I think your post gets at something real and that Silicon Valley types could stand with a bit more intellectual diversity in the sources they consume.
You say that the Silicon Valley canon leaves out “a respect for pluralism and suspicion of grand projects”, but that’s precisely what Seeing Like a State is all about. The whole point of that book is to critique grand, centrally-planned projects which fail to consider the perspectives of “local knowledge” (dare I say, “pluralism”).
I’ve often thought it contradictory that Silicon Valley types simultaneously valorize Robert Moses while regarding Seeing Like a State as central to their ideology. It makes me think the myopia of that worldview isn’t due to which books are or aren’t in the canon but due to a lack of intellectual curiosity on the part of its readers. It seems that someone whose reading is limited to those books and blogs is more motivated by a desire to justify their ideology (anti-government in the case of Seeing Like a State and pro-creative destruction in the case of the Power Broker) than a desire to deepen their worldview. Otherwise they’d read more books!
What is fascinating about the lists, including Collison’s, is that they read like cheat codes, not actual intellectual pursuit.
Seeing Like a State is Brilliant, but so are Progress and Poverty and Small is Beautiful, which are complementary and give dimension.
Scott’s work in this canon is a placeholder for a meme, not a subject of contemplation (btw, your analysis of Scott is good, theirs is bad).
The list contains loads of survey texts. This suggests mimetic behavior, not curiosity or inquiry, as in “I should like to be conversant in quantum theory/complexity/classic philosophy” rather than any serious attempt to probe ideas.
A curious intellectual might read Spinoza or Bergson or Whitehead along with a more contemporary thinker, not just sweep over the fashionable terrain.
And the list contains virtually zero writing on epistemic uncertainty or the nature of power, instead mired in stories about the exercise of power with manic confidence. Moses (The Power Broker) was a disease that left New York crippled, and the best parts of New York today are those places he was not able to destroy.
Postmodernism (also conspicuously absent) is a response to uncertainty that came out of the sciences, but it may as well not exist for the modern tech bro because it thrives on the intellectual potential of contingency, and they crave the cozy womb of certainty.
These are not intellectuals nor are they even deep thinkers. They are poker players who want power, and reading for them is a means to a preordained end.
As an ex-SV denizen myself, I am surprised that "The Diamond Age" is on the reading list. I would have thought that Iain Banks' "culture novels" (https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?100) would have been the preferred readings. Perhaps despite their love of AI, they see themselves as rulers rather than being ruled by AI?
Silicon Valley is where thinking goes to die. It's filled with little Eichmanns trying to copy the latest BIG IDEA in a totally unique way and occasionally stopping to admire their own navel lint. Each one of these little Eichmanns should have to read The Intelligent Investor (Benjamin Graham), How Fascism Works (Jason Stanley), and The Dispossessed (Ursula LeGuin). No telling whether many of them would understand all three.
Our current fintech shenanigan politics reminds me of two old school journalistic best sellers. Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar and Liars Poker by Michael Lewis. Both books tell the same story, that of the clubism and mendacity of the powerful in which enormous self-regard is a pathetic cover for profound self-deception. These books aren't deeply philosophical. They just tell a story that keeps repeating itself.
I read “Seeing Like a State” earlier this year based on your (and Cosma’s) recommendation, having long been a fan of Scott’s lecture about “Why Civilizations Can’t Climb Hills.” I can imagine a few reasons why it’s on the Silicon Valley canon: first, they read it as a critique of organizations (governments) rather than methods (aestheticization & oversimplification); surely the private sector and markets can make this work properly! Second, they assume the flexibility and speed of a software development cycle can be applied to people and real world institutions. Third, are we even sure they understand it? Given the well documented tendency of SV luminaries to misinterpret the message of most fiction they treat as totemic, it wouldn’t surprise me if they think states just hadn’t built sufficiently sophisticated torment nexuses. I noticed that The Selfish Gene is on the list, and I’d bet dollars to donuts most tech CEOs conflate “genes are the unit of selection” with “genes determine everything.”
