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
About this listen
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...
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Step Right This Way!
- By Brad on 06-03-18
By: Gary Lachman
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Excellent Sheep
- The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
- By: William Deresiewicz
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Excellent Sheep takes a sharp look at the high-pressure conveyor belt that begins with parents and counselors who demand perfect grades and culminates in the skewed applications Deresiewicz saw firsthand as a member of Yale's admissions committee. As schools shift focus from the humanities to "practical" subjects like economics and computer science, students are losing the ability to think in innovative ways.
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skip the book read the essay
- By Amazon Customer on 05-07-15
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The Smallest Minority
- Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics
- By: Kevin D. Williamson
- Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Listener beware: Kevin D. Williamson - the lively, literary firebrand from National Review who was too hot for The Atlantic to handle - comes to bury democracy, not to praise it. With electrifying honesty and spirit, Williamson takes a flamethrower to mob politics, the “beast with many heads” that haunts social media and what currently passes for real life. It’s destroying our capacity for individualism and dragging us down “the Road to Smurfdom, the place where the deracinated demos of the Twitter age finds itself feeling small and blue.”
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Brutally honest, accurate and relevant
- By Sean on 09-19-19
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A Time to Build
- From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream
- By: Yuval Levin
- Narrated by: Ford Enlow
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Americans are living through a social crisis. Our politics is polarized and bitterly divided. Culture wars rage on campus, in the media, social media, and other arenas of our common life. And for too many Americans, alienation can descend into despair, weakening families and communities and even driving an explosion of opioid abuse. Left and right alike have responded with populist anger at our institutions, and use only metaphors of destruction to describe the path forward: cleaning house, draining swamps. But, as Yuval Levin argues, this is a misguided prescription.
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Incisive and Illuminating
- By Jakob on 01-26-23
By: Yuval Levin
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The Nineties
- A Book
- By: Chuck Klosterman
- Narrated by: Chuck Klosterman, Dion Graham
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. Landlines fell to cell phones, the internet exploded, and pop culture accelerated without the aid of technology that remembered everything. It was the last era with a real mainstream to either identify with or oppose. The ’90s brought about a revolution in the human condition, and a shift in consciousness, that we’re still struggling to understand.
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A Very White Middle-class Take On The Nineties
- By Umar Lee on 02-10-22
By: Chuck Klosterman
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How to Save the West
- Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises
- By: Spencer Klavan
- Narrated by: Spencer Klavan
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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It has been proclaimed many times, but perhaps never more convincingly than now, when every news cycle seems to deliver further confirmation of a world gone mad. Is this the endgame? Author Spencer Klavan is a classicist, with a Ph.D. from Oxford, and a deep understanding of the West. His analysis: The situation is dire. But every crisis we face today, we have faced before. And we can surmount each one. Klavan brings to the West’s defense the insights of Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, and the Founding Fathers to show that in the wisdom of the past lies hope for the future.
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Spectacular! A must read!
- By M.A. on 02-15-23
By: Spencer Klavan
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Giving the Devil His Due
- Reflections of a Scientific Humanist
- By: Michael Shermer
- Narrated by: Michael Shermer
- Length: 13 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Who is the "Devil"? And what is he due? The devil is anyone who disagrees with you. And what he is due is the right to speak his mind. He must have this for your own safety's sake, because his freedom is inextricably tied to your own. If he can be censored, why shouldn't you be censored? If we put barriers up to silence "unpleasant" ideas, what's to stop the silencing of any discussion? This book is a full-throated defense of free speech and open inquiry in politics, science, and culture by the New York Times best-selling author and skeptic Michael Shermer.
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Flawed Audio
- By Private on 04-10-20
By: Michael Shermer
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The Story Paradox
- How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down
- By: Jonathan Gottschall
- Narrated by: Joshua Kane
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Humans are storytelling animals. Stories are what make our societies possible. Countless books celebrate their virtues. But Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the science of stories, argues that there is a dark side to storytelling we can no longer ignore. Storytelling, the very tradition that built human civilization, may be the thing that destroys it.
