In order to incite some initial discussion on the blog, I want to pose some questions about the “moral space” of the tech industry and how people in tech attempt to orient themselves in that space in their work. The history of the tech industry—as it is told and understood by key actors within it—is often rendered as a story or tale of virtuous striving by individual entrepreneurs who found their own companies and create radically innovative products that are not just commodities, but technologies that “change the world” as know it. Think Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and so on. In the moral space of tech in particular and informational capitalism writ large, the biographical stories of ascent and accomplishment become narrative frames and templates by which inhabitants of tech culture assess and evaluate their own identity, ambition, and moral worth.
Consider the stories of Wendy Liu and Elizabeth Holmes. Obviously, their specific biographies are quite different, with Wendy Liu struggling with the ethics of the business practices of her small start-up and Elizabeth Holmes pursuing her ambitions of tech greatness at any cost and ending up being convicted of fraud. Yet, there are significant communalities in her stories as they both are living and working with the hegemonic ideological framework of the moral space of tech.
One of these commonalities is their embrace of the tech dictum of “fake it until you make it”.
So central is this dictum to the entrepreneurial ethos of the tech start-up that Liu that she titles the fourth chapter of Abolish Silicon Valley (pages 53-75) that detail the first months of her start-up “Fake it until you make it”. Moreover, much of the discussion of the case of Elizabeth Holmes and its implication for Silicon Valley and the tech industry focuses on whether or not her fall from tech grace would put an end to ‘fake it until it make it” as a strategy for start-ups.
So, here are the questions for discussion:
1) Given what we have read in Liu and know about the case of Elizabeth Holmes, what does “fake it until you make it” mean as an ethic and business practice?
2) Why is does it appear to be such a common belief and value in tech culture?
3) Can we articulate it more systematically as an ideological construct, that is, as a form of power-knowledge that frames the world in existential, normative, utopian terms?
In addition to the Liu book and the Holmes documentary, here are some links to stories about the rise and fall of Holmes and Theranos that you will find illuminating and helpful in reflecting upon those questions.
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