In the final reduction, "seeing like a state" is the same as "seeing like an individual." Your time and attention are limited by the hours of the day, and your knowledge has formal limitations. Therefore you MUST sort the world around you into a smaller set of categories. These categories may be created by you, or (more usually) learned from other people. In other words your cognition is limited, and so to make any sense of the world at all, you sift and reduce it: you force "legibility" (Scott's term) onto it.
Of course this happens analogously at any level of focally-organized entity, from individual to state.
This is a basic and rather unrecognized problem for both libertarians and socialists, in different ways:
Libertarians think the market system compensates for limited knowledge, and in their discourse the market system always lays, even unspoken, under their assertions. But of course there are many kinds of pertinent and crucial information which are not transmitted by prices. "Marketizing" these concerns just overloads an individual's limited time and attention with more choices, or with individual concerns about the choices made by others on crucial topics such as equality, stability or the environment.
On the other hand, yet quite similarly, socialists (and other advocates of government solutions) do not consider that adding more rules and regulations also overloads an individual's limited time and attention. You yourself do not like more rules, and further, you are burdened with the responsibility of providing and guiding a bureaucracy, to manage the infractions of others.
Some of the few writers who have pointed to the general process of "legibilizing into reduced categories" include Babbage, Mach, Whitehead, Korzybski, Bateson, Simon. Scott may be one of the few writers who illustrates the consequences, although in a specific process.
The issue that our brains are reductive and therefore the systems that our brains can manipulate must be reductive as well is true. And that this affects both totalizing capitalism as well as socialism is also true.
But this elides Scott’s conclusion which is since all totalizing regimes destroy through systems of legibility, they are all invalid. Only systems that are localized can work. He was an anarchist.
Not sure I would characterize Scott's conclusion in that way. Some systems need to be localized (e.g. wildlife ecosystems; neighborhood management). Others may be totalized if we all agree to it, and if we have procedures to change them when necessary (e.g. laws and voting).
Where I might diverge a little from Scott is his statement that "language is the best model: a structure of meaning and continuity that is never still and ever open to the improvisations of all its speakers." Because I think it is possible to argue (after Mach's concept of "the economy of thought") that a language is reductive too. Its function to economize thought (for communication and storage of ideas) necessarily "legibilizes" the kinds of ideas which can be expressed. It is another form of totalization. (This is perhaps mildly perceptible in the responses from LLMs, which of course are simply surfing over a nonliving corpus, to reproduce likely responses to questions or prompts.)
What is missing, beyond the humans themselves, is the simultaneous need for alternate languages, music, painting, dance, etc. all put together. Similarly the Silicon Valley types don't see that big government, cumbrous as it is, is the developed response to a lot of different problems and needs, and to which they are as blind as high modernism.
I'm unsurprised that the based and stable geniuses of Sand Hill Road and Pacific Heights do not think James Scott's observations apply to them, just other people.
They are completely without introspection. They want both centralized totalitarian control as well as near anarchy and see no irony or conflict in that.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has a magical appeal. The Golem was poignantly less than human for having been formed using only 12 of the 24 letters of the alphabet. I think Turing showed that just one symbol is as good as many, and that any human language can express any human thought which is why there are poets working in every language.
Because the whole schtick of the "Richard Feynman" who shows up in the Ralph Leighton-curarted memoirs is that they are about a very special boy who can put his thumb in the eye of hidebound institutions and understand things better from first principles. Tech visionaries see themselves in that person.
I think your post gets at something real and that Silicon Valley types could stand with a bit more intellectual diversity in the sources they consume.
You say that the Silicon Valley canon leaves out “a respect for pluralism and suspicion of grand projects”, but that’s precisely what Seeing Like a State is all about. The whole point of that book is to critique grand, centrally-planned projects which fail to consider the perspectives of “local knowledge” (dare I say, “pluralism”).
