As someone who grew up on a steady diet of Strugatsky brothers, I’m not sure _Hard to Be a God_ is the best choice for the alternative Silicon Valley canon. It is part of The Noon Universe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noon_Universe), which is essentially the Soviet version of Iain Banks’ The Culture. But, instead of that book, I would include _The Beetle in the Anthill_ and _The Time Wanderers_. These two novels show how the response of an enlightened, highly technologically and socially advanced society to a perceived existential threat is the creation of secret police and the subsequent split of the humanity.
Also, gotta have Stanislaw Lem’s _Summa Technologiae_!
Gotta add a couple which are actually about what they actually do in Silicon Valley
1 - The Mythical Man-Month
2 - Soul of a New Machine
These by themselves puncture an awful lot of the dumbass ideology currently circulating among *bad* programmers in Silicon Valley. (In my experience, the *good* programmers who know what they're doing do not fall into these particular nutbar ideologies.)
On tech economics:
Definitely "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".
Also there's a vital essay on TechDirt by Mike Masnick -- I think it's called "If you can't compete with free, you can't compete".
My SF canon includes:
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- it's about how important randomness is
- Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre -- one of the very few to get biology right
- Swarm by Bruce Sterling -- most people really don't understand evolution, and he really tries to hammer the core ideas home here
....wow that's only 7, I'm proud of how short I kept that
I do not get the good reception of Remembrance of Earth's Past, although I've only read the first book. I was just too annoyed by the fact that you are presented with a situation in which one side has a weapon that can kill anyone and everyone but instead they use it to create mild inconveniences. Hard to follow that. Also, having read the wondering earth, my take away from that story was that the moral is simply "you should trust the government despite evidence to the contrary"
I don't think I clearly perceive the criteria of selection here; we don't seem to require either books about Silicon Valley or books that its denizens have read. The common element seems to be "books that would be good for them, if they did read them".
I'll go with that. I'm not sure I can settle on eight essentials. Books that might be on my list that are not on yours:
Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
I can't say anything about Stafford Beer, having never read him, but I'd settle for Davies' The Unaccountability Machine
Cheney & Seyfarth's Baboon Metaphysics, and I'm not even half-joking
And why not your friend Mercier & Sperber's The Enigma of Reason?
I suppose this will look lame, but I really believe my scarily prescient 1999 novel Acts of the Apostles (about an evil-genius Silicon Valley billionaire & would be messiah, the cult of high-geek fanboys who venerate him, and their plan for world domination) belongs on this list. The 25th anniversary edition, coming Real Soon Now, has an introduction by Cory Doctorow, which perhaps gives some indication of its minor cult status. Here's Salon's review, 'Hacking the Overmind,' from way back when: https://www.salon.com/2001/02/21/hacking_the_overmind/
Ok. Here are my "Essential Eight." Was trying to come up with recommendations that I thought were particularly appropriate for Silicon Valley and even more specifically for my particular slice of that world (social software). So I've cheated a bit since my list includes a couple of essays as well as books (although they are both very long essays).
Anyway here are my recommendations (not listed in order of importance):
- Lord of the Rings (Tolkien): Not only is it a necessary cultural touchstone in the Valley, but the core lessons about the dangers of power and the heroism that exists within us all are perhaps as important today as they have ever been.
- The Fountainhead (Rand): Well aware of the issues with Rand. But The Fountainhead is still an important story about being true to one’s vision even when the forces that be are not open to it.
- The Mythical Man Month (Brooks): Essential to understanding how to move fast effectively.
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs): A critical book to internalize for anyone designing social environments.
- Servant Leadership (Greenleaf): While Greenleaf is primarily known for his seminal essay “The Servant as Leader,” his essays “The Institution as Servant” and “Trustees as Servants” should be required reading for boards.
- Ender’s Game (Card): Life as a video game. Plus another cultural touchstone.
- Status As a Service (Wei): Huge fan of many of Eugene’s essays, but I think this one is probably the most essential.
- Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics (Askonas, Schulman): The best essay ever written about moderation.
