What Tech Calls Thinking

September 7, 2020
Daub (Four-Handed Monsters), a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University, skewers tech industry pretensions in this blistering takedown. The philosophy of Silicon Valley, according to Daub, amounts to a collection of self-serving, ad hoc aphorisms plundered from self-help manuals, New Age bastions like the Esalen Institute, and Ayn Rand. Because Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made dropping out of college de rigueur, Daub writes, younger tech entrepreneurs—often hailing from wealthy families in which failure has no real financial consequences—who follow in their footsteps have a limited understanding of the intellectual ideas they claim guide their thinking, such as historian René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and economist Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction.” Daub also claims that Silicon Valley’s ubiquitous talk of “disruption” is more about “rearrang what already exists” than revolutionizing the status quo. (Uber, he writes, didn’t fundamentally alter the experience of hailing a cab: “What it managed to get rid of were steady jobs, unions, and anyone other than Uber making money on the whole enterprise.”) Though generalists may find some of the references obscure, Daub’s mix of humor, righteous anger, and intellectual rigor appeals. This provocative takedown of Big Tech hits the mark.