Why Criticize Big Tech?

A review of Adrian Daub’s book, 'What Tech Calls Thinking'

Adrian Daub in 2022. Image by Wikimedia Commons.

“The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism.” “The Despots of Silicon Valley.” “The Rise of Reactionary Futurism.” These dramatic headlines graced the pages of The New York Times and The Atlantic over the past year. They serve as examples of the increasing mainstream media attention to—and criticism of—the ideologies emerging out of Silicon Valley.

The most immediate impetus for these articles appears to be tech venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” published on Substack in late 2023. The “Manifesto” was, among other things, an intellectual victory lap for what

N.S. Lyons

has called the “Right-Wing Progressives” (RWPs) a year after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter/X in 2022.

Musk’s takeover of the professional-managerial class’ favored social media platform prompted large swathes of the left-liberal commentariat to develop a newfound passion for attacking Big Tech. This has been a notable but often overlooked shift in discourse. Criticism of Big Tech, in the preceding years (marked, as they were, by rampant censorship of covid dissidents, the Trump movement, and other “deplorable” causes) had been the rhetorical domain of the American right.

But was it simply Musk’s transformation of Twitter into X and Andreessen’s celebration of RWP ideology that precipitated the explosion in left criticism of Big Tech over the past two years? Certainly some critics have done nothing more than jump on a bandwagon. However, the intellectual roots of this contemporary left critique of Big Tech had already been laid in academia.

German-born and American-educated Stanford University professor of comparative literature, German studies, and gender studies,

Adrian Daub

, has been at the forefront of this contemporary academic left critique of Silicon Valley. His aptly-titled book, What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley, was released as one installment in a four-part collaborative series between publisher FSGO and Logic Magazine (now Logic(s)) in 2020.

Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking, published in 2020 by FSGO and Logic.

Given the upsurge in left-leaning criticism of the tech industry following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and the publication of Andreessen’s “Manifesto,” it is worth studying Daub’s book. What Tech Calls Thinking provides essential background for understanding the more recent attacks on Silicon Valley from those whom Lyons identifies as “the world’s overwhelmingly left-wing tech journalists.”

If outrage at Big Tech was a predominately right-wing coded phenomenon when Daub’s book was published in 2020, four years later it is just as much if not more associated with a certain brand of left criticism. This tech-critical left has a particular distaste for an ascendant RWP ideology characterized by utilitarian “Effective Altruist” philosophical commitments, anti-woke rhetoric, and, most significantly, an unflinching faith in the forward march of (trans)humanity through technological progress.

The publication of Daub’s book in 2020 and the considerable media attention it garnered from mainstream outlets proved to be a key inflection point in discourse on Big Tech. What Tech Calls Thinking helped open the space for the left-liberal journalistic attacks on Silicon Valley that have become more commonplace in the past two years. As such, I believe that it is timely to revisit Daub’s book four years later to better understand and evaluate the claims of the contemporary leftist critique of Big Tech.

Translating the Translators

What Tech Calls Thinking is a very well-written book. At times, it’s almost too well-written. It reads like a more academic version of a tightly-edited New Yorker essay—immaculate prose, yet at times so clean that it begins to feel predictable. That said, Daub does an excellent job articulating complicated theoretical concepts for an audience outside of the university. For someone situated in notoriously obfuscatory fields like comparative literature and gender studies, this is all the more impressive.

Daub’s book is at its best as a work of translation. Not in the literal sense of translation from one language to another, but, rather, from the lexicon of Silicon Valley into idioms and concepts that the uninitiated reader can understand. I suspect that Daub’s continued engagement with German intellectual life was an asset in his ability to adeptly translate Silicon Valleyse to a readership that may otherwise not be familiar with the idiosyncratic vocabulary of RWPs.

One of Daub’s central claims is that Silicon Valley ideology (which I will use interchangeably with RWP ideology) cunningly deploys language to repackage old ideas as something new. As Daub writes in his introduction:

This book is about concepts and ideas that pretend to be novel but that are actually old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie. The rhetoric of Silicon Valley may seem unprecedented, but in truth it is steeped in some pretty long-standing American traditions—from the tent revival to the infomercial, from predestination to self-help.

Daub dwells on the mix-and-match approach deployed by the so-called “thought leaders” of Silicon Valley throughout the book. These are thinkers who prioritize charisma and captivating narrative over intellectual depth and rigor; “a quick, ornamental wave of the hand is enough” to communicate ideas that would, in a more serious intellectual environment, demand proper citation and detailed explanation. Daub contends that RWP ideology is “university-adjacent, academish,” promulgated “outside, but within shouting distance of, the university.”

