toward personalized medicine, pointing to Google’s investments in life sciences startups like Calico and Verily, as well as its hiring of futurist Ray Kurzweil. According to Mielke, both he and the Google co-founders have had an epiphany: “The computer revolution was really exciting, but ultimately it’s the human source code that matters and that’s the human genome, the code that powers all of us.”

It’s a dizzying existential leap from skipping dinner to cheating death, but it also explains why some of the newer acolytes to a practice that dates back to ayurvedic medicine are approaching intermittent fasting with such zeal. Scientific research, mostly in mice, has shown that intermittent fasting can boost metabolism and fight diabetes and obesity; adherents are fond of mentioning studies about enhancing longevity.

It's also, according to Paul Benigeri, an engineer for the nootropics company Nootrobox, supposed to be a contrast to the status quo. “We're always splurging,” said Benigeri. “We eat a lot, we play a lot of games, we download a lot of apps.” Fasting offers a more austere alternative, he said. “You kind of feel like a monk.” (The Warrior Diet has been around for a couple years, but Benigeri said that he and his co-workers came up with “Himalayan” because it invoked a “super extreme” way of life.)

Indeed, perhaps there’s a reason that all three dietary archetypes seem to hark back to a time before standing desks, and why fasters tend to invoke evolutionary biology when explaining their choices. For years, a certain stratum of the tech industry has enjoyed unlimited access to venture-backed abundance. But if Salesforce managers are taking Benedictine vows and even Google is tidying its estate, we may be approaching an ascetic bent in the economic cycle.

Aside from the meetups, WeFa.st is basically just a group chat on Slack, the popular software for organizing teams and offices. Nootrobox, which sells mind-enhancing supplements, set it up after the company’s six-person, all-male staff challenged themselves to try it. WeFa.st isn’t the first online hangout for fasting obsessives, but it represents a new spin on the concept. You’re more likely to find hardcore disciples on bodybuilding sites like Leangains, but there, commenters are seeking “a shredded eight-pack,” explained Justin Schafer, a regular breakfast club member and former marketing analyst for Solar City, Elon Musk’s energy startup. The WeFa.st guys, said Schafer, are obsessed with “an optimally functioning human brain.”

Illustration by BuzzFeed News

Last week's breakfast was held at the Yerba Buena location of The Grove, a popular chain of homey cafes in San Francisco. The space earnestly adheres to the woodsy theme with actual floor-to-ceiling tree trunks amid the dining tables. At 8 a.m., the line to order already stretched from the counter to the door.

Because everyone is quasi-starving, biohacker etiquette permits digging in as soon as one’s food arrives. While some of us waited, Schafer passed around a box of Tulsi tea made with “holy basil” from India that supposedly makes the drinker impervious to stress, as well as a pop-top plastic bottle of L-theanine, a beginner-level nootropic that’s said to kill the jittery side effect of coffee.

I put the tea in my pocket and swallowed the pill with my coffee. If I had work to do after breakfast, Schafer assured me that I would now be good to go. All I had to do is put in some earbuds, go to Brain.fm (a site that uses artificial intelligence to recommend songs) and listen to some binaural beats, where different tones are played in each ear in order to enhance concentration. Geoff Woo, the Nootrobox CEO, nudged me. With a “belly full of food” I’d be ready for action, he said. (One big selling point for intermittent fasting is avoiding the food coma that plagues carb enthusiasts like myself.) Schafer, who was sitting across from me, made a tick-tock gesture with his index fingers to mimic the beats switching from ear to ear.

They grinned like they were going to induct me into a bungee-jumping club or hand me a micro-dose of LSD, not send me back to my office to sit on a chair and look at a screen. Once I returned to my desk, however, the combo did seem to do the trick. Schafer is a good salesman. A few days later I found myself in line at Whole Foods with two boxes of Tulsi tea and a strong suspicion that with a few tweaks, I might be able to master my own destiny.

During the three breakfasts I dropped in on, people were friendly and encouraging — intermittently cognizant of how they sound to the wider world, but also relishing in the subversiveness. (“I’m not a psychopath,” Schafer replied when I asked him if The Warrior Diet meant always saying no to after-work drinks or dinner with friends.) There’s a lot of talk about 23:1s or 16:8s, shorthand for the ratio of fasting hours to feeding hours. I watched a few try to out-reference each other with research papers like they were baseball stats. One biohacker, who identified himself only as Carl, told me that he’d “been reading shitloads of research” and described a week of plowing through 40 research papers on fasting — while simultaneously fasting. Carl said he got into discussions with academics about cell replication and cancer. “I not-so-gracefully shut them down,” he bragged. When I asked whether he was a programmer or a researcher, Carl didn’t specify, but he did volunteer that he was probably better read on the subject “than most people that are raised in academics.”

Illustration by BuzzFeed News

I decided to try a short fast after the first biohacker breakfast.

Practitioners recommend no more than 500 calories a day on fasting days. I didn’t intend to eat 94% of these allotted calories before 9 a.m., but it just sort of happened. I ate lentil soup (300 calories) and that made me want a slice of bread (140 calories) — and what kind of monster eats dry bread (70 calories of olive oil). By 3 p.m. on Tuesday I was scrolling through The Grove’s menu looking for the fattiest thing I could order. By 6 p.m. I was eating a soft-boiled egg (70 calories) to make it through the night. When I woke up the next morning, though, I felt excellent and ordered something (semi) healthy instead.

It supposedly gets easier. Benigeri told me that while abstaining, he and Gavin Banks, Nootrobox’s business development guy, have fantasized about In-N-Out and sent each other pictures of steak. But he also told me that talking about being hungry in the Slack group is rare because it implies weakness. The gnashing of teeth, he said, tends to happen one on one.

Banks was on the Himalayan Fast, so he wasn’t eating the morning of my second breakfast. Intermittent fasting, he said, helps him work better and faster. “I feel crispier and sharper throughout the day.” Crispier? “Crispier,” he said with a nod, making a gesture as if nerve endings were firing.

According to him, that’s the “motivating factor” that distinguishes fasting from diets. “The goal is to live forever, right?” Benigeri said to Banks, rapping his knuckle on the wooden table.

But it’s also apparently about the challenge. At the breakfast, the group joked about selling fasting kits containing air and water. Banks, who started fasting to lose his love handles, suggested “a mirror to look at yourself and not quit.”

“It’s another little mental victory over being lazy,” said Banks. (Not to mention one over temptation from the tech company cafeteria: “I'd get bored, have a snack,” Benigeri said. “I'd get angry, have a snack.”)

“Physical performance isn't necessarily representative of your salary,” Banks continued. Rather, salaries are “measured by how much you are output-ing at work.” (The number of nouns that these biohackers verb-ized during the course of one meal was arresting.) Fasting improves mental clarity so that he can do more work and generate more revenue. So instead of competing on a physical plane, “I am competing with the rest of the world.”

Schafer, who is 28 years old, said he quit his job recently to help out the family business and start up something of his own. In the meantime he’s driving a Lyft. I spoke to him just after he had dropped off a passenger. “People treat you differently when you’re in the service sector. It’s a little bit like a second-class citizen — and that’s totally fine. My identity is not tied to my current means of generating income. It’s more of a social experiment.”

I asked him if he’s concerned that the world will soon be divided into two categories: Uber drivers and Uber passengers. He said a dividing line was forming, but it would be between “the people who can wield technology and those who are the servants of technology. People who can master technology will be creating the systems,” like Uber, “and the others will be on the receiving end of it, I guess,” he said, referring to Uber’s plans to turn turn to driverless cars.

In Schafer’s mind, his lifestyle choices and the arc of technological development are aligned: “There are only going to be more distractions, more stimulations, and more opportunities to not focus on what matters.” So it will be increasingly important “to know how to focus and know how to prioritize in order to adapt to the present and the future.” He sounded like the mirror-image of a doomsday prepper: The apocalypse as told from the perspective of someone who expects to thrive in this harsh new reality.