--------
Note: Not an accident that Lord of the Rings and The Fountainhead follow each other. For the record, I’m well aware of the wonderful Rodgers quote about the two novels that can change a bookish 14 year old’s life (including the fact that the other was Atlas Shrugged):
You seem to have missed the context of the discussion about the SV canon. People are precisely objecting to the LotR/Rand/Card canon that SV folks all seem to have read, and suggesting books like The Dispossessed to add to the canon instead. Having read the SV canon, as well as much of the Farrell-style canon, I think both contain valuable work. The main thing I would stress is that to produce people who are resilient to ideological capture, if someone has read a book by Ayn Rand then they should read a book by Ursula K. Le Guin as well, and vice versa; LoTR needs to be balanced by the Hitchhikers Guide; and Ender's Game must be counterpoised by any of many works of Russian literature where the sovereign individual is ground under the wheel of a relentless leviathan. It's not good to internalize just one part of human mythology unless we want to produce drones prone to their primate biological imperatives. Then again Peter Thiel and cohort seem explicitly to want people who don't have the breadth of human mythology in their heads, so that they can move fast and break things without being held back by knowing stories that might make them hesitate before removing Chestertonian fences.
I’d throw in a few Cory Doctorow books, particularly For the Win (a dystopian book about the types of kids who are taken advantage of by gaming platforms to build up assets for free) and The Lost Cause (on American polarization). An Ecomodernist Manifesto by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger would be a more orthodox SV VC read, which wouldn’t quite fit the purpose of this article. Same with Speed and Scale by John Doerr (on climate policy goals).
For more out-there perspectives, I’d add The Ministry for the Future by Robinson (good cli-fi, even if the interest in blockchain gives it a faddish flavor), Losing Earth by Nathaniel Rich (on the power of the fossil fuel lobby), Drawdown by Paul Hawken (on the power of social interventions in climate action), and Chain of Title by David Dayen (a gripping investigative tale on mortgage fraud and American inequality).
Also “Mother Earth Mother Board” by Neal Stephenson, “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” by Gibson, Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz, and Island by Huxley are very much worth reading. Maybe In This Economy by Kyla Scanlon and The Sirens’ Call by Chris Hayes too
Robert Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy (or the Kim Stanley Robinson Mars series if you prefer a fictional setting). I don't know if there's a better cautionary tale than our current situation for the dangers of allowing accumulations of individual wealth, but that seems to be the greatest cognitive failure among the Silicon Valley set just now.
Braudel's 3 volumes on Civilization and Capitalism is good for showing that there is no "origin" of capitalism (it is not a phase change); rather it is the centuries-long accumulation of infrastructure. We really need to abandon the abstraction of markets that is derived from the myth of barter. Capitalism is constraint, not the free-for-all of trying to get the better of your fellow.
I like the metaphor of capitalsim as an engine that consumes fuel to produce power with a bias for producing more power, whether through efficency or growth doesn't matter to it. An engine ungoverned like that has to eventually blow itself up or run out of fuel.
Looking through my library, this would be my list:
1. A Discipline of Programming - Edsger Dijkstra
2. The Cathedral & the Bazaar - Eric Raymond
3. The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to
Restore the Sanity - Alan Cooper
4. The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan's Computer Challenge to the World -
Edward A. Feigenbaum, Pamela McCorduck
5. The Alignment Problem - Brian Christian
6. Summa Technologiae - Stanislaw Lem
7. Shaping Things - Bruce Sterling
8. Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century - Alex Steffen
As someone who grew up on a steady diet of Strugatsky brothers, I’m not sure _Hard to Be a God_ is the best choice for the alternative Silicon Valley canon. It is part of The Noon Universe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noon_Universe), which is essentially the Soviet version of Iain Banks’ The Culture. But, instead of that book, I would include _The Beetle in the Anthill_ and _The Time Wanderers_. These two novels show how the response of an enlightened, highly technologically and socially advanced society to a perceived existential threat is the creation of secret police and the subsequent split of the humanity.
Also, gotta have Stanislaw Lem’s _Summa Technologiae_!
