Silicon Valley is an aristocratic culture

So was Washington DC, once upon a time

Before the main event, an important message from our sponsors. Underground Empire, my and Abraham Newman’s book on the transformation of the global economy, is available on Kindle right now for $2.99. Buy it if you haven’t! It’s a steal. Paul Krugman calls it “a revelatory book." Dani Rodrik says it is “the book you need to read if you want to understand where the world economy has been and where it may be headed.” The Washington Post says that we “write fluidly and grippingly. . . . As the book jumps from nondescript Northern Virginia office parks housing America’s intelligence establishment, to the boardrooms of mid-20th-century New York banks, to sanctions-dodging tankers traversing the Indian Ocean, it’s not hard to detect the influence of techno-thriller writers such as Neal Stephenson.”

And now, the post itself.

In the last several days, Tanner Greer, a conservative writer on China who I read regularly, am regularly surprised by in valuable ways, and occasionally chat with, sparked off a debate on whether there was a “Silicon Valley canon” of books. The conversation pulled in Patrick Collison among others. Tanner - who is connected to the Silicon Valley right - then wrote a longer post, building on the canon to advance a theory of the difference between Silicon Valley and Washington DC’s attitude to books. He also and separately took polite issue in comments with my American Affairs essay, which provides a different, and more reductive account of how business models have shaped a particular strain of political thinking in Silicon Valley.

I don’t think he’s completely wrong in his own post or in his criticisms, but I don’t think he’s right either. So there may be grounds for a useful debate.

To summarize what I’m going to say - Tanner emphasizes how broader culture and individual values reinforce each other in DC and Silicon Valley book habits. Tanner argues, rightly as far as I can, see that books “[stake] out the norms, conventions, and ideals that govern the community as a whole” for Silicon Valley, in a way that they do not for Washington DC.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Silicon Valley people care more about reading and ideas than their DC counterparts, as he also claims. It sometimes means that they care more about seeming to be well-read, which is a different thing altogether.

The actual difference, as I see it, is not one between the philistines of the Beltway and the bibliophiles of the Valley. It is between a technocratic culture in which the public display of a sound general education is irrelevant and an aristocratic one where it can be a valuable asset. Doing well in DC policy circles depends on technocratic knowledge, bureaucratic ruthlessness and connections that are mostly acquired through work or shared education. To do well in Silicon Valley, you want these things, but you also may prosper better if also you appear to have cultivated the appropriate personal dispositions. Being able to talk in the right ways about certain books may persuade others that you might have those dispositions. Hence, it makes it more likely that your start-up will be picked for Y Combinator, get early funding from the right places and so on.

Most of the elements of this explanation are already there in Tanner’s post, but they are partly obscured by his embrace of Silicon Valley’s self-generated mythology of disruption and rebellion. To the extent that Silicon Valley, unlike DC, has a ‘canon’ of books, it is not because Silicon Valley people care more about books than their Beltway equivalents. It is because book-larning does a different kind of cultural work in the Valley than inside the Beltway.

Here are what seem to me the relevant bits of Tanner’s argument:

In Washington, the man of ideas is a wonk. The wonk is not a generalist. The ideal wonk knows more about his or her chosen topic than you ever will. … Washington intellectuals are masters of small mountains. … At its summit their field of view is limited to the narrow range of their own expertise. … I trust you now see why a city full of such men has so little love for books. … One must read many books, laws, and reports to fully master one’s small mountain, but these are books, laws, and reports that the men of other mountains do not care about. One is strongly encouraged to write books [that] … will be read only by the elect few climbing your mountain. The social function of such a book is entirely unrelated to its erudition, elegance, or analytical clarity … a sign of achievement that … [a]n author has mastered her mountain. The wonk thirsts for authority: once she has written a book, other wonks will give it to her.