Illustration by BuzzFeed News

There were two to five women at the three breakfasts I went to, better than the low bar set by your average tech conference, considering the size of the group. At the first meal, I met Mielke’s girlfriend, Jun Axup, who is also a startup founder and Ph.D. researcher. She’s been fasting for the past 12 years, but in a more organic manner. Axup doesn’t care for breakfast foods, so she fasts from 7 p.m. or 8 p.m. until noon the next day. It wasn’t until Mielke introduced her to intermittent fasting that she realized there was a name for it.

She described the gender imbalance in intermittent fasting as unfortunate, but expected — the same skewed ratio she’s had to face at work and school. (The research on how intermittent fasting effects women is not definitive. Some female fasters claim that it causes anxiety and irregular periods. A female founder at the breakfast club reported bloodshot eyes.) But Axup pointed out that it doesn’t reflect a lack of interest. “The fasting thing might be more male-dominated right now,” she said, but just look at all the YouTube videos about anti-ageing face creams or other makeup tutorials. “This whole search for a fountain of youth? Women have been doing this for a long time, too.”

Danielle Morrill is the CEO of Mattermark, a startup that collects and crunches data on private companies, which just raised more than $7 million in funding. Morrill began fasting inadvertently a couple months ago when she started getting up 5 a.m. and found the prospect of a sunrise meal unappealing. An investor in Bulletproof Coffee clued her in to the surrounding fervor. (Bulletproof’s founder, Dave Asprey, is partly responsible for the intermittent fasting fad.) Morrill hesitates to tweet or talk much about her diet, to avoid scrutiny and unnecessary competition. “I just want to figure out what is the ideal way to live day-to-day and I don’t think anyone really teaches you that.”

Illustration by BuzzFeed News

George Burke, another WeFa.st member, used to run a bitcoin startup and now organizes the San Francisco Peak Performance Meetup. Nearly 600 people are signed up for the meetups online, which is roughly 200 more members than WeFa.st. About 50 to 75 people have been showing up at events.

Burke had a unique perspective. He said he approached intermittent fasting not because he was a Type A guy who was always on his grind, but because he felt self-conscious about not being that guy. “I never really felt all that productive. My whole life I always felt like I was one step behind everyone else, so I was always looking for an edge.” Burke said that’s why he organizes the meetup, to share whatever he’s learned, but also to surround himself with experts. (It’s not too shabby for his personal brand in the fitness-tech space either.) “There are a lot of people who are underperformers and underachievers who simply accept their place in life, and I don’t,” he told BuzzFeed News. And now? A wrist full of self-tracking devices later? “People perceive me as being equal, so I’ll take it,” he said.

Schafer also traced his faith in fasting back to a sense of insecurity. In high school, he followed the whey protein and weightlifting wisdom popular in the '90s. It didn’t work. He would fall asleep during AP calculus every day because it came after lunch, and he lost the sense of himself as a curious, hyper-literate kid. That doesn’t seem to be an issue now. During the course of our 45-minute conversation, he mentioned Seth Godin, The Paleovedic Diet, Dave Asprey, Derek Sivers (who pioneered the decision tree: “Hell yeah!” or “No”), and Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile — a veritable office lounge shelf of counterintuitive thinking.

Burke’s approach to productivity makes him an ideal hypebeast for biohacking. His daily routine sounds like a word cloud for the quantified self. For example, Burke has also dabbled in micro-dosing LSD, another trendy productivity hack that posits that micrograms of hallucinogens can be office appropriate. During his bitcoin days, he said he wasn’t scared to lead a meeting while microdosing because “they are mostly libertarians and many of them enjoy their vices. I’ve never been to wilder parties, outside of the bitcoin space."

As with all health fads, there’s still a lot of conflicting advice about fasting and micro-dosing, but that uncertainty doesn’t faze Burke. “I’ll experiment with almost anybody’s advice. That’s kind of what biohackers do,” he explained.

Burke’s quest to reach the apex of performance has some hardware components as well. He wears an Apple Watch to measure his heart rate and an Atlas wristband to measure reps at the gym. He also uses a Pavlok, a device that zaps users with a bit of electricity, as a means of curing bad habits.

So far, he’s found it useful for both fasting and quitting vaping. He recommended a new Chrome plugin that punishes you for opening too many windows. “Set it at 10 or more browser tabs, it’s going to zap you.” Burke said the sensation was kind of like touching a doorknob charged with static electricity. “It’s uncomfortable but it’s not painful. They even make sex toys with little type of zap, so you’re not going to die,” he assured me.

Burke had to miss the biohacker breakfast, but when he broke his fast later that day it was with food from Two Forks, a meal delivery service. His options that day included grass-fed beef with roasted plantains and green beans and shallot salad, as well as free-range chicken with roasted eggplant and kale salad. Even though it’s made for Paleo, Burke still has to tweak it to his standards. “I have to modify [the deliveries] because there are still starches in these meals that I’m not going to eat.”

Last night on the way to a happy hour for reporters covering F8, Facebook’s annual conference for developers, I accidentally got in a line for a different happy hour, one meant for the company’s media partners — the publishers increasingly dependent on its platform. I was confused by the trifecta of velvet rope, lady with clipboard, and corporate signage in glacial Facebook blue, all visible from the grimy street in San Francisco’s Mid-Market. Men in VC casual (blazer with jeans, lightweight down coat with jeans, fleece with jeans) made their way inside. My name wasn’t on the list, so I asked what the event was for. “This is for Facebook,” the nice lady said. I’m also looking for Facebook, I told her.

In retrospect, it didn’t really matter. Facebook likes to play nice with both sides, and the drinks were just as free at the party for reporters as they were at the party for the media businesses that employ them.

Facebook has long offered users and businesses on its platform the same Faustian bargain: We’ll give you the tools for free and connect you with each other, and in return you give us the content that makes it all interesting and the data that makes it all lucrative. Facebook is a 12-year-old company now and we know how this story can unfold. The traffic that once seemed like a gift can turn and go elsewhere. But when the future looks so fragmented, those tools can be hard to resist.

Facebook is less of a kingmaker and more like a Hindu deity, creating and destroying markets instead of worlds. And that’s never more clear than at F8. (Onstage this morning, for example, CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared to casually fell the toll-free industry while also extending its lifespan. It was during a demonstration of how users can contact “business bots” from companies from within Messenger. “I find it pretty ironic because now to order 1-800-FLOWERS, you never have to call 1-800-FLOWERS again,” he enthused.)

F8 is ostensibly Facebook’s conference for developers, but considering that Facebook didn’t start talking to engineers until half an hour into the keynote, it clearly has other audiences in mind. Yes, thousands of developers attended this year’s event at Fort Mason, a former U.S. Army post in San Francisco’s Marina District. But the real audience is online, and on the other end of news stories (like this one) about the event.

Every single slide that flashed onstage was easily digestible to the more nontechnical audience members, like code-averse bloggers or, more to the point, biz dev execs and gurus of growth. The one slide that wasn’t easily parsed showed the equations necessary to build Facebook’s new 360-degree camera. That slide appeared expressly to show how much unfathomable work went into what Facebook can make easy. “The math on this is insane!” Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer, told the crowd.

But the best indication of who this conference was really for were the slides that display corporate logos over more of that Facebook blue. “Developers” may sound like a bunch of upstart Zucks-in-the-making, but the social network part of Facebook is already more than 10 years old and well into the phase where it has to make its platforms profitable. Simply put, F8 isn’t for developers in the way we’ve always thought of them. It’s the place where Zuckerberg shows big brands a shortcut to the future.

Mark Zuckerberg walked onstage with the confidence of a man who sees where he’s going while everyone else is still groping about in the darkness. While we pop watermelons to figure out Live Video, Zuckerberg is thinking a decade into the future. “We’re going to walk through our road map for the next 10 years,” he said.

