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One of the most conspicuous paradoxes of Silicon Valley has been that the leadership of the tech sector, with all its power, wealth, and influence for remaking our world, failed to maintain a decent quality of life in the one major city where it’s concentrated, San Francisco. Academics and journalists, who tend to scorn Silicon Valley’s ambitions as absurd or dangerous, and to dismiss its achievements as superficial, inadequate, or pernicious versions of what a government headed by a proper set of intellectuals (i.e., by us) would accomplish, have likewise claimed that the mutual disappointments of the last year’s alliance of MAGA populism and tech elites should have been predictable from the start. After all, they argue, the latter had until recently expressed their political interests mainly by dreaming of independent city states, while failing to make the kinds of contributions to society and culture that even the robber barons of the Gilded Age had made. So what did you expect from their foray into Washington power politics?
Then again, Silicon Valley’s political record so far ought to be surprising. The leaders of the tech sector are almost the only people in American life since the end of the Cold War who actually have some experience of sustaining our inherited greatness, and of foreseeing and building a better future. Indeed, tech elites today might well be said to have the same sort of reasonable claim to national leadership and esteem that the generals, planners, and engineers who won World War II enjoyed in the generation after 1945. Almost alone among contemporary Americans, intelligent young people at the Valley’s intersection of information technology and finance can find themselves not only richly rewarded for their talents and risk-taking but also equipped with the resources, skills, and mentorship to transform their own and our collective life. With the innovative products they invent or bring to market, they reshape the way we buy, sell, make, move, talk, and think. Many of those who have made fortunes doing so turn their abilities to envision and execute far-ranging plans from commerce to broader goals on behalf of the shared future of humanity. In these respects they fulfill, whether they know it or not, functions that were once those of political, religious, scholarly, and industrial elites, whose own recent accomplishments seem comparatively dim.
Yet they seem to lack the ability to transfer their success and skills into politics. It is not that tech elites have failed to think about the subject—or about philosophy, culture, and other fields beyond their core areas of professional competency. They are conspicuous readers, or at least conspicuous owners and discussers of books that consider society and history from perspectives far removed from those of the engineer or capitalist. As a historian, literary critic and political theorist, I have been struck, along with many of my colleagues, by the recent proliferation of a so-called “canon” of such books read by many of the Valley’s leading technologists and financiers, along with people who, from within or beyond Silicon Valley, wish to outdo, imitate, or simply better understand the mindset of those leaders.
First posited by Stripe CEO Patrick Collison in dialogue with China-watcher Tanner Greer, and enriched in an ongoing dialogue that included Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Marc Andreessen, Tyler Cowen, and several others, the idea that there is a “Silicon Valley Canon” read by current and would-be leaders of the tech sector was either powerfully accurate, or had the force of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If, perhaps, it wasn’t yet true at the time Collison said it a few years ago that anyone-who’s-anyone (and anyone who wants to be anyone) in the Valley reads the books on some version of his list, it seems to have come true through the cumulative influence of countless discussions of the topic. There is a strong consensus among even commentators who criticize the canon that it does exist, does shape and reflect a worldview, and does consist of more or less the books that Collison, Armstrong, and others cite.
The books number a few to several dozen. Although some are quite lengthy, they can be read by a busy person in a year and an unoccupied person in a summer (provided, that is, you follow a version of the canon that excludes the prolific collected blog posts of thinkers like Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky). They fall into a few major headings: biographies, histories, novels, and works of philosophy, social science, psychology or other forms of what could be called theory. Books from the same categories make up the required reading of students everywhere, although the authorship of the Silicon Valley Canon is much more white and male than almost any curriculum outside of Great Books colleges. Many of its authors, from Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) to Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged) were bestsellers, and seem neither to share a worldview nor to have anything to do with success in the tech sector per se.
Reading the canon will not equip you with the skills to invent or invest your way to wealth in the Bay Area (or even in Austin). At least it didn’t do so for me. Nor does it provide special insight into the unique culture of the Valley. Rather, in its diversity and contradictions, the canon shows how our tech sector is rooted in long-standing American dilemmas, at once political and personal, about the meaning of freedom and its relationship to power. What makes the Valley and its inhabitants special is not so much that they have absorbed these ideas, but that amid a broader crisis of American collective and individual agency, they still possess, almost alone, the power to act on them—to realize the ambitions they learned from literature.
