The Silicon Valley Canon

I’ve got a new essay on the ‘Silicon Valley Canon,’ and the political turn of the tech elite, out in the magazine Colossus.

It’s an odd venue and an odd topic for me. Colossus offers friendly coverage of techno-capitalists, for an audience of people who are, or aspire to be, such people. I don’t know anyone in that world, and, as an intellectual, or at least a former academic, I’m oriented to find technology and capitalism, along with their boosters, distasteful and alien.

From the perspective of someone living a life that is basically about responding to ideas (a scholarly, writerly, or clerical role) and loafing around (my extended unemployment as neo-bohemianism), making a lot of money by making stuff has always seemed suspicious. And the frantic pace, candid guile, and unembarrassed, garrulous vaunting of the tech-business world naturally rubs the wrong way someone used to the torpor, hidden scheming, and indirect, embarrassed self-promotion of the intellectual one.

The ‘Silicon Valley Canon’ doesn’t make for appealing reading, either. I wasn’t excited by the prospect of spending last summer getting through The Lord of the Rings, which I was too bored to finish in sixth grade, or biographies of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Ew! So, initially, I declined.

Then the editor offered me more money… along with the arguments that 1) my not knowing anything about the technology sector would be, somehow, an advantage for giving a fresh perspective 2) the essay would be timed to come out on the first anniversary of Trump’s second inauguration, a moment when, presumably, some of the magazine’s readers who had supported the MAGA-tech alliance might be rethinking their choices, or wondering how their peers had gone so astray.

I’m not sure if I delivered on 1. My basic point—that these books have teen boy energy—is probably not too original or non-obvious. Although I hope that the way I go about making it might have some interest (most essays, after all, are more about the journey than the destination). I tried, anyway, not to think about these books in terms of their ‘ideology’ (there’s nothing coherent in them, especially in them taken all together) or in terms of what they say about Silicon Valley specifically. For one thing, I don’t know, for a fact, that these books really do shape the thinking and actions of tech elites. They seem to me rather to be books that are broadly popular throughout an American readership, and so the essay is really more about my idea of ‘America’ in relation to these books than about tech-capital in particular. Although, for that matter, what do I know about America?

For 2., I found the prospect of a tech oligarch listening to me rather absurd, but maybe—I for a moment convinced myself—it could be the not-too-implausible next step of my itinerary. After all, a few years ago, I was approached by the Soros people asking if I’d like some of their money, and if so what I’d do with it. I fumbled that bag when I expressed horror on learning that they were funding Compact (“Matthew Schmitz and Sohrab Ahmari, those are bad people!” I said, dumbly) and told them their mistaken investments in the Balkans had made life worse for any number of people I know there, setting back whatever left-liberal causes they meant to promote.

I told myself if there were ever another encounter with a billionaire, I’d be nicer. As Bowen Yang and Matt Rodgers have recently relearned, “authenticity is dangerous and expensive.” And, then, wouldn’t I like my commentary to actually influence someone’s political action?

Around the same time, in response to a piece I wrote critiquing his anti-woke campaign, Chris Rufo emailed me asking what I saw as an “alternative strategy.” I wrote back, rather angrily, that a good start would be not humiliating and threatening white-collar workers with a campaign that, for all its anti-wokeness, has the same shape as what it purports to oppose. He didn’t get back to me after that, of course. I don’t know that dealing with him more civilly would have been productive (it’s not as though Rufo is one nice conversation away from deciding, hey, restoring institutional neutrality means, foremost, protecting the people who staff institutions from moral-political blackmail)—or that I could have been more civil, given that I think he’s a dreadful little shit and my people skills have never been amazing.

But the fact that he reached out, and was himself civil to me, was a good lesson. My editor had urged me to write an ‘internal’ critique of Rufo-ism, one premised on the idea that what Rufo is doing has a rational kernel that could be decently expressed. And it was heartening to see that I’d written something sufficiently ‘internal’ that he took it, and/or me, as worth responding to. Even if no good came of it, it made me think that some version of that approach, targeted to someone for whom I didn’t have contempt, might work.

So, this time around, I thought, I should be gentle with the potential Silicon Valley elite who might read this essay, and address it squarely to him. Not that I know what such a person is like; I had to imagine him. There’s an art of conjuring into existence your ideal reader, and there’s another art of flattering someone by ascribing to him some combination of the virtues he wishes to be seen as having and the ones you wished that he possessed. Internalizing this praise, he might actually acquire/display them! The addressee of this essay is an ambitious all-American attracted to some aspects of the contemporary right, but who senses that something is amiss.

Are there such people? Are any of them going to listen to me?

