What Tech Calls Thinking

An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley

By: Adrian Daub

Narrated by: Andrew Eiden

Length: 3 hrs and 58 mins

Publisher's summary

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

"In Daub’s hands the founding concepts of Silicon Valley don’t make money; they fall apart." (The New York Times Book Review)

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.

©2020 Adrian Daub (P)2021 Random House Audio

Trite, filled with vapid examinations

The author has an understanding of some of the big wigs in the media of the tech landscape. The bad guys: the zuckerbergs, peter tiel, elon musk, sandberg, larry elison, steve jobs, etc. He his incredibly harsh in his critique and has a fundamentally sound understanding of philosophy and makes many apt points of observation. His examination however is hollow. He makes no attempts and understanding other than a skin deep point of view from media reports and Edgar filings. He does present interesting things that I did not know about my own industry (spoiler alert, I'm biased). But he fails in both his critiques and in his lack of praise for what the tech industry has done. For one, he almost entirely neglects the biases of race and gender in the tech industry as well as homophobia even back to the beginning (Alan Turing famously was chemically castrated by the British government and then killed himself as a result, none of this is mentioned in the book). He does not mention that a 'programmer' early in the industry was comprised almost entirely of women, who were later sidelined for men when the jobs became high paying and high status. He fixates on Ayn Rand and individualism in the industry, which is an odd problem for tech in particular, but he also fails to even mention open source technology, the individualism encouraged by early proponents of computers, the wonderful technologies that were built on the foundations of thinkers like Noam Chomsky (a radical activist), Claude Shannon (a pioneer in information technology) and others. Even his critiques fail to mention things like Marvin Minsky (the most famous name in artificial intelligence research up until OpenAI's ChatGPT creation) being on the Jeffery Epstein lists. The MIT design lab was mentioned as a small footnote along with the Stanford D School. My point being that philosophically, this work was incredibly weak. He fails to mention any reformers, activists, or even people who recognize the flaws of the industry outside of Timnit Gerbu. Cathy O'Neil (author of Weapons of Math Destruction - a fantastic work) would be aligned with many points of his work, yet he fails to mention her.

I'm disappointed I wasted time reading this. It was at best just a hit piece on the very recent developments in tech industry, not in computer science, data science, or any science really. The author uses gotcha headlines and nobody's like James Damore to paint a picture of carte blanche racism and sexism within tech as a whole. It's just an incredibly weak argument for an industry that empoyees millions of people of all shapes, colors, ethnicities, backgrounds and opinions and that's just in the US alone. He also fails to even mention people that would help shape his argument of tech as the evil empire, like Palmer Luckey founder of Anduril and Oculus who is a psycho, or Sam Bankman-Fried, and spends little to no time on the critique of Theranos and why that was possible to happen.

Just weak. Do better. I expected a hit piece, but this was just soft. It also only focused mostly on roughly the last 10-15 years of the industry, with the exception of his focus on the PayPal mafia. There is so much more to explore in this topic, even in the negative light the author took which could be much, much more interesting.