Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions

An article from Bloomberg Weekend

[Foreshortening of a Library by Carlo Galli Bibiena, courtesy of The Met]

Back in February, I wrote a piece for Bloomberg Weekend on the relationship between Silicon Valley and Great Books. My understanding from them was that after a period of 180 days, it would be fine to publish it on my website. The 180 days have passed so here it is. A longer original piece (currently 4k words and counting) is in the hopper for next week.

In other minor personal news, I put up a page on my website a few weeks ago, to try to put some order on the many requests that I’m getting these days to write, read, republish, talk and recommend. I feel a bit guilty doing this, but my life is becoming impossible. It does address, among other things, requests for Substack crossposts, recommendations etc.

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Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions

In 2008, Paul Graham mused about the cultural differences between great US cities. Three years earlier, Graham had co-founded Y Combinator, a “startup accelerator” that would come to epitomize Silicon Valley — and would move there in 2009. But at the time Graham was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which, as he saw it, sent a different message to its inhabitants than did Palo Alto.

Cambridge’s message was, “You should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to.” Silicon Valley respected smarts, Graham wrote, but its message was different: “You should be more powerful.”

He wasn’t alone in this assessment. My late friend Aaron Swartz, a member of Y Combinator’s first class, fled San Francisco in late 2006 for several reasons. He told me later that one of them was how few people in the Bay Area seemed interested in books.

Today, however, it feels as though people there want to talk about nothing but. Tech luminaries seem to opine endlessly about books and ideas, debating the merits and defects of different flavors of rationalism, of basic economic principles and of the strengths and weaknesses of democracy and corporate rule.

This fervor has yielded a recognizable “Silicon Valley canon.” And as Elon Musk and his shock troops descend on Washington with intentions of reengineering the government, it’s worth paying attention to the books the tech world reads — as well as the ones they don’t. Viewed through the canon, DOGE’s grand effort to cut government down to size is the latest manifestation of a longstanding Silicon Valley dream: to remake politics in its image.

The Silicon Valley Canon

Last August, Tanner Greer, a conservative writer with a large Silicon Valley readership, asked on X what the contents of the “vague tech canon” might be. He’d been provoked when the writer and technologist Jasmine Sun asked why James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, an anarchist denunciation of grand structures of government, had become a “Silicon Valley bookshelf fixture.” The prompt led Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe and a leading thinker within Silicon Valley, to suggest a list of 43 sources, which he stressed were not those he thought “one ought to read” but those that “roughly cover[ed] the major ideas that are influential here.”

In a later response, Greer argued that the canon tied together a cohesive community, providing Silicon Valley leaders with a shared understanding of power and a definition of greatness. Greer, like Graham, spoke of the differences between cities. He described Washington, DC as an intellectually stultified warren of specialists without soul, arid technocrats who knew their own narrow area of policy but did not read outside of it. In contrast, Silicon Valley was a place of doers, who looked to books not for technical information, but for inspiration and advice. The Silicon Valley canon provided guideposts for how to change the world.

Said canon is not directly political. It includes websites, like LessWrong, the home of the rationalist movement, and Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex Ten, for members of the “grey tribe” who see themselves as neither conservative nor properly liberal. Graham’s many essays are included, as are science fiction novels like Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. Much of the canon is business advice on topics such as how to build a startup.

But such advice can have a political edge. Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, co-authored with his former student and failed Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters, not only tells startups that they need to aspire to monopoly power or be crushed, but describes Thiel’s early ambitions (along with other members of the so-called PayPal mafia) to create a global private currency that would crush the US dollar.

Then there are the Carlylian histories of “great men” (most of the subjects and authors were male) who sought to change the world. Older biographies described men like Robert Moses and Theodore Roosevelt, with grand flaws and grander ambitions, who broke with convention and overcame opposition to remake society.

Such stories, in Greer’s description, provided Silicon Valley’s leaders and aspiring leaders with “models of honor,” and examples of “the sort of deeds that brought glory or shame to the doer simply by being done.” The newer histories both explained Silicon Valley to itself, and tacitly wove its founders and small teams into this epic history of great deeds, suggesting that modern entrepreneurs like Elon Musk — whose biography was on the list — were the latest in a grand lineage that had remade America’s role in the world.

Putting Musk alongside Teddy Roosevelt didn’t simply reinforce Silicon Valley’s own mythologized self-image as the modern center of creative destruction. It implicitly welded it to politics, contrasting the politically creative energies of the technology industry, set on remaking the world for the better, to the Washington regulators who frustrated and thwarted entrepreneurial change. Mightn’t everything be better if visionary engineers had their way, replacing all the messy, squalid compromises of politics with radical innovation and purpose-engineered efficient systems?

One book on the list argues this and more. James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s The Sovereign Individual cheered on the dynamic, wealth-creating individuals who would use cyberspace to exit corrupt democracies, with their “constituencies of losers,” and create their own political order. When the book, originally published in 1997, was reissued in 2020, Thiel wrote the preface.

Under this simplifying grand narrative, the federal state was at best another inefficient industry that was ripe for disruption. At worst, national government and representative democracy were impediments that needed to be swept away, as Davidson and Rees-Mogg had argued. From there, it’s only a hop, skip and a jump to even more extreme ideas that, while not formally in the canon, have come to define the tech right.

In 2013, Balaji Srinivasan, a homegrown intellectual and entrepreneur, gave a Y Combinator speech arguing that Silicon Valley had to escape or subvert the control of the East Coast “Paper Belt,” which deployed government bureaucracy to stifle innovation. He was quickly offered a job by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin argued that all government employees should be “retired” and entrepreneurs should become monarchs. Yarvin was plucked from blogging obscurity by Thiel and is now interviewed by publications like the New York Times and cited as an influence by JD Vance.

