Silicon Valley's thing about Great Men

There _is_ an alternative

[detail from storyboard for The Lost Thing, Shaun Tan]

I’ve a new piece in Bloomberg Weekend on DOGE and the books that have shaped Silicon Valley’s understanding of itself. The article is now behind a paywall, but the publishers are fine with me eventually (i.e: in a couple of months) publishing it here. As a temporary substitute, here’s the broad argument, and the reason why I wrote it.

The Bloomberg piece argues that there is a deep connection between the books that have come to shape Silicon Valley culture and the disasters that are unfolding thanks to Elon Musk. It starts from last summer’s debate over the “Silicon Valley canon,” which was spurred by Jasmine Sun, and taken up by Tanner Greer, a conservative writer, and Patrick Collison, the cofounder of Stripe, who identified 43 books and websites as members of the core canon that shaped ideas in Silicon Valley.

Tanner laid out his understanding of the debate here. He argued that the Silicon Valley canon is a kind of paideia - a curriculum of power or mirror for princes. It provides the founders and venture capitalists of Silicon Valley with a sense of their vocation as an elite, based in large part on accounts of the experiences of the great men and small teams of individuals who have reshaped the world. As Silicon Valley has begun to aspire to world-bestriding greatness, it has begun to read up on how greatness is achieved. In the canon, a biography of Elon Musk rubs shoulders with histories of Teddy Roosevelt and Robert Moses.

I think Tanner is right - and Noah Smith offered strong indirect evidence for his thesis yesterday, in a post defending Elon Musk as a Great Man, which he illustrated with a statue of Genghis Khan, quite literally a man on horseback. However, I’m far more skeptical of the merits of this education than either Tanner or Noah. Elon Musk’s ambitions and how terribly they are going wrong, provide an object lesson in overweening technological ambition. The appropriate classical Greek term for DOGE’s ambitions is not paideia but hubris - the arrogant over-reach that gods and fates deplore. Science fiction plays a big role in the Silicon Valley canon, and as Aldiss and Wingrove point out in their classic history of the genre, the core story of science fiction is ‘hubris clobbered by nemesis.’*

Hence my piece, which pulls at a different thread of argument from the beginning of the debate, when Sun asked why a lot of people in Silicon Valley had James Scott’s Seeing Like a State on their bookshelf. What would we discover if we took up Sun’s suggestion, and think about what Silicon Valley makes of Scott, and Scott might make of Silicon Valley? The Bloomberg piece:

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 [quoted] 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.

This thread of argument might perhaps trace back further, to a very different Silicon Valley culture, which has been obscured by Musk, DOGE and the cult of the founders. Hence my essay, which looks to clear space, not to make room for my own grand vision, but to open things up again for the kind of plurality that used to flourish in the Bay Area.

My introduction to that earlier Silicon Valley came via Aaron Swartz. Back in 2009, he nominated me and another person** as possible attendees at Foo Camp, an ‘unconference’ organized under the auspices of O’Reilly Media. Aaron thought that having social scientists there might add to the conversation. For me, the benefits flowed in just the opposite direction. Academics like myself are used to treating problems as things to study, not things to solve. My brain was rewired by three days in the company of brilliant, enthusiastic people, weird in all the good ways, possessed of an enormous variety of interests, but all practically focused on making the world into a better place through getting stuff done. I had my criticisms (some of the people I talked to seemed naive about politics and what the Obama administration might accomplish) but they were very much secondary to what I had to learn.

What struck me at the time was the culture’s combination of open-endedness and personal modesty. That may in part have been down to Foo (which tacitly but emphatically discouraged self promotion), but it also seemed to reflect the priors of the people who came to it. People wanted to make things better, but they didn’t assume that they knew exactly how to. They were curious, and they listened.

Aaron himself represented many of the best aspects of this culture. He was a member of the first graduating class of Y Combinator, but was not, as far as I could see cut out to be the kind of founder with aspirations to grandeur. What he excelled at was connecting people, and spotting ways to help them. The first couple of years after his death, I kept discovering about his lengthy correspondences with people whom I had never known he had known, with wildly varying ideologies, woven together into a kind of invisible intellectual republic of people who usually did not realize that they had Aaron in common.

