A couple quick observations from my vantage as long-time participant-observer in Silicon Valley. First, the engineers are very different from the finance guys. These are distinct subcultures in Silicon Valley. Now, of course, sometimes these bleed into each other in the form of a single person when they are a successful founder of a tech start-up (e.g., Larry Page & Sergy Brin), but the subcultures are quite distinct. I know it goes against the stereotype, but engineers are more likely to be actual readers and, for that matter, intellectuals. They're the ones more likely to be music/art nerds. You see them at concerts at Bing and other cultural events in the area. They've often read a much greater breadth of science fiction than just Asimov and a couple Neal Stephenson novels 😬. The finance guys are definitely like what Greer describes as wanting to seem like they've read the canon. I think you're completely right, Henry, in suggesting that this is about showing that you've been properly indoctrinated/are "founder material." Note that Sand Hill Road is home to finance guys, not engineers, he tips his hand when he uses SHR as a metonym for Silicon Valley.
Second, the idea that Silicon Valley people fancy themselves generalists is probably true. They may even actually be generalists to an extent. Once again, I've found much more intellectual versatility among the engineering culture. I think what I'm calling the engineering culture is the older Silicon Valley culture. It's playful and curious, way less concerned with "disruption" or "rebellion" and more into messing around with stuff and making useful things. In the other subculture, one of the qualities that successful venture capitalists (i.e., the denizens of Sand Hill Road) cite is generalism. You have to be a quick study so that you can be successful as the CFO/CEO of the start-up to which you are providing funds until they go public. Surely, VCs specialize somewhat, but the start-ups in any given VC's portfolio can be pretty wildly different from each other, even if they're in the same sector.
Third, there's not much diversity. You can see that in the shockingly shallow list of SciFi novels in the canon, but the whole thing really reeks of sameness. I actually think this is a fair representation of the culture here, at least for team Sand Hill Road. This seems to me as almost certainly a major factor in the demise of good ideas in Silicon Valley of late.
One of the best things Aaron ever did for me was to get me invited to Foo sometime around 2008-2009 - I loved the people I met (mostly engineers). It was incredibly refreshing to meet people whose first instinct when they came across a problem was not to study it but to solve it. That is not the dominant approach among political scientists. In my ideal world, we'd have some kind of 'piecemeal democratic engineering' a la Popper's piecemeal social engineering - bringing together social science academics with engineering/maker people who are not too completely wedded to seeing the world as a set of straightforward optimization problems to figure out how to get things done and unstuck.
I used to find it off-putting to see discussions of "Silicon Valley culture", "tech bros", etc, but now I understand that these terms are referring to "founders, funders, and wannabees", and as you say, finance people. That is, basically, ambitious business people, whose business is related to computing. So not the software engineers, hardware designers, managers of these people, experts in relevant domains, and so on; about a quarter of them from India, a quarter from China, a quarter from other places outside the U.S. These people may not be the loudest or most visible, but they are the vast majority of tech people in Silicon Valley. These are the people you might plausibly compare to midlevel bureaucrats in DC, which seems to be the people who are being considered to constitute DC culture. If the "founders, funders, and wannabees" constitute silicon valley culture, then you might just as well say that senators, representatives, and cabinet members constitute DC culture.
> The technologists of Silicon Valley do not believe in authority.
What a strange and silly thing to write. You could convince me of that for someone like Woz or Moxie Marlinspike, but they'll never run one of the behemoths that control Silicon Valley now. They wouldn't want to and nobody would let them.
The novel Microserfs, published in 1995, features as a major theme Silicon Valley's attempt to rebuild the currency of its myth even as its protagonist discovers that it has the same money-centric, dominance-focused ethos as Microsoft.
They absolutely believe in authority when it is potentially their own.
I see echoes of both Isaiah Berlin's "The hedgehog and the fox" and C.P. Snow's "The two cultures" in this discussion. It would be interesting to examine STEM-adjacent academia from these perspectives as well – there are various forces acting on it, some pulling it in the direction of technocratic culture, others in the direction of aristocratic culture. The late Sanjoy Mitter proposed a synthesis in his 1985 essay "Toward the definition of a new engineering education" (https://mitter.lids.mit.edu/publications/O-1-toward-the-definition.pdf), but, alas, it never went anywhere. The relentless hyperproductivity is, in part, SV-driven, but, ironically, one does not have time to read and engage deeply with books (canonical or otherwise) if one is fully invested in the Red Queen's race of publishing in top conferences.
