WinSocially Weekly
A bloody tale from Silicon Valley
We’ve been enthralled by this documentary about Theranos and we think there’s a lot to be learnt from it.
A quick summary in case you weren’t following the rise and fall of the company.
It was a blood-testing startup that was once valued at $9 billion.
Founded in 2003 by Elizabeth Homes when she was 19 years old.
Its board included such people as William Perry (former U.S. Secretary of Defense) and Henry Kissinger (former U.S. Secretary of State).
In 2018, Federal prosecutors indicted Holmes and Theranos chief operating officer Sunny Balwani on fraud charges.
Theranos's valuation eventually dropped from $9 billion to zero.
Fake it ‘til you make it
Or in the case of Theranos, until it all comes crashing down on you. In fact, we recommend pairing it with both documentaries that came out this year about the infamous Fyre Festival. They are all entertaining tales that has much to tell us about how the modern world operates. From a professional perspective, there are few things we’d like to spotlight about these failed scams.
How did both the Fyre Festival organisers and Elizabeth Holmes get so far with products that did not exist? Good marketing and hype are too simplistic as answers.
What they had was a total conviction in what they were selling. This article has some fascinating insights into the psychology behind that.
Though that might seem delusional, Ariely, author of “The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty,” says it’s psychology. “It’s about the stories we tell ourselves,” he says, and that’s “a slippery slope.”
Ariely points to a study he and his colleagues performed, where they looked at people’s brains as they told lies over and over again. “We saw that over time, their brains reacted less and less and less to lies, they were less sensitized,” he says.
“We start believing our own lies,” Ariely tells CNBC Make It.
Storytelling remains the most powerful tool available in communications, whether it’s a tragic tale like Holmes’s about how the death of her uncle motivated her
"I grew up spending summers and the holidays with my uncle," Holmes began her anecdote at the TEDMED conference in 2014. "I remember his love of crossword puzzles and trying to teach us to play football. I remember how much he loved the beach. I remember how much I loved him. He was diagnosed one day with skin cancer, which all of a sudden was brain cancer and in his bones. He didn’t live to see his son grow up, and I never got to say goodbye."
or something aspirational and glamorous like this launch video for the Fyre Festival
That takes us to this very important fact that anyone involved in communications should remember — People want to believe.
What Theranos and the Fyre Festival did so successfully was take things that people wanted to be true and real, created a great story around them and sell that with total conviction and self-belief.
This quote is about the big tech but is applicable to almost everything in a world obsessed with “disruption” and "Move fast and break things".
The Inventor is a cautionary tale for the way we look at so-called visionaries promising us the world, from business people to politicians. Silicon Valley may see itself as the heart of our culture, but it's pumping blood through veins and arteries that stretch across the globe -- and it isn't that great at diagnosing its own problems.
Talking Points
This isn’t an entirely serious story but it is a remarkable one.
Gravel’s account is being run by a “group of students” in Westchester, New York who, as one of them told Splinter in an interview, convinced the former senator to think about running again.
The young people running his account have a very few resources but a mastery of social media and a very authentic product. In 2019, those alone can take you far indeed.
Much more seriously, some important follow up to the tragedy in Christchurch.
If Facebook, YouTube and other platforms are providing infrastructure and incentives for extremists, then how do we hold them accountable?
According to [Facebook], the graphic, high-definition video of the attack was uploaded by users 1.5 million times in the first 24 hours. Of those 1.5 million copies of the video, Facebook’s automatic detection systems automatically blocked 1.2 million. That left roughly 300,000 copies ricocheting around the platform to be viewed, liked, shared and commented on by Facebook’s more than two billion users.
However, while we have been very critical of Facebook, it’s important to note the role of the relatively obscure message board 8chan in propagating the video. It’s hard enough to make Facebook and Google accountable. How is 8chan going to regulated?
As the New Zealand gunman live-streamed the massacre onto Facebook, fewer than 200 people watched. The social network said its moderators removed it sometime after a user first reported it as troubling, 29 minutes after the stream began.
But on the anonymous message board 8chan, where the gunman had announced his “attack against the invaders” with a link to the live footage, a nameless group had already been racing to save, preserve and re-upload the video in corners of the Web where it’d be harder to take down.