Coming up with an alternative Silicon Valley canon

Choose your own adventure.

A short follow-up on Monday’s piece on canons.

First, an aside on Noah Smith’s own effort at canonizing, proposing a list of books on economics that you should read in his opinion, while identifying others you should absolutely not. The books that he likes and that I’ve read, I like too, but I think that there’s grounds for disagreement on two of the books he says that readers ought avoid. One is Acemoglu and Johnson’s book Power and Progress, which Noah has repeatedly attacked while obviously misunderstanding what Acemoglu and Johnson actually say. The other is more interesting - the late David Graeber’s book Debt. I earned Graeber’s enduring enmity for writing a critical response entitled “The World Economy Is Not a Tribute System.” But in fairness, if I were to write a similar piece today, it would have to be titled something like “The World Economy Is Not A Tribute System: But Donald Trump Sure Wants To Make It Into One, Doesn’t He?” The Ukraine ‘deal;’ the Columbia imbroglio; the demand that Denmark hand over Greenland - all these suggest that we’re in a world where the US is making the kinds of crude demands for payment based on brute power that Graeber said that it was back then. It’s being done incompetently, and won’t work, but we are, actually, in a world where the U.S. behaves like a particularly stupid imperialist.

Second - the Silicon Valley canon itself, and its alternatives. The main that I wrote the Bloomberg article was that I wanted to start discussion about what an alternative Silicon Valley canon might look like. When I was at Social Science Foo a few weeks ago, I put together a session where other people could name the books they thought ought be on the list. With permission, but without naming names of participants, the books they suggested are below (bar a few where I can’t reconstruct my notes). It’s a long list, and not particularly organized. Notably, the initial list is very heavy on books written by white guys (this regularly happens in my experience with decentralized suggestion processes, even when the suggestions come from a diverse crowd).

One participant in the discussion said that initial canons ought be short - he suggested they should be limited to an “Essential Eight.’ So what are your essential eight books that ought be on an alternative Silicon Valley canon. I provide mine. Lay out yours in comments, drawing from the suggested list or elsewhere as you like.

Henry’s Essential Eight

Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book and Conditions of Liberty (nodded at in the Bloomberg piece as books that classical liberals ought read to understand the frailty of the social conditions they prize).

Danielle Allen, Justice By Means of Democracy (best left-liberal defense of pluralism).

Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (“Comrades! Let’s Optimize!” can go horribly wrong).

Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower (and that’s not all that can go wrong).

Ruthanna Emrys, A Half-Built Garden ( what would AI social media look like if it were optimized to counter human bias rather than take advantage?)

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed.

Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, The Ordinal Society. How social media make society and society make social media

Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial. The ur-text for understanding how technologies shape our ability to coordinate and think together.

Longlist From The Social Science Foo Session

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Mark Blyth, Great Transformations.

Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco.

Liu Cixin, Remembrance of Earth’s Past (series).

Hubert Dreyfus, Mind Over Machine.

Stefan Eich, The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes.

Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neo-Liberal Order.

Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto.

Sheila Jasanoff, Uncertainty.

Neil Lawrence, The Atomic Human: What Makes Us Unique in the Age of AI.

Hugh Kenner, The Mechanical Muse.

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (““understanding the novelty of your own tipping point’s demise.”)

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed.

Jonathan Levy, Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States

Robert Meister, Justice Is an Option: A Democratic Theory of Finance for the Twenty-First Century.

Tom Nicholas, VC: An American History.

Margaret O’Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America.

Lin Ostrom, Governing the Commons.

Philip Mirowski, More Heat Than Light.

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation.

Chen Qiufan and Kai-Fu Lee, AI 2041: Ten Visions For Our Future.

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt, Aurora.

Strugatsky Brothers, Hard To Be a God.

David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep.

Joseph Vogl, The Ascendancy of Finance.