On Stephenson: I’ve heard that he wrote Snow Crash as a rebuke/satire of his libertarian friends.
I suspect there’s a very specific slice of Silicon Valley that is interested in political philosophy and what you’re seeing is partly about the rise of an ideology but also about the part of the information ecosystem that makes sense to outsiders and journalists.
On Stephenson - I think that sounds quite likely. He was good friends with my co-author Martha Finnemore when they were younger, but I've not actually met him. Still, I suspect he's gotten more libertarian over time, in a idiosyncratic free-market-hits-Midwestern values kind of way. On this just being a slice - that seems plausible too. But it's a pretty significant slice! Not saying that they agree on stuff obvs, since they don't but Thiel, Hoffman, Musk, Collison, Schmidt, Zuckerberg all harbor or have harbored interests of this kind, as well as a bunch of second tier people like Sacks, Srinivasan etc. But 2: would love to hear your impressions, whether they agree or disagree - when I said that I wrote this half in the desire to be corrected I was speaking truth.
I think that he's a predecessor for today's "conservative tech libertarian" culture—take Cryptonomicon (1999), the hero leaves his "politically correct" Cultural Studies girlfriend and straightens himself up in a personally conservative way (Horatio Alger values good, going to church and tradition good) all while being involved in Internet cryptographic money backed by gold. Now compare with the newest wave of Twitter anime pfp tech influencers like Yacine who are insistent on being anti-trans, that people marry early and have many children and so on
Though he is perfectly willing to write an evil rich person like Bob Rife or El Shepherd, I have noticed that his books will often have a rich person who does something smart and interesting – the Sultan of Kinakuta, Eliza, Dodge Forthrast, TR – in order to move the plot forward. Here in reality we have been mostly getting Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and Balaji Srinivasan: the former type of guy who wants to keep believing he is the latter type of guy.
(Edit: totally whiffed on the antagonist of Snow Crash since I haven't read it since the 90s)
For what it's worth, Interface (co-written by Stephenson and his uncle, published a couple of years after Snow Crash) is a pretty straightforward rootsy-libertarian fantasy.
Snow Crash obviously has a lot more going on, but its plainest, fiercest satire is of government bureaucracy.
This hardly makes me feel better about Silicon Valley, in fact it makes what Silicon Valley has become even more repulsive to me. The computer and software engineers whose stories I find inspiring were the ones who sought not to gain and wield power but to build better computers and programs to give power to their users. I find people like Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Richard Stallman, Federico Faggin, Gary Kildall, the BSD people at Berkeley, etc. far more interesting than some wannabe aristocrat who is more concerned with emulating Augustus Caesar than building a better computer or giving people more control over the computers they already have. Silicon Valley doesn't even make the silicon anymore; some nobody engineer in Taiwan has done more for me any my PC than most of the Silicon Valley "founders" of today whose products are either security and surveillance services, or outright con jobs.
edit: And it should be noted that a lot of these earlier Silicon Valley/Bell Labs/MIT/Berkeley people were wonks par excellence, they had incredible knowledge and mastery of computers and often very little else, and were fine with that. Gary Kildall determined the basic architecture of personal computers all the way up to the 2000s and he basically had no idea what he was doing when it came to business, which led to his total ruin in the end. Business was, to him, an annoying thing getting in the way of making better software for microcomputers.
What are your thoughts on the tension between Silicon Valley's self-proclaimed anti-authoritarian spirit and its conformity to an unofficial intellectual "canon" that seems necessary for success? Does this dynamic shape innovation in a positive or limiting way?
I personally know a VC partner at a Thiel associated fund who (had his assistant) write a blog post about reading Rene Girard but afterwards was genuinely surprised to find out Girard was Catholic.
