Burn Before eBaying

“It’s the whatever-ness of it. You feel that at any minute in any town this could happen...”

Tilda Swinton

This article is brought to you by eBay, the $28 billion tech company where you can sell your virginity or buy a Virgin Mary grilled cheese.

While everyone is focused on a taxing New York Times exposé, another stunning New York Times investigation is being overshadowed, that of the eBay Cockroach Cult where employees of eBay terrorized a couple who simply wrote a blog that contained occasional mild criticisms of the company.

If you have no idea what this story's about, I'll bring you up to speed. James Baugh, who may be a former CIA agent or maybe just thinks he was a former CIA agent, headed up eBay's department of Global Security and Resiliency. Baugh took his role very seriously. For example, when he found a knife on a barbecue grill on the eBay campus, Baugh warned his staff that a deranged person could use this knife to hurt somebody, then proceeded to stab an office chair.

Nobody removed the knife. It continued to stick out of the chair in eBay's office like an excalibur that nobody in the eBay kingdom had the power to extract.

James Baugh also enjoyed screening instructional videos for his staff, clips from movies such as The Wolf of Wall Street, Full Metal Jacket and American Gangster that he used to illustrate his management philosophy. One of his favorite movies was Meet the Fockers that he used to teach staff about the loyalty he expected from his team, his circle of trust.

In his crackerjack circle of trust was Veronica Zea, a young woman hired as a contract employee whose previous role was operating a roller coaster at a California amusement park. Her job was to track people of interest to eBay and place them on threat matrix.

This is where eBay CEO Devin Wenig and his communications chief Steve Wymer enter the story. At the top of Wenig and Wymer's threat matrix were Ina and David Steiner, husband and wife bloggers who criticized eBay, especially CEO compensation and the way eBay treated its sellers. Snippets of the exchange between Wenig and Wymer concerning Ina Steiner include:

Take her down! We are going to crush this lady! I want to see ashes! She is a biased troll who needs to get BURNED DOWN!

eBay is a company whose community values include treating others the way you would like to be treated, but such treatment did not extend to critics Ina and David Steiner. Based on his conversations with CEO Devin Wenig, comms chief Steve Wymer alerted his head of Global Security and Resiliency:

I genuinely believe these people are acting out of malice and ANYTHING we can do to solve it must be explored. Whatever. It. Takes.

James Baugh had his marching orders: target the Steiners and burn them down. Time to roll another film clip. On this occasion, the film was Johnny be Good where a villainous football coach is forced to deal with unexpected deliveries to his house. James Baugh asked his team to brainstorm unexpected deliveries for the Steiners.

Someone suggested sending a coffin, but eBay didn't send coffins to the Steiners perhaps because they couldn't find a supplier who delivers coffins to residential addresses. However they did send the Steiners a book on grief after losing a spouse, along with a funeral wreath, live spiders and a box of live cockroaches. The magazine Hustler Barely Legal arrived at neighbor's house with David Steiner's name on it. Swinger parties were directed to their address. $70 of pizza pies arrived and demanded payment. Twitter harassment that hinted at violence was also part of the burn-down-the-Steiners plan.

The Steiner's horror movie finally ended when local police traced a rental car parked across the street from their house to Veronica Zea, the intelligence analyst who was "terrified and stuck," on her roller coaster ride at eBay.

In the end, people inside the circle of trust including James Baugh and Veronica Zea were arrested and charged with conspiracy to cyberstalk and tamper with witnesses, each charge associated with a prison sentence of up to five years. CEO Devin Wenig made off like a bandit with a $57 million exit package like CEOs always do, and comms chief Steve Wymer now heads up a Boys & Girls organization in Silicon Valley where he pretends to uphold the Golden Rule. eBay's stock has doubled during the pandemic.

What does all this mean? Internet critiques can make people crazy, as The New York Times suggests, or something else?

Isn't it possible that every company is to some extent a cockroach cult? When I worked in finance, we'd perform ritual financial estimates E-1, E-2, and E-3, a mind-reading exercise where we'd try to guess what the executives wanted the future to look like. We would bend, squeeze, and stretch numbers until they resembled a silly putty version of a possible truth in a tortuous back-and-forth of financial fortune telling with the executives getting angrier and angrier the longer the exercise continued.

Three times each year, E-whatever was the most important thing in my life. I started to believe my job was terribly important, a sign that Bertrand Russell said heralded the approach of a nervous breakdown. E-whatever became conflated with my existence as a human being, yet there was a barely audible mantra in my mind reminding me that it was all utterly meaningless. But it couldn't be meaningless because everybody around me believed that E-whatever was terribly important too. This collective delusion was a source of both comfort and terror. 

Nobody asked me to sit in a car and watch the house of couple who criticized the company, but if they did, perhaps I'd do it, especially if I was a contract employee who thought I'd be summarily terminated for disobeying, like the anonymous woman in the circle of trust at eBay who was fired for chewing on her pen. Maybe I'd quit over the live cockroaches, but surely I wouldn't be responsible for delivering the cockroaches to the door of the enemies of the company. I'd simply place an order with online cockroach firm. That's not so bad, and if I didn't do it, somebody else would. Maybe I'd start to believe I was a former CIA agent who played a terribly important cockroach role at terribly important company.

The company I worked for was on the stock exchange. You can't be heartless if you have stock ticker, can you…?

No, no. God no. We don't want those idiots bumbling around in this. Burn the body. Get rid of it. And, uh, keep an eye on everyone. See what they do. Report back to me when, uh, I don't know...when it makes sense. ~ CIA Superior, Burn After Reading