Seismic changes were coming, Zuckerberg warned the crowd. New eras were afoot. If you are still reeling from smartphones, you'd best prepare for video. If you don’t have a drone, well here’s one flying onstage. (Here’s another flying overhead that’s about to light up the planet with internet!) If your eye is on America, Facebook’s way ahead of you with 70% of third-party developers coming from outside the U.S. So just stick with Facebook and you’ll be fine. The future is bright. The future is manageable. The future is coming at you from all 360 degrees. The future is here, on Facebook.

To pull that off, Zuckerberg has placed bets, well, everywhere. Augmented reality, virtual reality, live video, 360-degree video, artificial intelligence, business bots. You name it; Facebook is about to offer you a free way to start testing it, whether that’s APIs, the kind of connective software that lets 1-800-FLOWERS make its own app on Facebook Messenger, or hardware that turned the melting heap of cameras necessary to film 360-degree video into a sleek mini-spaceship of a camera that Facebook launched at the end of today’s keynote.

Facebook doesn’t have to choose between messaging or virtual reality. It just colonizes both platforms, figures it out, offers a helping hand to the advertisers, publishers, and e-tailers considering joining, and makes itself indispensable (for a cut). In a way, Facebook almost seems like artificial intelligence itself. Learning and getting smarter as it goes.

When Zuckerberg was onstage it was easy to see why that pitch works. He made the transition to our virtual videographic future sound seamless.

Right now you need a big block strapped to your head to experience virtual reality, but that will soon evolve into a simple pair of glasses. Sure, the business bots trying to communicate with customers in Messenger are pretty crude now, but soon they could truly be artificially intelligent. (And Facebook will even provide the AI.)

It was almost like rendering the future in flat design. The difficulty of deploying satellites or laying down undersea cables and microfiber to connect the next billion? Now a mere icon of a cell tower. The difference between communicating online one-to-one and broadcasting to the entire world? Just a blip on a line.

“Now, let’s talk about the next five years,” Zuckerberg told the crowd. Messenger was the fastest growing app in the U.S., ahead of even Facebook. That got a laugh. (It’s especially funny if, like Facebook, you’re still in first and second place.) People are sending 60 billion messages a day on Messenger, while SMS only sent 20 billion messages a day at its peak. Again, the old create and destroy.

Zuckerberg’s best guided tour, however, may have been through Facebook’s “playbook.” First Facebook explores new technology. Then Facebook builds that technology into a product. Then Facebook attaches that product onto its existing ecosystem of a “a billion or more people,” who can ease into it. One, two, three. Bing, bam, boom. It sounded so freaking simple.

The same easy-peasy pattern popped up throughout the keynote. Here is a new tech. This tech is important. This tech is hard. But Facebook can make it easy. Here, try this simple software/hardware. Now, go off and make money. This was the point of Facebook’s string of APIs and futuristic hardware: to make people stop thinking about 360-degree video as some far-off thing you’ll have to figure out. Facebook has already done it. Just sign on.

The victory after victory after victory started to swerve toward ridiculous. By the time Cox announced that the internet-beaming barges just outside being used for a drone demo were having some trouble because of the weather, I half expected Facebook to explain to us how they found a way to fix the antiquated mess that is the Earth’s atmosphere.

Throwing its considerable weight behind every platform is a nice strategy, if you can get it. A few months ago, analyst Ben Thompson wrote a post breaking down how Facebook “squashed” Twitter, looking in retrospect at the importance of early 2009 when Facebook had a lead on desktop, but only had 35 million active users on mobile compared to Twitter’s 30 million active users who were mostly on mobile. Anything Twitter can do now “can’t make up for the failure to evolve in those critical few years when the attention unlocked by mobile was up for grabs,” he wrote. The flip side of that argument shows how well Facebook has set itself up to succeed. And why Zuckerberg is so paranoid about never making an evolutionary misstep again. (See also: Microsoft and mobile.)

There are no interruptions during a keynote, so Zuck didn’t have to face questions about, say, Facebook’s stumbles with Free Basics. Or how much the spontaneity of live videos sounds like Snapchat. Or a recent report in The Information that Facebook users are sharing 20% less about their personal lives, hurting News Feed, Facebook’s profit center. No one onstage allowed for the possibility that users may not want to chat with airlines and online retailers “like they’re your friend.” Or what happens if businesses decide they don’t really want to give Facebook a cut anymore. Someday there will be another Zuckerberg who will also want to use Facebook’s vertical integration approach, and decide to cut Facebook out of the equation.

That’s not today though.

The easy-glide frictionless let-us-do-it-for-you extended to the conference as well. Veteran tech bloggers like to swap stories about the good old days of elbowing competitors to get a good seat, but everything was in a timed and orderly queue. There were snack stations and Four Barrel coffee and even giant boxes of tampons in the ladies’ restrooms. The Wi-Fi was amazing.

Two industrious entrepreneurs (also dressed in VC caj) were standing outside Fort Mason hours before the event began handing out free vials of nootropics, smart drugs that supposedly make you think better. These are the real deal, they promised; each contained 300 milligrams of some substance that doctors in Europe said would be good for Alzheimer’s in…some way. Every other sign visible around the former U.S. Army base was draped in Facebook logos, so I asked how they were allowed to set up in that prime spot, right by the entrance. The security guards tried to shoo them away, the nootropics salesmen explained, but they "gave them drinks and they seemed to like it.” What would happen to me if I take this? I asked. Will it make me crazy? “If it does, it will probably be in a good way,” they assured me. “I would recommend drinking it cold and fast.”

The substance was alarmingly bubbly and looked like it should be refrigerated, if not FDA regulated, but I guzzled it anyway. Hey, it was free and it promised to make me a better me.

John P. Fleenor / HBO

Last night, an investment bank and a venture capital firm co-hosted a premiere screening of a farcical premium cable show about tech companies. It sounds like the setup to a joke, but like on the show itself, it's not clear who gets the last laugh.

A few minutes before the crowd of industry insiders gathered at a San Francisco movie theater for a sneak peek at the first episode of Silicon Valley’s third season, news broke that Uber had settled two class-action lawsuits that could have cost the company its $50 billion business model. Meanwhile, across the country in New York City, Uber investor Shervin Pishevar was on a red carpet, posing next to Tom Hanks to celebrate Pishevar’s first turn as a movie producer. As the seat of capital and culture-shaping continues to inch north from Hollywood to Silicon Valley, it’s hard to stay on top of an industry constantly beta-testing the limits of its power.

Another reminder that tech truth can be stranger than fiction: a scene in the middle of the episode onscreen, when a promising startup reveals that its top secret tech project is (ba dum bump) just a Snapchat-like filter for adding 3D mustaches with names like The Sam Elliott and The Hitler. Earlier this week in the real world, Snapchat, which is valued at $16 billion, got in trouble for the boneheaded and utterly preventable decision to release a blackface filter of Bob Marley to celebrate 4/20.

None of these real-time footnotes made a difference to the audience in San Francisco, who cracked up — just as I did — with each new riff and pratfall. Where the show's first season focused on the trials of turning an idea into a company and the second on the trials of getting funded and off the ground, Season 3's major theme is regaining and retaining control.

In the first few episodes, Richard Hendricks, the brainy doofus at the helm of Pied Piper, the data compression startup that serves as Silicon Valley’s inanimate protagonist, meets his new nemesis: “Action” Jack Barker, the gray-haired CEO brought in to replace him. Unlike previous foes, Barker has a wider spectrum of emotions, all of which he employs to charm and defang Pied Piper’s employees. The biggest laugh of the night went to T.J. Miller's character, the proud wastrel Erlich Bachman, who runs over what he thinks is a deer, only to realize that his victim was in fact an experiment from Stanford Robotics, played by Boston Dynamics' lovable kickable robot.

From the get-go, Silicon Valley has emphasized its commitment to this type of detail. The people involved with the show have repeatedly cast their challenge as a choice between broad strokes and pixel-to-pixel verisimilitude, and they choose door number two. Mike Judge and co. seem very happy with their decision, and the chummy vibe at last night’s screening was a testament to the benefits: For tech personalities, getting tapped to fact-check or offer fodder for the show is almost as much of a bragging right as scoring one of the show’s many cameos.

