DoubleNewSpeak: Inventing Tech Jargon for Pleasure & Profit

Originally published in The Guardian.

Jargon is like hoodies and Soylent in Silicon Valley — ever-present, and yet one has to believe that there is a better way. However, this ‘pain point’ is also an opportunity for enterprising wordsmiths. In Silicon Valley, speaking cutting-edge start-up is the bare minimum required to inspire confidence. Being ahead of the jargon curve can bring great social and financial rewards. It may even be confused for true innovation.

With this in mind, my co-founder and I at DoubleNewSpeak have decided to launch our Minimum Viable Vocabulary. If the product is sticky, we will soon be considered visionaries and showered with venture capital — at which point we will scale like crazy. In two years, everyone will be speaking our language, and I shall devote my energies to overseeing the construction of an enormous IKEA-style ball pit in our open plan office.

So here it is (after a full twenty minutes of ideating and six rigorous minutes of beta testing). For the aspiring tech hustler, we suggest:

‘Layoff’ is old-fashioned. Why not call it a ‘freedom cull’? Or a ‘quarter quell’? Perhaps even a ‘staff detox’?

Evangelist? Bah! Your Head of Marketing should be a Product Demagogue. We’re not conveying enthusiasm here, people — we’re conveying dangerous rabble-rousing obsession with our product. But, you know, in an artisanal way. ‘Growth Hacker’ is so 2014 — replace it with ‘Lumberjack’.

We’re all trapped in a punishing cycle of job title inflation. The future looks grim without a modern-day Scott Volcker to drag us over the coals and tame the beast (shout-out to all those ’70s monetary policy fans out there). So your former Digital Prophet really needs a promotion to ‘High Sparrow of the Worshipful B2B CRM Space’. Your Thought Leader should probably just start borrowing directly from Kim Jong-Il. Acceptable forms of address include: Mastermind of the Revolution, Ever-Victorious Iron-Willed Commander and Guiding Star of the 21st Century.

Continue that military aesthetic with a cheeky ‘Blitzkrieg’ — no one does ‘Sprints’ anymore. But definitely avoid ‘bootstrap’ — given the Valley’s woman problem, these days it’s ‘garter’ or bust. Or ‘bustier’, I suppose.

‘Pivot’ is out, ‘pirouette’ is in — it sounds almost like planned it.

As for adjectives — ‘sticky’ can be ‘viscous’, ‘frothy’ is either ‘rabid’ or ‘lightly sparkling’, and ‘agile’ is being replaced with ‘spry’, ‘limber’ or ‘lithe’.

By the way, this ‘paradigm shift’ should be referred to as a ‘thought schism’.

Let’s double click on the phenomenon of tech jargon (a year ago, we’d be drilling down, and two years ago, we’d be going granular). Jargon is interesting because it’s not inherently bad. It’s an efficient form of communication initially — but when new words don’t actually describe a novel concept, they tend to have less benign purposes.

In Silicon Valley, fresh buzzwords are often a short-cut; a way to sell a less-than-impressive reality, gain unearned credibility and join an in-group. Early adopters are advantaged and hold-outs exposed to increasingly high costs. In fact, the economics of platforms and luxury goods collide in the jargon economy. Owning a dominant platform allows you to capture value from users’ activity. If your language becomes popular, it brings industry credibility and allows you to capitalise on the reputational boost. But your terminology can become over-used and drained of meaning — hello, “disruptive innovation”. If utility is based partly on rarity and novelty, like a Chanel bag, this tips the delicate balance; mass adoption is both the goal and the beginning of the end.

Silicon Valley is not alone — not at all. Jargon is a classic strategy. Pseudo-professions like management consulting have been attempting to legitimize themselves with superfluous systematised vocabularies for decades. And despite their protestations, the tech industry is not that different from other sectors; it is distinguished mainly by the scale of people’s ambitions and the super-profits made possible by infinitely reproducible solutions (software). Ironically, in trying to avoid corporate America’s deadening euphemistic vocabulary, Silicon Valley may have created a parlance equally stripped of meaning.

Its tone also reflects its American origins; if, say, Denmark had been the epicentre of the technological renaissance, tech would feel very different. Silicon Valley’s jargon draws on manifest destiny, refusing to admit failure outside a narrative of eventual success. It tends toward hype and hyperbole, mixed with the saccharine dead-on-arrival enthusiasm of American consumer service. With its talk of ‘rockstars’ and ‘gurus’, it buys into that libertarian worship of the individual which so often teeters into celebrating arrogance.

It feels only fitting to end a whine about America with a grumpy Englishman — but unfortunately, Orwell is over-quoted on the evils of doublespeak. However, Thomas Paine said it well in The Age of Reason:

“All this is nothing better than the jargon of a conjuror, who picks up phrases he does not understand to confound the credulous people who come to have their fortune told. Priests and conjurors are of the same trade.”