By the way, updated English translations of both of the Strugatsky books I mentioned have been recently published:
https://www.amazon.com/Beetle-Anthill-Rediscovered-Classics/dp/1641606789/ (_The Beetle in the Anthill_)
https://www.amazon.com/Waves-Extinguish-Wind-Rediscovered-Classics/dp/1641606266/ (_The Waves Extinguish the Wind_, which is the direct translation of the original Russian title, as opposed to _The Time Wanderers_)
Gotta add a couple which are actually about what they actually do in Silicon Valley
1 - The Mythical Man-Month
2 - Soul of a New Machine
These by themselves puncture an awful lot of the dumbass ideology currently circulating among *bad* programmers in Silicon Valley. (In my experience, the *good* programmers who know what they're doing do not fall into these particular nutbar ideologies.)
On tech economics:
Definitely "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".
Also there's a vital essay on TechDirt by Mike Masnick -- I think it's called "If you can't compete with free, you can't compete".
My SF canon includes:
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- it's about how important randomness is
- Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre -- one of the very few to get biology right
- Swarm by Bruce Sterling -- most people really don't understand evolution, and he really tries to hammer the core ideas home here
....wow that's only 7, I'm proud of how short I kept that
I'm pleased to say that I approve of all the SF entries in your canon. By that token all the non-fiction is going on my list.
I might add:
- Player Piano (pitfalls of mechanization)
- The Spell of the Sensuous (humans are beings with senses that connect with the natural world)
- Humanly Possible (what human flourishing actually looks like and contends with)
Dan Davies "The Unaccountability machine" should definitely be up there. Its a must read.
Likewise Stafford Beers The Brain of the firm.
I do not get the good reception of Remembrance of Earth's Past, although I've only read the first book. I was just too annoyed by the fact that you are presented with a situation in which one side has a weapon that can kill anyone and everyone but instead they use it to create mild inconveniences. Hard to follow that. Also, having read the wondering earth, my take away from that story was that the moral is simply "you should trust the government despite evidence to the contrary"
I bounced off it hard, so it would not be one of my suggested readings but the list was a collective effort ...
Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash with a huge THIS IS PARODY sticker on the cover might be a good addition.
I don't think I clearly perceive the criteria of selection here; we don't seem to require either books about Silicon Valley or books that its denizens have read. The common element seems to be "books that would be good for them, if they did read them".
I'll go with that. I'm not sure I can settle on eight essentials. Books that might be on my list that are not on yours:
Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
I can't say anything about Stafford Beer, having never read him, but I'd settle for Davies' The Unaccountability Machine
Cheney & Seyfarth's Baboon Metaphysics, and I'm not even half-joking
And why not your friend Mercier & Sperber's The Enigma of Reason?
I suppose this will look lame, but I really believe my scarily prescient 1999 novel Acts of the Apostles (about an evil-genius Silicon Valley billionaire & would be messiah, the cult of high-geek fanboys who venerate him, and their plan for world domination) belongs on this list. The 25th anniversary edition, coming Real Soon Now, has an introduction by Cory Doctorow, which perhaps gives some indication of its minor cult status. Here's Salon's review, 'Hacking the Overmind,' from way back when: https://www.salon.com/2001/02/21/hacking_the_overmind/
Ted Gioia has been on this beat for a while, highly recommended. https://www.honest-broker.com/p/my-alternative-tech-canon-26-mind
Honestly, the book that comes to mind for me most immediately is The Prince
Ok. Here are my "Essential Eight." Was trying to come up with recommendations that I thought were particularly appropriate for Silicon Valley and even more specifically for my particular slice of that world (social software). So I've cheated a bit since my list includes a couple of essays as well as books (although they are both very long essays).
Anyway here are my recommendations (not listed in order of importance):
- Lord of the Rings (Tolkien): Not only is it a necessary cultural touchstone in the Valley, but the core lessons about the dangers of power and the heroism that exists within us all are perhaps as important today as they have ever been.
- The Fountainhead (Rand): Well aware of the issues with Rand. But The Fountainhead is still an important story about being true to one’s vision even when the forces that be are not open to it.
