What do you think?
Rate this book
What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley
From FSGO x Logic: a Stanford professor's spirited dismantling of Silicon Valley's intellectual origins
Adrian Daub's What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to Silicon Valley's world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie. From the myth of dropping out to the war cry of "disruption," Daub locates the Valley's supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Ayn Rand, the New Age Esalen Foundation in Big Sur, and American traditions from the tent revival to predestination. Written with verve and imagination, What Tech Calls Thinking is an intellectual refutation of Silicon Valley's ethos, pulling back the curtain on the self-aggrandizing myths the Valley tells about itself.
FSG Originals � Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech's reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry's many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.
Adrian Daub's What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to Silicon Valley's world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie. From the myth of dropping out to the war cry of "disruption," Daub locates the Valley's supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Ayn Rand, the New Age Esalen Foundation in Big Sur, and American traditions from the tent revival to predestination. Written with verve and imagination, What Tech Calls Thinking is an intellectual refutation of Silicon Valley's ethos, pulling back the curtain on the self-aggrandizing myths the Valley tells about itself.
FSG Originals � Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech's reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry's many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2020
116 people are currently reading
2632 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 162 reviews
December 2, 2020
The title of this book held so much promise! But it reminded me of the kind of conversation you have at a party that’s just cynical and referential enough to make you look clever and edgy, but doesn’t hold up to scrutiny when someone actually challenges it.
December 20, 2021
The premise of What Tech Calls Thinking is powerful and necessary--in its own mythos, the ideologies of Silicon Valley emerged as a rational response to monopoly, a belief that demands an attentive unraveling. However, Daub's text does not live up to that promise. In its brevity, inability to contextualize beyond the 20th century (is one supposed to believe that the ideas of Ayn Rand, Habermas etc. emerged ex nihilo at the turn of the 20th century?), and hedging around antiracist and feminist critiques, Daub engages in many of the same fallacies he charges big tech with. It's disappointing, but altogether not surprising, given that for all intents and purposes, Daub emerged from the same environment as the very subjects of his scrutiny.
October 16, 2020
A commendable attempt, though at some points lapsing into caustic tones. But also filled with moments of self-awareness.
The title & the marketing set up very high expectations, so my instinct is to give two stars but adding an extra point because the author has attempted a book so far outside the sphere of his traditional concerns. And I suppose it is still an interesting treatment of the valley, esp. when considered against the general tone of techlash books (if that is the genre this is aspiring to be).
The chapter on Desire will be useful as an intro to Girardian obsessions of some parts of the valley. I was also thrilled by the Beckett references in the chapter on Failure.
The title & the marketing set up very high expectations, so my instinct is to give two stars but adding an extra point because the author has attempted a book so far outside the sphere of his traditional concerns. And I suppose it is still an interesting treatment of the valley, esp. when considered against the general tone of techlash books (if that is the genre this is aspiring to be).
The chapter on Desire will be useful as an intro to Girardian obsessions of some parts of the valley. I was also thrilled by the Beckett references in the chapter on Failure.
November 5, 2020
A critique that gets the more general points right, but is very imprecise regarding the technicalities.
When it comes to issues that have been far more mainstream regarding the ills of SV culture, news one may see in a Vice, The Verge, or a Motherboard article, Adrian excels in their analysis. But when a topic requires a far more in-depth analysis, Adrian misses and I mean sometimes, spectacularly.
Adrian is a brilliant writer and this critique reads wonderfully. That said, the issue lies in their approach to critique. Adrian often ventures a path that abstracts too far from the realities of SV and often ends up defanging what could have been a strong point.
It's obvious that Adrian had structured this book to tackle what they saw as the essence of Silicon Valley as a culture. To do so, they try to link the current day realities of what SV believes to be the true and often pure origins of an idea to what has become a twisted version thereof. All this in a sort of Anarcho-Syndicalist style reminiscent of publications like Vice, Slate, Logic, or MotherJones. This isn't bad, I read 2 of the 4 fairly often. That said it exposes the lens through which they are thinking, one that is fairly outdated.
In critiquing SV drop-out culture, for example, Adrian remarks that Holmes may have been more ethical had she taken her ethics course, omitting the fact that most Tech founders, don't necessarily have backgrounds in the fields they pursue. As someone once tweeted "Stop trying to get techbros to take ethics classes. Most of them have never even taken Intro to ML" . Oh, and there's no way an ethics course makes one more ethical by default. Lawyers aren't any less ethical lest their education in ethics. The problem here isn't one that can merely be solved by "gaining an education" it lies far deeper in the structure of American society as a whole, one increasingly devoured by elite overproduction, of which the SV elite and Adrian themselves, are very much a part of.
When they speak of Thiel, an entity mentioned 45 whole times in the book, never once do they remark on what actually makes him and Palantir so dangerous.
The man who is depicted as a radical libertarian is quite obviously a Dark Enlightenment thinker. And yet, when the ideology is brought up, it is simply done so with regard to accelerationism, and not with regard to its political ambitions.
It presents Thiel as part of the SV mythos when his claim to fame lies in the fact that he adamantly despises it. What makes Thiel and other Dark Enlightenment figures so dangerous (and this isn't to be conflated with mere Kurzweilian Singulatarianism, which Adrian does), is that they do not fear dealing with political controversies.
Mencius Moldbug( Garvin Yarvis ) another popular dark enlightenment thinker put up a critique of Y combinator founder Paul Graham, that might very well have sounded like Adrian wrote it themselves.
"At this point, the reality of power is too obvious to dismiss. But as bad as these people are at seeing power, they are far worse at using, building, or taking power."
Adrian makes mention of the fact that Silicon Valley likes to be vague; utopian, but vague, to avoid all the possible consequences and responsibilities that a definitive vision may bring. Ironically, Thiel would agree with that statement! He termed it Indefinite Optimism!
In Zero To One he says:
"To an indefinite optimist, the future will be better, but he doesn’t know how exactly, so he won’t make any specific plans. He expects to profit from the future but sees no reason to design it concretely."
He goes on to say:
"But indefinite optimism seems inherently unsustainable: how can the future get better if no one plans for it?"
A lot of critiques made in this book are critiques Thiel himself has of the culture. If anything Adrian may find very disheartening, the fact that he and Thiel have far more in agreement, when it comes to Silicon Valley as a culture. Which brings me to my next point.
When Adrian critiques the culture around "disruption", it is often in terms of something taking place, in lieu of its larger social consequences. This analysis buys into the fact that "disruption" is indeed taking place, a point contradicted by their own emphasis on Elizabeth Holmes, who had to inflate the capabilities of said technology all the while gaining from said deception.
The truth, however, lies in the fact that even the technological disruption aspect of the tech industry isn't taking place nearly as fast as some of its prophets have claimed, isn't nearly as revolutionary, and rarely shows up in growth and wellbeing metrics of a nation.
The truth lies in the fact that the whole Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem, is quite simply, not built to innovate! It's meant to buy enough time on low-risk ventures that assure early investors an exit.
But guess which organizations do indeed encourage massive innovation. Rather contrary to what SV has made seem, it's the tech behemoths like Google or mission-oriented governmental organizations like DARPA. The mythos of SV is that big companies like Google were started up by self-sufficient geniuses. And yet, as one can verify, the google search algorithm was one funded by the government, as was the project that is now known to have become Google Earth.
While Adrian remarks on the story of individualism in that culture, they miss what it's hiding. A truth many know. A truth its own elite think, and yet don't tell the many smart kids that seek to make a name for themselves in said innovation ecosystem.
What makes Thiel dangerous, is this realization and open embrace of government programs as well as denial of SV culture. While Google would reject government contracts, Palantir and Anduril openly embrace them, knowing their tech may end up in the kill chain. Palantir isn't merely dangerous because it "erodes civil liberties" it's quite simply because it's the most effective path to massive social influence. What makes this path so alluring, as indicated by Mariana Mazzucato in The Entrepreneurial State, is that the State always selects for technological innovations. ARPANET(what has become the internet today) and the GPS were at its infancy military tech. Governments will fund your projects, if they work. A herculean task, sure, but one most entreprising techies had initially sought when they approached the SV innovation economy.
