In August, a thoughtful blogger, Tanner Greerposed an interesting question to the Silicon Valley crowd: “What is the content of the ‘vague technology canon’? If we say it’s 40 books, what is it?” He used the term “canon” in the sense of “the collection of works regarded as representative of a period or genre”, but sharply qualified it to Harold Bloom – the great literary critic who spent his life fighting for a canon consisting of the great works of the past (Shakespeare, Proust, Dante, Montaigne et al) – spinning in his grave.
Greer’s challenge was immediately taken up by Patrick Collison, co-founder with his brother, John, of the fintech giant Stripe (market value $65 billion) and therefore one of the richest Irishmen in history. Unusual among tech titans, Collison is a passionate advocate of readingand so it was perhaps predictable that he would produce a list of 43 books – and adds a caveat that this was not “the list of books I think one should to read – that’s just the list that I think roughly covers the big ideas that are influential here”. (“Here” is Silicon Valley.)
The list included some predictable choices: Isaac Asimov’s Foundation; Richard Dawkins’s The selfish genes; Ayn Rand Atlas shrugged; Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue; Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence; Richard Rhodes’s The making of the atomic bomb; Eric Raymond’s The cathedral and the bazaar; Christopher Alexander’s A pattern language; Fred Brooks’s The Mythic Man Month and Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But there were also surprises, especially James Scott’s See Like a StateRobert Caro’s The Power Broker and – quite unexpectedly – The Sovereign Individual, a strange book by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson which was published in 1997 and has since enthralled a good few tech bros who are acolytes of Peter Thiel.
The list attracted a lot of attention, as lists often do. Marc Andreessen, the fabulously wealthy, opinionated crypto-enthusiast (and, now, Donald Trump supporter) dismissed it as “aspirational”; the “real” list, he insisted, consisted simply of Malcolm Gladwell’s oeuvre, Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and “various DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] training manuals”. More thoughtful commentators have put forward their own favourites: why not Tim Wu’s The Master Switchask one; another wanted to know why Don Norman’s Designing everyday things and Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial was missing Where were the works of Rene GirardThiel’s favorite guru? And so it went on.
Just as one can usually tell something about an individual by inspecting their bookshelves, it’s tempting to try to draw inferences from these lists about how the world’s tech elite think. One thing immediately stands out: only three of the authors on Collison’s list are women – Ayn Rand, Donella Meadows and Anna Wiener. It tells you a lot about the valley. Greer – the guy who asked the original question – divide them into five overarching categories: “works of speculative or science fiction; historical case studies of ambitious men or important moments in the history of technology; books that outline general principles of physics, mathematics or cognitive science; books detailing the operating principles and business strategy of successful startups; and finally, narrative histories of successful startups themselves”.
The number of biographies in the list does not surprise Greer because he detects an implicit “great man” theory of history in the canon. (Which makes one wonder why there’s a biography of Elon Musk, but not one of Steve Jobs?) He thinks that today’s tech bros, like Plutarch in his day, are drawn to the stories of past great men and quotes the ancient historian to that effect. “Virtue in action immediately takes such a hold on a man that he no sooner admires a deed than he wants to follow in the steps of the perpetrator. Fortune praises us for the good things we may possess and enjoy from her, but virtue for the good deeds we can perform: the former we are content to receive from the hands of others, but the latter we want others to do from ourselves experience.”
Yes, sure. For real insight into the intellectual life of Silicon Valley, however, we’ll have to look elsewhere. A good starting point is What technology calls thinking: an inquiry into the intellectual foundations of Silicon Valley by Adrian Daub, a humanities professor at mid-valley, Stanford. Reading him gives one the feeling that there is a great deal of virtue signaling in the reading lists of contemporary tech titans. He places their supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Rand, the new age Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and American traditions, of the tent revival to predestination. And it rather confirms what should have turned us eons ago: that this tech giant no longer has our best interests at heart any more than John D Rockefeller did back then.
What I read
Bunker mentality
Property shopping for the Apocalypse is a lovely New Yorker piece by Patricia Marx on how the price of underground bunkers is heating up in the US.
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History of rock
Stone Age builders were good engineers. This is the conclusion of a study of a 6,000-year-old monument published in Nature.
Give this piece a chance
Cynthia Zarin’s article Another Life: On Yoko Ono in the Paris Review is a delightful profile of a woman we thought we knew – and didn’t. It includes the story of how she met John Lennon.
