But if these ideas come from CBT, the vocabulary used to describe them seems to come from somewhat less mainstream fields. The term “reframing,” for instance, comes out of something called neuro-linguistic programming. The idea of a cybernetic psychology took off after World War II, as cybernetics and information theory began to reshape many disciplines. In the 1970s, several of Gregory Bateson’s students pioneered the field of neuro-linguistic programming. Associated above all with Richard Bandler and John Grinder, neuro-linguistic programming remains influential today, even though it is widely regarded as a pseudoscience. Although NLP practitioners resist codifying their teaching, the basic idea is that we can reprogram behavioral patterns by changing our mental processes and the language we use in reflecting on them. They mean the “programming” quite literally, declaring that in communication there are no mistakes—everything is feedback.
The focus on failure is a central node along which, it seems, Silicon Valley translates computational concepts into psychological theories—or, as critics would have it, self-help platitudes. Mythologizing failure magically turns empathy into looking at yourself. Hearing “fail better” out of context, it turns out, allows you to reframe your navel-gazing as a posture of humility.
To Mark Zuckerberg’s credit, his 2017 Harvard graduation speech actually acknowledged the biggest problem with the gospel of failure: that its proper functioning presumes (and depends on) a thoroughly middle-class, young, white, and abled subject. “The greatest successes come from having the freedom to fail,” he said, and added a little later, “I know lots of people who haven’t pursued dreams because they didn’t have a cushion to fall back on if they failed.”
Zuckerberg is right: in capitalism in the United States at large, but most egregiously where the tech industry is concerned, the meaning of failure depends on who is doing the failing. For tech, failure is always assumed to be temporary; for everyone else, it’s terminal. Taxicab companies are going out of business because they’re losing money? Creative destruction, my friend—sink or swim. Uber hemorrhages cash? Well, that’s just a sign of how visionary the company is. This double standard justifies the exploitation of workers outside of the tech industry—and, in certain cases, the exploitation of workers within it. After all, in a world in which all failure is assumed to be temporary, there are recourses that workers at startups do not avail themselves of. Rather than sue the company that promised them options it never delivered, then went out of business and left them broke, they will quietly move on to the next startup, try harder, fail better. The tech industry is good at getting even its most well-compensated employees to forget one simple fact: whatever else failure is about, it is also about responsibility, particularly for one another.
And the question of whether or not someone gets to “fail fast” and then “iterate” is deeply dependent on social factors. Race and class are two of them, but the simplest is probably age. In 2017, after a string of terrible publicity, Uber’s then CEO, Travis Kalanick, admitted, “I must fundamentally change as a leader and grow up.” Even in a place as chockablock with balding skateboarders and middle-aged trick-or-treaters as San Francisco, a forty-year-old CEO of a seventy-billion-dollar company casting himself as an overenthusiastic kid who just needs to get his shit together was seen as a bit much. Not everyone can be or act young. And in the Valley, for most people, both have become unsustainable.
Failing in Silicon Valley is often a prerogative of the young—or, in Kalanick’s case, the young-acting. The speakers and attendees of FailCon, for instance, “totally clustered,” Cass Phillipps notes. They ranged in age from twenty-eight to forty-five. The speakers were usually talking about failures that were a few years in the past—with the notable exception of one unfortunate presenter who had to change his topic three weeks before the event because his next venture failed. Founders and investors sometimes talk about a “runway”: failure doesn’t matter because you still have a lot of time to achieve liftoff.
This runway gives failure a local component. In Silicon Valley, failure comes encased in bubble wrap, precisely because the people who gave the money and the people who blew it on a terrible idea are likely to work together again, or at least run into each other at parties. But what about those who aren’t? If you are not in their circle, then an altogether different set of rules applies. Many of the employees who have forgone sleep, pay, health care, and a social life for the benefit of now-worthless shares will not be instrumental in making the next spin of the wheel the winning one.
There are many ways to close up shop in Silicon Valley: get acquired or acqui-hired, wind the company down, buy out your investors, or start anew as a small business. Depending on how a company dies, however, most of the employees will not be part of these transactions. Google won’t acqui-hire the receptionist, or even the publicity person. Given the gender dynamics of Silicon Valley, this means that men usually are the ones who actually get to fail better. Given that many founders meet in college, it means that having gone to school with the top team is a plus. Those excluded are people who are treated as contractors and receive only equity, people who vest and then leave, people who are thrown out before they reach a vesting cliff after a mysteriously negative performance review.
And for these people, the law of repeat business reveals its ugly side. “None of this litigation happens