The technologists of Silicon Valley do not believe in authority. They merrily ignore credentials, discount expertise, and rebel against everything settled and staid. … They were armed with nothing but some seed funding, insight, and an indomitable urge to conquer. And so they conquered. … it shapes the mindset of Silicon Valley in two powerful ways. The first is a distrust of established expertise. … The founders of the Valley invariably think of themselves as men of action: they code, they build, disrupt, they invent, they conquer. This is a culture where insight, intelligence, and knowledge are treasured—but treasured as tools of action, not goods in and of themselves. … The expectation that anyone sufficiently intelligent can grasp, and perhaps master, any conceivable subject incentivizes technologists to become conversant in as many subjects as possible. The technologist is thus attracted to general, sweeping ideas with application across many fields.

This is fertile soil for the dabbler, the heretic, and the philosopher from first principles.  It is also a good breeding ground for books. Not for writing books—being men of action, most Silicon Valley sorts do not have time to write books. But they make time to read books—or barring that, time to read the number of book reviews or podcast interviews needed to fool other people into thinking they have read a book … The technology brothers read—a lot! I am sure more novels are read every year on Sand Hill Road than on Capitol Hill. Washington functionaries simply do not live a life of the mind. If Silicon Valley technologists do not always live such a life, they at least pretend to.… Siloed off on so many little mountains, I could not speak of a common DC canon, vague or otherwise. But for Silicon Valley the term is just—there are no formal canonizers in Silicon Valley, and thus no formal canon. But a “vague” canon, the sort that ties together any historical community of requisite intelligence and literacy, certainly exists. … The classical historian did not think in terms of “historical processes” but in terms [of] deeds … Each Greek polis was united by a common set of moral ideals. … That I think is half the purpose of these biographies of Roosevelt and Rockefeller, Feynman and Oppenheimer, Licklider and Noyce, Thiel and Musk. These books are an education in an ethos. Such is the paıdeía of the technologists..

This presents a mostly but not entirely unflattering account of Washington DC, and a mostly, but not entirely flattering account of Silicon Valley. And there is much that rings true! But also, there is plenty that does not.

First is Tanner’s strong claim that people in DC “have little love for books,” and hus assurance that “more novels are read every year on Sand Hill Road than on Capitol Hill.” Tanner doesn’t present any explicit evidence to support this contention, so I presume he is going on personal experience.

I have a different experience of conversations in both places. I am neither a standard DC policy wonk* nor, obviously, a competitor for place in Silicon Valley. The consequence is that I find a lot of the gossip in both places boring - I don’t care about who is on the rise and who is on the way down. When I possibly can, I invariably turn the conversation to books, which I am more interested in. On the basis of extensive experience, I don’t believe that people are more (or for that matter less) likely to read books in Silicon Valley than in DC, or to talk about them either, if you inquire nicely.

Your own mileage may vary depending. Still, the last dinner with DC people I was at (just a few days ago - and I swear this is not a set up) I ended up chatting with a former Hill staffer turned White House official turned lobbyist, and we quickly converged on David Lodge’s academic novels. I suggested that she might like Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution if she hadn’t read it already, and she said that two other people had already separately recommended it to her in conversation. Pictures is not a complete obscurity, but it is far from being a beach bestseller either. And this is not untypical of my experience. People in DC - at least, the biased sample of people who I run into - read lots! And not just that. My limited acquaintance of DC foreign policy people includes Julian Gewirtz and Ray Nayler, who furthermore write in different forms, but to great acclaim, on topics unassociated with DC policy wonkery. The plural of anecdote isn’t data, but I’ve lots more anecdotal sort-of evidence along these lines for what it is worth.

More importantly, there is a very interesting tension in Tanner’s account of Silicon Valley. He emphasizes the genuine bookishness of its elites, but there is something about this bookishness that makes him a little uneasy. He weaves mildly caustic asides together with the encomiums, suggesting that Silicon Valley people sometimes “read the number of book reviews or podcast interviews needed to fool other people into thinking they have read a book” and that they “at least pretend to” live the life of the mind, unlike their DC equivalents. Wanting to read is a somewhat different thing than wanting to seem well-read.