Thiel's danger lies in the fact that he'll inspire more companies like Palantir, like Clearview, which help propagate Dark Enlightenment ideology, through the medium of the State.
With Tech, it isn't merely enough to describe what it thinks. It rarely does any thinking, it just executes. Adrian fails to take that into account.
When it comes to issues that have been far more mainstream regarding the ills of SV culture, news one may see in a Vice, The Verge, or a Motherboard article, Adrian excels in their analysis. But when a topic requires a far more in-depth analysis, Adrian misses and I mean sometimes, spectacularly.
Adrian is a brilliant writer and this critique reads wonderfully. That said, the issue lies in their approach to critique. Adrian often ventures a path that abstracts too far from the realities of SV and often ends up defanging what could have been a strong point.
It's obvious that Adrian had structured this book to tackle what they saw as the essence of Silicon Valley as a culture. To do so, they try to link the current day realities of what SV believes to be the true and often pure origins of an idea to what has become a twisted version thereof. All this in a sort of Anarcho-Syndicalist style reminiscent of publications like Vice, Slate, Logic, or MotherJones. This isn't bad, I read 2 of the 4 fairly often. That said it exposes the lens through which they are thinking, one that is fairly outdated.
In critiquing SV drop-out culture, for example, Adrian remarks that Holmes may have been more ethical had she taken her ethics course, omitting the fact that most Tech founders, don't necessarily have backgrounds in the fields they pursue. As someone once tweeted "Stop trying to get techbros to take ethics classes. Most of them have never even taken Intro to ML" . Oh, and there's no way an ethics course makes one more ethical by default. Lawyers aren't any less ethical lest their education in ethics. The problem here isn't one that can merely be solved by "gaining an education" it lies far deeper in the structure of American society as a whole, one increasingly devoured by elite overproduction, of which the SV elite and Adrian themselves, are very much a part of.
When they speak of Thiel, an entity mentioned 45 whole times in the book, never once do they remark on what actually makes him and Palantir so dangerous.
The man who is depicted as a radical libertarian is quite obviously a Dark Enlightenment thinker. And yet, when the ideology is brought up, it is simply done so with regard to accelerationism, and not with regard to its political ambitions.
It presents Thiel as part of the SV mythos when his claim to fame lies in the fact that he adamantly despises it. What makes Thiel and other Dark Enlightenment figures so dangerous (and this isn't to be conflated with mere Kurzweilian Singulatarianism, which Adrian does), is that they do not fear dealing with political controversies.
Mencius Moldbug( Garvin Yarvis ) another popular dark enlightenment thinker put up a critique of Y combinator founder Paul Graham, that might very well have sounded like Adrian wrote it themselves.
"At this point, the reality of power is too obvious to dismiss. But as bad as these people are at seeing power, they are far worse at using, building, or taking power."
Adrian makes mention of the fact that Silicon Valley likes to be vague; utopian, but vague, to avoid all the possible consequences and responsibilities that a definitive vision may bring. Ironically, Thiel would agree with that statement! He termed it Indefinite Optimism!
In Zero To One he says:
"To an indefinite optimist, the future will be better, but he doesn’t know how exactly, so he won’t make any specific plans. He expects to profit from the future but sees no reason to design it concretely."
He goes on to say:
"But indefinite optimism seems inherently unsustainable: how can the future get better if no one plans for it?"
A lot of critiques made in this book are critiques Thiel himself has of the culture. If anything Adrian may find very disheartening, the fact that he and Thiel have far more in agreement, when it comes to Silicon Valley as a culture. Which brings me to my next point.
When Adrian critiques the culture around "disruption", it is often in terms of something taking place, in lieu of its larger social consequences. This analysis buys into the fact that "disruption" is indeed taking place, a point contradicted by their own emphasis on Elizabeth Holmes, who had to inflate the capabilities of said technology all the while gaining from said deception.
The truth, however, lies in the fact that even the technological disruption aspect of the tech industry isn't taking place nearly as fast as some of its prophets have claimed, isn't nearly as revolutionary, and rarely shows up in growth and wellbeing metrics of a nation.
The truth lies in the fact that the whole Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem, is quite simply, not built to innovate! It's meant to buy enough time on low-risk ventures that assure early investors an exit.
But guess which organizations do indeed encourage massive innovation. Rather contrary to what SV has made seem, it's the tech behemoths like Google or mission-oriented governmental organizations like DARPA. The mythos of SV is that big companies like Google were started up by self-sufficient geniuses. And yet, as one can verify, the google search algorithm was one funded by the government, as was the project that is now known to have become Google Earth.
While Adrian remarks on the story of individualism in that culture, they miss what it's hiding. A truth many know. A truth its own elite think, and yet don't tell the many smart kids that seek to make a name for themselves in said innovation ecosystem.
What makes Thiel dangerous, is this realization and open embrace of government programs as well as denial of SV culture. While Google would reject government contracts, Palantir and Anduril openly embrace them, knowing their tech may end up in the kill chain. Palantir isn't merely dangerous because it "erodes civil liberties" it's quite simply because it's the most effective path to massive social influence. What makes this path so alluring, as indicated by Mariana Mazzucato in The Entrepreneurial State, is that the State always selects for technological innovations. ARPANET(what has become the internet today) and the GPS were at its infancy military tech. Governments will fund your projects, if they work. A herculean task, sure, but one most entreprising techies had initially sought when they approached the SV innovation economy.
Thiel's danger lies in the fact that he'll inspire more companies like Palantir, like Clearview, which help propagate Dark Enlightenment ideology, through the medium of the State.
With Tech, it isn't merely enough to describe what it thinks. It rarely does any thinking, it just executes. Adrian fails to take that into account.
October 17, 2020
I really wanted to like this book because I saw Taylor Lorenz recommend it. Nonetheless, it's a pretty shallow analysis of SV, crediting the marketing of their products and mission when that's a simplistic view based on the companies now. Marketing things with a false pretense has been happening for years since the tobacco industry and Coca Cola. As someone that enjoys techlash, this didn't have any enlightening arguments. If you're not in tech and know nothing about the nuanced world that is SV and want a surface level read this is good. If you're into critical thinking or have a background in SV this may not be the choice.
December 13, 2020
This has to be one of my favourite reads this year - short and snappy but DENSE with fascinating ideas and perfectly crafted tech culture criticism.
Each of the book’s chapters takes a word commonly used in Silicon Valley (and the associated international startup communities) - such as ‘failure’, ‘disruption’, ‘drop-out’ and ‘content’ - and dives into the ‘intellectual bedrock’ at the heart of the discourse which surrounds them.
Adrian is a Professor of Comparative Literature (among other things!) at Stanford - so his critical eye and vast knowledge of intellectual history swiftly pulls apart the pseudo-intellectualism so many in the startup community use to justify their success and problematic behaviour.
Honestly, this book was a breath of fresh air, and left me pondering so many different ideas. There were parts I didn’t necessarily agree with, but that’s kind of the point - tech culture relies so heavily on just-so stories and ideas that *feel* true and inevitable but ultimately are built on sand; this book shows the importance of not taking them (or their gurus which spout them) at face value.
Each of the book’s chapters takes a word commonly used in Silicon Valley (and the associated international startup communities) - such as ‘failure’, ‘disruption’, ‘drop-out’ and ‘content’ - and dives into the ‘intellectual bedrock’ at the heart of the discourse which surrounds them.
Adrian is a Professor of Comparative Literature (among other things!) at Stanford - so his critical eye and vast knowledge of intellectual history swiftly pulls apart the pseudo-intellectualism so many in the startup community use to justify their success and problematic behaviour.
Honestly, this book was a breath of fresh air, and left me pondering so many different ideas. There were parts I didn’t necessarily agree with, but that’s kind of the point - tech culture relies so heavily on just-so stories and ideas that *feel* true and inevitable but ultimately are built on sand; this book shows the importance of not taking them (or their gurus which spout them) at face value.
