While death and failure have been discussed to a limited degree as a part of the mythos of the ‘innovation industry’ and the technology sector at large (Draper, 2017 Links to an external site.; Lipartito, 2003 Links to an external site.), this account shows the ways that death is mobilized on an individual level by employees within this industry. By diagnosing death and transmuting these diagnoses into persistent lessons that one could iterate on later in a career, employees both reinforced the larger ideology of productive failure while exhibiting individual mastery over it.

While ‘death’ as an analytic has been criticized for asserting an inaccurate binary of technological change, this account shows how death can also be analytically useful when understood as a socially situated discourse, especially one that is subject to contestation. Thus, like the STS lens of breakdown and repair, which tends to reveal obfuscated power relations, so too does looking through death, and to death, reveal obscured relations–especially around who or what is of value–that otherwise hide behind Silicon Valley corporate rhetoric.

Importantly, Friendster’s death by association with its Southeast Asian users was contested–in fact, actively worked against–by some employees. Many expressed attempts to convince company leadership, including CEOs and, by extension, investors, that they should embrace the users in Southeast Asia and view them as a sign of vitality.

These patents included Friendster’s newsfeed design, as well as the user relationship status typically associated with Facebook, “It’s Complicated.” Many interviewees, despite noting that they had not followed Friendster after they left, discussed their knowledge that Friendster patents had been sold to Facebook prior to their IPO. As these accounts show, for some, Friendster was materially gone but is ever-present.

I mean I can’t build a product and support a product that I don’t believe in. I was like the only one left at that point [opposing music]. [Former CEO] Taek [Kwon] was gone, and I just didn’t see the product going anywhere at that point.

described the moment where it was realized the Southeast Asian users were Friendster’s primary community: When you start to dig into that problem set, then you get to this thing, which is like, ‘Oh, a tremendous amount of usage is overseas.’ We’re taxed with all the burden of serving this audience, which is massive and super resource intensive, and there’s no monetization potential here. Continuing, she compared Friendster’s decline to the demise of Google’s Orkut platform, which had lasted from 2004 to 2014.

Writing in the context of a platformized Silicon Valley where death and failure discourses abound, but in an analytical context where these discourses have rarely been addressed from a grounded basis and where death is rarely employed as a lens, this article addresses this gap by examining the ways that these discourses are mobilized by those who worked with the technological system under question. How do Friendster employees, then, relate to death within an industry saturated by these discourses? In line with STS analyses of breakdown and repair, what otherwise obfuscated material, social, and economic relations does focusing on death reveal?

That is, instead of signaling a dead end, death is a term that is useful precisely because of its analogy to the mortality of living things. As hospice physician BJ Miller (2020 Links to an external site.) has noted, death is nearly indefinable. It is characterized often “by what it lacks:” a heartbeat, a brain wave, breath. Yet living things are constantly undergoing cellular turnover, in the process of dying, even when they are understood to be alive and well. Death can be defined personally and affectively, for instance, the belief that death is when you can no longer enjoy your favorite meal or interact with loved ones. Death is also bureaucratically rendered.

In turn, this article draws on 13 interviews with former Friendster employees to show the ways in which this platform’s ‘death’ is not so much a singular and bounded event as it is a discursive negotiation between different actors.

For all its success, however, Friendster was quickly plagued by slow load times, managerial mishap and ascendant competitors as it tracked upward on its proverbial hockey stick of growth. In the mid-2000s,

AOL volunteers must force a reconceptualization of community making as no longer altruistic or an act of familial responsibility, but rather as a commercial service. They must also force a reconceptualization of the relations between the service providers and recipients.

The large socio-economic changes of the past thirty years are of significant importance to an analysis of unwaged labor on the Internet, because they create the context within which such activities as forming and supporting community, volunteering, and pursuing hobbies can be tapped as a source of revenue.

All told, the restructuring of the volunteer program at AOL after 1996 resulted in AOL having a much greater degree of control over what the community leaders did and how they interacted online, especially those serving as guides. Guides now had to adhere to minimum shift requirements, engage in the corporate bureaucracy when they needed to act against a member, enter a structured two-week training session, fill out extensive shift reports, and deal with a management that increasingly appeared to be unresponsive to their needs.

them from the remote staff that were paid for their services. Some remote-staff volunteers saw their relationship to AOL as a work relationship even in this early period, primarily because they felt that in exchange for services they were getting significant savings in online-provider costs. One remote-staff volunteer, upon learning that AOL would be converting to a flat service fee and that guides might be required to pay a discounted monthly fee, stated, Yeah, I’ll guide for $3.95 a month if they only make us work one shift [:::]. I’m a teacher and it warms the cockles of my heart when I look into a kid’s face and see that he ‘‘gets it’’ [:::] but I sure as hell wouldn’t keep going to work each day if I wasn’t getting paid.15

I wanted to know who’d been paid [:::] so I put in my request for who had been [:::] promised paychecks and who was receiving paychecks. They refused to answer that [:::] now why refuse to answer that [:::], and you know people that were paid that were management from my area refused to answer the question, but all of a sudden I started getting jumped on by these other people and I know for a fact that three out of four of those other people got paychecks [:::]. I understand it’s a corporation and it has a right to make money but I think even a corporation has to have some sense of morals and what is proper behavior [:::] it’s very underhanded.21

AOL was wildly successful at marketing its online services, primarily because of a central vision articulated by Steve Case that crafted the services as facilitators of communication, not as a sales service, such as the services of CompuServe, a chief competitor, came to be viewed. Thus, for the company, online chat, e-mail, and bulletin boards were its main form of content early on.

it was a process marked with a sense of loss of the promises that the Internet seemed to hold. Community turned out to be for sale and the AOL ‘‘family’’ turned out to be alienating as the membership grew.

FOX’s decision to adopt elements of cable’s niche marketing strategies rather than emulate the programming strategies of the Big Three allowed the netlet to vie with the networks by focusing on counterprogramming and narrowcasting designed to appeal to underserved audiences. In fact, one could argue that, in the early nineties, FOX’s attention to underserved black (and Latino) audiences facilitated its transformation from netlet to network.

Even with the election of Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1992, deregulation remained the modus operandi of the federal administration. In fact, under Clinton, the deregulatory moves of the multi‐channel era culminated in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which was the first significant reform of the Communications Act of 1934 and marked a dramatic shift in the industry as a whole.

With the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 and his subsequent appointment of Mark Fowler to the position of FCC chairman, the deregulation that began a decade before, roared ahead at an unprecedented rate.

For a growing subgroup of American middle-class boys, these ten­sions were resolved in mechanical and electrical tinkering. Trapped be­tween the legacy of genteel culture and the pull of the new primitivism of mass culture, many boys reclaimed a sense of mastery, indeed masculinity itself, through the control of technology.