With tech elites having turned to national politics, evaluating their alliance with populism, and considering their next move, the promises and limitations of that literary education should be of concern to all of us. If they are to avoid the bewilderment, inefficacy, and steady loss of agency that felled their counterparts in traditional institutions like the universities, media, and federal government, it should be of concern to them, too.
The term “canon” originally referred to rules that defined life for religious communities. It came, by extension, to mean lists of texts taken to be essential for intellectual communities, whether in universities (themselves once religious institutions) or the more expansive Republic of Letters. A canon can form only where a group of people has already gone through a long course of common experience. It looks toward the past, preserving the record of what are taken to be the crucial insights of earlier generations, and toward the future, allowing those insights to be passed on to new entrants into the community. If Silicon Valley’s leaders, inhabitants, observers, and critics agree that a “canon” exists in the most innovative and productive sector of America’s economy, this means that this sector, now three or four generations old, has become, in its own way, traditional.
The critical mission of any functioning tradition is to incite the ambitions of its young, incoming members, giving them models to emulate and goals to reach for—and then to direct and discipline their ambitions so that, as they grow up, young people will preserve the systems that educated them. Potential entrants into the community must be made into the right combination of dangerous (energized, independent, hungry for greatness, capable of innovating) and safe (humbly aware that they are custodians of an order that they must safeguard and one day transmit to a younger cohort). Too much safety and the tradition stagnates into lifeless routine. Too much danger and the tradition collapses, leaving the young ignorant and disoriented (in the worst of cases, the stagnation of elite institutions goes hand-in-hand with the re-barbarization of society).
The Silicon Valley Canon fulfills this complex task surprisingly well. Although no one designed it to do so, it balances books that awaken personal ambition to excel against books that chasten and overawe callow desire with broader perspectives on the forces that shape our lives and exceed our mastery.
In the former category are biographies of Silicon Valley titans like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, as well as earlier economic and political heavyweights like John D. Rockefeller and Theodore Roosevelt. This should not be either bemoaned or celebrated as a sign of conservative individualism or a cult of “great men.” Biography has been one of the most popular genres of non-fiction for generations, among every segment of the reading public. Many of us enjoy finding out about the peculiarities and peccadillos of exceptional people in order to soothe ourselves with the comforting falsehood that we, in our mediocrity, are better off than those restless, strange, apparently unhappy oddities. Nor is the Silicon Valley Canon primarily about great men. For every biography of an individual, there are two or three books about institutions, groups, networks, and systems. These include histories of the Valley’s early days, such as Michael Hiltzik’s Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age and M. Mitchell Waldrop’s The Dream Machine. These books are full of brilliant and eccentric characters, but the reader soon comes to understand that, individual brilliance being commonplace at the technological frontier, what matters most are the specific structures that channel this accumulated brain power towards the cooperative realization of a vision (rather than towards over-elaborate tinkering or a quick hit of profit—the professional vices, respectively, of engineers and financiers).
Readers of the Silicon Valley Canon, as they move through practically oriented books like Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma or Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup, find themselves encouraged to think about institutions, from large corporations to new small businesses, as having special ways of being that are more than the sum of their individual members’ personalities, and which can be understood, shaped, and improved. At a larger historical scale, the canon includes works like James Burnham’s sociological treatises on power in 20th-century economics and politics, and James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s The Sovereign Individual, which attempts to bring similar perspectives to bear on the new century. (A recent re-edition of the latter notes that the authors notably flubbed in imagining that a sovereign hyper-capitalist Hong Kong, not a rising nationalist China, was the image of the world’s future.)
Still further into abstraction are texts like James Carse’s gnomically pithy Finite and Infinite Games or Douglas Hofstadter’s sprawling Gödel, Escher, Bach—or René Girard’s explanations of nearly every human phenomenon in terms of sacrifice and imitation. These books are a counterweight to any “great man theory of history,” and could be said to serve as the Valley’s own version of the social sciences or French Theory, which likewise fascinated generations of academics with the idea that behind the buzz of individual action and biographical chatter were obscure systems comprehensible to a perspicacious few.
