The co-founder of iconic New York Mac computer shop Tekserve has died. I learned about Tekserve after I moved to New York from Berkeley in 2014. My new employer, The Intercept, dealt in sensitive files (e.g. from the Snowden archive of NSA documents) and had a healthy paranoia about buying things like laptops online.

Tekserve was very close to our first office on 5th Ave. The Intercept, funded by the founder of eBay, had a very tech startup-y approach to IT: I was told to walk over there and buy whatever I needed. My boss told me they sold to pretty much all the news media outlets in the city.

I opted for a little Macbook Air with an 11 inch screen, maxed out on RAM and flash storage (I think we still called those SSDs). I also bought an NEC MultiSync monitor (27 inches?) since I'd wanted one of those since I was a teenager, and also because my wife's uncle (by then retired) was an NEC sales rep traveling to the U.S. for many years. And an external keyboard and trackpad.

I remember being awed by the size of the store. I also remember distinctly that there was already another Ryan Tate in the database -- I gave them my name and they asked something like, "OK ya you live on <address in Manhattan>?" And I said no, must be a different Ryan Tate, I live in Brooklyn. (I had probably met this other Ryan Tate, probably it was the chef whose SoHo restaurant Savoy I visited right before it closed, maybe two years before all this, on a trip to NYC, and he came out that night to say hello to his name twin.)

It was probably the nicest, smoothest, most informative sales process I've been through at any computer store. I had done the Apple store thing to buy two Macs at this point, it was fine but always a lot of standing around (this has not changed) and at no point did I feel like someone on staff knew more than me about what I was buying. Tekserve flipped that around. It was all very human. I remember something at some point got mixed up about the monitor but they corrected the mistake on the spot.

I did deal with two Mac stores in Berkeley, M.A.C. on University Ave, which was great but much smaller than Tekserve. Actually they are still around it looks like! When I went there, as I recall, they were up a narrow flight of stairs in a second-floor retail space not even a block from the university. Indie Mac stores always felt a bit like pirate operations in the best way, and M.A.C. definitely was part of that aesthetic. I also got my first Mac from the UC Berkeley computer store (do those exist any more?).

I also patronized my friend Thomas Oh's Mac consultancy, Platinum Systems, also based in Berkeley (I can't remember if they ever had an office). He upgraded my Performa 636CD.

Tekserve went out of business in 2016, under pressure from company-owned Apple Stores, including a spectacular-looking one on 5th Ave.

The Apple Stores were an excellent move for Apple and its customers, but I always thought it was crummy and cheap that Steve Jobs' Apple didn't throw a bone to the indie shops that supported the company for decades, including when it was on the ropes. There's a thing I learned about recently called Record Store Day, where recording labels support indie shops with special vinyl releases and deals. There was a half block line out the door of my local record store for this last year. Apple could have had something similar, with some exclusive windows here and there for indie shops on some products or versions of products.

Anyway, it was nice to read about what a decent person and boss David Lerner was at Tekserve.

I was recently one of 20 people laid off from The Intercept, and one of my sources of comfort in the wake of that event has been re-watching Drifting Clouds, a 1996 film from the gifted director Aki Kaurismäki. It portrays a couple who lose their jobs amid recession in early 1990s Finland. There's a great scene set at the closing night of a restaurant where one of the couple works as head waitress. The owner spends her last moments there listening to a band play the sentimental iskelmä song Kohtalon Tuulet, or "Winds of Fate," and watching the aging clientele dance. Subtitles helpfully translate the wistful lyrics into English:

My youth is gone, but bitter I never should be
Happiness I was able to feel
With my friends to accompany me

All of our dreams now faded away
Bringing tears to my eyes

The winds of fate took all that away
All of our dreams never fulfilled

When those winds blow over me some day
You will never see me here again

As the band plays its final notes inside the plush and colorful restaurant, the head waitress, from the cold grays of a Helsinki sidewalk, bundles the owner off into a cab. "Thanks for everything, Ilona," says the owner. "And farewell."

"Goodbye manager," says the head waitress.

It is about as moving a depiction as I've seen of the last moments of a job, of the heartbreaking blend of sentimental humanity and brutal reality.

But really what sticks with me are the lyrics, and how Kaurismäki links the "winds of fate," a kind of death, to the end of a job. It's a perceptive move, because these days our careers feel like a series of hypotheses about how the world will work — and all of them are eventually smashed.

The Intercept I just left is, for example, one in a series that were born and died in my seven and a half years there: The editor in chief who hired me left a few months in and was replaced, the parent company's business model switched from blogs to streaming video, the publication went from for-profit to nonprofit, we housed and then relinquished the Snowden archive, the staff grew and shrank, the focus evolved.

Another provocative media company where I used to work, in the same building as The Intercept, was profitable and thriving until one day it ended up bankrupt because its reporting angered the wrong billionaire.

The couple in Drifting Clouds persevere, even as the setbacks pile up to comical heights, and with some merciful good luck create a new start for themselves. Similarly, change in the media business has done me more favors than harm. When I started college, my expected career track was to start at a small newspaper and hop to a series of progressively larger ones, earning a pittance along the way. By the time I graduated there was an explosion of web publications, then blogs, then digital media juggernauts like BuzzFeed and Vox, nonprofit investigative publications like Pro Publica and The Intercept, then the micro-nonprofits, and now further atomization into the likes of Substack and Patreon-supported publishers. I find these new vistas invigorating.

I'm on record as saying that some post-me Intercept is going to be the best yet, but I'm still proud of the ones I was a part of. My colleagues there (and the contractors and freelancers I worked with) were unbelievably talented and generous human brings, and thanks to them my teams

• revealed hidden NSA listening stations in a New York skyscraper and across the U.S.;
• exposed Google's secret plans for a search engine censored by the Chinese government;
• revealed Facebook's secret blacklist of people and groups too dangerous to praise;
• reported out the biggest-ever leak of files from Chinese authorities;
• explained new forms of surveillance, from tower dumps to your car's onboard computer to plug-in video surveillance networks;
• shined light on Oracle's activities in China;
• carefully redacted, reported out, and published more than 2000 internal NSA documents; and
• caught Zoom lying about encryption.

Yes, the "winds of fate" eventually blew over me, and I got bundled into my metaphorical cab. That was the price of being able to work at a fearless investigative online magazine with the kindest and most capable coworkers I've ever encountered, and it was absolutely worth it. At some point I'll figure out what comes next; hit me up on LinkedIn! In the meantime I'm enjoying some much-deserved beach time with my family this summer, which thankfully comes with some much nicer winds (and sadly not any iskelmä).

—Ryan Tate, June 15, 2022