What Silicon Valley calls governing is detached from and disinterested in human nature and normal life. Even when it comes to normal life with technology and the internet, it is fixated on privilege and hierarchies for their own sake. And whatever intellectual ambition it possesses is easily seduced by ideologies that support these privileges and hierarchies.
Speaking Out of Place is produced in collaboration with The Creative Process and is made with support from Stanford University.
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Adrian Daub about his book What Tech Calls Governing. This is a devastatingly brilliant and immensely witty critique of Silicon Valley “disruptors” and the fragile, clueless egos of (currently) vastly wealthy people (mostly all men) and both their insinuation into our government and their detachment from reality. Among other things we talk about their aversion to caring about anything but themselves. We end with a conversation about utopias that are already here for us, once we leave off any fascination with a world where, as Daub says, “the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, but for some inexplicable reason, your dishwasher can communicate with your car.”
Adrian Daub is an academic and writer living in San Francisco. He is the author of What Tech Calls Thinking, The Cancel Culture Panic, What Tech Calls Governing, and many other books. Together with Moira Donegan he hosts the podcast In Bed with the Right, which focuses on rightwing conceptions of gender and sexuality. His next book will be Project 1933: Fascism Then and Now.
DAVID PALUMBO-LIU
So welcome back to Speaking Out of Place, Adrian. It is always a pleasure talking with you and looking over your extensive list of books authored on so many different subjects, from four-handed compositions for the piano to James Bond songs, to the connection of the genre of ballads to memory and German nationalism, sexuality and the total work of art after Wagner, to the metaphysics of marriage and German idealism.
For such a young man, your productivity and brilliance is unbelievable. And now these two books on Silicon Valley. In 2020, you published What Tech Calls Thinking, and now we have What Tech Calls Governing. And while I would love to ask you about the inspiration and impetus for each of your books, we have limited time. So let us just talk about the last two I mentioned. What led you to write these two books and maybe the connection between the two?
ADRIAN DAUB
Yeah. So What Tech Calls Thinking had a much longer genesis than this new one. I started writing about Silicon Valley sometime in the early 2010s, which you will remember was a kind of unusual time in the place that we both inhabit, namely Silicon Valley. On the one hand, the world was really starting to fixate on these companies that were starting to remake everyone's lives.
At the same time, I feel like the tech industry took over the university in a way that felt kind of unprecedented, although not so much the companies themselves, but just their promise of the future. And my sort of key experience was that I would be teaching students by Adorno, Marx, phenomenology or just German literature, and then I would find out that they are going to work at Palantir the next year.
And I was like, “Am I maybe not very good at what I do? How does this go together?” But this was a time when students would tell me, “I want to work at Google and make the world a better place.” I am like, “I have some news for you about corporations, my friend.” And so initially, my writing was often about trying to articulate why it was so uncanny to me that my students were gravitating towards this industry, not just for a paycheck, which I begrudge no one. If in order to stay in the Bay Area in 2015, you had to have a job there as a 22-year-old, I think. But that is not why they went. They went swallowing the propaganda.
As I started writing, a funny thing happened. The same students came back, and the same students, being the brilliant young minds that they were, had seen through the bullshit fairly quickly. And they came back to tell me, “You were right, but not in the way you thought. This is actually worse, or it is different.”
And a lot of them were women, a lot of them were people of color, a lot of them were queer and could articulate for me how exactly Silicon Valley was encoding this kind of very reactionary ideology in spite of then still this very demonstrative commitment to certain kinds of diversity.
And the book emerged out of those two things. On one hand, my attempt to understand how this industry thought and why its thought was so persuasive to some people who I thought ought to know better. But also drawing on the experiences of friends, students and people I have met at parties. The Kool-Aid was in many cases wearing off.
They had spent a lot of time in these places and they knew them quite well. This was also a time I feel when there was a lot of doomsday stuff about the tech industry where people were like, “These people are going to be able to do this and that,” et cetera, et cetera, which we once again have with AI.
And it was really helpful to have informants, have friends in that industry that could be like, “That is not going to happen. That is just a sales pitch. Trust me, I am part of that project. It is a disaster,” right? And so that was really helpful too, that some kind of exoticism about how unusual and how brilliant these companies were was overblown, but also a lot of the sort of tech doomerism was really just a pitch in slightly different garb.
And so my view of Silicon Valley has always been tempered by the fact that I have seen just a lot of it close up and I have watched people go through the various pipelines. They have allowed me to come to their workplaces. I have had really long-term been able to follow people's trajectories in it, and that was a valuable kind of entry point into understanding how exactly this little sociotope works.
And then the second book is really about what happened since 2020 when the first book came out, about the sort of very clear rightward lurch of a lot of the people at the top of these companies. It is about the fact that always threadbare commitments to diversity within these companies were very quickly shunted aside and the various kind of culture war alliances that seem to have emerged for a lot of these companies and their upper echelons, from the alliance with the manosphere in the case of Zuckerberg to COVID denialism for a lot of the billionaire class, to things like Trumpism light or just full-on fascism among a lot of these people.
And I try to explain from the same vantage point that I used in that first book what exactly shifted here, and that it is not necessarily a story of some secret master plan that these geniuses are now putting into action and there is nothing we can do about it. But to really tell the story of these people who are aging, who are no longer really that active in the companies they once founded, who are confronting the same existential dilemmas that all of us are.
But unfortunately, while they have their midlife crisis, they also have fifty billion dollars, which is just a bad combination it turns out, right? And so I did want to keep it on the ground level. I am not telling you a story of some Mephistophelean genius that is somehow manipulating everyone. These political shifts are the shifts of that weird uncle everyone has in their WhatsApp Group.
ADRIAN DAUB
Right? Like who did not handle the pandemic very well, who had a divorce that got real ugly and who now has shifted their politics to fit their own sense of personal decline. And that is true for a lot of these people too.
DAVID PALUMBO-LIU
Yeah. I am so glad you began your response with talking about the classroom because I have a classroom question for you later in the podcast because I could not imagine doing this without asking you about how we handle these issues in the classroom. And I will not even get into our almost colleague Peter Thiel at some point.
ADRIAN DAUB
Yes.
DAVID PALUMBO-LIU
But I want to get to this really great passage that you have that I think encapsulates a lot of the book. You write:
What Silicon Valley calls governing is detached from and disinterested in human nature and normal life. Even when it comes to normal life with technology and the internet, it is fixated on privilege and hierarchies for their own sake. And whatever intellectual ambition it possesses is easily seduced by ideologies that support these privileges and hierarchies.
And you do a really good job of exactly excavating Peter Thiel's long involvement with suppression of diversity initiatives, et cetera. So could you talk about how this really forms the core of much of what you say in the book? That this preservation of these hierarchies through various means, various narratives, various media memes that will proliferate the sense that certain people belong in certain places and never the twain shall meet.
ADRIAN DAUB
Yeah, this is also my sort of implicit, not critique, but tweak of a very famous article called “The Californian Ideology,” which sort of established this notion that really these tech companies or that the tech culture really has brought to the fore a kind of ideology that mixes the countercultural and the libertarian.
And I am adding there a point that I think Jason Stanley has very aptly made, which is to say that a lot of libertarianism is not as it sometimes presents itself, right? Namely, these companies or their founders would often talk about how they wanted less government interference and people should just work stuff out for themselves.
But it was very clear that when you listen to them carefully, that they thought that if illegitimate, meaning government interference, were to be taken out of the...