What makes inhabitants of Silicon Valley peculiar is not the books they read, or their seemingly incoherent views on politics. The Valley appears to be an outlier in American culture because it preserves, to an unusual degree, possibilities for acting on characteristic attitudes inherited from our national past.
The tension at play between the individual biography, and the inhuman systems charted by the historical and theoretical texts, is also at play within the canon’s works of fiction. Nearly all of them are novels about apparently ordinary heroes who, with plucky male companions or sexy female paramour-sidekicks, confront vast forces of evil. They could be read as celebrations of individualism, or of small groups who still have agency to shape their own lives and push back systems that would remake the world for the worse. Some of the appeal of The Lord of the Rings, Atlas Shrugged, Neuromancer, Snow Crash, or The Player of Games comes from identification with protagonists who escape or upturn structures that recall, in their scope, hostility, and opacity, the organized horrors we encounter in our own society. All of these books are in some sense allegories of modern life, and speak to its anxieties. But just as Satan is the most exciting character in Paradise Lost, in the novels of the Silicon Valley Canon it is often the system itself, not the protagonist, that most excites the reader. (Tolkien in particular was a master of world-building far more than of writing convincing dialogue or lively characters.)
Readers of such fictions learn to imagine alien societies, technologies, histories, languages, and forms of consciousness. This excites their ability to envision new futures for themselves individually and humanity collectively—a classic, long-recognized function of science fiction and fantasy. It also (and this has perhaps been less appreciated) equips readers to return from an imagined elsewhere with a new set of eyes, capable of seeing their own cultural context as something specific, contingent, and changeable. It is a kind of critical theory.
At the same time, as the dramatic tension of these novels thrums in the danger that the powerless individual might at any moment be crushed by the systems opposed to his freedom, they awaken a double imperative to evade or acquire power—the typical dilemma of the American confronting politics, unsure whether he must escape or master it.
Like ordinary Americans, the elites of Silicon Valley can easily shift among various political ideologies that ought to be, from a strictly intellectual perspective, incompatible. One moment they are libertarian, fantasizing about privatized networks decoupled from any government; the next they are fuming that the Department of Defense hasn’t purchased enough of their weapons and surveillance systems, and are donating to politicians who will remedy this injustice. Tech elites can seem far removed from the values, experiences, and interests of ordinary Americans, rich enough to do whatever they please—but we find them regularly on our screens submitting to humiliating questions in Congress, the offices of The New York Times, or comedians’ podcasts, trying with apparent desperation to keep our attention and good will. In America, almost everyone is a would-be celebrity, even the wealthiest and most powerful among us; we have been taught to desire attention, to confuse it with safety, love, respect, and glory.
The Silicon Valley Canon offers inspiring portraits of great men alongside dizzying theories that dissipate individual agency within obscure structures, as well as fictions that pit heroic individuals and teams against what may be more compelling and memorable oppressive systems. Moving among the canon’s books is, ideally, an education in maintaining equilibrium. Pulled one way by exemplary stories of personal accomplishment, readers are pulled the other way by the troubling thought that the path to true agency—the power to shape one’s own life—runs through identification with, mastery of, or merger into structures much larger than any person or lifetime. Just as it should be no surprise that Silicon Valley elites can be “don’t tread on me” libertarians one day and fervent supporters of an imperial presidency on the next, so it is no contradiction that they can move back and forth from individualist humanism of the crunchiest variety to post-human accelerationism.
What makes inhabitants (or would-be inhabitants) of Silicon Valley peculiar, compared to other Americans, is not the books they read, or their seemingly incoherent views on politics. The Valley appears to be an outlier in American culture because it preserves, to an unusual degree, possibilities for acting on characteristic attitudes inherited from our national past. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, outside of exceptional periods like the Great Depression, large numbers of Americans found themselves at literal or metaphorical frontiers, confident they could create the future. They transformed unsettled regions, inaugurated a national literature and culture, and invented revolutionary technologies. By the middle of the 20th century, as America’s economic rise brought along with it vast increases in military might and state capacity, American elites came to imagine that by combining their energies, they had the power and the mandate to remake the world. Leveraging the federal government, research universities, and large industrial enterprises, they would not so much abolish the old libertarian interpretation of American freedom as translate it to a fantastically larger scale. Where the individual, family, or small community had once shaped its own private path outward from a frontier into greater independence, now a free nation would realize an emancipated future for the planet. Through the Space Race that symbolized its technological prowess and pursuit of glory, it might even do so for the universe.