In a grad seminar years ago, Gayatri Spivak told me (I’m sure she’s told this story many, many times) that early in her career she had to defend “postmodernism” on the BBC in a debate staged with an old white guy. She felt nervous about doing something on television, and about having to defend what listeners would doubtless already have decided was foreign nonsense, and especially about doing so as a relatively young brown woman in a sari against a stereotypical Oxbridge don. She wondered how she should conduct herself. She thought about what kind of women, if any, such a man, and their audience, might respect, and finally remembered that, given his social class, he must have had a nanny. So, gently but firmly, she explained ideas to him in a slow, even, encouraging tone. It worked! As you can see for yourself.

The pose of post-colonial governess isn’t the right one for me, or for this essay, but I’ve thought a lot since about Spivak’s gambit. Many of my essays in recent years have been addressed to no one in particular—that is, to ‘the public,’ that eighteenth-century fiction, even though many of the essays themselves are precisely about other intellectuals’ failed strategies for addressing the public, or of trying to rhetorically draw out from the public multiple more specific audiences on whom their writings might act in different ways. I’ve been looking at different mistakes of the Straussians, with essays on the ways people informed by Strauss (or Bloom) like Fukuyama, BAP, Manent, Sedgwick, etc. talk to their public/s. Which so far hasn’t made me very savvy about my own writerly persona and ways of addressing/constituting audiences!

(What I’ve written on gay literature and culture, of course, I addressed to gay guys, and I wrote out of a wish to call into being an audience of smart, literate gays who may not in fact exist…)

In this Colossus essay, then, I strain to be uncharacteristically nice about business, technology, and people who are into them! It’s not all guff and pill-sweetening, either (“we’re so lucky to have Silicon Valley! You guys are amazing! Love what you do… if you could just make a few smaaaallll changes???”). I have for a while been frustrated by my proximity to the sort of writer who, consciously or unconsciously drawing on background notions from humanist-flavored Christianity, pessimistic deviations of Marxism, or vulgarized Heidegger, fumes about whatever new distraction-app on the phones or financial ruse of the VC bros as Mammon’s latest outrage.

There are many magazines, some of which I write for, like the Hedgehog Review (and ones I don’t write for, like Harper’s, The Point, Baffler, etc.) where you can find people from left- or right-coded vantages critiquing specific instances of technological change and capitalism-in-action—often validly enough—in the name of an ideal vague enough to mush together Enlightenment-Commie aspirations to free, multi-sided human self-development with religiously-inflected ecstatic acceptance of our metaphysical limitations. Uber-Eats, Klarna payments, self-driving cars and ubiquitous sports betting hinder the awakening of the revolutionary subject, the arrival of Messiah, existential insight into our finitude, etc.

Now, I’m also unhappy about tech-slop, and what seems like the ever-more exploitative and dysfunctional economic system of which it’s an expression. But I’m not sure, these days, in the name of what (other than slightly less grotesque injustice), or to whom (other than anyone who will read/pay me), I make my complaints. And I suspect that a similar uncertainty goes for everyone else—that many of the people making these critiques don’t have much faith in the emancipatory/revelatory projects to which critique was once effectively, and is now still nominally, in service. Critique, after all, aims at doing something for the sake of something else, not just in exposing the inadequacies of its target, which is only a hieroglyph of a vaster historical process to be hastened or steered through the proper interpretation of such symbols.

Although we all seem to be doing it, maybe more than ever, does anyone still believe in critique?

Last year, I had a subscription to the New Left Review, and was struck by the tone of self-conscious futility, and even perverse enjoyment of the sense of futility, that filled the articles—things are bad and getting worse, there’s little to be done, at least we know that. Notwithstanding which, Aaron Benanav can imagine in its pages, for some 15,000 words, what a post-capitalist economic system might look (it seems to consist of complicated spread-sheets, and to look like a sort of supped-up version of ESG), although who the addressee of this pitch is remains unclear. Much of the left’s intellectual activity, as I said in an essay few years ago on Habermas (paywalled, but read aloud here), seems to consist of a search for a replacement for the revolutionary proletariat who never made its rendez-vous with destiny in 1848… a wishing aloud, to no one in particular, ‘wouldn’t it be nice if the left could…?’—which I suppose has its place.

I had little impression, though, of these leftist academics speaking to anyone except each other—rather than to union and party leaders out there somewhere awaiting, if not marching orders, new ideas and inspiration. One of the symptoms of the present crisis, I suppose, is that I really have no idea where such institutions or groups to be addressed might exist, or how one might participate in the work of bring them back into existence.

Tech oligarchs, however, do exist (and that, you might say, is the problem!). It may be a useless or self-defeating fantasy to imagine that any of them could be convinced that what they’re allowing to happen isn’t even in their own interest, rightly understood—and would they really let me tell them how to rightly understand their interest? But, since I was asked (and paid!) to do so, I gave it a shot.

The essay is also, I suppose, my pitch for myself to be some techlord’s court philosopher. As Plato to Syracuse, so me to Silicon Valley…