What Tech Calls Thinking
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.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
5mentions
4people
2021–2025years
40% recommend60% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- In What Tech Calls Thinking, there’s a part that analyzes tech college dropout culture. There was a good point that it’s this odd double bind of wanting the prestige of the school but also wanting to rebel or deny it. You want to show to everybody that you could get into Stanford but also you’re too cool for it. It’s also quite funny in that the more challenging classes occur to the end of college. Even if you’re a very advanced student, the classes are only so sophisticated in the first year or two. But I guess the idea is that these kids are genius autodidacts and therefore can learn all the material on their own? That seems plausible in some cases (CS, math) and less so in others (biomedical engineering cough Elizabeth Holmes cough)
- Hatching Twitter - Nick Bilton
Bad Blood - John Carreyrou
How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story - Billy Gallagher
Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork - Reeves Wiedeman
Whistleblower: My Unlikely Journey to Silicon Valley and Speaking Out Against Injustice - Susan Fowler
Uncanny Valley - Anna Wiener
What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry Into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley - Adrian Daub
The Scapegoat - René Girard
- I wouldn't recommend complaining.. bellyfeels only
Thus said, PR's can look like narcissism .. those who call it out are some of the prigs Uncle Paul warned us about :)
Schizotypes too.. it's the peer-unreviewed grandiosity i suppose. what would Kohut say?
Wish I'd discovered Ron earlier. His *overflow throwaways make me want to mine his conspiracy theories :) hope somebody addressing his emotional holes RN
If I had to guess your ex a Borderline. Glad dang concurs on the method.. (?) if that kinda helps/works it'd be worth internalizing
Equivalently I'd have to deal with the (situational?) emo holes associated with Stripe before I can internalize "their" (alien) way of thinking[0] :) but maybe you already have more experience there:
https://xcancel.com/patrickc/status/1848393059559502177
Stripe acquires Stablecoin s-u Bridge
Fun thing of his to equate htsc with sc. It's one of those things nobody has to or will shout about when they've got it
[0] with Daub as a bedside reference/biblio
https://www.adriandaub.com/s/NOTES-What-Tech-Calls-Thinking....
- McLuhan cameo in Annie Hall (1977)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROIrLRQi-m0
"The scene encapsulates McLuhan's theory rather neatly. McLuhan is famous for the claim that the medium is the message. What he meant by this is that the way in which radios, TVs, or phones address us is more important than what they say when they do. In this case, Allen is alluding to the fact that film is an interactive medium: we are being addressed not as a remote community, as in a radio broadcast, but instead as direct visual witnesses. Before turning to McLuhan, Allen's character has already made his case, that the guy behind him is a nuisance, across the fourth wall to us filmgoers.
The scene in Annie Hall epitomizes how readily available McLuhan's ideas were in the 1960s and 70s. Unless you were an Oscar-winning filmmaker, you couldn't pluck the literal McLuhan out of thin air, of course. But you could certainly invoke his ideas with about as much (apparent) ease. Its safe to say laypeople are less familiar with McLuhan's ideas today than they were then, and its also safe to say that many who regurgitated his theories, like the gentleman in Annie Hall, didnt actually understand them all that well. And given the line the actual McLuhan speaks in the scene, we, the viewers, will likely fear we're misunderstanding him as well.
Did that mean his whole fallacy was wrong? In a way, no, since knowing to invoke McLuhan was perhaps a better proof of his theories than actually understanding those theories. Maybe that is also why Allen left McLuhan's odd line in the final version of the script and the final cut of the film. After all, the point of the scene is that Allen is able to pull the actual McLuhan from behind the standee and have him settle a dispute directly -- not what McLuhan actually says, which in no way resolves the dispute. And this was true in the sixties already: invoking McLuhan was a way to show you were switched on, tuned in, vibing, or whatever other media metaphor you want to use to show you've grasped what's happening. You got it, and if you couldn't quite say what it was, that mattered less than that you got it."
- Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking (2020)
- What's interesting is how much of pg's early life was spent in preparation. Of course, it wasn't obviously preparation at the time, but art school + computer science PhD is a rare and effective combo. It's almost the complete opposite of the standard college dropout founder archetype. I recently read a hilariously titled book, "What Tech Calls Thinking" that's a pretty scathing analysis of the tech world. But one accurate point the author makes is that the college dropout founder usually doesn't have that much domain specific experience. Unless you come into college extremely well prepared, you're probably going to spend your first few years doing core and introductory classes. It's pretty unlikely you're going to get to the top 1% of a field within the first two years of college.
With pg, it's at the complete opposite extreme. I mean, ffs who does an PhD and then decides to go to art school? I'm curious on whether pg believes he would have done well had he done a startup immediately after undergrad. Considering how much Lisp played a factor, I doubt it. What about post-PhD and pre-art school? I'm not sure either; the art school did have a strong influence as well.
Another aspect that I liked was the duality of art and CS. I can relate to it, as I have a pretty big obsession with film and CS. Sometimes it feels like an endless tug of war between the two; one always distracting me from the other. It's fascinating seeing someone else handle that struggle.