April 20, 2021
I read almost all of this on a plane on a day I was off of coffee (should've been in a terrible mood) and this still managed to be fucking incredible, one of my favorite (if not my favorite) tech-critical books i've read yet. this + Voices of the Valley were both great so I'm inclined to read all of the Logic x FSG stuff
really phenomenal look into how tech uses ideas that are 'academia-adjacent' and how it weaves its own mythology. also a pretty quick read. recommend to anyone interested in this kind stuff
really phenomenal look into how tech uses ideas that are 'academia-adjacent' and how it weaves its own mythology. also a pretty quick read. recommend to anyone interested in this kind stuff
October 21, 2020
“This is a book about the history of ideas in a place that likes to pretend its ideas don’t have any history.” Thus, begins Adrian Daub’s arresting and extraordinary book that is a dizzying concoction of Marshall McLuhan’s prescience, Ayn Rand’s unrelenting obstinance, and everything in between. Silicon Valley’s obsession with resurrecting and resuscitating time worn ideas and repackaging them as novel forays in innovation, is more a leitmotif of the tech industry than a temporary zeitgeist. As Daub reasserts, taking journalist Franklin Foer’s powerful quote as an aide, Silicon Valley companies “have a set of ideals, but they also have a business model. They end up reconfiguring your ideals in order to justify their business model.”
Daub, in a refreshingly original and enthusiastic manner demonstrates how Silicon Valley shibboleths such as “dropping out,” “disruption,” “genius”, and “failure” are elevated to sacrosanct ideals, thereby fawning an entire industry egged on by a more than just eager media, which just cannot wait to lap up Horatio Alger success stories. Consider “dropping out” for example. Once considered to be a symbol of inadequacy and a notion of incapability, this term is now arguably the playbook for supposed greatness. Equated with the exploits of tech moguls such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs et al, “dropping out” is bandied about and extolled with a frequency that borders on the intolerable. Daub informs his readers that this phenomenon of glorifying a ‘drop out’ culture, can be traced back to the counterculture of the late 1960s. Those were the times when the doyen of hippie culture Timothy Leary advocated an entire generation to turn on, tune in and drop out. This birthed, in the words of Daub, “elitism that very visibly snubs the elite … while nevertheless basking in its glow.” This is the same elitism that waxed eloquent over the “dropping out” from Stanford of the notorious Elizabeth Holmes who fell from grace post an unraveling of her fraudulent blood-testing organisation, Theranos. But as Daub, genuinely asks, “what did she drop out into?” Forking out $1 million out of a superrich family friend, to add to a generous dosage of monetary assistance from her father, Holmes had it all covered. Dropping out, my foot!
“Disruption” is yet another word which tech has appropriated for itself as an uncompromising neologism. It is as though continuity is an anathema, even if such a continuity happens to be perfectly well balanced, harmonized and functioning in a totally steady state. Nothing can compromise the motto of “Move Fast and Break Things.” “If it ain’t broken, then don’t fix it” has become a dated concept, a draconian and antediluvian throwback to passive and muted thinking. Except that, as Daub illustrates, such conventional thinking could in fact be the need of the hour. “As the poet Charles Baudelaire wrote in the 19th century, when the world around him was modernising at a breakneck pace: ‘The form of a city / changes faster, alas, than a mortal’s heart.’ Keep living the way you’re living, and soon enough you’ll find yourself living in the past.”
The origins of the term disruption, as employed in its contemporary connotation may be attributed to the wisdom received from can be traced to the philosophy of “creative destruction” expounded by Austrian political economist, Joseph Alois Schumpeter. In a six-page chapter forming part of his book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Schumpeter introduced to his readers “The Process of Creative Destruction.” He held forth on how the ancient is consistently replaced by the modern. To quote the economist himself, “the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.” This ‘Schumpeterian’ notion, as Daub educates his readers has been taken to irrational levels by the tech fraternity. “Disruption is possessed of a deep fealty to whatever is already given. It seeks to make it more efficient, more exciting, more something, but it never ever wants to dispense altogether with what’s out there. This is why its gestures are always radical, but its effects never really upset the apple cart: Uber claims to have “revolutionised” the experience of hailing a cab, but really that experience has largely stayed the same. What it managed to get rid of were steady jobs, unions and anyone other than Uber making money on the whole enterprise.”
This fixation over the notion of “disruption” is also syncretic with the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s principle of accelerationist humility. As Daub educates his readers, this tenet is emblematic of an extreme form of something that forever denotes an idea of disruption. This search for altering things in perpetuity irrespective of an underlying necessity ensures that a world of artificial churn and a perpetual motion machine keeps perceptions occupied and dogmas, well entrenched.
If Ayn Rand’s remorseless capitalism is a bedrock that is yet to be outgrown by some of tech’s superstars such as the irreverent Peter Thiel, the influence of the Esalen Institute and its former speakers still permeates the fabric of the functioning of the technology landscape. The brainchild of a Stanford graduate named Dick Price, who was influenced by a lecture titled “Human Potentialities”, and delivered by Aldous Huxley, the Esalen Institute was a veritable brewery of philosophy. Aiding Price in the establishment of this institute were Michael Murphy, Frederic Spiegelberg, Gregory Bateson, and Fritz Perls. Prominent and most wanted (and vaunted) speakers taking to the rostrum included, R. Buckminster Fuller, Ken Kesey, Linus Pauling, Joseph Campbell, and Huxley himself.
The gestalt characterizing Esalen was the human potential movement, one of the longest-lasting institutions of New Age spiritualism. The tech industry seems to be on the firm grip of the “Esalen Principle” these days. As Daub informs us, the Institute’s current CEO comes from the Wikimedia Foundation, and the institute itself offers courses in “Designing the Life We Want” taught by Silicon Valley consultants. Daub also visits some other prominent thinkers whose philosophy has been appropriated or rather misappropriated by corporate money bags to further their capitalist cause.
“What Tech Calls Thinking” – thought provoking, turbulent, and topical.
Daub, in a refreshingly original and enthusiastic manner demonstrates how Silicon Valley shibboleths such as “dropping out,” “disruption,” “genius”, and “failure” are elevated to sacrosanct ideals, thereby fawning an entire industry egged on by a more than just eager media, which just cannot wait to lap up Horatio Alger success stories. Consider “dropping out” for example. Once considered to be a symbol of inadequacy and a notion of incapability, this term is now arguably the playbook for supposed greatness. Equated with the exploits of tech moguls such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs et al, “dropping out” is bandied about and extolled with a frequency that borders on the intolerable. Daub informs his readers that this phenomenon of glorifying a ‘drop out’ culture, can be traced back to the counterculture of the late 1960s. Those were the times when the doyen of hippie culture Timothy Leary advocated an entire generation to turn on, tune in and drop out. This birthed, in the words of Daub, “elitism that very visibly snubs the elite … while nevertheless basking in its glow.” This is the same elitism that waxed eloquent over the “dropping out” from Stanford of the notorious Elizabeth Holmes who fell from grace post an unraveling of her fraudulent blood-testing organisation, Theranos. But as Daub, genuinely asks, “what did she drop out into?” Forking out $1 million out of a superrich family friend, to add to a generous dosage of monetary assistance from her father, Holmes had it all covered. Dropping out, my foot!
“Disruption” is yet another word which tech has appropriated for itself as an uncompromising neologism. It is as though continuity is an anathema, even if such a continuity happens to be perfectly well balanced, harmonized and functioning in a totally steady state. Nothing can compromise the motto of “Move Fast and Break Things.” “If it ain’t broken, then don’t fix it” has become a dated concept, a draconian and antediluvian throwback to passive and muted thinking. Except that, as Daub illustrates, such conventional thinking could in fact be the need of the hour. “As the poet Charles Baudelaire wrote in the 19th century, when the world around him was modernising at a breakneck pace: ‘The form of a city / changes faster, alas, than a mortal’s heart.’ Keep living the way you’re living, and soon enough you’ll find yourself living in the past.”
