Disrupted

Dan Lyons is a Journalist. I can't emphasize that last word enough. Nor, it seems, can Dan Lyons.

Lyons, a former Time writer and internet content raconteur, found himself in his early 50s without a decent job. After decades of covering the latest 20-something billionaires, he (sensibly) decided he wanted to jump into a startup to try to make his own big hit. Disrupted is his tale of woe, bemoaning the millennials and their shoddy union sensibilities and their loud music (no, seriously).

I don't want to dismiss Lyons' takedown of his former employer, Hubspot, as a simple case of “Old guy doesn't get how things work now.” There's absolutely no doubt that the management, owners and coworkers at his new employer are insane. The problem is, the things he brings up as issues on which to prosecute an entire industry/generation aren't exclusive to either the industry or that generation: As someone who's worked for a marketing agency, the headquarters of a multilevel marketing company and yes, even newspapers, all of the traits and peculiarities he mentions are things I've encountered. The trait of “being a shitty manager/coworker” is not endemic to a certain age group; it's more just an indicator of shitty people.

Don't get me wrong, the book is fun! See him learn that manager does not equal friend when his crazy direct supervisor's power-tripping petty bullshit constantly tears into Lyons after acting like they're best pals. Watch through some veiled sexism (paraphrase: “I'm not saying all women are shitty, but the three or four whom I interact with the most and are the only ones I talk about in depth in the book are terrible workers AND people”) as he grovels to the PR manager for offending her (paraphrase: “I don't understand why she's all upset just because I said an interview she arranged for the CEO went terribly.”). Revel as he reveals just how freaking out of touch he is when he tells us about his “hundreds of thousands of Facebook followers” then acts shocked and violated when it turns out his employer is watching what he writes and doesn't particularly enjoy his raining criticism down upon them.

As a former journalist, I particularly disliked the part where he complained about how much better journalists are as people. DID YOU KNOW that journalists: a) don't like meetings; b) would “[slam] doors and [turn] the air blue with profanity” if their boss made them a promise and then someone up the line changed their mind; c) if made to go to training, make fun of each other and the instructors and intentionally waste time. Oh, and also joke about killing someone in front an HR person; d) are lousy when asked to write someone beneath their level, like lead-generating blog posts (because of all their JOURNALISM EXPERIENCE).

Some of those are true, about some of the journalists I've worked with. Most are not. (Though, in fairness, journalists - especially older journalists - do tend to complain a lot that they're not allowed to say literally whatever they want in the newsroom, regardless of sexism/racism/profanity/just terrible ideas. As someone who's listened to a lot of them, this censorship is decidedly in everyone's best interest.) In fact, I'd bet you could replace the word “journalist” with “white guys who worked a white-collar job in the 80s/early 90s” and a lot of Lyons' complaints would have exactly the same meaning. Please note that I'm not calling him racist; I'm saying he's a overprivileged twit.

I'm not so much upset with the book or the writing as I am the idea of the book. Michael Lewis rose to fame with his (then-)shocking expose of the financial industry in Liar's Poker precisely because we didn't already know about. Lyons tended to follow trend stories (he did write for Time, after all) back when he wrote regularly, so his explosive reveal that “most web-based startups have terrible products and even worse business plans” isn't shocking, it's late and, most importantly, lazy. There's lots of good journalism out there about the bad and the good of our current economic/business/cultural climate. And it doesn't require taking a single company as evidence/harbinger of the doom of all things.

In a way, it's a tale of two mistakes. His, for his choice of employer, and me, for choice of reading material. I doubt either of us will make the same mistakes again. Oh, well. Unlike most of the readers of this book, at least I learned something.