Although it certainly isn’t the most serious social problem with Silicon Valley’s approach to failure, there is something deeply corrosive about the primacy of the story. The fetishizing of narratives of failure and one’s eventual salvation from failure prevents what Cass Phillipps had in mind: to linger with failure, to make sense of it. Even if we could get to the utopia Zuckerberg seemed to be envisioning when he spoke at Harvard—one where everyone has the freedom to fail and society does its best to shield them from the most extreme consequences and to help them try again—there would be something troubling about the smoothness of such a system. After all, the gospel of failure assumes that all failure is just a stepping-stone to a greater success.
A lot of the younger venture capitalists are themselves highly successful founders, and the contingency of their own success hasn’t yet sunk in. I’ve seen that people who strike it rich in Silicon Valley are generally dumbstruck by their own success. It comes so early, so unpredictably, so noiselessly—a bolt of lightning out of a blue sky. But people have to make sense of what happens to them. Some withdraw almost shyly from their own good fortune. But those who don’t withdraw have to tell themselves stories about it. Why do they deserve their good fortune? What does it mean?
In his Histories, Herodotus tells the story of Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos in the sixth century B.C. Polycrates had succeeded in all of his endeavors—“no matter where he directed his campaigns, fortune consistently favored him.” An allied ruler pointed out to him that there was such a thing as too much good fortune, and that, in order to ward off the jealousy of the gods, he ought to rid himself of something he valued above all. “Better to go through life experiencing bad as well as good luck than to know nothing but success.” Polycrates decided to throw a priceless ring into the Aegean. But soon afterward, one of Polycrates’s cooks brought him a most unexpected find: while preparing a fish for a feast at the palace, the kitchen staff had discovered their ruler’s ring, and naturally returned it to him immediately. In terror, the allied ruler abandoned Polycrates, terrified by the extent and the relentlessness of Polycrates’s good fortune.
The concepts explored in What Tech Calls Thinking can be read as so many attempts to grapple with something that resembles the strange fate of Polycrates—to find reasons why success has happened to certain individuals, certain companies, certain sectors of the economy, with such relentless force. But rather than casting away a precious ring, the kind of thinking I have traced in this book seeks to reframe itself to avoid Polycrates’s dilemma. Confronted with the uncanny smoothness of their ascent, Silicon Valley’s protagonists fetishize the supposed break and existential risk entailed in dropping out of college to found a company. Confronted with the fact that the platforms that are making them rich are keeping others poor, they come up with stories to explain why this must necessarily be so. And by degrading failure, anguish, and discomfort to mere stepping-stones, they erase the fact that for so many of us, these stones don’t lead anywhere.
The domestication of failure is where one generation of Polycrateses pass both their existential dilemma and their unwillingness to grapple with it on to the next. Because only those who have encountered the most stupefying, most inexplicable success will end up funding the next generation of startups. If you wind down, get acqui-hired, or make some other type of “graceful exit,” you usually don’t have the cash to do venture capital investing. Among those who do have that kind of cash, their sense of reality can be deeply warped—and maybe it has to be, as they are all a little shell-shocked by their extraordinary good fortune. Perhaps the most important thing Silicon Valley could still learn about failure is that it is powerless before its own success.
Acknowledgments
This book has been a long time coming as I, a humanist with very little experience in tech, started to get my bearings in the strange land of Silicon Valley. I’d like to thank the many folks who have spoken candidly with me over the years about the ideas they encounter in the tech industry. Some of the critiques rehearsed here were first inspired by these friends—and for that reason alone I probably shouldn’t name them. I want to thank my editors at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and Zeit Online for giving me one fascinating assignment around the Valley after another—sending me to Cougar Night at the Rosewood Sand Hill, asking me to do a deep dive into the R. Buckminster Fuller Collection at Stanford, and not giving out my email when a bunch of Elon Musk fans got mad at me.
The editors of Logic—Moira Weigel, Ben Tarnoff, Christa Hartsock, and Jim Fingal—were instrumental in making this book happen. So were several of the writers of that wonderful publication—Xiaowei Wang, Wendy Liu, and many others. My colleagues at Stanford, including Fred Turner, Jennifer Burns, Annika Butler-Wall, Persis Drell, Joshua Landy, and Denise Winters, helped me tell the Stanford part of the story as best I could. A massive thank-you to Ashe Huang, who fact-checked the Stanford portions of the book, and to Will Tavlin, who fact-checked all of it again. And an even bigger thank-you to Jackson Howard and Emily Bell at FSG, who helped hone this manuscript over many months.
I am indebted to the