The origins of the term disruption, as employed in its contemporary connotation may be attributed to the wisdom received from can be traced to the philosophy of “creative destruction” expounded by Austrian political economist, Joseph Alois Schumpeter. In a six-page chapter forming part of his book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Schumpeter introduced to his readers “The Process of Creative Destruction.” He held forth on how the ancient is consistently replaced by the modern. To quote the economist himself, “the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.” This ‘Schumpeterian’ notion, as Daub educates his readers has been taken to irrational levels by the tech fraternity. “Disruption is possessed of a deep fealty to whatever is already given. It seeks to make it more efficient, more exciting, more something, but it never ever wants to dispense altogether with what’s out there. This is why its gestures are always radical, but its effects never really upset the apple cart: Uber claims to have “revolutionised” the experience of hailing a cab, but really that experience has largely stayed the same. What it managed to get rid of were steady jobs, unions and anyone other than Uber making money on the whole enterprise.”
This fixation over the notion of “disruption” is also syncretic with the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s principle of accelerationist humility. As Daub educates his readers, this tenet is emblematic of an extreme form of something that forever denotes an idea of disruption. This search for altering things in perpetuity irrespective of an underlying necessity ensures that a world of artificial churn and a perpetual motion machine keeps perceptions occupied and dogmas, well entrenched.
If Ayn Rand’s remorseless capitalism is a bedrock that is yet to be outgrown by some of tech’s superstars such as the irreverent Peter Thiel, the influence of the Esalen Institute and its former speakers still permeates the fabric of the functioning of the technology landscape. The brainchild of a Stanford graduate named Dick Price, who was influenced by a lecture titled “Human Potentialities”, and delivered by Aldous Huxley, the Esalen Institute was a veritable brewery of philosophy. Aiding Price in the establishment of this institute were Michael Murphy, Frederic Spiegelberg, Gregory Bateson, and Fritz Perls. Prominent and most wanted (and vaunted) speakers taking to the rostrum included, R. Buckminster Fuller, Ken Kesey, Linus Pauling, Joseph Campbell, and Huxley himself.
The gestalt characterizing Esalen was the human potential movement, one of the longest-lasting institutions of New Age spiritualism. The tech industry seems to be on the firm grip of the “Esalen Principle” these days. As Daub informs us, the Institute’s current CEO comes from the Wikimedia Foundation, and the institute itself offers courses in “Designing the Life We Want” taught by Silicon Valley consultants. Daub also visits some other prominent thinkers whose philosophy has been appropriated or rather misappropriated by corporate money bags to further their capitalist cause.
“What Tech Calls Thinking” – thought provoking, turbulent, and topical.
February 4, 2025
Jedes Buch, was mir die Ideologie von Peter Thiel näher bringt, wird sowieso instantly von mir geliebt.
Dieses Buch hat genau die richtige Länge und verbirgt so viele unfassbar originelle und aufregende Gedanken in sich, dass man sich auf jeder Seite schon auf die nächste freut. Es ist nicht unbedingt so, dass dieses Buch einen roten Faden, der sich am Ende auflöst, sondern die Kapitel stellen eher einzelne Gedanken zur Tech-Industrie dar, aber die einzelnen Gedanken sind so perfekt ausformuliert, dass es gar keinen roten Faden braucht. Dringendste Empfehlung!
Dieses Buch hat genau die richtige Länge und verbirgt so viele unfassbar originelle und aufregende Gedanken in sich, dass man sich auf jeder Seite schon auf die nächste freut. Es ist nicht unbedingt so, dass dieses Buch einen roten Faden, der sich am Ende auflöst, sondern die Kapitel stellen eher einzelne Gedanken zur Tech-Industrie dar, aber die einzelnen Gedanken sind so perfekt ausformuliert, dass es gar keinen roten Faden braucht. Dringendste Empfehlung!
February 24, 2021
I liked the part about dropping out.
“Anyone who’s gone to college in the United States knows that it can be a scattered experience: random requirements, exciting but seemingly disparate course offerings, choices determined by time conflicts and departmental whims. This is particularly true the first few years—that is, the only ones a dropout typically spends at school.”
Yes, it seems like one is risking a lot by leaving, but what in fact did a person learn as a first- or second-year student? Even after a complete undergraduate AND graduate education one can walk away quite dissatisfied by their schooling. But this is not a signifier of education's uselessness. Paradoxically, the opportunity cost of leaving is higher than many would like to admit, and I'm talking about intellectual development here, not socioeconomic gain. I would like to see more entrepreneurial types direct that energy towards their education itself, where disruption is truly difficult and hard to come by. If this chapter became a book, I'd be interested.
This is also, not accidentally the section where I actually felt some sort of local texture coming through. The Denise Winters anecdote. Daub's insider knowledge of what a Stanford UG education looks like. I would like to have read a book that told me more about the ambient feeling of Silicon Valley as many of the critical and historical expositions felt easy to me, stuff you could find in a magazine like TNR or The Boston Review and digest for breakfast or in a post-dinner haze.
“Anyone who’s gone to college in the United States knows that it can be a scattered experience: random requirements, exciting but seemingly disparate course offerings, choices determined by time conflicts and departmental whims. This is particularly true the first few years—that is, the only ones a dropout typically spends at school.”
Yes, it seems like one is risking a lot by leaving, but what in fact did a person learn as a first- or second-year student? Even after a complete undergraduate AND graduate education one can walk away quite dissatisfied by their schooling. But this is not a signifier of education's uselessness. Paradoxically, the opportunity cost of leaving is higher than many would like to admit, and I'm talking about intellectual development here, not socioeconomic gain. I would like to see more entrepreneurial types direct that energy towards their education itself, where disruption is truly difficult and hard to come by. If this chapter became a book, I'd be interested.
This is also, not accidentally the section where I actually felt some sort of local texture coming through. The Denise Winters anecdote. Daub's insider knowledge of what a Stanford UG education looks like. I would like to have read a book that told me more about the ambient feeling of Silicon Valley as many of the critical and historical expositions felt easy to me, stuff you could find in a magazine like TNR or The Boston Review and digest for breakfast or in a post-dinner haze.
February 15, 2022
As someone who works in tech, I found the arguments laid out in this book spot on.
It's heady at times (it's been a while since I read philosophy), but it's worth the effort.
It's heady at times (it's been a while since I read philosophy), but it's worth the effort.
March 30, 2025
People smarter than me gave bad reviews but idk and idc i loved this, fuck tech burn it all down (i read this entire book on the amazon app on my iphone)
February 16, 2021
I learned a bit about what Daub thinks Silicon Valley thinks, but I'm not sure if there's any overarching argument, and there's certainly no call to action. There's no attempt to say what 'Tech' is before ascribing thought to it, either, and the fanciful generalisation remains unexamined throughout.
In sum Daub says:
1. Tech's cult of dropping out is dangerous because it might be a bad thing if the people who end up pulling important levers of society only have the most scant education in the liberal arts.
2. Tech's attitude to content - rooted in Mcluhan's 'medium is the message' - prioritises The Platform while the content creators make nothing, and denies any responsibility for what is making it billions.
3. Tech has an adolescent Randian mystique of genius trammelled by lessers, that allows it to present itself as a victim, while ignoring the social structures that make its success possible.
4. Any communication is destined to fall short of its potential, and The Platform's gearing for engagement inevitably leads to trolls whose automatic reactions exalt mindlessness and are devoid of informational value.
5. Girardian mimetic desire appeals to Tech (incorporated as Thiel) because it shows people as sheep, it reveals an esoteric universal structure to reality, it intellectualises disruption that is really just a redescription of orthodoxy, and finally, it allows those with the power to feel like the victim of displaced anger, something which Daub says "may be the most secret of Silicon Valley's secret desires".
6. The fetish of disruption is rooted in Marx, via Schumpeter's 'creative destruction', which should lead naturally to a surrender to accelerationism. It relies on a creative amnesia, imagining stable continuities that didn't exist. It implies an ethical imperative - that any disrupted continuity deserves to be disrupted - that gives all advantage to the disrupter. It blinds observers to the fact that, while the tech may have changed, the industry is business as usual, with profit just concentrating even more with The Platform at the expense of labour.
7. Finally, tech's mythology of failure only works for those who can afford to fail, and is only viewed positively in light of the salvation of consequent success.