That confidence has largely disappeared. Neither the pre-modern freedom of the frontiersman living according to his own or his small, self-determining community’s will, nor the modern freedom of citizens working together to achieve a great plan, resonate with most Americans today. Many of us are too socially isolated and economically precarious to dream of moving further out from the frontier. We are, at the same time, also too regulated and surveilled by our malfunctional public and private administrative infrastructures to imagine that such institutions could be, as they once were, instruments of an emancipatory vision. We lack, in equal measure, the virtues of autonomy and solidarity, which a long strand of American tradition had once held together in a world-mastering synthesis.
Ever fewer Americans in the working, middle, and even most sectors of the upper class can conceive of themselves as the authors of their own destinies. For them, the contradictions of freedom evoked by the core texts of our national tradition, and the archetypes of American mythology, are of increasingly little relevance. Whether expressed in books like Neuromancer or Walden, the image of the Lone Ranger or the robber baron, or the collective endeavors of the Transcontinental Railroad and Apollo missions, visions of personal or national emancipatory action—the stuff our traditional American identity is made of—now inspire in most American readers only longings that can find no satisfactory outlet in reality. The questions that our culture once posed about what freedom really meant, whether it was individual or collective, found outside or within systems of power, are now perhaps real problems only within Silicon Valley, and within its canon.
The Silicon Valley Canon has, through its varied genres, real resources for grappling with the dilemmas experienced in this last preserve of American tradition. If it didn’t, then it wouldn’t be read and recommended. But it also has limitations and failings characteristic of the more dysfunctional aspects of our wider culture. The canon’s books are memorable and formative for their readers in large part because they are first encountered mostly in adolescence—and particularly by teenage boys.
While much has been said recently about the decline of the male writer, and the still more obvious and troubling decline of the male reader, teenage boys, especially nerdy teenage boys who may grow up to be engineers, programmers, founders, or venture capitalists, still have (although perhaps this too is rapidly vanishing) a window of reading in their early lives. Teenagers read to learn about what the world is, or could be like. They read to augment and channel the powerful feelings that come with adolescence, its yearning to become and be recognized as a unique, worthy individual in control of his own life, with an esteemed place in the lives of others.
In adolescence, the thrill of such books, and the bracing challenge that they pose for readers, who are summoned to equal or outdo the heroes portrayed in them or the geniuses who wrote them, is so vitalizing that readers do not notice the generally poor quality of the prose. Nor should they. Fifteen is not an age to stumble over the absurd sententiousness of Robert Caro’s musings about “power,” or scoff at Tolkien’s cardboard imitations of Walter Scott. It is an age for hunger, not taste.
Unfortunately, little about American adulthood—and especially little about Silicon Valley adulthood—encourages readers, as they grow up, to move on from adolescence and acquire taste. The exercise of literary skill, and other forms of aesthetic excellence, has been linked throughout Western history with traditions of craftsmanship and devotion to one’s work that require a steady, lifelong exercise of a vocation and a certain distance from worldly distraction. The appreciation of such skill, conversely, has often been seen as the privilege of leisured aristocrats who alone have the time and resources to read broadly and carefully enough to develop a discriminating eye. The cultivation of taste is slow work—and to a great extent incompatible with “work” in the sense of full-time professional employment.
In America, almost everyone is a would-be celebrity, even the wealthiest and most powerful among us; we have been taught to desire attention, to confuse it with safety, love, respect, and glory.
