What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley (FSG Originals x Logic)
Adrian Daubamazon.com
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What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley (FSG Originals x Logic)
If Silicon Valley has domesticated failure, it has done so as part of a self-help ethos. It is interested in the way failure can make a better you, and the language it borrows frames failure as a route to an eventual redemption.
Adrian Daub • What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley (FSG Originals x Logic)
And by degrading failure, anguish, and discomfort to mere stepping-stones, they erase the fact that for so many of us, these stones don’t lead anywhere.
Adrian Daub • What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley (FSG Originals x Logic)
The more we are detached from communal standards and an in-group whose views validate us, the more we are alone with ourselves and the cold, unflinching gaze of society—and we have to seek validation via what we consume, how we decorate our homes, how we take care of ourselves, and so forth.
Adrian Daub • What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley (FSG Originals x Logic)
Silicon Valley founders, inventors, and moneymen routinely embrace the first-person plural when they’re really talking about themselves—although they will frame it in such a way that you cannot quite tell whether they are using the royal “we” or imagine a phantom team around them at all times.
Adrian Daub • What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley (FSG Originals x Logic)
For tech, failure is always assumed to be temporary; for everyone else, it’s terminal.
Adrian Daub • What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley (FSG Originals x Logic)
The term “disruption” makes a monolith of the particulars of the everyday, a leviathan out of structures and organizations that are old, have grown up organically, and are therefore pretty scattered and decentralized.
Adrian Daub • What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley (FSG Originals x Logic)
Self-help is frequently about asserting our autonomy, not by rejecting societal norms or our historical situation but by understanding them better than other individuals in society, and thereby coming out ahead of others in our situation.
Adrian Daub • What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley (FSG Originals x Logic)
Often enough, talk of disruption is a theodicy of hypercapitalism. Disruption is newness for people who are scared of genuine newness. Revolution for people who don’t stand to gain anything from revolution.
Adrian Daub • What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley (FSG Originals x Logic)
It’s not that certain platforms (ahem, Twitter.com) tend by some crazy fluke to be lousy with trolling, shit-posting, and abuse. They are set up to enable it. They live by engagement, and that means by exchange: not of information but of triggers. The troll plays the instrument the way it’s meant to be played. And the instrument’s creator is forced
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