1, 7, and to a lesser extent 3, give good reason to look quizzically at, gently mock, and then disregard dropout and early failure autofiction. 4 misses the mark, dressed up in some nice Huxley new age stories, it ends up being about trolling. While the asymetric effect on troll and trolled is well put, the phenomenon is dismissed too casually, without realling engaging with the causes and effects. 5 is neat, and apparently has great explanatory power, but ends up being a little like the philosophy it criticises - promising an esoteric machinery that is either univeral and therefore unsupportable, or particular and therefore unworthy of note. The remaining two points are more important, but, I think, are already well understood. 2 is so true it is enshrined in Section 230 protections, which the internet behemoths will defend to the end. And 6 just calls out the 'con' of disruption as a veneer for ever more rent seeking.
Ultimately this would have been better off expanded - with more discussion of what 'tech' is, and greater examination of tech's thinking on monopolies, addiction, social engineering, privacy, ethics, and the impact of machine learning, quantum computing, and ubiquitous connectivity, and the implications for civil society, regulation and policy…Or, preferably, shortened to a series of 7 loosely-related blog posts flagging some themes to look out for when reading about tech.
In sum Daub says:
1. Tech's cult of dropping out is dangerous because it might be a bad thing if the people who end up pulling important levers of society only have the most scant education in the liberal arts.
2. Tech's attitude to content - rooted in Mcluhan's 'medium is the message' - prioritises The Platform while the content creators make nothing, and denies any responsibility for what is making it billions.
3. Tech has an adolescent Randian mystique of genius trammelled by lessers, that allows it to present itself as a victim, while ignoring the social structures that make its success possible.
4. Any communication is destined to fall short of its potential, and The Platform's gearing for engagement inevitably leads to trolls whose automatic reactions exalt mindlessness and are devoid of informational value.
5. Girardian mimetic desire appeals to Tech (incorporated as Thiel) because it shows people as sheep, it reveals an esoteric universal structure to reality, it intellectualises disruption that is really just a redescription of orthodoxy, and finally, it allows those with the power to feel like the victim of displaced anger, something which Daub says "may be the most secret of Silicon Valley's secret desires".
6. The fetish of disruption is rooted in Marx, via Schumpeter's 'creative destruction', which should lead naturally to a surrender to accelerationism. It relies on a creative amnesia, imagining stable continuities that didn't exist. It implies an ethical imperative - that any disrupted continuity deserves to be disrupted - that gives all advantage to the disrupter. It blinds observers to the fact that, while the tech may have changed, the industry is business as usual, with profit just concentrating even more with The Platform at the expense of labour.
7. Finally, tech's mythology of failure only works for those who can afford to fail, and is only viewed positively in light of the salvation of consequent success.
1, 7, and to a lesser extent 3, give good reason to look quizzically at, gently mock, and then disregard dropout and early failure autofiction. 4 misses the mark, dressed up in some nice Huxley new age stories, it ends up being about trolling. While the asymetric effect on troll and trolled is well put, the phenomenon is dismissed too casually, without realling engaging with the causes and effects. 5 is neat, and apparently has great explanatory power, but ends up being a little like the philosophy it criticises - promising an esoteric machinery that is either univeral and therefore unsupportable, or particular and therefore unworthy of note. The remaining two points are more important, but, I think, are already well understood. 2 is so true it is enshrined in Section 230 protections, which the internet behemoths will defend to the end. And 6 just calls out the 'con' of disruption as a veneer for ever more rent seeking.
Ultimately this would have been better off expanded - with more discussion of what 'tech' is, and greater examination of tech's thinking on monopolies, addiction, social engineering, privacy, ethics, and the impact of machine learning, quantum computing, and ubiquitous connectivity, and the implications for civil society, regulation and policy…Or, preferably, shortened to a series of 7 loosely-related blog posts flagging some themes to look out for when reading about tech.
June 2, 2021
I'm biased because the author is a colleague-friend, and I love hearing his droll erudite voice in this text. But the approach is also brilliant, puncturing Silicon Valley's self-mythologizing rhetoric with deft facts and deceptively simple slashing of cliches, misquotations, and inspirational pablum.
October 15, 2020
A book that is a simultaneously serious and hilarious critique of what might be described as the profound vacuousness, the deep shallowness, of Silicon Valley’s pseudo-philosophical self-conception. Why does Tech as an industry uniquely produce so many people who think of and present themselves not just as successful businesspeople with interests and maybe ideals (this is true of most industries) but also as supposedly interesting thinkers and philosophers? In fact, what Daub shows is that Tech doesn’t so much think philosophically as it propounds a philosophy, that is, a particular kind of Weltanshauung.
Daub’s method, quite precisely, is that of literary criticism, in a series of pithy, snarky chapters that deconstruct some of the keywords and concepts that Tech uses to understand itself: the myth of “Dropping Out” (tied back to the counterculture of Ken Kesey and Stewart Brand) to start one’s company; the denigration of “Content” providers (including data cows) and exaltation of “platform” builders, which discusses the importance of Marshall McLuhan’s ideas; the hero-worship of the lone “Genius” derived from the juvenile appeal of Ayn Rand; the cult of “Communication,” which continues the discussion of McLuhan and includes a highly original account of why social media platforms produce “trolls” and trolling; the peculiar understanding of “Desire” in the valley, drawing on the weird and pseudo-deep ideas of Rene Girard; the embrace of “Disruption,” which evacuates all the moral ambivalence of Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction”; and finally, “Failure,” whose meaning has come to be almost completely inverted in the lexicon of the privileged denizens of Tech who only seem to fail upwards.
“What tech calls thinking,” Daub observes, “is done largely outside, but within shouting distance of, the university.” In fact, however, what tech calls thinking is largely done within shouting distance of one specific university: Stanford. The book lacks an index, but if it had one, the entry for Stanford would be embarrassingly long. Himself a professor of German literature at Stanford, Daub has written an extremely Stanford-centric book: his main historical narrative of the emergence of the Silicon Valley ethos — “from counterculture to cyberculture” — is taken from Stanford media studies scholar Fred Turner; his account of the appeal of Ayn Rand is derived from the work of Stanford historian Jennifer Burns; his account of Stanford-grad Peter Thiel’s intellectual development rests on the Palantir founder’s tutelage under Rene Girard, a Professor of French at Stanford. One of the missed turns of the book, in fact, is its failure to consider the particular importance of Stanford as an institution in creating the self-aggrandizing, pseudointellectual, “academish” (15) ethos of Tech that Daub so expertly skewers.
Daub’s method, quite precisely, is that of literary criticism, in a series of pithy, snarky chapters that deconstruct some of the keywords and concepts that Tech uses to understand itself: the myth of “Dropping Out” (tied back to the counterculture of Ken Kesey and Stewart Brand) to start one’s company; the denigration of “Content” providers (including data cows) and exaltation of “platform” builders, which discusses the importance of Marshall McLuhan’s ideas; the hero-worship of the lone “Genius” derived from the juvenile appeal of Ayn Rand; the cult of “Communication,” which continues the discussion of McLuhan and includes a highly original account of why social media platforms produce “trolls” and trolling; the peculiar understanding of “Desire” in the valley, drawing on the weird and pseudo-deep ideas of Rene Girard; the embrace of “Disruption,” which evacuates all the moral ambivalence of Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction”; and finally, “Failure,” whose meaning has come to be almost completely inverted in the lexicon of the privileged denizens of Tech who only seem to fail upwards.
“What tech calls thinking,” Daub observes, “is done largely outside, but within shouting distance of, the university.” In fact, however, what tech calls thinking is largely done within shouting distance of one specific university: Stanford. The book lacks an index, but if it had one, the entry for Stanford would be embarrassingly long. Himself a professor of German literature at Stanford, Daub has written an extremely Stanford-centric book: his main historical narrative of the emergence of the Silicon Valley ethos — “from counterculture to cyberculture” — is taken from Stanford media studies scholar Fred Turner; his account of the appeal of Ayn Rand is derived from the work of Stanford historian Jennifer Burns; his account of Stanford-grad Peter Thiel’s intellectual development rests on the Palantir founder’s tutelage under Rene Girard, a Professor of French at Stanford. One of the missed turns of the book, in fact, is its failure to consider the particular importance of Stanford as an institution in creating the self-aggrandizing, pseudointellectual, “academish” (15) ethos of Tech that Daub so expertly skewers.