Throughout our history, Americans have had scant appreciation for the way of life either of the craftsman or the aristocrat. The former seems to labor without getting rich; the latter does no labor at all. Ambitious Americans tend to think of success as the energetic, publicly visible expenditure of all one’s energies, resulting in the gain of wide notoriety and enormous sums of money—not the fashioning of a perfect object or a virtuosic personality. For most Americans, and especially American males, adolescence is the first and last time to read widely and think expansively before the chase for success begins. College, which once provided future elites with an extended period of leisure mixed with study, is now a time of intensive professionalization, especially in top-ranked schools. The smartest and most energetic young people will continue to read, of course, and some of them will even continue to read books. But they will not, most of them, develop the capacities for reading, appreciating, thinking, and talking traditionally understood to require enormous stretches of unstructured, unsupervised free time.
This is true of all Americans but, like many things, particularly true of those aspiring to enter the Silicon Valley elite, who speak of time—and with good reason—as their most precious capital. Youth, in our society, is a valuable resource, and one’s 20s are the time to grind. For those with the intelligence and skills to play in the arena of high technology and its adjacent financial sector, the right moves in the first years after adolescence can pay off in a vast fortune. With such stakes, any entrant into this competition cannot afford, and perhaps can hardly imagine, the values of the patient craftsman or idle aesthete.
The Valley’s canon may offer many useful mental resources for young men entering a competitive world in which they may win great power. But it offers far less orientation by which such men, as they grow older, can learn to occupy new roles beyond the anxious quests of adolescence. Those who have won Silicon Valley’s competitions for status often seem to revert, in the full glare of publicity, to teenage behaviors that would have embarrassed or ruined them in the early, upward phases of their careers. Individually and collectively, Silicon Valley’s elites are stepping into roles characteristic of middle-age: positions of stewardship, responsibility, and authority for which their lives, cultures, and canon have left them unprepared.
In other eras, elites in such a situation would seek the company of cultured specialists who could offer advice, along with the pleasures of encountering new perspectives that might enlarge and mature their own points of view. The nomad conquerors arriving from the steppe, or the Roman generals having annexed the East, surrounded themselves with literati, philosophers, priests, and courtesans out of a combination of respect, contempt, and curiosity. Much of ancient political wisdom concerns a proper balancing among the varying human types that fill a court, no one of which ought to monopolize a ruler’s attention. Or throughout American history, when the cultural segregation of the sexes did much the same work of ensuring a variety of human types, the wives and daughters and fruity sons of plutocrats created the museums, art collections, and social reform movements that complemented the tycoons’ one-sided achievements, softening their edges and palliating their harms. Our contemporary culture offers little in the way of such variety or complementarity of human types, and it must be said that Silicon Valley elites have exercised often risibly poor taste in selecting candidates to fill the roles that traditionally supplemented and advised raw power. If the Bay Area’s equivalents of a learned courtesan and philosopher-poet are Aella and Curtis Yarvin, then a nation that depends on Silicon Valley to do what politicians cannot is in serious trouble.
Today’s “tech right” aims—to put its case as sympathetically as possible—to revive the American spirit of self-determination and to leverage the power of the state towards the construction of a better future for the American people. In that sense, it shares something of the broader animating energies of Silicon Valley. While much of the MAGA base and many of its more religiously conservative thinkers are deeply skeptical of technology, elites, and anything out of California, the tech right represents (leaving aside its members’ actual lifestyles and personal beliefs) much of what most people think is most essentially American about America. In particular, the Valley incarnates the ability to “do things,” to articulate and achieve long-range projects, which has all but disappeared from other sectors of the economy and most glaringly from politics.
But just as it has assumed new political responsibilities in virtue of its special stewardship of the American tradition, many tech leaders have aligned themselves, at least temporarily, with a Republican Party that has become ferociously un-conservative. Switching positions with yesterday’s cultural left, it blasts away, with greater force than any of the old tenured radicals, at norms, institutions, and traditions declared to be so much dead weight. Canons are not of much interest to the MAGA right, whose leadership and pundits are—even if they went to Ivy League schools or profess a Catholic faith themselves—vulgarly dismissive of claims to authority from intellectual or clerical elites critical of their policies. The right, like the left whose tactics and attitudes it now imitates, acts like a rebellious teenager rather than an authoritative adult.
