What Tech Calls Thinking
by Adrian Daub · first published 2020
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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
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…and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork - Reeves Wiedeman Whistleblower: My Unlikely Journey to Silicon Valley and Speaking Out Against Injustice - Susan Fowler Uncanny Valley - Anna Wiener What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry Into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley - Adrian Daub The Scapegoat - René Girard
on “Ask HN: Books on the inside stories of big tech?” ↗In What Tech Calls Thinking, there’s a part that analyzes tech college dropout culture. There was a good point that it’s this odd double bind of wanting the prestige of the school but also wanting to rebel or deny it. You want to…
on “Peter Thiel's $100k offer to skip college is more popular than ever” ↗…time, but art school + computer science PhD is a rare and effective combo. It's almost the complete opposite of the standard college dropout founder archetype. I recently read a hilariously titled book, "What Tech Calls Thinking" that's a pretty scathing analysis of the tech world. But one accurate point the author makes is that the college dropout founder usually doesn't have that much domain specific experience. Unless you…
on “What I Worked On” ↗…vibing, or whatever other media metaphor you want to use to show you've grasped what's happening. You got it, and if you couldn't quite say what it was, that mattered less than that you got it." - Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking (2020)
on “Marshall McLuhan in 1977 with a mind-bending riff on identity in the digital age” ↗…Fun thing of his to equate htsc with sc. It's one of those things nobody has to or will shout about when they've got it [0] with Daub as a bedside reference/biblio https://www.adriandaub.com/s/NOTES-What-Tech-Calls-Thinking.... https://www.adriandaub.com/books/what-tech-calls
on “Fig trees convert atmospheric CO₂ to stone, research reveals” ↗