May 3, 2025
Strange book. Daub has tremendous insights into the philosophies of Silicon Valley and describes how it has borrowed and reshaped other ideas. The problem is that he goes off on tangents that add little to the narrative and make it hard to follow. Each of the chapters is only loosely tied to the others and he only ties them together in the last paragraph of the book. Honestly, had it been framed as a series of essays on Silicon Valley rather than a linear narrative, it would have worked better. I recommend even with these caveats.
July 13, 2022
Deserved to be read widely. Beautiful, cynical prose criticizing the ethos of 'Silicon Valley'. The last chapter on 'failure' is profound. If you blindly love this Valley of Success, I bet you are going to hate this book. But if you are working in or on the industry simply with a critical mind, it is a must-read, even though you would end up disagreeing with it.
November 18, 2023
(3.5/5)
August 28, 2025
A tidy, effective survey of the intellectual underpinnings of Silicon Valley. Rather than take their ideas at face value, Adrienne Daub approaches Silicon Valley intellectuals as a specific milieu with biases and unacknowledged blind spots despite their attempts to position their worldview as universal. He examines how this narrowness leads to a superficial, and ultimately juvenile philosophy that mainly serves to reaffirm tech intellectuals pre-existing motives or interests.
The theory bro in me may have enjoyed a deeper exploration of the ideas that shape Silicon Valley, but in this instance, the short length is the point. Daub is able to quickly discredit most of the ideas by simply exploring the contexts in which they were developed.
Still, even bad or underbaked philosophy can be interesting in relation to how it shapes (or is believed to shape) the world, and there are many juicy insights into tech’s intellectual origins. I especially enjoyed Daub’s discussion of Marshal McLuhan and the popularity of his aphorism “the medium is the message” to tech thinkers. Well worth the read.
The theory bro in me may have enjoyed a deeper exploration of the ideas that shape Silicon Valley, but in this instance, the short length is the point. Daub is able to quickly discredit most of the ideas by simply exploring the contexts in which they were developed.
Still, even bad or underbaked philosophy can be interesting in relation to how it shapes (or is believed to shape) the world, and there are many juicy insights into tech’s intellectual origins. I especially enjoyed Daub’s discussion of Marshal McLuhan and the popularity of his aphorism “the medium is the message” to tech thinkers. Well worth the read.
November 16, 2020
Illuminating “the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley” is a very necessary task. I was excited to read Adrian Daub’s attempt after enjoying other titles in the FSGO/Logic series (especially Xiaowei Wang’s excellent Blockchain Chicken Farm). Unfortunately this is a slapdash effort that doesn’t go very deep into the bedrock.
The chapter on Rene Girard epitomizes the book’s failings. Girard’s theories of mimetic desire and scapegoating were a crucial intellectual influence on Peter Thiel. Geoff Shullenberger’s essay “The Scapegoating Machine” in The New Inquiry close-reads Girard as well as Thiel’s own Zero To One to provide a complex model of Thiel’s thinking, including why Thiel shocked Silicon Valley by vocally supporting Donald Trump. Daub, on the other hand, devotes eleven pages to Girardian desire. The first two draw a caricature of the crank-adjacent people (like “aging visiting scholars and retired local dentists”) who read Girard. There are about two pages on mimetic desire. In the remaining seven, Daub sneers about how dumb Girard’s “cliche”, “obvious” theories are. I don’t like Thiel either — but I want to learn about his thought process, not what Adrian Daub finds cringeworthy.
The simplest explanation for this misplaced focus is, I regret to say, laziness. Daub simply doesn’t show much evidence of deep engagement with the tech people… or the thinkers. There’s an entire chapter about Disruption; I was shocked that Daub never mentions Clayton Christensen, who originated the concept of “disruptive innovation”. This is ironic: throughout the book Daub points out cases where tech people misunderstand the intellectual concepts they cite, and “disruption” would have illustrated the dynamic perfectly. The concept originally described cheap, inferior products improving quickly enough to take over the market for products that used to be completely superior. (For example, PCs disrupted the market for mainframes.) But SV people misuse “disruption” to mean any product that that really shakes up a market. The degradation of this term might have been an interesting case study, but Daub gives no indication he’s done the reading. Instead the chapter focuses on Schumpeter and the completely distinct concept of creative destruction.
The chapter on McLuhan isn’t bad, but it isn’t enough to redeem the general lack of depth here. Good books on Silicon Valley philosophy are out there to be written; I hope that next time Daub can “fail better”.
The chapter on Rene Girard epitomizes the book’s failings. Girard’s theories of mimetic desire and scapegoating were a crucial intellectual influence on Peter Thiel. Geoff Shullenberger’s essay “The Scapegoating Machine” in The New Inquiry close-reads Girard as well as Thiel’s own Zero To One to provide a complex model of Thiel’s thinking, including why Thiel shocked Silicon Valley by vocally supporting Donald Trump. Daub, on the other hand, devotes eleven pages to Girardian desire. The first two draw a caricature of the crank-adjacent people (like “aging visiting scholars and retired local dentists”) who read Girard. There are about two pages on mimetic desire. In the remaining seven, Daub sneers about how dumb Girard’s “cliche”, “obvious” theories are. I don’t like Thiel either — but I want to learn about his thought process, not what Adrian Daub finds cringeworthy.
The simplest explanation for this misplaced focus is, I regret to say, laziness. Daub simply doesn’t show much evidence of deep engagement with the tech people… or the thinkers. There’s an entire chapter about Disruption; I was shocked that Daub never mentions Clayton Christensen, who originated the concept of “disruptive innovation”. This is ironic: throughout the book Daub points out cases where tech people misunderstand the intellectual concepts they cite, and “disruption” would have illustrated the dynamic perfectly. The concept originally described cheap, inferior products improving quickly enough to take over the market for products that used to be completely superior. (For example, PCs disrupted the market for mainframes.) But SV people misuse “disruption” to mean any product that that really shakes up a market. The degradation of this term might have been an interesting case study, but Daub gives no indication he’s done the reading. Instead the chapter focuses on Schumpeter and the completely distinct concept of creative destruction.
The chapter on McLuhan isn’t bad, but it isn’t enough to redeem the general lack of depth here. Good books on Silicon Valley philosophy are out there to be written; I hope that next time Daub can “fail better”.
May 15, 2021
I have worked with many software engineers in my life, and a few Silicon Valley adjacent, and there is a particular kind of enthusiast who manages to both claim that SV has the only real solutions to the world's ills, and to be completely ignorant of the fact that there is any *kind* of thinking - in the sense of philosophy - involved at all. Other wonderful misconceptions include that somehow technology is still a disruptive upstart, rather than the companies dominating the world economy and setting orthodoxy.
This little volume combines setting out some of the basic origins of SV's ideologues (Ayn Rand and Michael McCluhan feature prominently here) with critique of how their ideas have been used, and a bit of a discussion about the impact of SV's assumptions on the world. The overall message is largely that SV is not doing anything new at all .
The short book is doing a lot of things, and all of them to some extent on the surface, making it the kind of volume I wish I could give to more of the Techies in my life, if for nothing else than to make them question their own assumptions about their field. I would have liked more - in particular there can be times where SV feels monolithic to the point of obscuring different ideologies.
This little volume combines setting out some of the basic origins of SV's ideologues (Ayn Rand and Michael McCluhan feature prominently here) with critique of how their ideas have been used, and a bit of a discussion about the impact of SV's assumptions on the world. The overall message is largely that SV is not doing anything new at all .
The short book is doing a lot of things, and all of them to some extent on the surface, making it the kind of volume I wish I could give to more of the Techies in my life, if for nothing else than to make them question their own assumptions about their field. I would have liked more - in particular there can be times where SV feels monolithic to the point of obscuring different ideologies.
December 15, 2022
A short but thought provoking gaze into the intellectual environment of big tech. The notable strengths are the dispelling of myths (the drop out to success pipeline, the mystique of failure etc) that are all too frequent in profiles or accounts of tech success.
