(Un)Happiness and Network Sociality


Chamath Palihapitiya, a prominent/successful venture capitalist and CEO of Social Capital (and, interestingly enough, a University of Waterloo alumni) recently appeared on Recode Decode— a tech podcast hosted by Kara Swisher. In their conversation, Palihapitiya reflects on a moment where he introspectively asked himself why his successes in VC had made him less happy. He states: 

“I had been exploring why, after the accumulation of all of these things— more companies invested in, more funds raised, more notoriety, more television appearances, more this, more that, more everything — why am I not more happy? [...] In fact, I’m less happy. And in fact, I think that I’ve actually really bastardized some core relationships in my life where I’ve created hyper-transactional relationships in many areas of my life.”

He later goes on to say that...

"... the counter-effect was, I would either be spending time with people that weren’t necessarily nourishing me, I was spending time in ways that amplified my anxiety and my feelings that I was somehow missing out or inadequacy or insecurity. And instead, what would be left over is not filling a void but a void that was equal in proportion to how fake all those experiences were. And it was all around me."

Interestingly, Palihapitiya has been a contrarian voice in Silicon Valley. Previously, he's stated that he feels tremendous guilt in helping craft Facebook and that he believes that the start-up economy is a 'Ponzi scheme'. What I find fascinating in this instance is the idea that perhaps the sort of isolation and un-happiness that Palihapitiya is discussing is a negative corollary of Castells' network society or the condition of what Wittel (2011) identifies as network sociality— particularly stemming from the idea that within network sociality there is a fundamental "erosion of enduring friendships, responsibility, and trust" (p.64).

What are your thoughts on Palihapitiya's self-reflexivity? Does his stature/prominence in the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem allow him to speak out about these issues? Is he a 'programmer', 'switcher', neither? Castells (2011). 

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