We don’t know which parts of the canon Musk has read, or which ones influenced the young techies he’s hired into DOGE. But it’s not hard to imagine how his current gambit looks filtered through these ideas. From this vantage, DOGE’s grand effort to cut government down to size is the newest iteration of an epic narrative of change.

Musk, a heroic entrepreneur, will surely make history as his tiny team of engineers cuts the government Leviathan down to size. One DOGE recruiter framed the challenge as “a historic opportunity to build an efficient government, and to cut the federal budget by 1/3.” When a small team remakes government wholesale, the outcome will surely be simpler, cheaper and more effective. That, after all, fits with the story that Silicon Valley disruptors tell themselves.

What the Silicon Valley Canon is Missing

From another perspective, hubris is about to get clobbered by nemesis. Jasmine Sun’s question about why so many people in tech read Seeing Like a State hints at the misunderstandings that trouble the Silicon Valley canon. Many tech elites read the book as a denunciation of government overreach. But Scott was an excoriating critic of the drive to efficiency that they themselves embody.

Scott expanded on Friedrich Hayek’s criticisms of the “religion of engineers.” Hayek, a darling of libertarians, wrote harshly about engineering by social democrats, but was willing to praise dictators like Augusto Pinochet who were enthusiastic about privatization. Scott, in contrast, was willing to indict all forms of “social engineering,” quoting for example a description of the military engineer’s “bulldozing habit of mind: one that sought to clear the ground of encumbrances, so as to make a clear beginning on its own inflexible mathematical lines.”

Musk epitomizes that bulldozing turn of mind. Like the Renaissance engineers who wanted to raze squalid and inefficient cities to start anew, DOGE proposes to flense away the complexities of government in a leap of faith that AI will do it all better. If the engineers were not thoroughly ignorant of the structures they are demolishing, they might hesitate and lose momentum.

Seeing Like a State, properly understood, is a warning not just to bureaucrats but to social engineers writ large. From Scott’s broader perspective, AI is not a solution, but a swift way to make the problem worse. It will replace the gross simplifications of bureaucracy with incomprehensible abstractions that have been filtered through the “hidden layers” of artificial neurons that allow it to work. DOGE’s artificial-intelligence-fueled vision of government is a vision from Franz Kafka, not Friedrich Hayek.

DOGE’s attempt to remake government in the image of Silicon Valley will not be the apotheosis of the engineering ideal that Musk hopes for. Even some sympathetic Silicon Valley elites, including Graham, are visibly nervous that it will end in calamity. It may become an object lesson in the importance of all the questions that should be asked by the canon but are not.

Canons create miniature universes of discourse, which emphasize some values and choices while de-emphasizing or even concealing others. So what does the Silicon Valley canon sideline or leave out? In short, a respect for pluralism and a suspicion of grand projects, both of which used to be quite common among technologists.

A better version of the canon could take inspiration from two of its anomalous members: Seeing Like a State and Anna Wiener’s memoir, Uncanny Valley. Scott’s book sets out to defend Jane Jacobs’ celebration of the plurality of self-organized human societies against Robert Moses’s bulldozers. Wiener’s book, which recounts her life working for startups and the project management site Github, provides contemporary evidence of how dark fantasies of control creep in around the edges of Silicon Valley’s engineering vision.

Placing these at the center of a reformed canon might identify an alternative to DOGE’s grand dreams of obliterating and building afresh. It could restart fruitful arguments among libertarians and the left that now risk being razed by the alliance between Musk’s social media clout and money, and Trump’s government coercion.

Some of this revised canon might draw on Patrick Collison’s own bookshelves, which contain a far wider range of ideas than the canon itself. Collison’s reading interests tend toward classical liberalism, but writers who rub shoulders on his shelves, like Karl Popper and Elinor Ostrom, could be brought into debate with less well-known liberals like Ernest Gellner and contemporary left-liberals like Danielle Allen. All of these thinkers are deeply concerned with building and maintaining a genuinely plural society in which groups can get along despite their differences.

Fiction, too, could help build bridges — perhaps by adding books, like Ruthanna Emrys’s A Half-Built Garden, that not only imagine dystopias but ask how people could collectively rebuild under such circumstances. Centering the argument on books like these might liberate the energies of a different cadre of young technologists than the ones DOGE recruits from. There are plenty of curious, lively and culturally omnivorous thinkers in tech, including Sun, Celine Nguyen, Eugene Wei, Saffron Huang, Dan Wang and Divya Siddarth. What books would they suggest be added to the canon?

Silicon Valley’s celebration of reading has blended very badly with the worship of power. The problems of the Silicon Valley canon, and increasingly of Silicon Valley itself, reflect the problems of a monoculture, in which people have converged on a particular definition of greatness built around engineering prowess and large-scale social disruption. That highlights some of the possibilities of technology, while occluding others.

Perhaps, instead of remaking America so that it reflects the Silicon Valley ethos, we ought to rebuild Silicon Valley’s internal economy to include some of the diversity and creativity in the society that surrounds it. The engineer’s focus on simplifying and solving problems can be of great value, so long as it is leavened by a deep appreciation of the richness and complexity of the systems that it looks to transform. Without that, it is liable to result in disaster.

Henry Farrell is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

Reference Shelf

• Seeing Like a State, by James Scott

• The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson

• Zero to One, by Peter Thiel

• The Power Broker , by Robert A. Caro

• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris

• Elon Musk, by Ashlee Vance

• The Sovereign Individual, by James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s

• A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys

• Uncanny Valley, by Anna Wiener