Many of Silicon Valley’s highest-profile founders and CEOs threw their support behind Donald Trump in the last election, or rushed to declare their support after he won, for merely tactical reasons. Trump’s campaign—like many political campaigns by members of either party—could be seen as an investment, or indeed a bribe. In return for a donation, a Silicon Valley leader may receive preferential contracts for his companies from the government, protection from anti-trust action, or, at a higher range of influence, a chance to help shape federal policy to his personal benefit, or the benefit of the sectors in which he is most concerned. At worst, this is simply corruption, a coarsening and intensification of American politics’ descent back into the depths of 19th-century graft, before men like Teddy Roosevelt brought a measure of meritocracy and competence to the federal bureaucracies, protecting the making and execution of policy from direct pressure by wealthy groups whose interests are opposed to those of other Americans.
On the other hand, while what’s good for Silicon Valley—and particularly, what’s good for its richest and most politically active leaders—is not necessarily good for America, it’s not necessarily bad either. If the public does not benefit from government contracts going to top donors, and more arguably does not benefit from, for example, attempts to deregulate cryptocurrency markets, it surely does benefit from policies that would protect and augment Silicon Valley’s contributions to the past half-century of American economic growth. To the extent that tech elites understand their own collective best interest in maintaining the special role of our national tech sector (rather than their merely individual interests in cornering markets and crushing rivals), their influence in politics is a good thing for all of us.
In some ways, Silicon Valley elites have been forced, despite themselves, to share the concerns of ordinary Americans. The explosion of crime and homelessness in San Francisco during the early 2020s was so stark that even the most privileged Bay Area executive, engineer, or venture capitalist could hardly avoid being alarmed, depressed, or outraged by these signs of social decay. For elites, the high cost of housing in the Valley and throughout California, the difficulty and expense of building new transportation and energy infrastructure, the low standards of the public educational system, and the proliferation of new schemes for taxing wealth, are also business problems, making the region less attractive as a base. For their white-collar workers, these issues are dire and existential, confronting them—as many Americans in other sectors throughout the country are confronted—with what for most of the 20th century would have been the distinctly un-American thought that they will not be able to provide a better life for their children. Insofar as they recognize these problems, and have a financial stake in solving them, Silicon Valley elites should be a welcome force in our national politics.
Most importantly, the Valley’s elites and would-be elites seem—as evidenced by their interest in defining a canon—newly conscious of their special, exemplary place in American society. Instead of dreaming of seceding from the United States, floating away on a libertarian-utopian island, they are intervening in our political life. In principle, this is a good thing. What works best about Silicon Valley is what used to work best about America, and the Valley’s canon contains lessons and models that might be useful in putting our sclerotic institutions back in working order.
The questions that our culture once posed about what freedom really meant, whether it was individual or collective, found outside or within systems of power, are now perhaps real problems only within Silicon Valley, and within its canon.
Reading the canon’s histories of the Valley, one is struck that behind the latter’s rise lay some of the best, still-functional components of already old and wobbling institutions. In the 1960s and ’70s, federal funding was far-sightedly dispensed by brilliant administrators like J.C.R. Licklider at the Department of Defense, which sponsored the creation of pioneering computer science programs at American universities. Often maligned (for many legitimate reasons) by today’s tech leaders, elite academia not only provided a platform for research into computing, but also opportunities for future Silicon Valley leaders to learn from humanist scholars. If Stanford had not received funding from the military industrial computing complex, and had not hired French theorist René Girard, it is hard to imagine the career of Peter Thiel, who studied and taught at the university, and whose career as a polymath venture capitalist owes much, by his own account, to Girard’s academic studies of imitation, violence, and religion. The lumbering corporate titan Xerox, although unable to make profitable use of its discoveries, funded, through its PARC division in the 1970s, the research that made possible the personal computing revolution of the following decades.
While the federal government, elite universities, and large corporations inspire a well-deserved contempt today among both the general public and renegade elites, especially in the worlds of technology and entrepreneurship, Silicon Valley emerged from those institutions. Today it still carries forward much of what was once most vital in them, and in doing so has, to a remarkable extent, preserved the United States from the descent into mediocrity and dysfunction that seemed to be its likeliest future half a century ago. Without the tech sector, led by Silicon Valley, the American economy would be a static, or shrinking, set of wealth-generating networks stripped alternately by short-sighted financial institutions, politicians equally heedless of the future, and progressive do-gooders who, intentionally or not, punish rather than reward talent.
