Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio García Martínez

As I observed more than once at Facebook, and as I imagine is the case in all organizations from business to government, high-level decisions that affected thousands of people and billions in revenue would be made on gut feel, the residue of whatever historical politics were in play, and the ability to cater persuasive messages to people either busy, impatient, or uninterested (or all three).

To paraphrase the very quotable Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, in the future there will be two types of jobs: people who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.

an incumbent in a market dominated by a few, with total information asymmetry, and the ability to make prices on the market rather than just take them, has little incentive to increase transparency.

This is how online advertising works: money turns into pixels and electrons in the form of ads, which turn into a scintilla of attention in someone’s mind, which after a few more clicks and electrons shuffling about, turns back into money. The only goal here is to make that second pile of money as large as possible relative to the first pile of money.

More symbolically, technology entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, pulling the plug on everything from taxi medallions (Uber) to traditional hotels (Airbnb) to dating (Tinder). One industry after another is simply knocked out via venture-backed entrepreneurial daring and hastily shipped software. Silicon Valley is the zoo where the chaos monkeys are kept, and their numbers only grow in time. With the explosion of venture capital, there is no shortage of bananas to feed them. The question for society is whether it can survive these entrepreneurial chaos monkeys intact, and at what human cost.

The harsh reality is this: to have influence in the world, you need to be willing and able to reward your friends and punish your enemies.

Another brief lesson in startups: Whenever you face some stressful, time-consuming, and risky challenge, firewall the rest of the company away from the mess. They’ll likely add no value, and the attendant uncertainty will corrode their productivity when you likely need it most. No matter what happens in the outside world—lawsuit, money issues, the fucking zombie apocalypse—do not let it infect the company’s headspace and become the top item in the internal narrative.

First, the ability to monomaniacally and obsessively focus on one thing and one thing only, at the expense of everything else in life.

Second, the ability to take and endure endless amounts of shit.

Incidentally, it helps to have enemies. While love is a beautiful emotion, far more empires have been built, books written, wrongs righted, fights won, and ambitions realized out of vengeful desire to prove some critic wrong, or existential dread of some perceived enemy, than all the love in the world. Love is grand, but hate and fear last longer.

As with any interview, whether it be a hardball technical/engineering interview, or the foofy product manager one, the challenge is very simple: either you’re incompetent and you struggle to provide even one answer you hope is right to the interview question, or you’re not, and your brain produces two or three. Each of those could be right, depending on your interviewer. Truth in the world resides only in mathematical proofs and physics labs. Everywhere else, it’s really a matter of opinion, and if it manages to become group opinion, it’s undeservedly crowned as capital-T Truth. And so you need to determine whatever the local version of truth is you’re inhabiting. And that you do by reading body language, and understanding the intellectual sauce your opponent has been marinating in (if any). With that in mind, you choose among the three alternative answers you could spout.

It was one of the highlights of the technology industry, and one of the “once in a lifetime” moments of our age. In pre-postmodern times, only a divine ritual of ancient origin, victory in war, or the direct experience of meaningful culture via shared songs, dances, or art would cause anybody such revelry. Now we’re driven to ecstasies of delirium because we have a price tag, and our life’s labors are validated by the fact it does. That’s the smoldering ambition of every entrepreneur: to one day create an organization that society deems worthy of a price tag. These are the only real values we have left in the twilight of history, the tired dead end of liberal democratic capitalism, at least here in the California fringes of Western civilization. Clap at the clever people getting rich, and hope you’re among them.

For my part, outside of physics textbooks, I found Truth to be a rather rare commodity, particularly in the tech world. I had also noticed that those who most made a big show of believing in Truth were unusually attached to whatever well-groomed pack of lies they held dear.