What Tech Calls Thinking, Adrian Daub
What Tech Calls Thinking, Adrian Daub
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What Tech Calls Thinking
An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley

Author: Adrian Daub

Narrator: Andrew Eiden

Unabridged: 3 hr 58 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/16/2021


Synopsis

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

"In Daub’s hands the founding concepts of Silicon Valley don’t make money; they fall apart." --The New York Times Book Review

From FSGO x Logic: a Stanford professor's spirited dismantling of Silicon Valley's intellectual origins

Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to Silicon Valley’s world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie. From the myth of dropping out to the war cry of “disruption,” Daub locates the Valley’s supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Ayn Rand, the New Age Esalen Foundation in Big Sur, and American traditions from the tent revival to predestination. Written with verve and imagination, What Tech Calls Thinking is an intellectual refutation of Silicon Valley's ethos, pulling back the curtain on the self-aggrandizing myths the Valley tells about itself.

FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

About The Author

Adrian Daub is a professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford University, and the director of Stanford's Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His research focuses on the intersection of literature, music, and philosophy in the nineteenth century, and he is the author of several books published by academic presses. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New Republic, n+1, Longreads, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in San Francisco.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Sohum on December 20, 2021

The premise of What Tech Calls Thinking is powerful and necessary--in its own mythos, the ideologies of Silicon Valley emerged as a rational response to monopoly, a belief that demands an attentive unraveling. However, Daub's text does not live up to that promise. In its brevity, inability to contex......more

Goodreads review by Daanish on October 16, 2020

A commendable attempt, though at some points lapsing into caustic tones. But also filled with moments of self-awareness. The title & the marketing set up very high expectations, so my instinct is to give two stars but adding an extra point because the author has attempted a book so far outside the sp......more

Goodreads review by Sam on November 04, 2020

A critique that gets the more general points right, but is very imprecise regarding the technicalities. When it comes to issues that have been far more mainstream regarding the ills of SV culture, news one may see in a Vice, The Verge, or a Motherboard article, Adrian excels in their analysis. But wh......more

Goodreads review by Gemma on December 12, 2020

This has to be one of my favourite reads this year - short and snappy but DENSE with fascinating ideas and perfectly crafted tech culture criticism. Each of the book’s chapters takes a word commonly used in Silicon Valley (and the associated international startup communities) - such as ‘failure’, ‘di......more

Goodreads review by Lucas on April 20, 2021

I read almost all of this on a plane on a day I was off of coffee (should've been in a terrible mood) and this still managed to be fucking incredible, one of my favorite (if not my favorite) tech-critical books i've read yet. this + Voices of the Valley were both great so I'm inclined to read all of......more