- The Mythical Man Month (Brooks): Essential to understanding how to move fast effectively.
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs): A critical book to internalize for anyone designing social environments.
- Servant Leadership (Greenleaf): While Greenleaf is primarily known for his seminal essay “The Servant as Leader,” his essays “The Institution as Servant” and “Trustees as Servants” should be required reading for boards.
- Ender’s Game (Card): Life as a video game. Plus another cultural touchstone.
- Status As a Service (Wei): Huge fan of many of Eugene’s essays, but I think this one is probably the most essential.
- Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics (Askonas, Schulman): The best essay ever written about moderation.
--------
Note: Not an accident that Lord of the Rings and The Fountainhead follow each other. For the record, I’m well aware of the wonderful Rodgers quote about the two novels that can change a bookish 14 year old’s life (including the fact that the other was Atlas Shrugged):
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/366635-there-are-two-novels-that-can-change-a-bookish-fourteen-year
You seem to have missed the context of the discussion about the SV canon. People are precisely objecting to the LotR/Rand/Card canon that SV folks all seem to have read, and suggesting books like The Dispossessed to add to the canon instead. Having read the SV canon, as well as much of the Farrell-style canon, I think both contain valuable work. The main thing I would stress is that to produce people who are resilient to ideological capture, if someone has read a book by Ayn Rand then they should read a book by Ursula K. Le Guin as well, and vice versa; LoTR needs to be balanced by the Hitchhikers Guide; and Ender's Game must be counterpoised by any of many works of Russian literature where the sovereign individual is ground under the wheel of a relentless leviathan. It's not good to internalize just one part of human mythology unless we want to produce drones prone to their primate biological imperatives. Then again Peter Thiel and cohort seem explicitly to want people who don't have the breadth of human mythology in their heads, so that they can move fast and break things without being held back by knowing stories that might make them hesitate before removing Chestertonian fences.
I’d throw in a few Cory Doctorow books, particularly For the Win (a dystopian book about the types of kids who are taken advantage of by gaming platforms to build up assets for free) and The Lost Cause (on American polarization). An Ecomodernist Manifesto by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger would be a more orthodox SV VC read, which wouldn’t quite fit the purpose of this article. Same with Speed and Scale by John Doerr (on climate policy goals).
For more out-there perspectives, I’d add The Ministry for the Future by Robinson (good cli-fi, even if the interest in blockchain gives it a faddish flavor), Losing Earth by Nathaniel Rich (on the power of the fossil fuel lobby), Drawdown by Paul Hawken (on the power of social interventions in climate action), and Chain of Title by David Dayen (a gripping investigative tale on mortgage fraud and American inequality).
Also “Mother Earth Mother Board” by Neal Stephenson, “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” by Gibson, Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz, and Island by Huxley are very much worth reading. Maybe In This Economy by Kyla Scanlon and The Sirens’ Call by Chris Hayes too
Robert Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy (or the Kim Stanley Robinson Mars series if you prefer a fictional setting). I don't know if there's a better cautionary tale than our current situation for the dangers of allowing accumulations of individual wealth, but that seems to be the greatest cognitive failure among the Silicon Valley set just now.
Braudel's 3 volumes on Civilization and Capitalism is good for showing that there is no "origin" of capitalism (it is not a phase change); rather it is the centuries-long accumulation of infrastructure. We really need to abandon the abstraction of markets that is derived from the myth of barter. Capitalism is constraint, not the free-for-all of trying to get the better of your fellow.
I like the metaphor of capitalsim as an engine that consumes fuel to produce power with a bias for producing more power, whether through efficency or growth doesn't matter to it. An engine ungoverned like that has to eventually blow itself up or run out of fuel.
Robert Wright, Non-Zero
Allison Pugh, Connective Labor
Would be nice to take account of the work of half the population in our account of the economy.
Scott Page: _The Difference_
Explains why DEI is super important to Silicon Valley.
Might partially explain why there is a Silicon Valley. Great universities are important, but the diversity in the Bay Area is unique.