The author's background in the humanities really shines through with the range of knowledge and the flow of the writing. Yet my only annoyance is that the chapters don't necessarily flow, but rather stab at the issue from multiple angles before taking a step back and admiring the (admittedly) convincing handiwork. From silicon valley's links to counter culture, it's obsession with Rand and individualism through to the better known issues of users creating value whilst platform owners stand back and take the money/credit these are all covered and in a way that has no time for diplomatic words.
Short, sharp and satisfying
The author's background in the humanities really shines through with the range of knowledge and the flow of the writing. Yet my only annoyance is that the chapters don't necessarily flow, but rather stab at the issue from multiple angles before taking a step back and admiring the (admittedly) convincing handiwork. From silicon valley's links to counter culture, it's obsession with Rand and individualism through to the better known issues of users creating value whilst platform owners stand back and take the money/credit these are all covered and in a way that has no time for diplomatic words.
Short, sharp and satisfying
July 24, 2022
One of the final paragraphs of this book provides a nice summary:
"Confronted with the uncanny smoothness of their ascent, Silicon Valley's protagonists fetishize the supposed break and existential risk entailed in dropping out of college to found a company. Confronted with the fact that the platforms that are making them rich are keeping others poor, they come up with stories to explain why this must necessarily be so. And by degrading failure, anguish, and discomfort to mere stepping-stones, they erase the fact that for so many of us, these stones don't lead anywhere."
This book largely confronts and deconstructs a lot of the buzzy words and stories that Silicon Valley types tell about themselves and their industry, often finding sympathetic ears in a journalist community that isn't as critical of them as they should be (though this definitely began to change post-2016). Though written by an academic, it's a fairly casual book and often times a little snarky. But to be honest, a lot of the ideas that narratives that people in Silicon Valley espouse -- about disruption, genius founders who dropped out of school, and what technology can provide for society -- aren't that deep or studied very deeply by them. Just talk to some engineers in or product people from a major tech company or start up and you'll find many incredible technically skilled people with shallow views of the world that seem to be be influenced by surface level understandings of obscure intellectuals, or ahistorical understandings of tech, politics, and culture. Much deeper questions can be asked about Silicon Valley companies and people, about access to capital, social responsibility, their political philosophies, and more, but this book doesn't do that. That's not a bad thing, but this book seems most useful to help decode a lot of tech jargon or improve one's BS-meter when talking to someone in tech. Given how short and quick of a read it is, I'd still say it's worthwhile.
I used the word "Silicon Valley" specifically and don't mean to describe all people who work in tech or at start ups in general because this book only considers the tech industry in that region, though that culture is very influential. If you've been following the industry or maybe have worked in it without drinking the kool-aid, you may not learn anything new here, but just find new language or more information on the backstories of ideas you already know of.
"Confronted with the uncanny smoothness of their ascent, Silicon Valley's protagonists fetishize the supposed break and existential risk entailed in dropping out of college to found a company. Confronted with the fact that the platforms that are making them rich are keeping others poor, they come up with stories to explain why this must necessarily be so. And by degrading failure, anguish, and discomfort to mere stepping-stones, they erase the fact that for so many of us, these stones don't lead anywhere."
This book largely confronts and deconstructs a lot of the buzzy words and stories that Silicon Valley types tell about themselves and their industry, often finding sympathetic ears in a journalist community that isn't as critical of them as they should be (though this definitely began to change post-2016). Though written by an academic, it's a fairly casual book and often times a little snarky. But to be honest, a lot of the ideas that narratives that people in Silicon Valley espouse -- about disruption, genius founders who dropped out of school, and what technology can provide for society -- aren't that deep or studied very deeply by them. Just talk to some engineers in or product people from a major tech company or start up and you'll find many incredible technically skilled people with shallow views of the world that seem to be be influenced by surface level understandings of obscure intellectuals, or ahistorical understandings of tech, politics, and culture. Much deeper questions can be asked about Silicon Valley companies and people, about access to capital, social responsibility, their political philosophies, and more, but this book doesn't do that. That's not a bad thing, but this book seems most useful to help decode a lot of tech jargon or improve one's BS-meter when talking to someone in tech. Given how short and quick of a read it is, I'd still say it's worthwhile.
I used the word "Silicon Valley" specifically and don't mean to describe all people who work in tech or at start ups in general because this book only considers the tech industry in that region, though that culture is very influential. If you've been following the industry or maybe have worked in it without drinking the kool-aid, you may not learn anything new here, but just find new language or more information on the backstories of ideas you already know of.
June 4, 2025
This is one of those books that didn’t turn out to be what I was hoping.
What I was hoping for was an account of what thinkers, philosophers or others, tech leaders (and maybe tech workers) credited as intellectual influences, what those thinkers thought, and how those thoughts affected the technological innovations coming out of Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
Daub is careful in his introduction to say that it is difficult to impossible to assign intellectual motivations to tech per se. What he does claim as the basis for his book, though, is that such tech leaders as Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel “represent the way the tech sector has communicated with the outside world.” The tech leaders then aren’t really citing thinkers who influenced and inspired them. They are citing thinkers who communicate what they themselves already think, and maybe communicate it better or more credibly than they could themselves.
That said, that the book isn’t the one I was hoping for is probably not a reflection on Daub, but maybe a reflection on the tech leaders themselves.
Part of that distinction between motivation and representation that Daub refers to has to do with how the tech leaders themselves appear to consume philosophy. A favorite passage or quote, or even a second-hand description of a philosopher’s thought, may resonate. It may be something that they find themselves inclined to agree with strongly, or that they find puts together in the right words what they never articulated themselves.
It’s not, then, as if the philosopher’s thought actually inspired them in the first place — there was just a happy marriage between the quote, the passage, or the description and the person’s thinking along the way somewhere. From that point on, that quote, passage, etc. may motivate or inspire, but the marriage happened because the person was already inclined toward what they found in the quote, etc.
Daub formulates the advantage of repackaging your own thoughts in the thoughts of philosophers and others as “your own intuitions repackaged as esoteric knowledge”. In that passage, he is specifically talking about Peter Thiel and the French author, Rene Girard, but it may stand for other tech leaders and their would-be influencers as well.
So, taking Daub’s book for the book it is rather than the one I hoped for, here are Daub’s chapters and the themes in each:
Dropping Out — the hero dropouts (Jobs, Zuckerberg, Elizabeth Holmes — okay, Holmes doesn’t turn out to be much of a hero). Daub makes the interesting point that often the “dropouts” are dropping out from elite institutions and with formidable safety nets. Dropouts from Stanford, Berkeley, or Harvard with financial resources aren’t necessarily models for the rest of us. They’ve already proved that they are high achievers, even by getting into those schools, and they will likely get second chances even if they fail.
Content — Marshall McLuhan provides a theme of context over content, echoed in the dominance of “platform technologies,” where the entrepreneur provides the structure (think eBay or Facebook) but not the content of the structure. And the platform tends to control the content, financially as well potentially as editorially.
Genius — Ayn Rand champions the idea of the individual genius struggling against resistance — the resistances of conformity, regulation, biases against change, etc.
Communication — really, the lack of communication pervading tech. Again, the platforms simply do not afford it, despite that so many are “social media” platforms. “Communication” becomes a degraded shadow of itself.
Desire — René Girard’s key contribution. Desire becomes a driver of innovation and the point theme for marketing.
Disruption — the economist Joseph Schumpeter is the featured thinker here, with the notion of “creative disruption” — the possibility (inevitability for Schumpeter) that change will become too fast, that in order to tame its effects on our lives (employment, risk, . . .), we will need to regulate it, tame it. The alternative is to embrace change with the confidence that you’ll pull things together in the end — “fail fast”, “move fast and break things.” Better to face and live with the consequences than cling to the stable.
Failure — the idea of failure as a stepping stone. And it may well be a stepping stone to success, IF you have the resources, as an entrepreneur or as a business, to iterate on the basis of what you have learned through your failures.
Daub’s tone is both a little bit academic and a little bit polemic. To be honest I was hoping for more academic and less polemic, even though I found myself more or less agreeing with the direction of his polemic.
