YoIn August, a thoughtful blogger, Tanner GreerHe posed an interesting question to the folks in Silicon Valley: “What is the content of the ‘vague technological canon’? If we say it’s 40 books, what are they?” He was using the term “canon” to mean “the collection of works considered representative of a period or genre,” but cleverly qualifying it so as to prevent Harold Bloom – the great literary critic who spent his life campaigning for a canon consisting of the great works of the past (Shakespeare, Proust, Dante, Montaigne, etc.) – from turning 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 of $65 billion) and thus one of the richest Irishmen in history. Unusually for tech titans, Collison is a Passionate advocate of readingso it was perhaps foreseeable that it would produce a list of 43 books – adding a caveat: it was not “the list of books that I think one ought “For reading, it’s just the list that I think roughly covers the main ideas that are influential here.” (“Here” means Silicon Valley.)
The list included some predictable choices: Isaac Asimov Base;by Richard Dawkins The selfish gene; On Rand Atlas Shrugged; from the Stewart brand Catalogue of the entire Earth;by Nick Bostrom Superintelligence;by Richard Rhodes The making of the atomic bomb; by Eric Raymond The Cathedral and the Bazaar; by Christopher Alexander A pattern language;by Fred Brooks The mythical month of man and by Robert Pirsig Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenanceBut there were also surprises, notably from James Scott. See as a Stateby Robert Caro The power broker and – most unexpectedly – The sovereign individual, A strange book by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson, which was published in 1997 and has fascinated a good number of technology experts who have been Peter Thiel acolytes ever since.
The list attracted a lot of attention, as lists tend to do. Marc Andreessen, the fabulously wealthy and opinionated cryptocurrency enthusiast (and, now, Donald Trump supporter) denounced it as “aspirational”; the “real” list, he argued, simply consisted of Malcolm Gladwell’s work, Yuval Noah Harari’s work, and John F. Kennedy’s work. Sapiens and “various training manuals on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).” More thoughtful commentators touted their own favorites: why not Tim Wu’s? The master switchone asked; another wanted to know why Don Norman Design of everyday objects and Herbert Simon The sciences of the artificial They were missing. Where were the works of René GirardThiel's favorite guru? And so it remained.
Just as you can usually tell something about a person by inspecting their bookshelves, it's tempting to try to draw conclusions from these lists about how the world's tech elite thinks. One thing immediately stands out: only three of the authors on Collison's list are women: Ayn Rand, Donella Meadows, and Anna Wiener. That says a lot about the valley. Greer, the man who posed the original question, divides them into five general categories: “works of speculative fiction or science fiction; historical case studies of ambitious men or important moments in the history of technology; books describing general principles of physics, mathematics, or cognitive science; books describing the operating principles and business strategy of successful startups; and, finally, narrative histories of successful startups themselves.”
The number of biographies on the list comes as no surprise to Greer, for he senses an implicit “great man” theory of history in the canon (which makes one wonder why there is a biography of Elon Musk but not one of Steve Jobs). He believes that contemporary tech brethren are, like Plutarch in his time, drawn to stories of earlier great men, and quotes the ancient historian to that effect: “Virtue in action so seizes a man so immediately that he no sooner admires an action than he is quick to follow in the footsteps of the doer. We value fortune for the good things we can possess and enjoy in it, but virtue for the good actions we can perform: the former we are content to receive from others’ hands, the latter we wish others to experience from ourselves.”
Yes, of course. However, to get a real sense of the intellectual life of Silicon Valley, we will have to look elsewhere. A good starting point is What technology calls thinking: an investigation into the intellectual foundation of Silicon Valley By Adrian Daub, professor of humanities at Stanford, the center of the valley. Reading it, one gets the sense that there is a healthy dose of virtue signaling in the reading lists of contemporary tech titans. Daub locates his supposedly original and radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Rand, the new age Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and American traditions, from the tent revival to predestination. And rather it confirms what we should have realized eons ago: that these tech guys don't have our best interests at heart any more than John D. Rockefeller did in his day.
What I'm reading
Bunker mentality
Real estate purchases for the apocalypse It's a beauty New Yorker Article by Patricia Marx on how the price of underground bunkers is rising in the United States.
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History of rock
Stone Age builders were good engineers. That is the conclusion of a study of a 6,000-year-old monument published in Nature.
Give this piece a chance
Article by Cynthia Zarin Another Life: About Yoko Ono in it Paris Review is a charming profile of a woman we thought we knew (and we didn't). It includes the story of how she met John Lennon.