Silicon Valley elites risk, however, either further degrading the institutions that they mean to save or, in a careless rush to replace them with new institutions imagined along the lines of lean startups, to crush the parts that still work. The federal bureaucracy, the university, and the large corporation, while all ailing in our present social and economic conditions, are each specific entities with their own peculiar structure, ways of instilling character, and orientation towards the future. We need each of them to function properly—that is, to be itself, rather than a mere instrument for generating profits, or for signaling its allegiance to passing moral and political trends.
What Silicon Valley elites have to offer the enfeebled institutions of American society beyond the tech sector is not a program of cost-cutting, unbundling, or reckless “breaking things.” Such programs have long been applied to our institutions by everyone from neoliberal economists to private equity boards to social justice mobs—and the consequence, perversely, has almost always been a reduction in the special core competencies of the institutions targeted, while new, parasitical institutions charged with surveilling their members swell and bloat. There is nothing radical about another round of austerity and moral panic. What the Valley’s leaders can offer—and what America’s institutions desperately need—is their example of individual ambition channeled into larger structures, and long-term planning that aligns tactical flexibility with the resolute commitment to a strategic vision that may take generations to achieve.
Silicon Valley’s leading critics and advocates alike often characterize America’s tech sector in terms of speed—the intense velocity of innovation and deal-making, the exhilarating or disturbing pace of change. But its technologists are perhaps more truly remarkable for their ability to put that frenetic energy in the service of large-scale, decades-long projects. Nearly all of the other institutions of American society in the past half-century, turning back from attempts to master the future, foster narrow, limited forms of expertise that aim only at marginal improvements (often failing to deliver those). Americans, accordingly, find the elites educated by and at the helm of these institutions unworthy of loyalty or respect.
The leaders of Silicon Valley, in contrast, inspire strong feelings, from admiration to jealousy to terror—various forms of recognizing their power to reshape the world. The goals articulated by tech leaders—especially as they enter later phases of their careers more removed from concrete technical and business realities, now free to muse about the destiny of humanity—can range from unobjectionable (eliminating diseases) to desirable but perhaps currently unfeasible (colonizing Mars), to confusing (holding back the advent of the Antichrist). While any particular leader or project may incite consternation and conspiracy theories, even the most outlandish of the former and most paranoid of the latter must be seen as a kind of tribute paid to the fact that Silicon Valley’s elite retains what was once a characteristic of America’s elite generally: the ability to set and achieve ambitious goals that are not justified simply in terms of immediate profit, social justice, or other restrictive frameworks. Almost uniquely among our leadership class, they can still look to the long-term, and can still act on a desire for glory. They are newly aware of themselves as responsible for a particular tradition, and for the future of a nation with few alternative pools of competent leadership.
In Silicon Valley, the spirit of the old American frontier, with its ornery, individualist craving for independence, as well as American high modernism’s confidence that reality itself can be made anew through the coordination of intelligences, both live on. The Valley’s elites, although they sometimes speak in a jargon of neologisms and seem to be obsessed with whatever is most new, have stepped into traditional roles. They style themselves as eccentric, isolated geniuses out of step with the world, or contrarians willing to offer bold opinions and infuriated by constraint of any kind—poses inherited from the world of our great-grandfathers, with its fiercely independent inventors in their home workshops, cantankerous robber barons flouting the courts, and pioneers pulling up stakes for a wilder borderland ahead. At the same time, the Valley’s elites also deploy a more modernist vocabulary that echoes the spirit of the mid-century “New Frontier” in which America’s “best and brightest” could bring about freedom and prosperity for all. Statesmen, sociologists, and CEOs of vast industrial enterprises likewise once saw themselves at the helm of history; they are now reduced, almost entirely, to an ancillary role minding the short-term interests determined by the vagaries of financial markets or the shifting imperatives of moral-political groupthinks.