But mutual admiration has also put Silicon Valley in a slippery position. It’s a biting satire suspiciously beloved by the people it’s supposed to be skewering. And it's a hyperrealistic, exhaustively vetted show that still manages to have some massive blind spots: a gender problem almost as stark as the one in the industry it parodies, a puerile sense of humor, and a bizarre devotion to the myth of the boy genius loner, to name but a few.

After the screening, there was a short question-and-answer session with some of the cast members, creator Mike Judge, and ex-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, who worked as a consultant on the show after he was nudged out of Twitter. (It’s a plausible career move considering he used to do improv comedy at Second City, although Costolo made a wisecrack about how the mighty have fallen.) Onstage, Costolo was asked to name a couple instances where he had to steer the show’s direction back to reality. Costolo said it was the other way around. “Most of the time it was me saying, ‘No, you can go way past that. They do far worse things than this!’” he explained. “You can go much, much farther.”

You can, but it may hurt your faves. Later in the Q&A when Judge was asked about the most memorable feedback he’s gotten, he pointed to a series of glowing tweets from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen after the pilot. “That was really cool for us, I think,” Judge said. “Somebody who is that much a part of Silicon Valley liking the show and just the details he mentioned were — that felt good.” Judge wouldn’t be the first man to fall under the @pmarca thrall.

And besides, Silicon Valley is satirizing a subculture that can already sound like a joke. Zach Woods plays Jared Dunn, Pied Piper's maternal caretaker. Woods said the show has a similar dynamic to Veep, HBO’s political gaffe-fest that will also premiere its new season on Sunday. “I think a lot of these shows that parody worlds are often out-parodied by reality,” he said during a press junket earlier that day hosted at the office of a PR firm.

Woods was sitting on a couch next to Martin Starr, who plays Bertram Gilfoyle, a wickedly deadpan developer and Satanist. Both actors pointed to one scene in the upcoming season that they found particularly hard to swallow — until they saw it unfold on the news — in which Pied Piper makes a promotional video. The show’s creators were trying to parody a bizarre Facebook ad from 2012 called “Chairs are like Facebook.” Starr and Woods thought audiences wouldn’t buy it, until they saw Uber’s delusional take on “Bits and Atoms.”

The screening was held at the New Mission Theater, the San Francisco outpost of an indie cinema chain known for serving patrons food and drink while they watch. On the marquee outside, the words “New Mission” are spelled out in neon green lights visible up and down the street.

For the rapidly gentrifying Mission District, the “new” part is painfully obvious. The theater sits right next to Vida, a condo development loathed by some locals for its gaudy design and gaudier prices. On one edge of the block is El Techo de Lolinda, a luxe Latin American food restaurant perpetually mobbed by those seeking its premium margaritas and rooftop vantage point. On the other edge of the block, next to Vida, is a burned-out building with a Popeyes Chicken on the ground floor and the remnants of more than a dozen rent-controlled apartments above. (The police did not suspect it, but neighbors continue to blame arson for the four-alarm fire last year.) Across the street from the theater is Doc's Clock, a dive bar and treasured San Francisco institution where the bouncer has been known to wear a “Die Techie Scum” shirt. In February, the property owner said she would not be renewing the bar’s lease.

The night of the premiere, the block was dotted in fliers blaming displacement on the influx of tech money. One said “TRICKLE DOWN DEVASTATION” and featured Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky's bloody, logo-adorned heads on pikes.

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News

The show has yet to venture into San Francisco’s affordable housing crisis, or San Francisco at all. There is a nod to the housing market in the second episode of the upcoming season, but the butt of the joke ends up being a hippie who was priced out, not the evicters. Which is fine: This is a half-hour sitcom, not a morality play. If you’re hoping for Sunday night TV to make the world a better place, you’ll be waiting a long time. San Francisco's housing crisis is real, but it’s not particularly funny.

The bigger bummer of a missed opportunity is the show’s treatment of gender. Viewers who gave up on Season 1’s disappointingly sexist casting probably didn’t stick around to see how Season 2 responded directly to that criticism in the form of Carla Walton, a stellar engineer with no fucks to give who alternately intimidates and gaslights her male co-workers at Pied Piper. But as with the short-lived Donald Glover arc on Girls, interest seems to have waned. After actor Christopher Welch’s death, the show hired Suzanne Cryer to play Laurie Bream, the managing partner who replaced Welch’s take on Peter Thiel, and perhaps that was enough for them. (Although Bream’s character can come off like Thiel with a vagina, basically, apparently Marissa Mayer was “one of” the inspirations for the part.)

More alarming than the casting is the boys club vibe that the show can’t seem to shake. In first three episodes, there is one shockingly graphic and entirely superfluous scene that seems like the kind of sophomoric prank that got pushed through the censors because you wanted to impress your friends. Like cast member T.J. Miller, the show can be a bit of a loose cannon. Since this season seems more tightly focused on what’s happening inside Pied Piper, it might mean less punching up and more flailing around.

After the Q&A was over, the crowd exited the theater to sample sliders, deviled eggs with trout, bowls of fries, and fried green tomato pizza, leaning on doors and banisters and garbage cans to balance their plates and drinks. The party spilled into Bear vs. Bull, the red-light-bathed bar on the New Mission Theater’s ground floor. PR reps made a permeable barrier around the talent, while men in dress slacks giddily waited their turn and hopefully remembered to turn off their smartphone flash.

A venture capitalist who was milling away from the selfie line said he preferred escapist television like Games of Thrones to Silicon Valley, but he had seen the third season premiere twice. The level of razzing on the show made sense to him. “It’s the kind of biting we are with each other,” he said, comparing it to watching episodes of L.A. Law as a kid without knowing anything about being a lawyer. The show never promised “meta social commentary,” he said. “There’s not going to be a ‘very special episode’ of Silicon Valley about the 1099 economy.”

Ilya S. Savenok / Getty Images

Last week, Uber announced that it had appointed Arianna Huffington as a board member. To those who have been following Huffington’s latest best-seller, The Sleep Revolution, it was a record scratch. Here was the author of a new book about the importance of sleep lending her personal brand to a company that, perhaps more than any other, symbolizes the perils of the always-on gig economy.

In The Sleep Revolution, Huffington warns that our success-driven culture is as deluded about the need for rest as it once was about smoking or climate change; she blames the epidemic of sleeplessness on smartphone addiction and the pressure to always be working. (CDC research supports that theory. The agency has called insufficient sleep a public health issue, caused in part by “societal factors such as round-the-clock access to technology and work schedules.”) Huffington takes care to note how the epidemic disproportionately affects women, citing research that they need more sleep than men and also suffer a more from the mental and physical effects of sleep loss. “Women stand at a particular disadvantage in this culture of overwork,” she writes. "When women work harder to climb the ladder and shatter the glass ceiling, sleep is often the first thing to go."

Huffington’s prescription is simple: Prioritize sleep, charge your devices outside the bedroom (downstairs, or maybe in the foyer), and develop a transition ritual to power down (hers is a bath by flickering candlelight and a silk pajamas from Journelle). For offices, the panacea is nap rooms.

The book itself is better rooted in reality, or at least history, when it ties the business world’s masochistic attitude toward sleep back to the Industrial Revolution, where “sleep became just another obstacle to work.” Huffington offers a few disjointed examples of potential remedies, from German car companies turning off their email servers at night to sleep tips from Google’s vice president of people development (“Focus on quantity.”)

But although the book claims that we’re on the cusp of “a new labor movement for our digital times,” Huffington’s advice for workers is no threat to Uber, or its trembling multibillion-dollar business model, dependent on armies of drivers picking up shifts whenever they can. That’s because Huffington recasts what should be a structural clash as a personal struggle. (For example, Uber’s contractor-driven workforce is never mentioned in the book.)

In a recent interview with BuzzFeed News about the book, Huffington told me that transformation depends on change from every walk of life. “The culture shift has to happen a lot faster, and like with any culture shift, it’s not going to come from the top,” she said, adding that it is up to each of us to “take charge” of our lives. “I’ve been amazed by many people even in entry-level jobs who are telling me their stories of how they’re setting boundaries. And because they do a phenomenal job when they are on, their boundaries have been accepted.”

