The Wired Sisters
A Tragedie of Digital Disruption, in One Acte
THERE WERE THREE of them, as there have always been three, and they met on a Thursday in a rented office above a Pret A Manger near Kings Cross. The baristas downstairs would later say that the coffee machine had behaved strangely that morning, producing three black coffees, without instruction, before anyone had arrived and that of the three women who came to collect them only two cast shadows. But baristas say a lot of things, and none of them write any of it down.
The three were named Denise, Morag, and Constance, and they were builders, for that is the word the industry uses, and they used it too, and we shall let it stand. Though what they built was not a bridge nor a building nor, indeed, anything that existed in the physical realm. They built platforms.
Between them they had built AlgoRecruit™ that rejected a human rights lawyer for "insufficient leadership signalling," The Happiness Index™ that secretly reported employees' private Slack messages to HR in a weekly dashboard, and FocusForge® that disabled your emails for three hours every morning whether you wanted it to or not. All three of their ventures had been seed funded. All three had been successful. All three had been acquired. And all three had made the lives of ordinary professionals immeasurably worse. They fully intended the next idea to be their most wicked yet.