It was the summer season of 2013, and Laurie Segall, a 27-year-old tech correspondent for CNN, was being given a tour of a intercourse dungeon designed particularly for Silicon Valley tech geeks.
Madame Rose, a dominatrix from Oakland, Calif., took Segall on a tour of the non-public membership — adorned with intercourse swings, leather-based restraints, silver chains and not less than one system designed to provide low-grade electrical shocks.
However these contraptions, regardless of appearances, weren’t typical BDSM toys.
“Every little thing in right here is high-tech,” defined Rose, as Segall remembers in her new memoir, “Particular Characters: My Adventures with Tech’s Titans and Misfits” (Dey Avenue Books).
The gasoline masks, as an example, got here with Apple earbuds, designed by certainly one of her “tech shoppers.” A big iron cage was “constructed in good proportion to the jail cells in Alcatraz by an MIT engineer,” Rose added.
Segall couldn’t assist however surprise if any of the engineers she’d interviewed or met at numerous tech conferences had spent any time in that cage. As if studying her thoughts, Rose informed her: “The place do you assume all of the Apple engineers get their inventive inspiration? I lock them up for the weekend.”
For Segall, who’d been masking the tech trade for CNN since 2008 — again when scrappy younger pioneers promising to vary the world with apps have been nonetheless extensively ignored by mainstream media — the assembly with Madame Rose gave her a brand new perspective.
“Maybe part of me felt a sure delight, imagining the over-confident bros of Silicon Valley getting locked up,” Segall writes. The tech world was more and more pushed by “extra and chance, defying norms, energy and management — I might really feel all of it hanging within the air, alongside whips and chains. I puzzled out loud concerning the connection between energy, management and intercourse.”
Madame Rose simply laughed and crossed her legs. “Oh, honey,” she stated. “When you solely knew.”
When Segall first joined the cable information big — the Atlanta native moved to New York Metropolis by the use of the College of Michigan — she hoped to make her mark by masking the identical tech entrepreneurs “I used to be assembly in dive bars and tech meetups,” she writes. “I needed to jot down concerning the folks nobody else was taking note of, those the world had but to note.”
She ended up touchdown unique interviews with lots of the greatest innovators in tech earlier than they grew to become family names, everybody from Mark Zuckerberg (Fb) and Jack Dorsey (Twitter) to Kevin Systrom (Instagram) and Travis Kalanick (Uber).
She was given entry not simply because she was among the many first to take them critically — Segall was recurrently briefing CNN anchors on rising tech traits, prepping them with ideas like, “Sure, ‘tweeting’ is the proper time period” — however as a result of she ran of their identical circles, ingesting and socializing with the longer term tech titans, and in some instances, relationship them.
The events have been her “secret weapon,” Segall writes, as a result of the “gossip flowed as freely because the drinks.” At one fancy gathering overlooking Central Park, she overheard a drunken enterprise capitalist mumbling, “Tweetdeck is promoting to Twitter for $40 million.” By ingesting until daybreak with the dealmakers themselves. she typically ended being the primary to report on such offers.
However as she obtained deeper into the tech revolution, Segall found that it wasn’t all about reinventing tradition and bringing folks nearer collectively. A lot of contemporary tech was about intercourse and experimentation and pushing the boundaries of what’s thought-about wholesome sexuality.
Or, as Madame Rose requested Segall: “Need to see the nipple clamps?”
In late 2013, the writer traveled to San Francisco for a narrative about intercourse employees who thought-about themselves Silicon Valley’s “different entrepreneurs” — a gaggle from “the world’s oldest career benefiting from the brand new cash pouring into the world’s latest career,” she writes.
Kitty Stryker, a social media marketer by day and prostitute by night time, informed Segall that when a brand new startup within the Bay Space was doing particularly effectively, she’d be visited recurrently by their staff — lots of whom weren’t shy about sharing how they obtained their riches.
“After which they could falter,” Stryker stated, “and then you definately’ll see a bunch of individuals from a unique startup.”
The escorts weren’t simply benefiting from the inflow of huge spenders—they have been going out of their method to goal them.
One other madam informed Segall that she made certain her steady of prostitutes wore “Recreation
of Thrones underwear” and lingerie adorned with phrases like “Winter is Coming” and “Geeks Make Higher Lovers,” particularly when promoting their providers on websites like MyRedBook and Craigslist, as a result of it “appealed to nerdy guys flush with startup inexperienced,” she informed Segall.
Many intercourse employees took benefit of the innovations created by their clientele.
Segall met one prostitute who recurrently used Sq., a cellular cost app designed by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, for extra discreet compensation from her johns.
“This most likely wasn’t what Jack had in thoughts,” Segall thought, recalling a coffee-shop interview the place Dorsey first informed her about his ambitions for Sq..
“I file it below a unique enterprise title,” the unnamed prostitute defined to Segall. “So far as Sq. is aware of, it’s a consulting enterprise.”
Not all the intimacy in Silicon Valley was being charged by the hour. In 2015, Segall discovered of a brand new app known as Secret, constructed by a former Sq. engineer, that permit customers anonymously “share secrets and techniques.” With a little bit snooping, Segall discovered that many distinguished Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have been polyamorous — which means, that they had a number of romantic relationships with each women and men.
Due to pals who vouched for her, Segall was quickly assembly folks like Sydney, an engineer at a serious tech firm who was in 4 relationships : with two ladies, a person (her fiancé), and an open slot for anyone who occurred to catch her consideration.
Sydney defined how love might be “hacked” within the “identical approach conventional industries have been upended by individuals who thought outdoors the strains,” writes Segall. “If entrepreneurs might hack transportation, i.e. Uber, why not hack the idea of conventional relationships?”
Folks in tech “have larger appetites for danger,” Sydney defined to justify her conduct. “Opening up your relationship is actually dangerous in an identical approach that beginning an organization is actually dangerous.”
Segall additionally stumbled upon an energetic swingers’ group, with weekly intercourse events the place little was left to the creativeness. She managed to safe an invitation from Ralph, the pseudonym of a former tech entrepreneur who bought his first firm for $5 million, to “Silicon Valley’s premier intercourse get together.”
“I’d discovered that 4,000 folks round Silicon Valley have been on his mailing record,” writes Segall. “Many have been startup staff, software program engineers and enterprise capitalists.”
Friends checked into the get together with an iPad, utilizing software program that Ralph bragged was
designed by “the identical man who constructed Oracle.”
Upon arriving on the get together, she made small discuss with couples she acknowledged from their tech careers — there was a girl who labored at Google, and an engineer who constructed supercomputers — and found how simply they agreed to speak concerning the swinging life-style.
“I keep in mind after we slept with one other couple and high-fived after,” shared a girl wearing a Catholic schoolgirl outfit, whereas her husband, an worker at Sq., blushed.
![One prostitute in the book is revealed to use Square for client payments. "That's probably not what [founder] Jack [Dorsey] had in mind," Segall writes.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/silcon-valley-sex-life-10.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1024)
Upstairs on the half was the “Magic Carpet F–ok Area,” a room carpeted in mattresses with pink sheets and blue pillows.
“That’s the place I noticed him — effectively, the again of him,” Segall writes. A enterprise capitalist she’d had a cordial however unmemorable dialog earlier within the night was now “on his knees, bare, an enormous multicolored tattoo on his decrease again, thrusting forwards and backwards.”
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