And there’s another tension too: between the claim that Silicon Valley is a lively milieu of rebels against “everything settled and staid” and the take-away that they loosely agree on a common canon of books that everyone ought to have read, or at least claim to have read. There appears to be rather a lot of cultural conformity among the anti-authoritarian free spirits, suggesting that there is something else that is going on.

So what is going on? My best guess is that you should just put Tanner’s somewhat tendentious claims about DC people intrinsically caring less about books to one side, and develop his much more interesting claims about culture. Further, you should do this historically. As far as I can see (I’m open to correction), Washington DC foreign policy wonks’ narrow professional specialization is, a relatively recent phenomenon, and Silicon Valley book culture even more so.

There are cultural differences, as Tanner suggests. He seems to me to be right when he argues that there is no loose canon of books that shapes conversations in DC as there is in Silicon Valley. Nor is there much of a shared intellectual culture outside of professional life, even in specific institutions. I’d be mildly surprised for example, if the aforementioned Julian Gewirtz and Ray Nayler even know about each other’s outside writing, despite both having worked at State at the same time.

My handwavey extrapolation of Tanner’s argument is that DC policy makers and implementers live in a technocratic culture, where those who master specialized knowledge prosper, while Silicon Valley founders, funders and wannabes live in an aristocratic one, where displaying the right kinds of shared cultural dispositions helps one do well. NB the “handwavey” bit: I’m writing half because I believe what I write, half because I hope to be corrected by people who know better.

Washington DC foreign policy - the particular area that Tanner and I know best - was plausibly an aristocratic pursuit until recently. Back in the day, people were expected to have to have mastered the appropriate cultural dispositions if they wanted to truly succeed. A general good education and a particular sprezzatura, the unconscious confidence that one could readily adapt to unforeseen circumstances, were prized above the patient mastery of technical information. Certainly, one was expected to understand the build up of nuclear forces in Europe, but one was also expected to be able to compose learned essays and hold one’s own at Georgetown dinner parties where anyone at all might turn up. When one wrote a diplomatic communique, it was desirable to display flair, confidence and an appropriate degree of understated, sardonic wit.

Over the last few decades, this aristocracy has given way to a more overtly technocratic culture of the kind that Tanner describes, where specific technical expertise is prized over general cultural competences. Those who stuck to the old cultural standards did not prosper. For a cruel and funny depiction of their decline, look at John Malkovich’s character in the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading - a mid-level intelligence official given to literary pretensions, sing-songs with male Yale classmates, and diffuse alcoholic incompetence.

Of course, the new technocratic approach too has its own baggage of cultural assumptions and social connections. If you aspire to high office, you want to go to one of a few law schools or policy schools, and to make the right political connections. But these schools too have embraced a purportedly neutral meritocracy over the cultural preoccupations of traditional elites. And if you want simply to become a foreign service officer, your schooling and connections matter less than your ability to pass a difficult exam and initial interviews. Neither path requires you to master a shared high culture, or much of a low one either.

My sense is that Silicon Valley has developed in just the opposite direction. My dearly missed friend, Aaron Swartz, was arguably the most genuinely open-ended intellectual to come out of modern tech. And he hated living in Silicon Valley in the early 2000s. He used to complain (sample here - he would expound on this at great length if you prompted him) about how intellectually dull Silicon Valley was, how disinclined people there were to talk about ideas, and how much happier he was after he moved to Boston, a place where people actually cared about books. Aaron was a member of the first class at Y Combinator. However, his broader intellectual interests were not only irrelevant to founder culture as it was back then but made him an actively bad fit, so that he ended up wandering off in a very different direction. In fairness, he was an awkward customer in all the right ways, and might very likely have lit out for other places no matter what.

Silicon Valley has changed remarkably in the intervening two decades. Its culture now centers not simply on technology but the exercise of power. Powerful founders and funders not only aspire to make lots of money, but to reshape the world along better lines.