The book offers many examples to support this argument, but reserves special condemnation for the outspoken tech venture capitalist and RWP political activist, Peter Thiel. In a chapter entitled “Desire,” Daub chronicles how Thiel popularized the theory of “mimetic desire,” a concept first advanced by French intellectual René Girard. In Daub’s words, this theory asserts that “Our desires are not ours; they are born from neither our autonomous whims nor any feature of the desired object…All of our desires come out of a network of copied desires—we like what others like.”

Peter Thiel speaking with attendees at the 2022 Converge Tech Summit at The Waste Management Phoenix Open at the Skybar at TPC Scottsdale in Scottsdale, Arizona. Image by Wikimedia Commons.

Daub questions the explanatory power of Girard’s theory, but is particularly hostile to Thiel’s influential translation of the theory for a Silicon Valley audience. Thiel takes an unabashedly instrumental reading of mimetic desire, ignoring the finer sociological and theological points in Girard’s writing. Thiel translates (and, in the process, transforms) the nuances of mimetic theory into a pragmatic blueprint to “avoid conflict within a business” and limit “counterproductive” disagreements. Daub argues that Thiel appropriates Girard’s theory to explain why tech elites should recognize their common desires, reconcile their differences, and unite to become leaders of the masses:

For Thiel, mimetic desire is something we can achieve mastery over in ourselves; and since others won’t be quite as good at such mastery, or sufficiently aware to achieve it, our self-knowledge puts us in a position to manipulate others. There are clear echoes of Ayn Rand in this version of Girard, but also far more pedestrian echoes of the motivational guru Tony Robbins: it reimagines as a marketing trick the human being’s status as a fallen creature. We can be saved, then turn around and monetize other people’s sinfulness.

It is Thiel’s brand of half-baked, mix-and-match philosophizing (a main course of Girard and a sizable helping of Rand garnished with Robbins) that Daub subjects to harsh criticism in What Tech Calls Thinking. Daub is a scholar’s scholar and is rightfully irked by RWP’s lack of concern with the history and nuances of the ideas that they draw upon to construct a self-serving narrative about the world and their place in it. He is able to translate (and demystify) the self-appointed translators of “big ideas” in Silicon Valley without succumbing to the temptation to dumb down theory for a broader audience. If one of the central problems with RWP ideology is its substitution of “a quick, ornamental wave of the hand” for serious intellectual engagement, it is commendable that Daub does not commit the same sin.

Universities, Dropouts, and Platforms

Daub, a Stanford professor, is understandably preoccupied with the university. His proximity to Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area is also a major boon to his project: he is able to observe many aspects of RWP ideology from a first-hand perspective as an instructor of students aiming for careers in the tech industry at an educational institution that has intersected with Silicon Valley in a multitude of ways.

One of the insights that emerged from Daub’s proximity to Silicon Valley is, as we have seen, his analysis of the “university-adjacent” character of Big Tech’s proverbial thought leaders. But what enables the “academish” nature of the RWP intellectual milieu? In a fascinating chapter entitled “Dropping Out,” Daub argues that the mythology surrounding the techie dropout has been pivotal in bolstering the broader narrative of Silicon Valley’s ascendancy and exceptionalism.

From Bill Gates to Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg to Elizabeth Holmes, many of Silicon Valley’s biggest names have crafted an image of themselves that relies heavily on their status as college dropouts. All of these figures began their college education at elite schools (Harvard University, Reed College, Harvard again, and Stanford University, respectively) only to drop out before completing their undergraduate degrees.

Daub contends that, in Silicon Valley culture, attending, and subsequently dropping out of, an elite university garners more kudos than actually having a degree from the same institution:

Dropping out of an elite university to start a company means tapping into a narrative. It’s a nice way of associating with a prestigious place while also not really associating with it. It’s elitism that very visibly snubs the elite; or, perhaps even better, snubbing the elite while nevertheless basking in its glow.

Daub relates this phenomenon to the countercultural history of the Bay Area. Building on fellow Stanford professor Fred Turner’s 2006 book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Daub argues that the Silicon Valley mythology surrounding the elite dropout connects directly back to the countercultural ethos encapsulated in Timothy Leery’s phrase, “turn on, tune in, drop out.” This link between hippies and techies, which I have previously written about on Handful of Earth, is an important one to make. Daub suggests, I think correctly, that the transformation of the Bay Area from hippie haven to techie territory was not a clean break. Instead, the shift was marked by significant overlaps and continuities in both ideological perspective and social foundation. The figure of the dropout is the bridge between these two iterations of Bay Area culture.  