That outlook places Huffington’s book a lot closer to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In than the latest wellness manual from Dr. Oz or Deepak Chopra, despite its New Agey title (Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time). Both Lean In and The Sleep Revolution look at institutionalized behavior affecting a large swath of the workforce. In Sandberg’s case, the behavior was women dropping out of leadership roles; in Huffington’s, it’s burnout caused by lack of sleep. But instead of interrogating the root causes, both books redirect responsibility to the individual and then present it as a tool of empowerment. When you’re being disenfranchised by management, lean in. When you’re burnt out by trying to stay ahead, lie down, sleep more.

Once upon a time, something like widespread lack of sleep may have become a labor issue. Huffington’s book mentions the populist movement in the late 1880s responsible for earning the right to a weekend, whose slogan was “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours of what we will." No one expects an actual revolution from a multimillionaire media magnate, of course, but it is odd to have entered this gilded age of corporate feminism, where activism can be packaged as self-help books. (Huffington, for her part, objected to the Lean In comparison, pointing out that her campaign involved partnerships with brands and a college sleep tour, also sponsored.)

What makes #SleepRevolution even less insurgent is Huffington’s emphasis on how sleeping more can lead to peak performance at your job. If Sandberg advised women to never get off the “rocket ship” of success, then Huffington offers much of the same: Stay on the rocket ship — just take a power nap in the back row.

Yet there’s little pressure on employers to improve working conditions beyond installing a nap room. The tips from Google’s head of people development, for example, were about the executive’s personal journey, not incorporating a sleep revolution into company policy. One of the Googler’s blithe suggestions was to “[b]e accountable,” noting: “It helps to have help. In my case I had Arianna as my sleep coach.” The onus is always on the individual to carve out time to rest — not her employers, managers, or legislators to create conditions where sufficient sleep is possible.

However, perhaps because of her proximity to disgruntled bloggers, Huffington is pretty adept at describing the internet worker’s dilemma. According to 2012 data from the CDC, the occupations getting the least sleep are home health aides, followed by lawyers, police officers, and physicians/paramedics, economists, and social workers — for the most part, people whose jobs force irregular schedules or long hours upon them. The knowledge-worker sleeplessness that Huffington describes is more of a perceptual roadblock to being rested: Your job may not be essential, but ubiquitous access to technology imbues hourly tasks with a sense of urgency. There’s a toxic combination of pressure from your employer to always be available and an internal FOMO alarm that keeps you scrolling your smartphone at night. (For example, in the process of writing this story, I worked on two vacation days and fielded a 7 a.m. Sunday email from my boss. I’m sure anyone reading this has worse stories!)

“I hope that in the end we also recognize that we are not just our jobs, right?” Huffington told me. “[If] we are completely identified with our jobs at whatever level, we’re going to be more anxious because the ups and down, the challenges impact our whole identity. It’s going to be much harder to go to sleep and come back fully recharged.”

That underlying anxiety about our collective unrest was on full display a few weeks ago during an onstage interview between Huffington and Sandberg at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The two are great friends; the acknowledgements for Sleep Revolution thank Sandberg for her careful line edits, and Huffington’s whirlwind tour of Silicon Valley began with a private book party at Sandberg’s modernist mansion in Menlo Park, which features a living roof, just like Facebook’s nearby campus.

The interview was hosted by the Commonwealth Club, the same public affairs forum that hosted another talk between the two women in 2014 to promote Huffington’s previous book called Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder, which contained pretty much the same message about sleep. In fact, both books start with the same anecdote about Huffington shattering her cheekbone on her desk when she fell from exhaustion and burnout.

At the recent event, held in a small auditorium, Huffington and Sandberg repeatedly mentioned their children as a turning point in realizing the importance of sleep, but there was no talk of nannies, or salary, or money in general. The midday crowd was overwhelmingly female and older than the average startup employee. When Sandberg polled the room about who felt rested, about half the people raised their hands.

But during the question-and-answer session after the show, simmering tensions began to rise up. One woman asked for advice on behalf new parents who are sleep-deprived because the “vast majority” of Americans have to go back to work three months after having baby. In response, Huffington prodded Sandberg to talk about Facebook’s great benefits. Another woman, the head of a circle called Lean In Latinas, said that young women in her group were “really anxious” about “being young and wanting to do it all” to the point that it affected their sleep. Later on, a mother approached the mic to talk about sleeplessness among children. “Everyone is aware that our teenagers, the coming generation is barely sleeping, the educators are aware,” she said. “Do you have any plans to fix the system?”

In his board announcement, Kalanick said Uber needed Huffington for her “emotional intelligence.” And he’s right. On the phone, she had a reasonable rejoinder for everything. Why did Kalanick just call losing sleep “part of the fun” of doing business not long before pledging to join her sleep crusade? We’re in a period of transition, which means lots of behaviors can co-exist at once. Should tech companies be responsible for paying a living wage? Of course, but it doesn’t have to be either/or. As for Silicon Valley’s unspoken contest about who can sleep the least, she said, “A new status symbol is emerging [in the tech industry] which is, ‘Hey, I’m important enough that I can disconnect. I’m important enough that I can go to a place without Wi-Fi and have people I can delegate to.’”

For revolutionaries without delegates? There’s always a hot bath.

Hello from the other side.

Gwyneth Paltrow's pop-up shop, goop mrkt, came to San Francisco this week. (Yep, note the very trendy lack of vowels!)

The shop opened at 140 Maiden Lane, a "stunning small-scale prototype of Frank Lloyd Wright’s design of the Guggenheim Museum," which feels VERY GOOP.

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed

At the goop mrkt's opening party, there was "pizza" from a recipe in Gwyneth's new cookbook.

Pizza made of gluten-free crust, yogurt and a bunch of green things.

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed

There were tons of attractive, lithe people in attractive, lithe outfits.

All with immaculate skin, obvi.

Jess Misener / BuzzFeed

And of course, tons of fancy stuff to buy.

Serums! Decorative baskets! Gold spatulas! Sustainable yoga mats! "Beauty dust"!

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed

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Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed

This week Gwyneth Paltrow, patron saint of conscious uncoupling, opened a pop-up store called goop MRKT near San Francisco’s Union Square. The temporary storefront was set up inside a former gift shop designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. French sandalwood candles and an 18-karat gold nameplate “Mommy” necklace were on display in glass cubbies along the building’s winding white ramp. Wright used the circular design as a prototype for the iconic interior of the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. One guest at the opening night soiree hashtagged his party pics #goopenheim.

Guests at the opening on Wednesday night — including the founders of Instagram, Pinterest, and Eventbrite, at least one venture capitalist, and a Twitter exec — were treated to fresh oysters, hand-shucked by a roving waiter with a man bun. Thursday evening, the store was closed for another, second-tier private event for the press. All the hors d’oeuvres were recipes made from It’s All Easy, Paltrow’s latest best-selling cookbook promising the masses a macrobiotic glow.

The waiter passing around a “pizza” made of flatbread and light green vegetables offered the corresponding page number from the cookbook. The triangle-shaped treat was about as close to a pizza as zoodles are to pasta carbonara. It tasted yeasty, but with a bright cucumber finish. For beverages, your choice was pinot grigio or an adorable mini-container of Goop Glow Beauty Milk (a breakfast smoothie) that had been “alchemized” by Moon Juice, one of the vendors at the market. It looked like chocolate milk and tasted like the slushy remains of a berry Jamba Juice. Again, unsettling, but not unpleasant.

The building’s interior was divided up into sections for kitchen, home goods, lounge, sporty clothing, work clothing, etc.; the effect was almost like perusing Gwyneth’s home in Brentwood, California, except with price tags. Rooting around for the tag was like a tiny adventure: Would an item be overpriced? (Plastic “Love” keychain by Stella McCartney, $165). Would it be bananas? (Yoga mats made from 100% recycled wetsuits, $79). Or would it almost seem reasonable, in context? (Individually wrapped bamboo face wipes by Ursa Major, $24). The smell of the room — tropical with herbal undertones — evoked the sense that you were about to get a very expensive massage.

