Adrian Daub

Not a fast read, but a fun takedown of Silicon Valley self-deluding jargon.

One of my favorite bits is about failure, especially "fail better". He punctures it from several angles, but I especially like the comparison to a Samual Beckett line from Worstward Ho, "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." In Beckett, "fail better" isn't about getting funded by venture capital next time, it is about a world where only failure exists. There is no success, the only show more options are to be bad at failing or better at failing.

Maybe this is for people who took the second year of philosophy, but if you did (or wanted to), try this book. And if you dropped out before taking philosophy, this is especially for you. show less

Tech thinking is a result of tech leaders trying to explain and justify their own success by reference to a handful ideas they absorbed in their teens and twenties. Those ideas include Ayn Rand's notion of lone genius, Marshall McLuhan's emphasis on media over content, a moralized version of Joseph Schumpeter's creative destruction, spiritual notions originating from Aldous Huxley by way of the Esalen Institute, and some self-help psychology inspired by CBT. In the bizarre but influential show more case of Peter Thiel, there is also the religious thinker Rene Girard.

Because these thinkers are so often cited by tech leaders, there's a tendency to attribute some part of their business success to those thinkers. But it is more plausible that there is a common explanation for both tech leaders success and their embrace of these ideas. A couple of candidate explanations are their being born to wealth and wanting a justification for the work they do.

This short book provides a sketch of the historical context of each of these influential ideas along with Daub's explanation of how each might have come to be embraced by tech leaders. In some cases the explanations are simple (eg, Ayn Rand flatters), whereas in others they contain nice ironies tech leaders don't appreciate (eg, Schumpeter on the inevitability of socialism).

I particularly liked the excursus on the google memo guy, James Damore. He is not a tech leader, but Daub believes his memo and its reception by people like David Brooks is a singularly neat example of trolling. Here's Daub: "It’s not that poor James Damore made an honest overture to the closed-minded (but 'unstable') libs and they turned on him. It’s that he sent a message meant to be misunderstood. To engage with it at all is to get tripped up in its terminology, to chafe against assumptions it has to make but won’t acknowledge. The real point of the message is the inevitable next step, where the writer claims that his text—which, recall, is pretty much impossible to make sense of on its own terms—was unfortunately and woefully misunderstood. The memo exists to allow David Brooks to be sad about it. Damore’s missive is not a communication that’s sent out into the world by someone hoping to be understood by an audience. It is a communication sent out by someone in order to be disappointed, an offering to be refused. But here’s the thing: James Damore is fairly typical in his occupying and weaponizing that space of preordained, deliberately engineered disappointment. We have all been there. We all send this missive, we all know the joy of being disappointed, at least some of the time. It’s the feeling of having tried to communicate honestly but the other side is just too darn ideological to genuinely engage. I don’t mean to suggest that this feeling is never correct or appropriate—rather that we over-rely on it and are falsely deferential to it, even when it isn’t correct or appropriate. After all, some version of this feeling is inherent in all trolling: I tried to engage with this question in good faith, and my opponents decided to be uncivil."

I'll be checking out other books in this series, a collaboration between FSG and Logic magazine. show less

This is one of those books that didn’t turn out to be what I was hoping.

What I was hoping for was an account of what thinkers, philosophers or others, tech leaders (and maybe tech workers) credited as intellectual influences, what those thinkers thought, and how those thoughts affected the technological innovations coming out of Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

Daub is careful in his introduction to say that it is difficult to impossible to assign intellectual motivations to tech per se. What show more he does claim as the basis for his book, though, is that such tech leaders as Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel “represent the way the tech sector has communicated with the outside world.” The tech leaders then aren’t really citing thinkers who influenced and inspired them. They are citing thinkers who communicate what they themselves already think, and maybe communicate it better or more credibly than they could themselves.

That said, that the book isn’t the one I was hoping for is probably not a reflection on Daub, but maybe a reflection on the tech leaders themselves.

