This book told me a bit about what Daub thinks Silicon Valley thinks, but I’m not sure if there’s any overarching argument, and there’s certainly no call to action. There’s no attempt to say what ‘Tech’ is before ascribing thought to it, either, and the fanciful generalisation remains unexamined throughout.
In sum Daub says:
- Tech’s cult of dropping out is dangerous because it might be a bad thing if the people who end up pulling important levers of society only have the most scant education in the liberal arts.
- Tech’s attitude to content — rooted in Mcluhan’s ‘medium is the message’ — prioritises The Platform while the content creators make nothing, and denies any responsibility for what is making it billions.
- Tech has an adolescent Randian mystique of genius trammelled by lessers, allowing it to present itself as a victim, while ignoring the social structures that make its success possible.
- Any communication is destined to fall short of its potential, and The Platform’s gearing for engagement inevitably leads to trolls whose automatic reactions exalt mindlessness and are devoid of informational value.
- Girardian mimetic desire appeals to Tech (incorporated as Thiel) because it shows people as sheep, it reveals an esoteric universal structure to reality, it intellectualises disruption that is really just a redescription of orthodoxy, and finally, it allows those with the power to feel like the victim of displaced anger, something which Daub says “may be the most secret of Silicon Valley’s secret desires”.
- The fetish of disruption is rooted in Marx, via Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’, which should lead naturally to a surrender to accelerationism. It relies on a creative amnesia, imagining stable continuities that didn’t exist. It implies an ethical imperative — that any disrupted continuity deserves to be disrupted — that gives all advantage to the disrupter. It blinds observers to the fact that, while the tech may have changed, the industry is business as usual, with profit just concentrating even more with The Platform at the expense of labour.
- Finally, tech’s mythology of failure only works for those who can afford to fail, and is only viewed positively in light of the salvation of consequent success.
1, 7, and to a lesser extent 3, give good reason to look quizzically at, gently mock, and then disregard dropout and early failure autofiction. 4 misses the mark; dressed up in some nice Huxley new age stories, it ends up being about trolling. While the asymetric effect on troll and trolled is well put, the phenomenon is dismissed too casually, without even really explaining why we should think it important. 5 is neat, and apparently has great explanatory power, but ends up being a little like the philosophy it criticises — promising an esoteric machinery that is either univeral and therefore unsupportable, or particular and therefore unworthy of note. The remaining two points are more important, but, I think, are already well understood. 2 is so true it is enshrined in Section 230 protections, which the internet behemoths will defend to the end. And 6 just calls out the ‘con’ of disruption as a veneer for ever more rent seeking.
Ultimately this book would have been better off expanded — with more discussion of what ‘tech’ is, and greater examination of tech’s thinking on monopolies, addiction, social engineering, privacy, ethics; the impact of machine learning, quantum computing, and ubiquitous connectivity; and the implications for civil society, regulation and policy…Or, preferably, shortened to a series of 7 loosely related blog posts flagging some themes to look out for when reading about tech.