This is the fifth pop-up store for GOOP, the lifestyle brand that introduced US Weekly readers to the master cleanse, cupping, and vaginal steaming. It’s part of Goop’s expansion into a “contextual commerce brand.” Paltrow hired Lisa Gersh, the former CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, as Goop’s CEO. And to fund the expansion, Goop raised a $10 million series A financing round last year, led by the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates, which has also invested in Gilt Groupe, Groupon, WebMD, and BuzzFeed.

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News

Contextual commerce is industry jargon for an editorial presentation and point-of-view so compelling that it seamlessly results in a sale. I experienced this phenomenon at the market’s Clean Beauty Apothecary when I was overcome with the need for a sleek pink bottle of Rosewater Uplifting Spray ($35) located in the best-seller drawer. It was a steal compared to Tammy Fender Bulgarian rose water ($65) in the anti-aging section. Perhaps it was so convincing because the Goop reps, who referred to their boss by first name only, just like the rest of us, emphasized that “every product in this shop is something that she said yes to.”

Before Thursday night’s shopping got into full swing, a trio of Goop executives positioned themselves on the curve of the ramp to shout-out some of the participating brands. “We happen to have Amanda from Moon Juice here. She’s the one that’s glowing,” said a Goop executive with stick-straight hair, gesturing to Amanda Chantal Bacon, a striking young woman in an oversize wool coat with a sundress underneath, who looked like she sprung up from the earth and an Abbot Kinney boutique simultaneously: horse-girl hair, hippie-girl skin, dgaf eyes. “You probably read about Moon Juice’s Moon Dust on Goop,” said the exec, “You can ask her your questions about finding the right dust.”

Internet dwellers are more likely to have heard about Moon Juice from the recent viral backlash than the webpages of Goop. The uproar was in response to an article in Elle detailing the oddball diet of “Hollywood’s favorite juice bar owner,” which calls for ingredients like shilajit resin, maca, mint chip hemp milk. The Frisky priced it out and found that eating like her for a day could cost $710, depending on how many “activated cashews” you have lying around your bungalow. Haters objected to the obscurity of the ingredients, the seemingly disordered aversion to food, and the preposterous statement that raw chocolate made of sprouted brown rice protein and chaga mushrooms is an “indulgence.” It's roughly the same condemnation of obliviousness and privilege that tends to circle Paltrow more so than humbler female-fronted brands like Jessica Alba's Honest Company, or ones that give off an empowering veneer, like Beyonce's Ivy Park.

Bacon was milling about in the kitchen section of the pop-up store, in front of a display of Moon Dusts, which the Goop site describes as elixirs and formulas. In person, Bacon made Moon Dusts sound like an additive that could be thrown in a batch of pancakes, just as easily as a tea. A full collection of all seven costs $340, but individual containers range from $55 to $65. Tiny mounds of each powder were displayed in little ceramic dishes; it wasn’t clear if those were testers, although one pile of dust had a distinct fingerprint.

“I did reach a plateau where I was like how much healthier can I be? That's where the quest began with these guys,” Bacon said, pointing to her dusts. Bacon said it was less about an immediate boost and more about the cumulative effect of taking the dusts and building a ritual around it. “It’s like tricking out your system, or you could look at it as biohacking,” she said. “Plays into the idea of slow beauty or slow conscientiousness in that these plants have all of their own intelligence.” Whereas a martini will knock you down or a quadruple espresso shot will send you on a roller coaster, the dusts represent a “sustainable force to tap into.”

Bacon said that the term biohacking usually connotes a male, extremist vibe, but her product line was just as fixated on optimization, efficiency, and a willingness to not give a shit about sounding crazy. “When it tumbles out of me it looks like this,” she said, gesturing again to her dusts. “But this is some hardcore biohacking.”

In that context, the Goop experience, normally derided for its costly, out-of-touch solutions to nonexistent problems (like an unsteamed vagina) sounds just like a contemporary tech startup. Behind me in the corner of the kitchen was Juicero, a Wi-Fi-connected juicer ($699), and a carrot-beet juice pouch ($5) that users have to get mailed to them since regular ingredients can’t be inserted into the machine. The company raised around $100 million in funding from prestigious Silicon Valley venture capital firms like Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins.

Bacon told me that Paltrow was a good touchstone for dealing with this kind of criticism in the face of new ideas. “I really have her to look to in any moment of doubt,” said Bacon. “The negative storm, especially when it goes viral, means that there's some success to be had. There's an awakening.”

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed

She was more taken aback by the strength of the response than the negativity. “I actually thought, People are ready to take that seriously!”

“If you're spending that much time on it that's saying, ‘Oh no, the wave is coming! Goddamnit, I’m going to have to try Sex Dust! It’s coming for me.’ Our sales went through the roof.” In fact, the bigger repercussion on her brand was finding more vendors “because the demand globally has been out of control.”

Bacon gamely answered other questions about the backlash. “Bad manners aside,” she said, “I thought there were valid and thoughtful questions: 'Does that work? Is it safe? Is it pleasurable? Is this meant for me? Can I afford this?'”

“The tone around it was a little bit aggressive, but that's just sort of the general tone out there,” she said.

On the eating disorder question, she expressed the same fear as many women who have found their name in the comments section of a post. “I was surprised that people didn’t call me fat,” said Bacon. She was under the impression that for women being torn up on the internet, “the thought is you’re always going to be called fat." When she saw herself described as the opposite, it was “only laughable to me,” she said, gesturing to herself this time. There is “absolutely nothing frail about me.”

Bacon also said that after the response, she went back to the “scientific nutrition program” that she uses to vet the labels for Moon Juice products and found that she had consumed 2,664 calories, 50% of which were from plant-based fats. (Her PR rep had trouble confirming the number, but said it was safe to say it was around 2,000 calories.

“I eat in a very particular way and it's my hobby,” said Bacon. “I'm a nerd. When you nerd out really hard on something for a lifetime, there are a lot of strange things that can happen.”

Just then Bacon’s 4-year-old, Rohan, came by. She picked him up and slung him on her hip, answering questions through a curtain of glossy hair that he pulled across her face. After a blood test at age 17, Bacon was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder called Hashimoto’s disease. She was told that she may not be able to get her period or that she might be diabetic by the time she was 25. But, said Bacon, “I completely changed my blood. Now, I have the blood of an 18-year-old and I'm in my mid-thirties.”

How singularitarian.

Google

The Burning Man vibe was intentional. For Google I/O this year — its annual developer conference, typically held in San Francisco's antiseptic Moscone convention center — the company stayed in Mountain View, camping out at Shoreline Amphitheatre, a grassy concert hall just a short bike ride away from its headquarters.

The keynote kicked off with a wink to the libertine festival. From control booths in the back of the theater, a woman in a leather vest and a man in a collarless blazer strummed a supersized string instrument made from cords that hung in the air high above the audience — an Earth Harp that previously made an appearance in Black Rock City. Google parked a massive “art car" shaped like a ship and festooned with Burning Man bumper stickers in the middle of its sandbox playground for new software and hardware. Product demos took place in repurposed shipping containers. Tycho DJ’d the afterparty.

It was all supposed to signal Google’s return to its roots. In 1998, when the company's founders split for the playa, they added the Man to Google's logo — its first doodle. Burning Man is where Eric Schmidt proved he wasn’t too square to be the company's CEO. When Larry Page spoke of setting aside a place to experiment, free from government interference, he’s describing Burning Man.

Mat Honan

In person, the effect was more corporate than countercultural — like something Shingy, the digital prophet with a microchip in his AOL business card, might pitch in a board room. But the mind-altering message still came through, just from an unexpected source: mild-mannered Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who made a convincing case for the radical scope of Google’s initial ambitions.

