Nothing was neutral, there was always something attached to it, clinging to it, triggering, pulling, insisting, asking her to look, telling her not to forget. She’d tried explaining this one to Adam, but he had shaken his head and insisted that she was going to exhaust herself, that it sounded like she was living several lives at once, all stacked up on her, weighing her down, bottoming her out. Waleed had understood, a little. He had told her it was the same for him, to walk through the city was to walk with ghosts.

She emerges from the confessional in a state of unease, far worse than when she went in. No penance to ease the burden! She knows she must end the affair but doesn’t think she can, a common human dilemma, not only related to romance. Shouldn’t have gone to the priest, not before she was ready. Who knows what she wanted when she went in there, but certainly not this outcome. Now she’s having a crisis.

Of more than a hundred former and current Nvidia employees I spoke with for this book, almost all had a tender story about Huang to relate. One employee—the same one whom Huang had humiliated in front of dozens of people, asking for a full refund of his salary—told me that when he was later diagnosed with a serious medical issue, Huang offered to pay in full, out of pocket, for his treatment. When Ben Garlick decided to leave Nvidia for a start-up, he was startled to receive an impassioned, personal plea from Huang to stay.

In Telegram and Discord groups, Fuentes traded tips with other Venezuelans working on Appen as they sought to deduce the rules like an elaborate puzzle. They discovered that using a VPN to appear to be in the US earned them the most money. They also learned—the hard way—that it was a high-risk endeavor. Appen searched for this kind of behavior, which was a violation of platform rules, and punished workers by closing their accounts. An account closure could be devastating. Any earnings a worker hadn’t withdrawn would vanish, and opening up a fresh account meant starting back at the bottom, with the least-well-paid tasks or, increasingly, no tasks at all.

Fuentes taught me two truths that I would see reflected again and again among other workers, who would similarly come to this work amid economic devastation. The first was that even if she wanted to abandon the platform, there was little chance she could. Her story—as a refugee, as a child of intergenerational instability, as someone suffering chronic illness—was tragically ordinary among these workers. Poverty doesn’t just manifest as a lack of money or material wealth, the workers taught me. It seeps into every dimension of a worker’s life and accrues debts across it: erratic sleep, poor health, diminishing self-esteem, and, most fundamentally, little agency and control.