But agreeing with a polemic doesn’t make it a work of genius and insight; it just makes it something you agree with. Take for example, Daub’s criticism of the platform, that the platform owner exploits the content providers. I don’t think the point is invalid, but I do think there’s a kind of one-sidedness in linking the dominance of the platform in tech thinking to the influence of McLuhan-like thinking. There are many reasons, certainly besides any influence of McLuhan, for a company, or an innovator, to focus on the platform rather than the content — the most obvious being that the platform provider gets a piece of all the revenue generated by all the content providers. And if the platform owner can capture the market (e.g., in platforms built on network effects like Facebook or eBay), the platform will KEEP the market and remain dominant as the content itself comes and goes.
All in all, I was disappointed, but like I said, maybe my disappointment is misdirected if I aim it at Daub. Maybe it’s just that I was hoping for more from our tech leaders themselves.
I should throw in, just in case, my review might come off as somehow anti-tech, that I made my career in tech and especially in innovative technology, as a researcher, prototyper, facilitator, and in other roles. I’m also an ex-academic philosopher, so that may account for what could be unrealistic expectations.
What I was hoping for was an account of what thinkers, philosophers or others, tech leaders (and maybe tech workers) credited as intellectual influences, what those thinkers thought, and how those thoughts affected the technological innovations coming out of Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
Daub is careful in his introduction to say that it is difficult to impossible to assign intellectual motivations to tech per se. What he does claim as the basis for his book, though, is that such tech leaders as Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel “represent the way the tech sector has communicated with the outside world.” The tech leaders then aren’t really citing thinkers who influenced and inspired them. They are citing thinkers who communicate what they themselves already think, and maybe communicate it better or more credibly than they could themselves.
That said, that the book isn’t the one I was hoping for is probably not a reflection on Daub, but maybe a reflection on the tech leaders themselves.
Part of that distinction between motivation and representation that Daub refers to has to do with how the tech leaders themselves appear to consume philosophy. A favorite passage or quote, or even a second-hand description of a philosopher’s thought, may resonate. It may be something that they find themselves inclined to agree with strongly, or that they find puts together in the right words what they never articulated themselves.
It’s not, then, as if the philosopher’s thought actually inspired them in the first place — there was just a happy marriage between the quote, the passage, or the description and the person’s thinking along the way somewhere. From that point on, that quote, passage, etc. may motivate or inspire, but the marriage happened because the person was already inclined toward what they found in the quote, etc.
Daub formulates the advantage of repackaging your own thoughts in the thoughts of philosophers and others as “your own intuitions repackaged as esoteric knowledge”. In that passage, he is specifically talking about Peter Thiel and the French author, Rene Girard, but it may stand for other tech leaders and their would-be influencers as well.
So, taking Daub’s book for the book it is rather than the one I hoped for, here are Daub’s chapters and the themes in each:
Dropping Out — the hero dropouts (Jobs, Zuckerberg, Elizabeth Holmes — okay, Holmes doesn’t turn out to be much of a hero). Daub makes the interesting point that often the “dropouts” are dropping out from elite institutions and with formidable safety nets. Dropouts from Stanford, Berkeley, or Harvard with financial resources aren’t necessarily models for the rest of us. They’ve already proved that they are high achievers, even by getting into those schools, and they will likely get second chances even if they fail.
Content — Marshall McLuhan provides a theme of context over content, echoed in the dominance of “platform technologies,” where the entrepreneur provides the structure (think eBay or Facebook) but not the content of the structure. And the platform tends to control the content, financially as well potentially as editorially.
Genius — Ayn Rand champions the idea of the individual genius struggling against resistance — the resistances of conformity, regulation, biases against change, etc.
Communication — really, the lack of communication pervading tech. Again, the platforms simply do not afford it, despite that so many are “social media” platforms. “Communication” becomes a degraded shadow of itself.
Desire — René Girard’s key contribution. Desire becomes a driver of innovation and the point theme for marketing.
Disruption — the economist Joseph Schumpeter is the featured thinker here, with the notion of “creative disruption” — the possibility (inevitability for Schumpeter) that change will become too fast, that in order to tame its effects on our lives (employment, risk, . . .), we will need to regulate it, tame it. The alternative is to embrace change with the confidence that you’ll pull things together in the end — “fail fast”, “move fast and break things.” Better to face and live with the consequences than cling to the stable.
Failure — the idea of failure as a stepping stone. And it may well be a stepping stone to success, IF you have the resources, as an entrepreneur or as a business, to iterate on the basis of what you have learned through your failures.
Daub’s tone is both a little bit academic and a little bit polemic. To be honest I was hoping for more academic and less polemic, even though I found myself more or less agreeing with the direction of his polemic.
But agreeing with a polemic doesn’t make it a work of genius and insight; it just makes it something you agree with. Take for example, Daub’s criticism of the platform, that the platform owner exploits the content providers. I don’t think the point is invalid, but I do think there’s a kind of one-sidedness in linking the dominance of the platform in tech thinking to the influence of McLuhan-like thinking. There are many reasons, certainly besides any influence of McLuhan, for a company, or an innovator, to focus on the platform rather than the content — the most obvious being that the platform provider gets a piece of all the revenue generated by all the content providers. And if the platform owner can capture the market (e.g., in platforms built on network effects like Facebook or eBay), the platform will KEEP the market and remain dominant as the content itself comes and goes.
All in all, I was disappointed, but like I said, maybe my disappointment is misdirected if I aim it at Daub. Maybe it’s just that I was hoping for more from our tech leaders themselves.
I should throw in, just in case, my review might come off as somehow anti-tech, that I made my career in tech and especially in innovative technology, as a researcher, prototyper, facilitator, and in other roles. I’m also an ex-academic philosopher, so that may account for what could be unrealistic expectations.
October 17, 2020
A surprisingly astute essay about ideas that are so often mentioned in the tech world, but evidently so rarely understood. It brings to mind a series of very inspiring lectures, which is perfectly adequate since the author is a professor at Stanford University. As Silicon Valley has more and more influence on our daily lives, I think it should be relevant for everybody.
The book is a part of a very interesting series, FSG Original x Logic, which dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives.
Thanks to the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.
The book is a part of a very interesting series, FSG Original x Logic, which dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives.
Thanks to the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.
June 10, 2023
I think I was hoping for a deeper intellectual history of Silicon Valley— while daub definitely does a good job of unpacking the bizarre rhetoric that Silicon Valley CEOs, etc. Like to use, he stops short of actually exploring the material historical underpinnings of “what tech calls thinking.” He gestures, for instance, toward the accelerationism underwriting “disruption,” but doesn’t go as far as to trace how these ideas might be linked to SV’s larger eugenicist history/its historic ties to the military industrial complex. The chapters “communication” and “desire” are the strongest; the rest are pretty uneven
December 7, 2020
There's a book out there that could actually be an inquiry into the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley; unfortunately, this is not that book.
A better title for this book would be "What academics call thinking". Mr. Daub's primary criticism is that Silicon Valley doesn't think the way he thinks they should. Completely left unexamined is whether the standard leftist academic critique actually corresponds to reality.
A better title for this book would be "What academics call thinking". Mr. Daub's primary criticism is that Silicon Valley doesn't think the way he thinks they should. Completely left unexamined is whether the standard leftist academic critique actually corresponds to reality.
Read
January 13, 2022actually quite liked it. had to re-read certain parts to fully understand but that's the thing about silicon valley and tech culture : there are obvious things to critique but there's an ideological undercurrent - of what makes a genius, how hacking the platform is a noble work but not taking accountability of the content isn't, of how it embibes the worst of capitalism with the charade of intellectual counterculture, and finally, of how little thinking most at the forefront of tech do.
March 15, 2023
A very useful introduction to concepts and individuals that form the foundation of Silicon Valley and its core elite’s self-definition. This book doesn’t include footnotes or endnotes (a list of consulted works is available from the author’s site) which I would have found very helpful, but I appreciated the author’s straightforward, conversational manner of explaining both concepts and concrete examples.
Read
November 27, 2022strongly disliked the writing style; felt detrimental to the seriousness of some of his points. possibly what i found most insightful was the chapter on thiel and mimetic theory (what do you guys think thiel would have thought about marinetti)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 162 reviews