I’ve often thought it contradictory that Silicon Valley types simultaneously valorize Robert Moses while regarding Seeing Like a State as central to their ideology. It makes me think the myopia of that worldview isn’t due to which books are or aren’t in the canon but due to a lack of intellectual curiosity on the part of its readers. It seems that someone whose reading is limited to those books and blogs is more motivated by a desire to justify their ideology (anti-government in the case of Seeing Like a State and pro-creative destruction in the case of the Power Broker) than a desire to deepen their worldview. Otherwise they’d read more books!
What is fascinating about the lists, including Collison’s, is that they read like cheat codes, not actual intellectual pursuit.
Seeing Like a State is Brilliant, but so are Progress and Poverty and Small is Beautiful, which are complementary and give dimension.
Scott’s work in this canon is a placeholder for a meme, not a subject of contemplation (btw, your analysis of Scott is good, theirs is bad).
The list contains loads of survey texts. This suggests mimetic behavior, not curiosity or inquiry, as in “I should like to be conversant in quantum theory/complexity/classic philosophy” rather than any serious attempt to probe ideas.
A curious intellectual might read Spinoza or Bergson or Whitehead along with a more contemporary thinker, not just sweep over the fashionable terrain.
And the list contains virtually zero writing on epistemic uncertainty or the nature of power, instead mired in stories about the exercise of power with manic confidence. Moses (The Power Broker) was a disease that left New York crippled, and the best parts of New York today are those places he was not able to destroy.
Postmodernism (also conspicuously absent) is a response to uncertainty that came out of the sciences, but it may as well not exist for the modern tech bro because it thrives on the intellectual potential of contingency, and they crave the cozy womb of certainty.
These are not intellectuals nor are they even deep thinkers. They are poker players who want power, and reading for them is a means to a preordained end.
Cryptonomicon is the finest story written concerning tech utopia, as dangerous as all previous utopias.
As an ex-SV denizen myself, I am surprised that "The Diamond Age" is on the reading list. I would have thought that Iain Banks' "culture novels" (https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?100) would have been the preferred readings. Perhaps despite their love of AI, they see themselves as rulers rather than being ruled by AI?
I didn't read far till Ayn Rand popped into the peabrain. Are the Tech Bros just warmed over Ayn with computers and internet instead of railroads?
Silicon Valley is where thinking goes to die. It's filled with little Eichmanns trying to copy the latest BIG IDEA in a totally unique way and occasionally stopping to admire their own navel lint. Each one of these little Eichmanns should have to read The Intelligent Investor (Benjamin Graham), How Fascism Works (Jason Stanley), and The Dispossessed (Ursula LeGuin). No telling whether many of them would understand all three.
Along those lines Fascism: A Warning by Madeleine Albright could be a fourth.
I think the Silicon Valley interpretation of Seeing Like a State is the clearest example of how readers all approach a text with their own baggage.
Our current fintech shenanigan politics reminds me of two old school journalistic best sellers. Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar and Liars Poker by Michael Lewis. Both books tell the same story, that of the clubism and mendacity of the powerful in which enormous self-regard is a pathetic cover for profound self-deception. These books aren't deeply philosophical. They just tell a story that keeps repeating itself.
I read “Seeing Like a State” earlier this year based on your (and Cosma’s) recommendation, having long been a fan of Scott’s lecture about “Why Civilizations Can’t Climb Hills.” I can imagine a few reasons why it’s on the Silicon Valley canon: first, they read it as a critique of organizations (governments) rather than methods (aestheticization & oversimplification); surely the private sector and markets can make this work properly! Second, they assume the flexibility and speed of a software development cycle can be applied to people and real world institutions. Third, are we even sure they understand it? Given the well documented tendency of SV luminaries to misinterpret the message of most fiction they treat as totemic, it wouldn’t surprise me if they think states just hadn’t built sufficiently sophisticated torment nexuses. I noticed that The Selfish Gene is on the list, and I’d bet dollars to donuts most tech CEOs conflate “genes are the unit of selection” with “genes determine everything.”