In typical self-reflexive professorial form, Daub is sufficiently critical of the academy. At times, he even talks about the commonalities between tech culture and academic culture, such as the shared tendency of university professors and tech elites to believe that “esoteric knowledge…gives them the ability to become leaders of others.” However, other parts of the book read like a defense of the university system against what Daub calls the “immature, autodidactic energy” of Silicon Valley.

One of Daub’s frustrations with the figure of the dropout is that students who attend just the first couple of years at American colleges and universities are “only” exposed to “the general stuff” (i.e. core requirements in the college curriculum). Daub believes that this fact explains RWP’s fascination with grand narratives and their concomitant dismissal of pesky intellectual details, details that fall into the domain of the more specialist academic fields that dropouts were never exposed to as a result of their premature exit from the university system.

Stanford University, where Daub is a professor. Image by Wikimedia Commons.

Daub is frequently insightful in his piercing criticism of the psychological drives on display in RWP dropouts. At the same time, his own insecurities about being a career academic (who has spent his life in the university system and also achieved scholarly success at a remarkably young age, by twenty-first century standards) is evident throughout What Tech Calls Thinking. The book reads not simply as a critique of the “intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley” but also as a defense of the university against the “university-adjacent” character of the RWP world.

In a chapter entitled “Content,” Daub is scathingly critical of the prestige ascribed to “the platform” in Silicon Valley. Invoking perennial debates about “form” versus “content” in the humanities, Daub firmly takes the side of content (and content creation) against the (plat)form, arguing that “few people come to the platform for anything but the content.” The platform is, in Daub’s view, imbued with undo cultural cachet in Silicon Valley. In the RWP worldview, those who create or come for the content are viewed as mere accoutrements, nothing but a decorative appendage to the main attraction of the platform.

Daub’s polemics against the platform made me wonder how he conceptualizes the university. Isn’t the university a sort of “platform” itself? Even if we refrain from using this admittedly irritating Silicon Valleyse to describe it, the university is undoubtedly more than the sum of its parts and certainly not reducible to the “content” taught in any one class on campus. The American idea of “the college experience” gets at this point in colloquial terms, and is eerily similar to discourse about “user experience” on tech platforms. 

Daub attempts to defend content creation against the platform and the university against Silicon Valley. What he fails to realize is that his existential attachment to “the university” comes from a similar place as RWP’s affinity with “the platform.” Indeed, if Daub thinks that Silicon Valley would be a better place if its thought leaders would stick around at Stanford for four years in order to take more specialized coursework (any specialization seems to do), this is nothing but a defense of “the platform” of the university, rather than any one of its particular content-based attributes. Perhaps the problem is less with platforms as such than it is with the overabundance of bad platforms churned out in Silicon Valley.

One particularly bad platform, in Daub’s view, is Yelp, a website and mobile app that crowd-sources reviews of businesses. Daub writes:

The programmers at Yelp are predominately men. Its reviewers are mostly female—and, at least in the initial years of the company, this was even more true as you got to the most active “elite” reviewers. Early rewards for elite reviewers—spa dates and skin care events—suggest that the company was aware of this and counted on it. Men build the structures; women fill them. Without users providing the content a review portal like Yelp would be deeply pointless. Nevertheless, the users aren’t compensated, or are compensated only with stickers and perks: their labor is “gamifed”; they earn special status or are sent book galleys. The problem isn’t that the act of providing content is ignored or uncompensated but rather that it isn’t recognized as labor. It is praised as essential, applauded as a form of civic engagement. Remunerated it is not.

Missing from Daub’s breathless critique are, ironically, the voices of these women themselves. Unlike the case of wage labor, or even housework, it is difficult to argue that these reviewers are subject to coercion—they do not depend on writing Yelp reviews to pay the bills or maintain their marriage. Moreover, the disposable income and leisure time necessary to dine at a large number of restaurants implies that these “elite” reviewers are hardly lacking in the financial department. Daub offers no evidence that these women want to have their reviewing labor remunerated in cash instead of receiving skin care experiences and spa dates in return. Perhaps some of them do, but we would never know since Daub makes no attempt to interview them on the topic and, thus, conveniently bypasses the question of their motives and agency.

By targeting his critique at platforms like Yelp for their purported failure to recognize feminine forms of content creation as labor, Daub also ignores the platforms, like Substack and Rumble, that do enable content creators to earn money from their creations. These are examples of platforms that work in a symbiotic relationship with content creators, falsifying Daub’s contention that the essence of the platform stands in irreconcilable contradiction with the interests of content creators. What we need are more platforms that work to productively resolve the potential contradictions between platform and content, not sweeping polemics against “the platform” as such that result in throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Why Criticize Big Tech?