It is fascinating to me, the ways that America exhibits aristocratic tendencies, and the ways that the desire among "the elite" for an existence that is not relentlessly aristocratic raises its head. Thus the fan base for Bridgerton, for example, and the nostalgia produced by college and book reading as signaling. https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/higher-ed-musings-4
A couple quick observations from my vantage as long-time participant-observer in Silicon Valley. First, the engineers are very different from the finance guys. These are distinct subcultures in Silicon Valley. Now, of course, sometimes these bleed into each other in the form of a single person when they are a successful founder of a tech start-up (e.g., Larry Page & Sergy Brin), but the subcultures are quite distinct. I know it goes against the stereotype, but engineers are more likely to be actual readers and, for that matter, intellectuals. They're the ones more likely to be music/art nerds. You see them at concerts at Bing and other cultural events in the area. They've often read a much greater breadth of science fiction than just Asimov and a couple Neal Stephenson novels 😬. The finance guys are definitely like what Greer describes as wanting to seem like they've read the canon. I think you're completely right, Henry, in suggesting that this is about showing that you've been properly indoctrinated/are "founder material." Note that Sand Hill Road is home to finance guys, not engineers, he tips his hand when he uses SHR as a metonym for Silicon Valley.
Second, the idea that Silicon Valley people fancy themselves generalists is probably true. They may even actually be generalists to an extent. Once again, I've found much more intellectual versatility among the engineering culture. I think what I'm calling the engineering culture is the older Silicon Valley culture. It's playful and curious, way less concerned with "disruption" or "rebellion" and more into messing around with stuff and making useful things. In the other subculture, one of the qualities that successful venture capitalists (i.e., the denizens of Sand Hill Road) cite is generalism. You have to be a quick study so that you can be successful as the CFO/CEO of the start-up to which you are providing funds until they go public. Surely, VCs specialize somewhat, but the start-ups in any given VC's portfolio can be pretty wildly different from each other, even if they're in the same sector.
Third, there's not much diversity. You can see that in the shockingly shallow list of SciFi novels in the canon, but the whole thing really reeks of sameness. I actually think this is a fair representation of the culture here, at least for team Sand Hill Road. This seems to me as almost certainly a major factor in the demise of good ideas in Silicon Valley of late.
One of the best things Aaron ever did for me was to get me invited to Foo sometime around 2008-2009 - I loved the people I met (mostly engineers). It was incredibly refreshing to meet people whose first instinct when they came across a problem was not to study it but to solve it. That is not the dominant approach among political scientists. In my ideal world, we'd have some kind of 'piecemeal democratic engineering' a la Popper's piecemeal social engineering - bringing together social science academics with engineering/maker people who are not too completely wedded to seeing the world as a set of straightforward optimization problems to figure out how to get things done and unstuck.
I used to find it off-putting to see discussions of "Silicon Valley culture", "tech bros", etc, but now I understand that these terms are referring to "founders, funders, and wannabees", and as you say, finance people. That is, basically, ambitious business people, whose business is related to computing. So not the software engineers, hardware designers, managers of these people, experts in relevant domains, and so on; about a quarter of them from India, a quarter from China, a quarter from other places outside the U.S. These people may not be the loudest or most visible, but they are the vast majority of tech people in Silicon Valley. These are the people you might plausibly compare to midlevel bureaucrats in DC, which seems to be the people who are being considered to constitute DC culture. If the "founders, funders, and wannabees" constitute silicon valley culture, then you might just as well say that senators, representatives, and cabinet members constitute DC culture.
What is perhaps unique to Silicon Valley is its mavens obsession with the SF of their childhood: https://tempo.substack.com/p/thermians
As for aristocracy: https://tempo.substack.com/p/structuring-tech-companies-the-despot
> The technologists of Silicon Valley do not believe in authority.
What a strange and silly thing to write. You could convince me of that for someone like Woz or Moxie Marlinspike, but they'll never run one of the behemoths that control Silicon Valley now. They wouldn't want to and nobody would let them.
The novel Microserfs, published in 1995, features as a major theme Silicon Valley's attempt to rebuild the currency of its myth even as its protagonist discovers that it has the same money-centric, dominance-focused ethos as Microsoft.
They absolutely believe in authority when it is potentially their own.
I see echoes of both Isaiah Berlin's "The hedgehog and the fox" and C.P. Snow's "The two cultures" in this discussion. It would be interesting to examine STEM-adjacent academia from these perspectives as well – there are various forces acting on it, some pulling it in the direction of technocratic culture, others in the direction of aristocratic culture. The late Sanjoy Mitter proposed a synthesis in his 1985 essay "Toward the definition of a new engineering education" (https://mitter.lids.mit.edu/publications/O-1-toward-the-definition.pdf), but, alas, it never went anywhere. The relentless hyperproductivity is, in part, SV-driven, but, ironically, one does not have time to read and engage deeply with books (canonical or otherwise) if one is fully invested in the Red Queen's race of publishing in top conferences.
