What tech calls thinking An inquiry into the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley

Daub (Four-Handed Monsters), a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University, skewers tech industry pretensions in this blistering takedown. The philosophy of Silicon Valley, according to Daub, amounts to a collection of self-serving, ad hoc aphorisms plundered from self-help manuals, New Age bastions like the Esalen Institute, and Ayn Rand. Because Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made dropping out of college de rigueur, Daub writes, younger tech entrepreneurs--often hailing from wealthy families in which failure has no real financial consequences--who follow in their footsteps have a limited understanding of the intellectual ideas they claim guide their thinking, such as historian René Girard's theory of mimetic desire and economist Joseph Schumpeter's concept of "creative destruction." Daub also claims that Silicon Valley's ubiquitous talk of "disruption" is more about "rearrang what already exists" than revolutionizing the status quo. (Uber, he writes, didn't fundamentally alter the experience of hailing a cab: "What it managed to get rid of were steady jobs, unions, and anyone other than Uber making money on the whole enterprise.") Though generalists may find some of the references obscure, Daub's mix of humor, righteous anger, and intellectual rigor appeals. This provocative takedown of Big Tech hits the mark. (Oct.)

A skeptical look at the self-congratulatory ideology of Silicon Valley. Interviewed by often worshipful journalists, tech billionaires invariably describe the philosophy that overcame the obstacles to unspeakable riches. Already familiar with myths, Daub, a professor of comparative literature and Germanic studies at Stanford, dug into the murky motivations of Silicon Valley gurus. The result is this slim volume, and readers who worry that a discussion of ideas by an academic must involve a hard slog will be pleasantly surprised. According to the author, there is less than meets the eye to disruptive and revolutionary, adjectives beloved of tech entrepreneurs for ventures better described as "maybe not legal." Thus, Uber and Lyft are certainly destroying traditional taxi services by making rides cheaper, but this is largely accomplished by paying employees less, converting them to independent contractors with no bargaining power or benefits. Once significant blemishes on a resume, dropping out and even failure have become cool. However, Daub points out that while a member of the White middle class who drops out of an elite college to get rich will likely fail, the result is not the welfare office but rather a return to college and a degree. For the most part, failure only hurts those who have no safety net to catch them. Tech billionaires often extol thinkers who were widely known a generation ago but are less familiar today. They fare poorly under Daub's gimlet eye. Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that a communication platform exerts more influence than its content, a concept that is catnip to tech entrepreneurs who make platforms. Those who provide content, "be it reviews on Yelp, self-published books on Amazon, your own car and waking hours on Uber," earn much less, sometimes nothing. Billionaires also remain enamored of Ayn Rand, who argued that the world is divided into creators and parasites and that the creator is above the law. Delightful proof that getting rich does not make you a deep thinker. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.