
What Tech Calls Thinking
An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley
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Narrated by:
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Andrew Eiden
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By:
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Adrian Daub
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
"In Daub’s hands the founding concepts of Silicon Valley don’t make money; they fall apart." (The New York Times Book Review)
From FSGO x Logic: a Stanford professor's spirited dismantling of Silicon Valley's intellectual origins
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 to predestination. Written with verve and imagination, What Tech Calls Thinking is an intellectual refutation of Silicon Valley's ethos, pulling back the curtain on the self-aggrandizing myths the Valley tells about itself.
FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: Recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.
©2020 Adrian Daub (P)2021 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...




















I'm disappointed I wasted time reading this. It was at best just a hit piece on the very recent developments in tech industry, not in computer science, data science, or any science really. The author uses gotcha headlines and nobody's like James Damore to paint a picture of carte blanche racism and sexism within tech as a whole. It's just an incredibly weak argument for an industry that empoyees millions of people of all shapes, colors, ethnicities, backgrounds and opinions and that's just in the US alone. He also fails to even mention people that would help shape his argument of tech as the evil empire, like Palmer Luckey founder of Anduril and Oculus who is a psycho, or Sam Bankman-Fried, and spends little to no time on the critique of Theranos and why that was possible to happen.
Just weak. Do better. I expected a hit piece, but this was just soft. It also only focused mostly on roughly the last 10-15 years of the industry, with the exception of his focus on the PayPal mafia. There is so much more to explore in this topic, even in the negative light the author took which could be much, much more interesting.
Trite, filled with vapid examinations
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