The question of the platform invites another question: Why criticize Big Tech in the first place? This is a very important question today since, as we have seen, there are formidable criticisms of Silicon Valley emerging from across the political spectrum. I see this as a positive development, and an opportunity for finding common ground across the outmoded left-right divide. However, if the reasons for opposing RWP ideology are radically different across these tech-critical camps, the potential for building political coalitions will be severely constrained.

In the spirit of political and intellectual generosity, I have endeavored to highlight Daub’s many insights in this book review. Even more praise could be given, especially to his sophisticated discussion in the chapters entitled “Disruption” and “Failure.” You can read the book to see for yourself. Despite the indubitable value of What Tech Calls Thinking, however, I am compelled to end my review on a more critical note since I believe that the foundation of Daub’s critique of Silicon Valley in particular and the contemporary left critique of Big Tech in general suffers from serious weaknesses.

One major weakness of Daub’s approach pertains to free speech. Returning to the question of the platform, one of Daub’s problems with the Big Tech platforms seems to be that they do not censor enough. He concludes his “Content” chapter with the following proclamation:

Twitter was happy to take responsibility for Tahrir Square, it seems, but Nazis are someone else’s problem. The promotional materials the companies put out claim revolutionary potential for their platforms, but in the end, the tech giants are always happy to get out of jail free by pointing out that they are not responsible for the content on those platforms. There is a tendency in Silicon Valley to want to be revolutionary without, you know, revolutionizing anything.

For Daub, presumably the way to be actually “revolutionary” would be to ban “Nazis” from these platforms. Interestingly, this is precisely what a contingent of pro-censorship authors called on Substack to do in the wake of October 7^th. Fortunately, Substack refused to capitulate to this aggressive pressure campaign.

Jonathan M. Katz’s viral article, published in The Atlantic on November 28, 2023.

The Substack controversy strikes me as a testament to the benefits of a principled platform. Yes, I come to create and engage with content on Substack, but the fact that it is a platform committed to free speech is one of the main reasons I keep coming back. Platform and content are interdependent, and Daub’s misleading partition of the two is deeply concerning for the left critique of Big Tech, not least because of the doors it opens up to censorship and information suppression. It’s no surprise, then, that Daub’s forthcoming book appears to argue that cancel culture is fake news.

Daub is clearly peeved by many of the personalities and political positions held in Silicon Valley. I’m sure that writing the book was cathartic for him, and I can relate to this kind of motivation for writing. However, the “gotcha” tone of What Tech Calls Thinking damages the power and appeal of his critique. Daub often takes potshots at political positions he dislikes in a far-fetched attempt to connect them back to Silicon Valley ideology without offering concrete evidence of any connection. For example, in what is overall a strong chapter on the idea of “disruption” in Silicon Valley, Daub attempts to link this RWP trope to vaccine hesitancy:

The way the term [disruption] is used today really implies that whatever continuity is being disrupted deserved to be disrupted. The very fact of X having been in charge is taken as evidence that X ought no longer to be in charge. Even if X is a doctor telling you to vaccinate your kid against measles.

He simply leaves it at that and moves on without any attempt to explain the logical or empirical connection between the ideology of disruption and parents who want to know what is being injected into their children. Shortly after Daub’s book was published, it was precisely vaccine mandates and passports that were mobilized for disruption on a global scale as a part of the pandemic response. Needless to say, paragraphs like these in What Tech Calls Thinking have not aged well.

There are many other examples of this kind of lazy thinking interspersed throughout the pages of the book. This is particularly ironic since Daub expressly sets out to expose the “bad thinking” in Silicon Valley circles. He is clearly smart enough to do better, so, as far as I can tell, these aspects of the book can only be explained by his blinkered ideological commitments. Daub is a culture warrior par excellence, an identity which often undermines his formidable erudition as a scholar.

What exactly are Daub’s ideological commitments? Allow me to conclude with some brief reflections on this question. Daub is undoubtedly a progressive, virtue signaling his woke worldview at every opportunity in between the substantive paragraphs of the book. But what is wokeism after all? According to

N.S. Lyons

’ useful model of political categories, it can be described as “Post-Modern Progressivism,” an ideological amalgamation of Progressive, Egalitarian, Individualist, and Spiritual-Intuitive (PEIS) political dispositions.