They see themselves as a political elite as well as a financial one, and they are looking to educate themselves, often in ways that reinforce their own values and understanding of their own benevolent role. They want to be formed, and accidentally or consciously form others too. Tanner talks a lot about the classic Greek concept of paideia (education/formation). Its most prominent elucidation, the Cyropaedia, was written by Xenophon to support Athenian conservatives, who favored the rule of the few, in their struggles with the democratic faction. Xenophon’s notion of elite education was the model for the “mirror of princes,” a genre of mediaeval texts providing guidance for the education of rulers. Latin texts were similarly bastardized in the nineteenth century to mould the young gentlemen who would rule the British Empire, and through them influenced the anglophile East Coast elites who populated the State Department and the OSS.

And that helps explain the creation of a canon. Founders who model themselves on Augustus Caesar, and engineers who aspire to reshape the world in their image, will not find what they need to know in textbooks on optimization. Nor, however, will they find it in the cultural precepts of the mid twentieth century WASP ruling class. Those were different times, and different values. Hence, they’re crafting their own mirrors from found materials - science fiction, biographies of great men, rationalist and libertarian tracts, and books about themselves. And there are lots of the latter, reflecting and refracting their own culture right back at them.

To be absolutely clear: there is nothing surprising in this, and nothing wrong with it either, when it goes together with openness. You want people with power to be intellectually curious and to educate themselves about the world. Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley contains some charming descriptions of her meetings with a a “Patrick” who is very clearly Patrick Collison. He seems to have genuinely wanted to talk to someone intelligently skeptical about the values that he was inclined to take for granted, and figure out their perspective. That’s all to the good.

When it’s a problem is when you mistake your homemade mirror for the world. That is the main argument of my aforementioned piece for American Affairs. It focuses on a particular slice of right wing opinion in Silicon Valley, which turns Silicon Valley’s hostility to regulation, and preoccupation with founders, exit and technological innovation into a bizarre set of prescriptions for how the world, and indeed the universe ought be re-ordered. Loose canons can give rise to loose cannons: the intellectual consequences of e.g. Atlas Shrugged, Zero to One, and The Sovereign Individual have mostly been pernicious.** So too for Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (excellent fodder for founders who are upset at the routinization of their charisma and the agonies of HR), Nick Land’s various writings, and the disordered labyrinths of Chairman Yarvin Thought, even if Burnham’s book has its virtues.*** Hence, my piece, which presses for the incorporation of classical liberal books and ideas into this micro-canon that challenge, rather than flatter, the prejudices of soi-disant Silicon Valley classical liberals.

And those who are not part of the elite, but want to be, may reflect the reflections of these mirrors. The big lesson I extrapolate from Tanner’s post - which may likely not be his intended one - is that the differences between Washington DC and Silicon Valley are more the product of different political economies of elite reproduction than of different individualized propensities to read books and derive internal lessons and satisfaction from them.

In both places, people want to get ahead. It’s the paths that differ. Washington DC is a largely technocratic culture, in which one’s mastery of particular technical knowledge matters far more than one’s general cultural capital. Silicon Valley, in contrast, has become a place where advancement is at least weakly tied to your familiarity with an accepted body of cultural knowledge. Funders and mentors are convinced that the personal qualities of founders matter enormously, beyond their technical prowess, and that they know how to spot a good one. And their assumptions about quality are plausibly shaped by their cultural priors. This creates strong incentives for ambitious younger people to reflect what they believe to be the values of those who have already succeeded, and will decide whether they get that meeting or funding round that they want. If there are good connections to be made through intellectual dinner parties, then you really want to bone up on those books, don’t you? Or, in a pinch, at least pretend that you have boned up. If success requires the acquiring or simulation of certain cultural competences, then so be it.

