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.

To create content is to be distracted. To create the “platform” is to focus on the true structure of reality. Shaping media is better than shaping the content of such media. It is the person who makes the “platform” who becomes a billionaire. The person who provides the content—be it reviews on Yelp, self-published books on Amazon, your own car and

But you get the sense that the film doesn’t direct its anger toward the big, bad corporation behind it all—instead, it spends most of its time lampooning the consumers who allowed themselves to be brainwashed by it. The cultural critic and blogger Mark Fisher has called this the film’s “gestural anti-capitalism,” and it is characteristic of Silicon

This is what historians of ideas call a “genius aesthetic”: it describes our tendency to think that the meaning of a work of art comes out of the specific mind of its creator, not out of the preexisting rules that creator worked within nor the broader spirit of the society and time.

It’s the feeling of having tried to communicate honestly but the other side is just too darn ideological to genuinely engage. I don’t mean to suggest that this feeling is never correct or appropriate—rather that we over-rely on it and are falsely deferential to it, even when it isn’t correct or appropriate.

Accelerationism advocates a surrender to the forces of acceleration instead, jumping into the river even as we can hear the roar of the waterfall.

Schumpeter agreed with Marx on two important points: that the ever-increasing efficiency of capitalist exploitation inevitably decreases the rate of profit, and that decreased rate of profit leads to monopolies.

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 “gamified”; they earn special status or are sent book galleys.

This is the genius behind the kvetching about “political correctness,” for instance: you get to keep talking the way you’ve always talked, but instead of having to worry you’re being lazy, you get to tell yourself you’re actually being courageous.