Episode 30: Adrian Daub - Questioning Silicon Valley

In this episode I spoke with Adrian Daub about his new book,  What Tech Calls Thinking, published by FSG Originals. I discovered Adrian’s fascinating book in a New York Times review which called it ‘scintillating.” Adrian examines the philosophical traditions tech leaders and their boosters draw on to make plausible and inevitable their industry’s resistible rise. His book is an engaging critique of an industry that is blinded by its own elitism and privilege while exploiting and distorting intellectual ideas in ways that function to erase cultural memory and blunt our analysis or skepticism. Diving deep into the intellectual history of Silicon Valley, we explore tech’s rhetorical strategies that have disabled critical thinking and critical analysis. We touch on  various motifs such as the “dropping out” of college media hype, Marshall McLuhan’s influence on tech and its valorization of the platform, tech and the counterculture (including Esalen), the hegemonic imperative of disruption, and the fake “fail better next time” trope among the Silicon Valley privileged – and much more.

Adrian is an academic and writer and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Adrian's writing on history, technology, pop culture and philosophy has appeared in The Guardian, n+1, The New Republic, Logic, Longreads and elsewhere.