The most important letter here as it pertains to Daub, I believe, is the P for Progressive. What Tech Calls Thinking is a powerful critique of the dominant ideology in Silicon Valley, which Lyons has compellingly described more recently as “Right-Wing Progressivism.” The problem for Daub is that he, too, is a progressive—a left-wing rather than right-wing one. Just as there is a through-line from the countercultural hippies of the 1960s to the Silicon Valley techies of today, Daub is haunted by the progressive ghosts that lurk behind both the ideology of Silicon Valley and his own worldview. He may be upset with Mark Zuckerberg’s motto, “move fast and break things,” but that is precisely what Post-Modern Progressivism has done during the time that Daub has been active in its flagship institution: the American university.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg onstage at the F8 conference 2014. Image by Wikimedia Commons.

Daub offers a compelling critique of “disruption” in Silicon Valley, but the reader is left without much of an alternative. He finds himself in the awkward place of criticizing disruption while simultaneously rejecting conservatism. The furthest he can go with his critique, then, is to implicitly defend an entity like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) against Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos scam. But what about the things the FDA “disrupted” before it? What about the FDA’s subservience to corporate interests? There is no room for these kinds of questions in Daub’s book, which elects to defend a caricature of the liberal progressive status quo against the threat of the RWPs.

What’s more, Daub’s dislike of autodidacticism left me with a bad taste in my mouth. While his criticism could have been directed solely at the elitist dropout narrative of Silicon Valley, his own elitist jabs at people with “autodidactic energy” suggest that he is uncomfortable with autodidacticism writ large. For Daub, one must go to (and complete) college in order to learn the correct ways to think about the world (which, for him, seem to essentially entail the cultivation of a PEIS political personality type) under the proper tutelage of professors like himself.

The good news is that, woke (and anti-woke) appears to be on its way out, not least due to new currents of autodidacticism in an American society increasingly skeptical of academia’s claims to ultimate intellectual authority. Compelling arguments for the decline of wokeism come from an interview by

Due Dissidence

with

Lee Fang

at the Dissident Dialogues festival, a discussion between Hannah Berrelli and Shay Woulahan on the RedFem podcast, and a piece by

Crispin Sartwell

at Sublation Media. Despite declaring that “woke is over now,” Sartwell notes that:

There will be vestiges for decades, and many young people, having been thoroughly trained in woke academic style, will be confused and disabled politically for a bit as the echoes fade…But the people who are really going to struggle are the college professors and administrators who came of age during this period, the squads of DEI officers and humanities professors who have already written hundreds of memos, or whole tenure books, in the approved vocabulary.

Daub, as a professor who rose through the ranks of academia in the early years of the woke era and attained the status of pubic intellectual at its peak, will likely be one of these unfortunate figures. What Tech Calls Thinking is, in this sense, an especially fascinating document. It is an example of just how much an otherwise worthy project completed by a competent scholar can be marred by a woke culture warrior mentality, a mentality which has already begun to feel dated.

What does the end of woke and anti-woke have to do with the raison d'être of tech criticism? As I have argued on Handful of Earth, “many of the so-called ‘culture wars’ in post-pandemic America can be more accurately described as ‘technology wars.’” Despite its many insights, Daub’s book ultimately obscures this truth by seeking to situate the critique of Big Tech itself firmly within the culture war fold. I believe that many culture wars are, upon closer examination, conflicts over the place of technology in society, whereas Daub endeavors to further culture warify the critique of tech.

Daub’s culture warification of tech criticism precludes the critique of what

Mary Harrington

aptly calls “the technological mindset.” For Daub, the problem with Silicon Valley is found not in its imposition of the technological mindset on the rest of society but, rather, in its whiteness and its maleness, attributes that are conveniently mapped onto “bad thinking.” If the Valley just becomes more DEI-ified, this perspective implies, the thinking will get better and tech can be reformed and redeemed after all.

One model for the woke salvation of tech appears to be the book’s co-publisher, which was rebranded from Logic Magazine to Logic(s) in 2023. Logic(s) describes itself as “the first queer Black and Asian tech magazine,” fittingly boasting funding from the “Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, [and] Omidyar Network.” The political upshot of Daub’s woke critique of tech is, as we ought to expect, a woker Silicon Valley, supported wholeheartedly by the left hand of capital, not a substantive challenge to “the technological mindset” itself.

These may seem like mere quibbles with an otherwise important book. However, if the tech-critical left and the tech-critical right are to find common ground and mount a united challenge to Big Tech, we cannot avoid the question of why we criticize Silicon Valley in the first place. There are many things to be gleaned from What Tech Calls Thinking, but a compelling answer to this crucial “why” question is not one of them.