There aren’t formal examinations that qualify you to get meetings on Sand Hill Road, but it possibly helps to display particular qualities. Wannabe entrepreneurs who want to impress funders or get into Y Combinator have good reason to study up and do what they can to match expectations, because they genuinely believe that those expectations provide good information about being a founder, because they want to seem as though they match those expectations so as to impress their betters and their peers, or both. As those expectations blur into notions about more general cultural competences, the results are predictable. People look to develop, or at least to display, the qualities that will help get them ahead.

Hence, my theory of the case is somewhat different than Tanner’s, but not, I suspect, incompatible with it. I think that Silicon Valley’s recent cultural convergence on a canon which includes, but goes well beyond, ‘how to succeed in tech’ books, is the product of two intersecting forces. The first is the broader ambitions of its elite founders and funders to shape the world beyond tech. The second is the narrower ambitions of the strivers, who would dearly like to be part of that elite, and work through the channels available to them.

To be clear: this doesn’t mean that everyone in Silicon Valley apes the joy of knowledge for effect and no more. From personal experience, lots of people who I meet in Silicon Valley care deeply and genuinely about books and ideas (I’d say the substantial majority of people who I’ve met there myself; but again, that is a very biased sample). Instead, it is to say that it is a culture where the people who care about reading certain kinds of books, and the people who care about being seen by others to have read certain kinds of books blur into each other.

Academia is much the same, and it used actually to be worse, back when canons were more important. One of David Lodge’s funniest set pieces in Changing Places involves the imaginary game of Humiliation, where you name a book you haven’t read, and get a point for everyone else at the table who has read it. Lodge’s novel describes how a striving academic faces the excruciating tradeoff between his “pathological urge to succeed and [his] pathological fear of being thought uncultured.”**** He opts for the first, and ends up getting fired because no-one wants to support an English professor who admits to not having read Hamlet. Silicon Valley people love board games too - a whole different culture. Have any of them ever played Humiliation? It would be fun - and extremely interesting - to observe if they have and do. If I had a time machine, I’d love to read Pierre Bourdieu on Silicon Valley dinner parties (he was entertainingly vicious on the cultural pretensions of academia), or, even better, Proust.

Nor does my argument mean that Washington DC people are any less grasping or ambitious than their Silicon Valley counterparts. It is just that the ambition flows through different channels: conversations at a CFR reception, e.g, rather than an intellectual dinner party. Such ambition is more visibly obnoxious in its bony-ribbed hunger when it is not decently concealed beneath dinner table sparring over some post in Slate Star Codex. But it is neither better nor worse.

What this all does mean, I think, is that Tanner’s observed differences between DC and Silicon Valley have far less to do with how much people care about books, and far more to do with their different machineries of elite advancement. In my experience, there are problems and attractions to both cultures. People in DC are by and large more variously read, and more scattered in their literary preoccupations. They don’t usually connect their reading to their professional lives. People in Silicon Valley … well … a loose canon can be both a good and a bad thing. They are more interesting about the things that they talk about in common, but less likely to have read surprising things.

More broadly, canons have their limits. Personally, I’d like to see a lot of things in that canon that aren’t apparently there at the moment, but that’s a topic for a different post.

* I am not really a proper member of either the DC wonk or the Silicon Valley community. Some of my co-authored work has been taken up by foreign policy people (Tanner has said generous things about it ) and I teach in a well known policy school etc, but I’m not a card carrying member of the policy community, since, knowing my limitations, I don’t have any interest in the usual forms of advancement. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a well-received policy argument is in want of a political appointment, but it is not true for me.

** I’ve sometimes wondered whether the similarities between the future of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and The Sovereign Individual are the result of direct influence or convergent evolution.

*** I didn’t have room to really write about any of these influences in the essay. My capsule summary is that Burnham’s book is no guide to the present, but is good and interesting, Land’s corpus is interesting but not good, and Yarvin is neither good nor interesting, except perhaps as a morbid symptom of some grosser pathology.

**** Again, the previously mentioned David Lodge conversation is a happy coincidence, not a setup.