In the final reduction, "seeing like a state" is the same as "seeing like an individual." Your time and attention are limited by the hours of the day, and your knowledge has formal limitations. Therefore you MUST sort the world around you into a smaller set of categories. These categories may be created by you, or (more usually) learned from other people. In other words your cognition is limited, and so to make any sense of the world at all, you sift and reduce it: you force "legibility" (Scott's term) onto it.
Of course this happens analogously at any level of focally-organized entity, from individual to state.
This is a basic and rather unrecognized problem for both libertarians and socialists, in different ways:
Libertarians think the market system compensates for limited knowledge, and in their discourse the market system always lays, even unspoken, under their assertions. But of course there are many kinds of pertinent and crucial information which are not transmitted by prices. "Marketizing" these concerns just overloads an individual's limited time and attention with more choices, or with individual concerns about the choices made by others on crucial topics such as equality, stability or the environment.
On the other hand, yet quite similarly, socialists (and other advocates of government solutions) do not consider that adding more rules and regulations also overloads an individual's limited time and attention. You yourself do not like more rules, and further, you are burdened with the responsibility of providing and guiding a bureaucracy, to manage the infractions of others.
Some of the few writers who have pointed to the general process of "legibilizing into reduced categories" include Babbage, Mach, Whitehead, Korzybski, Bateson, Simon. Scott may be one of the few writers who illustrates the consequences, although in a specific process.
An attempt at a graphical representation here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEaPv1k3BTk
The issue that our brains are reductive and therefore the systems that our brains can manipulate must be reductive as well is true. And that this affects both totalizing capitalism as well as socialism is also true.
But this elides Scott’s conclusion which is since all totalizing regimes destroy through systems of legibility, they are all invalid. Only systems that are localized can work. He was an anarchist.
Not sure I would characterize Scott's conclusion in that way. Some systems need to be localized (e.g. wildlife ecosystems; neighborhood management). Others may be totalized if we all agree to it, and if we have procedures to change them when necessary (e.g. laws and voting).
Where I might diverge a little from Scott is his statement that "language is the best model: a structure of meaning and continuity that is never still and ever open to the improvisations of all its speakers." Because I think it is possible to argue (after Mach's concept of "the economy of thought") that a language is reductive too. Its function to economize thought (for communication and storage of ideas) necessarily "legibilizes" the kinds of ideas which can be expressed. It is another form of totalization. (This is perhaps mildly perceptible in the responses from LLMs, which of course are simply surfing over a nonliving corpus, to reproduce likely responses to questions or prompts.)
What is missing, beyond the humans themselves, is the simultaneous need for alternate languages, music, painting, dance, etc. all put together. Similarly the Silicon Valley types don't see that big government, cumbrous as it is, is the developed response to a lot of different problems and needs, and to which they are as blind as high modernism.
Well said.
I read Ruthanna Emrys' essay (https://reactormag.com/the-perils-of-learning-alien-languages-the-sapir-whorf-linguistic-relativity-hypothesis/) on the continued influence of Sapir-Whorf on Science Fiction earlier today, and now you suggest that maybe the Silicon Valley clowns might benefit from reading Emrys' novel. That's an elegant twist.
I'm unsurprised that the based and stable geniuses of Sand Hill Road and Pacific Heights do not think James Scott's observations apply to them, just other people.
They are completely without introspection. They want both centralized totalitarian control as well as near anarchy and see no irony or conflict in that.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has a magical appeal. The Golem was poignantly less than human for having been formed using only 12 of the 24 letters of the alphabet. I think Turing showed that just one symbol is as good as many, and that any human language can express any human thought which is why there are poets working in every language.
I have no idea why the Feynman book is there. In fact the whole thing looks like a jumble of books with not much in common.
Because the whole schtick of the "Richard Feynman" who shows up in the Ralph Leighton-curarted memoirs is that they are about a very special boy who can put his thumb in the eye of hidebound institutions and understand things better from first principles. Tech visionaries see themselves in that person.