Part of that distinction between motivation and representation that Daub refers to has to do with how the tech leaders themselves appear to consume philosophy. A favorite passage or quote, or even a second-hand description of a philosopher’s thought, may resonate. It may be something that they find themselves inclined to agree with strongly, or that they find puts together in the right words what they never articulated themselves.

It’s not, then, as if the philosopher’s thought actually inspired them in the first place — there was just a happy marriage between the quote, the passage, or the description and the person’s thinking along the way somewhere. From that point on, that quote, passage, etc. may motivate or inspire, but the marriage happened because the person was already inclined toward what they found in the quote, etc.

Daub formulates the advantage of repackaging your own thoughts in the thoughts of philosophers and others as “your own intuitions repackaged as esoteric knowledge”. In that passage, he is specifically talking about Peter Thiel and the French author, Rene Girard, but it may stand for other tech leaders and their would-be influencers as well.

So, taking Daub’s book for the book it is rather than the one I hoped for, here are Daub’s chapters and the themes in each:

Dropping Out — the hero dropouts (Jobs, Zuckerberg, Elizabeth Holmes — okay, Holmes doesn’t turn out to be much of a hero). Daub makes the interesting point that often the “dropouts” are dropping out from elite institutions and with formidable safety nets. Dropouts from Stanford, Berkeley, or Harvard with financial resources aren’t necessarily models for the rest of us. They’ve already proved that they are high achievers, even by getting into those schools, and they will likely get second chances even if they fail.

Content — Marshall McLuhan provides a theme of context over content, echoed in the dominance of “platform technologies,” where the entrepreneur provides the structure (think eBay or Facebook) but not the content of the structure. And the platform tends to control the content, financially as well potentially as editorially.

Genius — Ayn Rand champions the idea of the individual genius struggling against resistance — the resistances of conformity, regulation, biases against change, etc.

Communication — really, the lack of communication pervading tech. Again, the platforms simply do not afford it, despite that so many are “social media” platforms. “Communication” becomes a degraded shadow of itself.

Desire — René Girard’s key contribution. Desire becomes a driver of innovation and the point theme for marketing.

Disruption — the economist Joseph Schumpeter is the featured thinker here, with the notion of “creative disruption” — the possibility (inevitability for Schumpeter) that change will become too fast, that in order to tame its effects on our lives (employment, risk, . . .), we will need to regulate it, tame it. The alternative is to embrace change with the confidence that you’ll pull things together in the end — “fail fast”, “move fast and break things.” Better to face and live with the consequences than cling to the stable.

Failure — the idea of failure as a stepping stone. And it may well be a stepping stone to success, IF you have the resources, as an entrepreneur or as a business, to iterate on the basis of what you have learned through your failures.

Daub’s tone is both a little bit academic and a little bit polemic. To be honest I was hoping for more academic and less polemic, even though I found myself more or less agreeing with the direction of his polemic.

But agreeing with a polemic doesn’t make it a work of genius and insight; it just makes it something you agree with. Take for example, Daub’s criticism of the platform, that the platform owner exploits the content providers. I don’t think the point is invalid, but I do think there’s a kind of one-sidedness in linking the dominance of the platform in tech thinking to the influence of McLuhan-like thinking. There are many reasons, certainly besides any influence of McLuhan, for a company, or an innovator, to focus on the platform rather than the content — the most obvious being that the platform provider gets a piece of all the revenue generated by all the content providers. And if the platform owner can capture the market (e.g., in platforms built on network effects like Facebook or eBay), the platform will KEEP the market and remain dominant as the content itself comes and goes.

All in all, I was disappointed, but like I said, maybe my disappointment is misdirected if I aim it at Daub. Maybe it’s just that I was hoping for more from our tech leaders themselves.

I should throw in, just in case, my review might come off as somehow anti-tech, that I made my career in tech and especially in innovative technology, as a researcher, prototyper, facilitator, and in other roles. I’m also an ex-academic philosopher, so that may account for what could be unrealistic expectations. show less

Short, sweet, and arguably necessary. At times I nodded vigorously in agreement with the author. But the condescending and incredibly elitist liberal arts professor narrative alienated even me.