As the ambitions of Silicon Valley elites grew, this intellectually plural culture of joyful weirdness and problem solving has shriveled and diminished. It’s still there, but it’s not nearly as visible or strong as it used to be.

Some of its key elements are being broken down for parts. One of my purely personal reasons for resenting DOGE is that it deliberately cannibalized the U.S. Digital Service, which modeled the kind of curious-driven problem oriented engineering approach that once made Silicon Valley into an intellectually attractive place, turning it into a Kafkaesque device to stamp Musk’s incoherent ideology into the flesh of the body politic. As in many other areas, the intellectual diversity has been replaced by monomaniacal ideological fervor.

Hence the piece’s suggestion that Silicon Valley move away from lionizing Great Men And Their World-Shattering Accomplishments and return to the intellectual curiosity, the weirdness and the frequent kindness that characterized it at its best. I’m not the only person to make this case: Cory Doctorow’s new novel, Picks and Shovels, does it too, in a fictional rather than an essayistic register.

Some people aren’t just writing about this culture, but trying to make it:

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?

These are all people who are a decade or more younger than I am: a couple of whom I know, a couple I have met briefly, and a couple I am only really aware of from their writing. I haven’t asked their permission to write about them, and they of course may (and indeed ought to) have completely different ambitions and aspirations than anything I might believe. That’s what plurality is about! Still, from my perspective, they are all people who look to me to exemplify in different ways the kinds of virtues that I think Silicon Valley used to prize more, and ought want to prize again.

One of the people who I haven’t met or even corresponded with is Jasmine Sun, who started this entire debate. By complete coincidence, the week that my piece came out, she co-hosted an event, aimed at getting the Bay Area back to where it ought be.

my grand solution was to throw a party. On Thursday, Clara Collier and I convened every Bay Area writer/editor/magazine-maker we could think of¹ and squashed them into The Interval, the bar operated by the Long Now Foundation. (The Interval is ground zero for the counterculture-cyberculture fusion, complete with two-story sci-fi library and Brian Eno installation behind the bar.) In true San Francisco fashion, the event began at 6pm sharp. … We hosted rationalist bloggers, Marxist zines, and local journalists. … Our goal was to gather folks who might otherwise never meet each other. I saw it as a minor social experiment: can you trap a bunch of idealists of vastly different cultural-political-aesthetic stripes in a room and have them fight? Or the more prosocial case: it’s only by colliding different weird ideas that even stranger and better weird idea-babies will be born.

I had no idea that this was going to happen when I was writing my article, but it represents a lovely synchronicity and makes it clear that there is a there there, completely independent of my description of it.

Someone whose judgment I trust was at it, and wrote to me the day before yesterday, happy that they had gone to

the first event … in some time that reminded me of ‘old San Francisco.’ The queer, dreamy weirdos whose futurism was difficult and provocative while techno-optimistic

but worried about how it will fare in a milieu that depends on a very different political economy of tech. I don’t know how it’s going to fare either. But I can hope. And there are other possible Silicon Valleys too. In the Bloomberg piece, I don’t write at all about tech criticism, which is its own thing, engaged in a different kind of relationship with the Bay Area. There is surely much more that is happening that I’m not aware of beyond this. And that is the real burden of my argument. I’d like to see tech bringing pluralism and diversity back into a culture that has become decidedly monochromatic rather than to pretend to dictate what ought dominate.

I still have my personal biases, which you can entertain or reject as you like. The dominant culture of Silicon Valley has reoriented itself around notions of greatness. I’d love to see it aspire instead towards the virtues of Dorothea in Middlemarch, a book that is enjoying its own minor revival. Perhaps my favourite passage in all of literature comes in Middlemarch’s closing pages, where Eliot describes how Dorothea’s

full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Not great deeds, but incalculably diffusive effects, and uncelebrated acts of kindness for the growing good of the world. That’s what we all ought aspire towards on the margin, and not just in Silicon Valley.

More on the canon itself towards the end of the week: that’s enough for now.

* I riff on this as an easter egg in the Bloomberg piece.

* The other invitee wasn’t able to make it.