A Review of WHAT TECH CALLS THINKING
An Inquiry Into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley, FSG, 2020. 160 pages.
No one is fooled by Silicon Valley talk. But multitudes long for a piece of the action, so they drink the Kool-Aid and plunge into the advertising lingo of “genius,” “unicorns,” “disruption,” “fail better!” and many other buzz words they believe will open the door for them to the fantastic riches of the tech world.
Nope, says Stanford Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Adrian Daub. While Silicon Valley’s ethos may have sprung from a 1960s maverick Timothy Leary-inspired drop-out, drop in culture most famously embodied by the late Apple inventor Steve Jobs, its language betrays a philosophy of cold privilege only its rare happenstance billionaires joy.
By now with endless scandals, bubble bursts, recessions, and a pandemic, even tech hopefuls have become wise to the Valley’s get-rich-quick myths. Skeptics and Schadenfreude-filled bystanders have been long ready for a take down. What Tech Calls Thinking serves up scathing critique, but perhaps differently than most critics imagine. Don’t look to Daub’s book for juicy exposé, or an ethnography of tech culture, a study of its historic gender and race exclusion, or any analysis of AI bias. What Tech Calls Thinking strictly focuses on the thoughtless language of Silicon Valley.
What Tech Calls Thinking asks readers to closely interrogate tech talk and look beyond the glittery promises to its foundations in exclusion. The book draws its title from German existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger’s late collection of lectures What is Called Thinking, which considers the thoughtlessness of modern thinking in a world dominated by technology. Heidegger exhorts his audiences in italics:
Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is we are still not thinking.
For Heidegger, to truly think requires a strong resistance to the empty talk of everyday life and a deep contemplation of human existence. While he believes there is a long tradition of forgetting the essence of humanity since the Greeks, his main concern is how late industrial era 20th century technology pares down complex thinking to one “rail” of a metaphorical train-track.
Daub suggests such a reduction of thought to thoughtlessness proves even truer in the 21st century digital world. Yet, he remains keen to show that not all tech culture is as empty as Heidegger asserts. Tech itself, and thinking about tech could and should be meaningful, Daub maintains. For example, he cites the origins of Computer Science as an academic subject under Eric Roberts, Stanford emeritus Professor of Computer Science, whose books and courses have initiated generations of technologists into the great ideas as well as ethical problems of code. Daub also elaborates ideas from Stanford’s famous d.school, asking how its methods have been reduced to mere marking terms that are in fact the opposite of thinking. Ideate! In industry means market first, iterate the same emptiness later.
With chapters dismantling Silicon Valley homilies about rugged individuals who “move fast,” “break things,” and live to tell about it in pseudo-humanizing inspirational Ted-Talks, Daub claims that at every turn tech culture turns out to be nothing more than rapacious capitalism that serves only the few at the top. For all its talk about novel “disruption,” tech merely further entrenches routine forms of corporate domination. Or, as Daub offers in his aphoristic style: “Disruption is the theodicy of hypercapitalism.”
Even when tech soul-searches, it merely performs empty genuflection about “empathy,” and “mindfulness.” Daub elaborates the conceptual origins of such claptrap, arguing that tech derives its power from popular appropriations of the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Rene Girard, as well as the anti-democratic romantic libertarian schlock of Ayn Rand. Truly a philosophy of selfishness cloaked in the language of self-liberation, Tech culture extorts the gig economy and enables the ostentatious self-pity wallowing of billionaires like Elon Musk when the public shames them for bizarre behavior induced by too much “micro-dosing.”
This is a satisfying, ambitious book with a unique outsider perspective. It recalls not merely Heidegger, but another book written by a German émigré, Frankfurt School theorist, Theodor W. Adorno, who like Daub felt no love for American Capitalist culture. What Tech Calls Thinking is Daub’s Minima Moralia, a collection of short reflections and aphorisms, in which Adorno cast a jaundiced eye on American pretensions to private happiness. Daub, also a native of Germany, arrived in the United States under much more auspicious conditions that the World War II refugee, Adorno. Indeed, Daub was educated in American universities and has made his academic career at Stanford since 2008. Yet, a remarkable shared spirit connects Daub’s book to Adorno’s: a deep humanist concern about the cold rationale of Capitalism and all of its false promises. Daub also shares Adorno's almost Augustinian refusal to be immediately interpretable when stacking philosophical concepts and popular ideas shoulder to shoulder. Daub wants readers to slow down, re-read, highlight, and then tweet.
Daub ends his bracing final chapter on the mendacious elitism of Silicon Valley’s “fail better!” culture with a retelling of Greek historian Herodotus’ tale of Polycrates, who being advised he was too successful, threw a valuable ring into the sea to avoid a reversal of fortune. However, a few days later, Polycrates' cooks discovered the ring inside of a fish they’d been preparing. Daub hopes to warn anyone naïve enough to believe they might enjoy the luck of Polycrates. Pretending failure in tech affirms no one’s good fortune. He also invites readers to imagine how the hubris of Silicon Valley billionaire overlords will sow the seeds of their own demise.