Silicon Valley’s leaders, of course, are immune to neither of these pressures. The tech sector, indeed, sometimes aggravates the worst tendencies of American culture, from investment driven by the false urgency of hype to products that further weaken our capacities for steady, focused attention. And perhaps by its very success, the Valley has drawn talent away from traditional institutions like the universities, media, and federal government, which already suffer from a lack of brains and character. While no one can ignore its problems or the costs of its success, Silicon Valley remains the most important instrument for American national power and prosperity, whether through the trials of the past half-century or through what may be the still more difficult years ahead. It plays a vital political role in the United States, propping up our national economic power and modeling expansive thinking, long-range planning, and collective action, while professional politicians lack even the rudiments of any of the three. Its leaders and thinkers, moreover, are increasingly aware that the Valley, now several decades old, must protect and transmit the practices and habits of mind that have allowed it to keep alive, for some, the American dream of self-creation. And it might be possible, just as Silicon Valley emerged half a century ago from the crumbling institutions of the modern American order, that out of Silicon Valley today might come the energy and expertise to restore our nation.
As they evaluate their alliance with MAGA, tech elites are unlikely to abandon politics altogether. Nor should we want them to. But their next steps are fraught with danger for all of us. To a frightening degree, our national future will depend on the continuing education of Silicon Valley leadership, on their changing relationship both to a “canon” of books and to the sense, however obscurely felt, that their own human type, with all its characteristic powers to exemplify the American spirit, needs critical supplements from beyond its own resources.
The Silicon Valley Canon itself is evidence of this need. Its readers are drawn to grand theories and bizarre tales by authors who are, many of them, singularly unlike denizens of the contemporary tech-world: religious luddites nostalgic for the medieval village, artists suspicious of money and success, scholars disconnected from the realities of power. Readers of the canon, in other words, find its texts appealing precisely because they seem to be written by people intriguingly unlike themselves, who set at low value the things most esteemed in the Valley and America. Practical-minded elites, as they turn from technology and finance to politics, should, indeed, seek out thinkers with perspectives that they themselves lack to help them clarify their new roles. But these elites, still teenagers in spirit, are, however powerful they seem on the national and global stage, oddly vulnerable to a sort of grooming, following guides whose eccentricity, grandiosity, or incoherence can be confused with wisdom.
Disturbingly, the path of their self-education may lead them on from the adolescent energies of the Valley’s canon not into deeper dialogue with diverse traditions (religious, political, scholarly, etc.) kept in prudent balance by a mature intellect, but into crankish, pseudo-sophisticated displays of misspent intelligence. Seeing our Vice President debate the pope about the ordo amoris, and Vance’s own mentor Peter Thiel invoke the katechon, one has the impression that the leaders of the fragile tech-MAGA alliance resemble nothing so much as middle-class suburban American teenagers protesting the uninspiring and uncompelling culture of their parents by adopting an edgy, esoteric belief system seductively removed from reality and from responsibility. (Notably, the Christian intellectualism of Vance seems to involve no deference to clerical or even papal authority). American academics who wasted formative years studying Lacan and Adorno, or leftist activists who squandered irreplaceable political capital trying to apply gender and critical race theory to the protocols of corporate human resources departments, might recognize an image of their own mistakes. The complicated delusions of ideology do not lead us out of adolescence, but only prolong it, especially if we use bits of jargon from Catholicism and Marxism not to shore up our membership in a social group like a church or party but to signal our personal brilliance.
Politics is the art of gathering people in order to move them. The ideal statesman conceals the full measure of his intelligence from the public, to whom he should appear, to be sure, as a superior man, but superior in a way which is not humiliating, confusing, or alienating for those he leads. The latter should be able to recognize their leader as an outstanding example of the virtues they think or wish that they possess themselves. These are not the most familiar imperatives among Silicon Valley elites. The peculiarities of tech sector fundraising incentivize leaders’ cultivation and display of a marketably quirky and “intellectual” persona over the skills of the savvy politician who knows how to appear exemplary in his greatness and his normalcy. If these elites, as they weigh their options a year into their alliance with MAGA, mean to learn how to get what they really want out of politics—and if the rest of us are to survive their self-education—they will need new books, new teachers, and new virtues.
Blake Smith is a historian and translator. He lives in Chicago.