Pichai returned over and over to Google’s 17-year-old mission statement: to organize the world’s information. Decade-old bets on machine learning and artificial intelligence have put Google ahead of the game when it comes to assisting users, he argued. So what if Google is years late to market and quasi-copying its competitors — the audacity and execution of its goal is (and was) radical. How many companies can make a prediction about technology that will be relevant a generation later, and actually pull it off?

And for an institution that’s been accused of antisocial tendencies, Google has learned a lot about people in 17 years, both in aggregate and about you as an individual. During the keynote, Pichai announced a few services and products intended to launch this year that brought the power of applying machine learning to human beings into stark relief. The coolest and most cinematic offerings were around the Google assistant, a “conversational” interface that powers everything from Google’s far-out improvements in voice search, to messaging, to Google Home, the company’s answer to Amazon Echo.

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Google Home is an unobtrusive device meant to blend into the background of your living room or your bedroom. In a promotional video, the a voice-activated, internet-connected speaker briskly enhances the morning routine of a photogenic family.

Google Home rearranged the mom’s schedule when her flight was delayed, woke up the son in time for school and helped the daughter cheat on her homework (but, like, in a cute way), and turned down the thermostat as they left home. The future of search is “ambient” and activated just by uttering the right words. The video makes it look like Google summoned the ghost in the machine, which now lives all around you.

“We think of this as building each user their own individual Google,” said Pichai. Fuck yeah, I want my own Google: I have some pressing questions for myself and I want answers fast.

Google’s ability to fulfill and even anticipate your needs has made its services incredible. Yet while the Google assistant and Google Home are both eager to take your relationship to the next level, it’s the information Google tracks that makes the magic. In order for Google Home to inform you that a flight is delayed, reschedule dinner reservations, and inform your friend, it needs access to your mail, calendar, and messaging. It has to dig through them and weave ties between one information stack and another. In other words, it’s not the individual products but how they all connect.

Mat Honan

Which is why instant gratification is the bane of privacy advocates. Because the uncomfortable truth about technology is that services are more useful when they’re given omniscient access to all your data.

Here's how it seems to work. First, Google’s technical genius convinces users to feed it information about our most intimate questions and communications. That anonymized information, in aggregate, helps improve Google’s machine learning and artificial intelligence. (Neural networks need to be fed, right?) And now Google is using all that artificial intelligence to make life more convenient, which in turn convinces users to have a hot mic in every room of our house and to feed it even more information.

Only Google can elicit that German-language-style mashup of desire and dread.

Yet despite all the implied trust, the word “permission” came up but once during a two-hour keynote, when Google’s Mario Queiroz described the vast potential of the Google assistant. “The Google assistant not only knows a lot about the world, but it can stand apart in how it can get to know you over time,” he said, quickly adding, “with your permission, of course.” The audience laughed. What else are you supposed to do when a multibillionaire company goes all sotto voce about its limitations? “As Google assistant gets better,” Queiroz went on to explain, “so will Google Home.” Then he played that video.

Pichai himself introduced another concern, albeit unintentionally. To demonstrate the ease and efficiency of enhanced search, Pichai showed the audience how the Google assistant could make the Friday night nuisance of finding a movie a breeze. Pichai asked, “What’s playing tonight?” The assistant knew he meant movies and spat back recommendations, trailers, and the like. He followed up, “What if I bring the kids?” and it refined the results and offered to buy four tickets. But how did the Google assistant know he had two kids? Or a partner for that matter?

In response to questions from BuzzFeed News, a spokesperson for Google said, “First, to be clear, the example Sundar walked through yesterday was entirely hypothetical — he was demonstrating how we think an assistant should work over time, provided you opt in to share this type of information and receive recommendations.” Concrete answers are not possible “until this functionality is available and working,” said the spokesperson. “Potentially, it could have been that you looked for and purchased four family movie tickets in the past.”

That omniscience is especially powerful compared to the myopic limitations of its chatbot competitors. (At Facebook’s recent developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg showed off a helper bot from 1-800-Flowers.) Siri is much more useful, but tends to short circuit when faced with casual conversation. That’s one reason why Danny Sullivan, chronicler of all things GOOG, said that anyone comparing Google Home to Siri was “missing the big picture.” What the digital helper represents is a search platform for your entire life, in every moment and every location. It's in your phone and on your computer, sure. But also your wrist, your car, your TV — and soon enough — your home.

Google

In the last stretch of the two-hour marathon, the sun began to descend row by row down the amphitheater, scorching strips of exposed skin not covered by complimentary Google sunscreen. The overheated audience dutifully exited and shuffled out. They stood in long lines to demo smartphone-guided robots that flung paint through the air at spinning cubes, and to buy swag that proved they were there.

When the Shoreline Amphitheatre location was announced, it was easy to imagine that Google wanted to use the lawn to roll out a fleet of self-driving cars or sky-dive onto the outdoor stage with VR gear for everyone. But, as Pichai argued repeatedly, context is everything. And letting Google in the front door is trippy enough.

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Nick Denton, founder of Gawker

POOL New / Reuters

Univision is not among the bidders to buy Gawker, sources familiar with the deal told BuzzFeed News. Earlier today, the New York Post reported that Gawker founder Nick Denton was looking to sell after the media company was ordered to pay $140 million in damages to Hulk Hogan for posting portions of sex tape.

The Post reported that one party had expressed interest in buying Gawker with a deal worth $50 million to $70 million and that Univision was one possible bidder. One source told BuzzFeed that Univision is actively pursuing how to expand its portfolio, but under recent conditions will not be bidding to buy Gawker, although the source did not rule out a bid in the future. Another source close to the Univision side said that the only negotiations were over a Spanish-language version of verticals like Gizmodo and Lifehacker. Univision has previously worked on Spanish-language sites for Variety and Atlantic City Labs.

Yesterday, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who sits on the board of Facebook and once served as CEO of PayPal, admitted that he has been financing lawsuits against Gawker with the hopes of crippling the media company. Thiel told Dealbook that he had paid about $10 million to finance claims from the wrestler, whose real name is Terry Gene Bollea. Dealbook spelled out the billionaire Libertarian's secretive legal machinations, but did not include comment on Thiel's pledge as a delegate for Donald Trump.

In April, Bloomberg reported that Univision was aiming for an IPO in the second half of the year that could raise as much as $1 billion. Before the verdict in the Hogan trial, Denton sold a minority stake in the company to Columbus Nova Technology Partners. According to the Post, Columbus purchased a minority stake in Gawker for $100 million, however Politico says the amount was "far less."

Disclosure: Nitasha Tiku is a former Gawker employee.

Asa Mathat for Vox Media

At 9 p.m. on a Wednesday night, at an exclusive resort along the California coast, Elon Musk blew a lot of millionaires’ minds.

Musk is the CEO of two audacious companies, SpaceX and Tesla. He was onstage at Code Conference, a prestigious, invite-only tech event to which tickets cost $6,500 (excluding hotel). The three-day conference is hosted by tech blog Recode at a cliffside resort outside Los Angeles and is attended by startup founders, brand reps, a curated list of reporters, and roving packs of venture capitalists wearing Apple Watches. Attendees exiting the ballroom after Musk’s hourlong session looked dazed. They made explosion gestures at the sides of their head as though the scope of Musk’s ambitions had — boom — set off cerebral rockets from which they may never recover.

The trigger for all this cognitive decimation included Musk’s meditations on Mars (it should be run as a “direct democracy”), neural lace (the next phase of artificial intelligence: a layer inserted in the jugular), and whether our reality is really just a video game simulation (no doubt). “The odds that we're in base reality is one in billions. Tell me what's wrong with that argument?” said Musk.

No one did. This was not the room for that. This year’s conference also included talks from Bill and Melinda Gates, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Musk was there to offer a vision of the future and some light intellectual domination — not to be fact-checked by lesser beings.

