The New Media Sweatshops

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The elevator door slides open and Jess slides in, looking slightly rumpled. Tara sizes her up.

“Didn't get much sleep last night?”

“You can tell?”

“Well, you're wearing the same clothes as yesterday.”

Jess laughs. Her music show, Freq, broadcast live over the Internet here at new-media house Pseudo, went late last night. Apparently the crowd got deep into the mix and the staff wound up hanging around until dawn. Now it's 10:30, and she's back from breakfast to make calls and set up meetings. “At some point I'm gonna have to shower,” she mutters as she wanders off to her desk.

Tara and I tour Pseudo studios, an odd mix of high camp and high tech. Each room reflects the peculiar pop-cultural animus of the twentysomethings who work here. There's the room for the women's Net shows, decorated in a late-'70s drag with a rainbow-colored bead door, shag carpeting, and inflatable toys. A group of goateed musicians hangs out in another room, holding keyboards and a computer monitor. (Who are they? “I have no idea,” Tara says.) There's a massive ballroom on the top floor where Freq is shot, complete with Dorian pillars and an ornate high ceiling, a reminder that this part of Soho has some of New York's most architecturally quirky lofts.

A recent graduate of Ohio University's broadcast news program, Tara is, technically speaking, executive assistant to Pseudo's CEO. Yesterday, however, the company needed someone to dress up as a “Pseudo chick” for a promotional photo shoot, so Tara—a tall, blond 22-year-old—found herself strapped into tall, white go-go boots, a micro mini, and a faux-fur-fringed black top. “The photographer had this 40-ouncer of Wild Turkey, and he kept saying, ‘Want some more? Want some more?’ ” she recalls. “We wound up getting loaded.” She didn't manage more than a few hours of sleep. “Sorry,” she apologizes, yawning. “I'm a bit burnt out today.”

In new media, it's difficult to find anyone who can boast a full night's rest. Later, I visit a 23-year-old acquaintance at a Web site design firm across town, only to find him collapsed on a comfy sofa in the staff room.

Late night? “Yeah.” He's been setting up a database for a Web site set to go live in two days. The client—a major corporation—is getting twitchy. Some deeply caffeinated all-nighters will be called for. “It's intense, but it's going pretty well,” he says, his hair out of whack with a minor case of bed-head. “I figure I have another two days like this. But it's cool—it's a really cool project.” He pours himself a thick coffee (bypassing the free beer) in the well-stocked kitchen and heads back to his workstation, plopping down beside two dozen other coders and designers clacking away at their keyboards as a stereo pumps out ambient techno on an endless loop. Most of them figure they'll be here until four in the morning.

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