Abstract
This chapter outlines a dominant nirvana fable of the successful IT startup from the interrelated Microsoft and Apple origin stories to recent instantiations concerning Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Uber. The popularization of this fable has channeled the potentially disruptive ideology of digital innovation into the institutions of contemporary venture capitalism. The chapter also describes two counter-fables: the thrown-over original partner elbowed out of the business and the nightmare of the failed IT startup. The successful startup fable is now being challenged by narratives about the IT industry’s rampant underrepresentation and harassment of women, monopolization by the most successful firms, and the covert but widespread use of the Internet and social media for extremism.
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Two accounts of Gerstner’s rescue of the company were produced by business journalists and published in 1999: Garr’s IBM Redux : Lou Gerstner and the Business Turnaround of the Decade and Slater’s Saving Big Blue: Leadership Lessons and Turnaround Tactics of IBM’s Lou Gerstner. Both conform closely to the established transformational corporate leader, or “superhero CEO,” genre that will be discussed at length in relation to the auto industry. Neither Garr nor Slater received cooperation from Gerstner himself or any of IBM’s senior management.
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The fascination was both shared and fed by other popular culture media. To cite just three “middle-brow” publications, between 1982 and 2011, Jobs appeared on the cover of Time magazine eight times and Gates eleven. Between them, they also had twelve covers of Newsweek .
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Turner, in From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006), provides a detailed archaeology of the cultural networks that linked 1960s countercultural movements to California’s emerging personal computing industry, with a particular focus on the cultural entrepreneur Stewart Brand of The Whole Earth Catalogue and the early networked community the WELL. The book’s final chapters analyze the role of Brand and Wired magazine in defining and promoting the doctrine of the technology entrepreneur as the agent of inevitable, and essential, social, and cultural transformation. It is, as Turner documents in detail, a doctrine that makes deregulation of technology industries an article of faith and which explains the Wired magazine cover interview of Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich by technology doyenne Esther Dyson in August 1995.
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A recent sampling includes Adam Lashinsky’s Wild Ride: Inside Uber’s Quest for World Domination, Leigh Gallagher’s The AirBNB Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions and Created Plenty of Controversy, and Brad Stone’s The Upstarts: How Uber, AirBNB, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World, all of which were published in 2017.
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The San Francisco-based systems engineer and writer Ellen Ullman has long been a voice for this movement, beginning with her 1997 memoir Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents. A new collection of her essays, Life in Code : A Personal History of Technology was published in 2017 and has been widely reviewed. While the essays—some newly written, some dating from the early days of the Internet—reflect on a wide range of IT issues, reviewers have focused almost exclusively on questions of gender and diversity.
Kendall (2011) analyzes the continuing reinforcement of the “white and nerdy” stereotype that excludes women and (some) men of color from popular culture representations of “techies.” Leslie Miley, a former Director of Engineering at Twitter, and the only African-American in a leadership position there, has spoken and written widely on the limitations of so-called diversity initiatives within the technology industry. See, for example, a November 6, 2015 interview with Miley posted on NPR’s Code Switch (http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/11/06/), accessed September 24, 2017. These are, of course, extremely complex and consequential issues, involving economic, cultural, legal, and political questions that cannot be adequately addressed here.
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Taplin is a fascinating figure whose eclectic background (concert and film producer, VP for Media Mergers and Acquisitions at Merrill Lynch, founder and CEO of Intertainer, a video-on-demand provider for cable and broadband, Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC) is reminiscent of the earliest days of American digital culture. He has worked with George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Martin Scorsese, and Wim Wenders. His 2011 memoir Outlaw Blues: Adventures in the Counter-Culture Wars was one of the first works created specifically as an enhanced ebook for the iPad, embedding more than 100 videos into its text. Taplin was appointed to the California Broadband Taskforce in 2007 and consults widely to both government and industry.
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Borins, S., Herst, B. (2018). Insanely Great: The Dominant IT Fable. In: Negotiating Business Narratives. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77923-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77923-2_2
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