Code Conference (formerly: D Conferences) is known for operating more like an executive clubhouse than, say, the crowded bazaars of TechCrunch Disrupt or CES. This is where young Mark Zuckerberg sweated through his Illuminati hoodie and where Steve Jobs and Bill Gates sat down together for a joint interview. This year, Obama was rumored to come (he didn’t). Elizabeth Warren came last year. Kim Kardashian appeared at one of Code’s offshoot events.

Recode co-founders Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg are two of the best-known tech journalists in the industry. Swisher is both feared and adored for her quick wit, bullshit detector, and combative interview style, which shines onstage. She generously mentors many reporters (including myself) and encourages them to be aggressive and fearless. Yet Code Conference is a very safe space for the tech elite.

Jack Dorsey felt comfortable enough to go onstage wearing a #StayWoke Twitter shirt despite Twitter’s abysmal diversity record. (The shirts were made by Twitter’s black employees group Blackbirds. There was one in every conference swag bag.) Despite the mounting antitrust cases against Google, CEO Sundar Pichai faced only one question about about investigations in the European Union. “It’s a position we feel fortunate to be in — we are very, very popular and users use us a lot,” he said with a smile. Sheryl Sandberg (a friend of Swisher’s) argued that Peter Thiel’s revenge plot on the media won’t get him kicked off the board because it was “independent” of his role at the world’s most influential media distribution platform. Sandberg made it all sound like a well-established, accepted practice; nobody blinked.

That safe cocoon extended even to the conference’s alt-programming track, like the talks from Bill and Melinda Gates about the massive impact that access to contraception has on the lives of women, and from DeRay Mckesson, one of the leaders of the Black Lives Matters movement, who joined Dorsey on stage. "Conferences like this don't reflect the diversity of the country,” Mckesson told the crowd, urging them to diversify the rooms where decisions get made.

He was the first and only African-American speaker onstage that week. Swisher told BuzzFeed News: “[President] Obama had accepted and had planned to come, but the schedule of his trip to Asia changed and made it not possible."

But back to Musk, whose only actual news was about updated deadlines for SpaceX and Tesla. However, his every utterance was covered like a revelation because, well, he’s Elon. He has successfully risen up from the ranks of piddling software slingers to become a metal-bending, gravity-defying demigod. His crazy ideas about electric vehicles and rockets have proven wildly influential. So if he says he’ll reach escape velocity to Mars before this ruined planet of ours implodes, you listen. And for the people in the room who haven’t shared a hot tub with Musk: *mind-exploding hand-gestures*.

The free booze helped.

When Musk’s private jet was delayed, pushing the session well past its 8 p.m. start time, guests lingered at the catered outdoor dinner, where they were served sweet potato samosas and meatless burgers from Impossible Foods (which has raised $182 million from investors like Bill Gates and Khosla Ventures to make a sustainable global food system). The previous night, a hipster coffee cart set up camp on the balcony, serving complimentary coffee cocktails.

At dinner the first night, there was a confluence of tables with powerful venture capitalists, not unlike Burning Man’s Billionaire’s Row by the beach. Vinod Khosla, Yuri Milner, Bill Gurley, Chamath Palihapitiya, and Jim Breyer could be found, and approached, milling about between sessions as well. The ability to pull from tech’s pantheon is what makes Code Conference so popular with industry insiders and reporters. But it also leads to a clubby environment where sacred principles and outlandish presumptions can go unchallenged. For example: What are the odds that investing in rockets is the best way to save mankind?

Never mind, blastoff.

Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!

The previous afternoon Bezos spoke onstage for a session just as rousing as Musk’s. Bezos also ascended into visionary mode when he talked about his own massive investment in space. Both billionaires threw out tweetable lines that showed their interplanetary perspective. Bezos spoke about “zoning Earth for residential and light industrial.” (The heavy industrial stuff would move “off-planet” in a few hundred years when chip factories would be built in space.) Musk threw out the phrase “Earth-based revenue,” like monetizing Mars was just a matter of time.

Meanwhile, back on our home planet, Uber accepted $3.5 billion from the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, where the repressive political regime has forbidden women to drive. (The news dropped right before Uber’s Chinese rival took the stage at Code.) Airbnb is trying to make its platform less hospitable to racists, and social media’s messianic march to take over the globe has clashed, disastrously, with regulators and cultural norms in India, Iran, and Russia. And Peter Thiel, a billionaire Facebook board member, has been secretly investing in lawsuits to put Gawker out of business while Facebook is battling widespread distrust over its bias and stranglehold on the media.

These clashes between technology and the world of men made the future as told by Musk and Bezos sound like an escapist fantasy — a tabula rasa where messy Earth-based problems either disappeared or were offshored to outer space. At times, the whole thing felt like a front-row seat to watch billionaires fight a proxy war over what the future will look like for the other 99 percent — whether that was space, AI, poverty, or the First Amendment.

Metropolis

Code Conference couldn’t have come at a weirder time in already strained relationship between Silicon Valley and its chroniclers. Media people are flabbergasted at tech investors defending Theranos; tech investors are appalled that anyone in the media could defend Gawker. Both sides also seem a bit chastened by what slipped past their attention (see again: Theranos). Tech investors seem certain that there’s a media conspiracy to hurt them. Media people got their Thiel conspiracy theory confirmed. And there’s a phalanx of public relations people in between. As “tech” progresses faster and faster and into new areas, the tech press becomes increasingly untrained to keep it in check. So, what better time to share some venture-backed meat and guarded small talk?

It felt like a zoo where the lions were let out of their cages, but you’re supposed to treat them like cats. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Recode announced before the conference that Gawker founder Nick Denton was coming to speak on the third day. Thiel was invited to debate him, but didn’t show. Nor could they find a stand-in. “People like to tweet and fund lawsuits, but no one would come out and debate,” Swisher said, as one of the Code’s signature red chairs remained empty.

The previous day, I'd heard Khosla say that he would have debated Denton, but the schedule didn’t work out. “What would you have said?” I asked. He didn’t want to comment, and suggested I read his tweets on the subjects — but to read all of them together. “I don’t care about Gawker so much,” Khosla said, eventually. He cares because “it lowers the standards of the New York Times” and other publications in regard to fact-checking. “What if I called you a child molester?” he asked.

Onstage, Denton told Swisher that the confluence of money and power in Silicon Valley are both “relatively new,” so they are not used to being covered as a group with entrenched interests. To the outside world, however, the rich seem to be “controlling things from the shadows, funding lawsuits, special-purpose vehicles, offshore accounts, whatever it is they can exercise power very discreetly.” Nowadays, a Silicon Valley billionaire is a 1,000 times more powerful than your average congressional representative “and yet subject to a fraction of the scrutiny, accountability,” said Denton. Those same power brokers, he added, invest or lead companies that monitor everyone else. News, journalism, and gossip are one corrective, he said.

But perhaps the chumminess on display at Code poses a more constant and diffuse threat to aggressive journalism than a vengeful billionaire, or even a biased billionaire publisher.

The closer you get, the argument goes, the more you know and the less you say in order to keep that access. It may sound like a soft power, but that is exactly what informs the kind of coverage you see in the press, and it explains Silicon Valley’s ability to evade questions. When Swisher and Mossberg tried to press Musk on his fears of runaway AI compared to fears of Donald Trump (whose golf course happens to be less than five miles away), the CEO of the company that's trying to send people to Mars said of the election, “I'm not sure how much influence I can have as one person in the outcome.”

During his speech, Musk touched on that same theme of increasing inequality when it comes to power and control. In the midst of his diatribe about the dangers of AI, Musk told the audience that there was a particular quote he loved from Lord Acton. “He was the guy who came up with ‘Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,’” Musk said. The quote that applied to AI, Musk continued, was “Freedom consists of the distribution of power and despotism in its concentration.”

The entrepreneur’s wording is a little different than Acton’s, but the meaning is the same. “I don’t know a lot of people who like the idea of living under a despot,” Musk quipped.

“And the despot would be the computer?” Swisher asked.

“Or the people controlling the computer,” Musk replied.

Disclosure: The author of this post was previously employed by Gawker Media. Update: This post has been updated with comment from Swisher.