Name: The End of ‘Going Viral’: Why Silicon Valley Won’t Save Us
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The End of ‘Going Viral’: Why Silicon Valley Won’t Save Us

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Next:ShareThis copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers visit http://www.djreprints.com.https://www.barrons.com/articles/will-silicon-valley-solve-the-coronavirus-51584367400In a week when everything changed, many of us began thinking uneasy, unfamiliar thoughts, such as where to procure nonperishable pantry items or what to do with our stock portfolios in a suddenly crashing market. But if you were a tech CEO or executive, steeped in a Silicon Valley culture that has been leading the markets and spreading seemingly without impediment for the past 10 years, the unfolding of a global pandemic might have prompted a different set of new, uneasy thoughts.The tech boom of the 2010s was built on, and advocated for, growth models based on “virality” as a tech-enabled, tech-accelerated good. Products from social networks like Facebook and Twitter to home- and car-sharing apps like Airbnb and Uber depended on exponential growth in users, drivers, guests, and hosts to drive usage and revenue. It’s strange to say it now, but in the last decade “virality” in the broader culture was stripped of its pathological context. The term became a signifier of what often looked like seamless growth and profit. “Community” became a that was virtualized to include the populations of whole social networks rather than the people in your neighborhood. For the tech companies and those invested in them, it was a very good run for virality as an abstract, technical ideal. Now, at the end of a decade of virality as a wealth driver, technology’s architects and those who live in the world it structured are experiencing a stark turn: Virality has become primarily literal, and pathological, again. And if, in the roaring tens, we as a population served many times over as human nodes in a number of very profitable technological networks, we’re all now grappling with ourselves as potential nodes for very real disease vectors. We’re thinking about how to arrest our personal roles in the transmission of this disease. Self-isolate, stay home, quarantine, social distance: In the span of weeks, we have gone from being encouraged to “socialize” ourselves throughout the world and expand our “community”, broadly conceived, to trying to figure out how not to socialize ourselves in order to protect our community, locally conceived. The Silicon Valley message advocating perennial “engagement” with others—whether brands or people—suddenly requires a pause, a rethinking, and probably, eventually, some kind of reset. The imperative for outward social engagement, for constant striving to expand one’s “reach” and “influence”—both of which in their embodied form are now medically hazardous—has been effectively cancelled. Is it possible that when the dust and fury of the coronavirus settles we might think differently about “engagement” itself? What if we don’t actually mind engaging with fewer people sometimes, and in quieter, less public ways? The technological networks and their executives and workers are, of course, experiencing this rapid change along with everyone else. Airbnb hosts and managers report mass cancellations; Uber drivers worry understandably about being in close contact with the people they drive; the Instagram “influencer” economy, famously driven by images posed in fabulous, aspirational travel locations, is halted for the meantime as travel is discouraged. Facebook and Twitter are the most “virtual” of all of these products in that one doesn’t have to transact in public in order to participate in them, and they may be best positioned to ride out the social-distancing economy. But the terms of the social-media economy that Facebook and Twitter rode to success are different now: Virality carries a new, sinister meaning; engagement in the time of coronavirus is risky and; and who cares how many social media friends and followers a person has at a moment when hospitals are . The built-in social-media product assumption of the 2010s, visible in Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook’s follower counts and engagement metrics was that what users, like companies, wanted was maximum engagement, followers, and attention, regardless of the details. That idea had begun to tire long before the virus hit. Perhaps this is why the Silicon Valley titans—typically eager to announce a shiny solution to this or that social problem—have stayed relatively quiet in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. Perhaps they, like or even more than regular folk, are wondering what to do when the social and economic terms have changed and the assumptions underlying entire industries have to be revisited. Some, like CEOs who have , may be considering trying to do what they can as corporate leaders to reduce the spread of the virus. But for executives who have built companies on exponential social engagement and the revenues that this perennial social push creates, this virus may pose a more existential product crisis. What if networks don’t grow all the time? What if, like trees in winter, people and societies need repose, closer and smaller “reach,” and a periodic refusal to sprout their networks bigger and broader than yesterday? What would our tech products look like then? How might the coronavirus crisis change how we think about our social and technical architecture? No one wants this crisis. But speaking for myself, as a long-term observer of Silicon Valley in all its glories and flaws, a moment of pause and, perhaps, reflection for our tech titans is not such an unwelcome thing. Kate Losse has written on tech and culture for The New Republic, The New York Times, Dissent, The New Yorker, Vox, Eater, and Curbed. She is the author of The Boy Kings, a memoir of early Facebook culture and Silicon Valley.CloseIn a week when everything changed, many of us began thinking uneasy, unfamiliar thoughts, such as where to procure nonperishable pantry items or what to do with our stock portfolios in a suddenly crashing market.SENDAn error has occurred, please try again later.Thank youThis article has been sent toCopyright © 2022 Dow Jones &amp; Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones &amp; Company, Inc. 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Next:ShareThis copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers visit http://www.djreprints.com.https://www.barrons.com/articles/will-silicon-valley-solve-the-coronavirus-51584367400In a week when everything changed, many of us began thinking uneasy, unfamiliar thoughts, such as where to procure nonperishable pantry items or what to do with our stock portfolios in a suddenly crashing market. But if you were a tech CEO or executive, steeped in a Silicon Valley culture that has been leading the...

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The End of ‘Going Viral’: Why Silicon Valley Won’t Save Us

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