In August, a thoughtful blogger, Tanner Greer, posed an interesting question to the Silicon Valley crowd: “What are the contents of the ‘vague tech canon’? If we say it is 40 books, what are they?” He was using the term “canon” in the sense of “the collection of works considered representative of a period or genre”, but astutely qualifying it to stop 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 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 $65bn) and thus among the richest Irishmen in history. Unusually among tech titans, Collison is a passionate advocate of reading, and so it was perhaps predictable that he would produce a list of 43 books – adding a caveat that it wasn’t “the list of books that I think one ought to read – it’s just the list that I think roughly covers the major ideas that are influential here”. (“Here” being Silicon Valley.)
The list included some predictable choices: Isaac Asimov’s Foundation; Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene; Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged; Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog; 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 Mythical Man-Month and Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But there were also surprises, particularly James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker and – most unexpectedly – The Sovereign Individual, a strange book by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson that was published in 1997 and has mesmerised a good few tech bros who are acolytes of Peter Thiel ever since.
The list attracted a lot of attention, as lists often do. Marc Andreessen, the fabulously rich, opinionated crypto enthusiast (and, now, Donald Trump supporter) decried it as “aspirational”; the “real” list, he maintained, simply consisted of Malcolm Gladwell’s oeuvre, Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and “assorted DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] training manuals”. More thoughtful commentators touted their own favourites: why not Tim Wu’s The Master Switch, asked one; another wanted to know why Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things and Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial were missing. Where were the works of René Girard, Thiel’s favourite 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 make inferences from these lists about how the world’s tech elite thinks. One thing immediately stands out: only three of the authors in Collison’s list are women – Ayn Rand, Donella Meadows and Anna Wiener. That tells you a lot about the valley. Greer – the guy who posed the original question – divides 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, math, or cognitive science; books that outline 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 ask why there’s a biography of Elon Musk there, but not one of Steve Jobs?) He thinks that contemporary tech bros are, like Plutarch in his day, attracted to the stories of earlier great men and quotes the ancient historian to that effect. “Virtue in action immediately takes such hold of a man that he no sooner admires a deed than he sets out to follow in the steps of the doer. Fortune we prize 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 at the hands of others, but the latter we desire others to experience from ourselves.”
Yeah, sure. For real insight into the intellectual life of Silicon Valley, though, we will need to look elsewhere. A good starting point is What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley by Adrian Daub, a humanities professor at the centre of the valley, Stanford. Reading him gives one the feeling that there’s a good deal of virtue signalling in the reading lists of contemporary tech titans. He locates their supposedly original, 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 it rather confirms what we ought to have twigged aeons ago: that these tech bros no more have our best interests at heart than John D Rockefeller did back in the day.
What I’m reading
Bunker mentality
Real-Estate 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.
History of rock
Stone age builders were good engineers. That’s 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.