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A bit of a mixed bag with some amazing discussion
- By Justin on 04-27-22
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Strange Rites
- New Religions for a Godless World
- By: Tara Isabella Burton
- Narrated by: Patricia Santomasso
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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A sparklingly strange odyssey through the kaleidoscope of America's new spirituality: the cults, practices, high priests, and prophets of our supposedly post-religion age.
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Insightful
- By Jared Pomeroy on 12-28-20
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Trekonomics
- The Economics of Star Trek
- By: Manu Saadia
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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What would the world look like if everybody had everything they wanted or needed? Trekonomics, the premier book in financial journalist Felix Salmon's imprint PiperText, approaches scarcity economics by coming at it backward - through thinking about a universe where scarcity does not exist. Delving deep into the details and intricacies of 24th-century society, Trekonomics explores post-scarcity and whether we, as humans, are equipped for it.
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An Amusing & Practical Analysis of Fictional Ideas
- By Lost In The Wash on 09-19-16
By: Manu Saadia
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Nonverts
- The Making of Ex-Christian America
- By: Stephen Bullivant
- Narrated by: Liam Gerrard
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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The United States is in the midst of a religious revolution. Or, perhaps it is better to say a non-religious revolution. Around a quarter of US adults now say they have no religion. The great majority of these religious "nones" also say that they used to belong to a religion but no longer do. These are the nonverts: think "converts," but from having religion to having none. There are currently about fifty-nine million of them in the United States.
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Deeply Insightful, But …
- By S. J. Young on 12-29-22
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Anthro-Vision
- A New Way to See in Business and Life
- By: Gillian Tett
- Narrated by: Imogen Church
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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While today’s business world is dominated by technology and data analysis, award-winning financial journalist and anthropology PhD Gillian Tett advocates thinking like an anthropologist to better understand consumer behavior, markets, and organizations to address some of society’s most urgent challenges.
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A Woke Joke-My First Returned Book
- By Bob Flob on 06-16-21
By: Gillian Tett
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The Death of Truth
- Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
- By: Michiko Kakutani
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 3 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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We live in a time when the very idea of objective truth is mocked and discounted by the occupants of the White House. Discredited conspiracy theories and ideologies have resurfaced, proven science is once more up for debate, and Russian propaganda floods our screens. The wisdom of the crowd has usurped research and expertise, and we are each left clinging to the beliefs that best confirm our biases.
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Prescient Account of the Mechanics of Tyranny
- By Brian Price on 07-27-18
By: Michiko Kakutani
What listeners say about What Tech Calls Thinking
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ben Nelson
- 01-08-24
Trite, filled with vapid examinations
The author has an understanding of some of the big wigs in the media of the tech landscape. The bad guys: the zuckerbergs, peter tiel, elon musk, sandberg, larry elison, steve jobs, etc. He his incredibly harsh in his critique and has a fundamentally sound understanding of philosophy and makes many apt points of observation. His examination however is hollow. He makes no attempts and understanding other than a skin deep point of view from media reports and Edgar filings. He does present interesting things that I did not know about my own industry (spoiler alert, I'm biased). But he fails in both his critiques and in his lack of praise for what the tech industry has done. For one, he almost entirely neglects the biases of race and gender in the tech industry as well as homophobia even back to the beginning (Alan Turing famously was chemically castrated by the British government and then killed himself as a result, none of this is mentioned in the book). He does not mention that a 'programmer' early in the industry was comprised almost entirely of women, who were later sidelined for men when the jobs became high paying and high status. He fixates on Ayn Rand and individualism in the industry, which is an odd problem for tech in particular, but he also fails to even mention open source technology, the individualism encouraged by early proponents of computers, the wonderful technologies that were built on the foundations of thinkers like Noam Chomsky (a radical activist), Claude Shannon (a pioneer in information technology) and others. Even his critiques fail to mention things like Marvin Minsky (the most famous name in artificial intelligence research up until OpenAI's ChatGPT creation) being on the Jeffery Epstein lists. The MIT design lab was mentioned as a small footnote along with the Stanford D School. My point being that philosophically, this work was incredibly weak. He fails to mention any reformers, activists, or even people who recognize the flaws of the industry outside of Timnit Gerbu. Cathy O'Neil (author of Weapons of Math Destruction - a fantastic work) would be aligned with many points of his work, yet he fails to mention her.
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.
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