On Stephenson: I’ve heard that he wrote Snow Crash as a rebuke/satire of his libertarian friends.
I suspect there’s a very specific slice of Silicon Valley that is interested in political philosophy and what you’re seeing is partly about the rise of an ideology but also about the part of the information ecosystem that makes sense to outsiders and journalists.
On Stephenson - I think that sounds quite likely. He was good friends with my co-author Martha Finnemore when they were younger, but I've not actually met him. Still, I suspect he's gotten more libertarian over time, in a idiosyncratic free-market-hits-Midwestern values kind of way. On this just being a slice - that seems plausible too. But it's a pretty significant slice! Not saying that they agree on stuff obvs, since they don't but Thiel, Hoffman, Musk, Collison, Schmidt, Zuckerberg all harbor or have harbored interests of this kind, as well as a bunch of second tier people like Sacks, Srinivasan etc. But 2: would love to hear your impressions, whether they agree or disagree - when I said that I wrote this half in the desire to be corrected I was speaking truth.
I think that he's a predecessor for today's "conservative tech libertarian" culture—take Cryptonomicon (1999), the hero leaves his "politically correct" Cultural Studies girlfriend and straightens himself up in a personally conservative way (Horatio Alger values good, going to church and tradition good) all while being involved in Internet cryptographic money backed by gold. Now compare with the newest wave of Twitter anime pfp tech influencers like Yacine who are insistent on being anti-trans, that people marry early and have many children and so on
Though he is perfectly willing to write an evil rich person like Bob Rife or El Shepherd, I have noticed that his books will often have a rich person who does something smart and interesting – the Sultan of Kinakuta, Eliza, Dodge Forthrast, TR – in order to move the plot forward. Here in reality we have been mostly getting Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and Balaji Srinivasan: the former type of guy who wants to keep believing he is the latter type of guy.
(Edit: totally whiffed on the antagonist of Snow Crash since I haven't read it since the 90s)
For what it's worth, Interface (co-written by Stephenson and his uncle, published a couple of years after Snow Crash) is a pretty straightforward rootsy-libertarian fantasy.
Snow Crash obviously has a lot more going on, but its plainest, fiercest satire is of government bureaucracy.
This hardly makes me feel better about Silicon Valley, in fact it makes what Silicon Valley has become even more repulsive to me. The computer and software engineers whose stories I find inspiring were the ones who sought not to gain and wield power but to build better computers and programs to give power to their users. I find people like Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Richard Stallman, Federico Faggin, Gary Kildall, the BSD people at Berkeley, etc. far more interesting than some wannabe aristocrat who is more concerned with emulating Augustus Caesar than building a better computer or giving people more control over the computers they already have. Silicon Valley doesn't even make the silicon anymore; some nobody engineer in Taiwan has done more for me any my PC than most of the Silicon Valley "founders" of today whose products are either security and surveillance services, or outright con jobs.
edit: And it should be noted that a lot of these earlier Silicon Valley/Bell Labs/MIT/Berkeley people were wonks par excellence, they had incredible knowledge and mastery of computers and often very little else, and were fine with that. Gary Kildall determined the basic architecture of personal computers all the way up to the 2000s and he basically had no idea what he was doing when it came to business, which led to his total ruin in the end. Business was, to him, an annoying thing getting in the way of making better software for microcomputers.
What are your thoughts on the tension between Silicon Valley's self-proclaimed anti-authoritarian spirit and its conformity to an unofficial intellectual "canon" that seems necessary for success? Does this dynamic shape innovation in a positive or limiting way?
I personally know a VC partner at a Thiel associated fund who (had his assistant) write a blog post about reading Rene Girard but afterwards was genuinely surprised to find out Girard was Catholic.
What a surprise to see that a conservative writer with connections to the SV right has a florid and silly writing style
It is fascinating to me, the ways that America exhibits aristocratic tendencies, and the ways that the desire among "the elite" for an existence that is not relentlessly aristocratic raises its head. Thus the fan base for Bridgerton, for example, and the nostalgia produced by college and book reading as signaling. https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/higher-ed-musings-4
I'd never heard of "The Sovereign Individual" before but I'm definitely going to read it now. (Gonna have to re-read Snowcrash after).
Intriguing article. I just used the word sprezzatura in some notes I was writing about cultural capital.
From a literary POV, liking Atlas Shrugged past adolescence is immediate cultural disqualification in intellectual circles. I loved it when I was 15.