Apple headquarters is located five blocks down from the front door of the high school Steve Jobs attended as a teenager. Its $5 billion, donut-shaped flagship is home to a company that today is worth more than $2 trillion, arguably the most successful American company ever. It all started in a garage at 2066 Crist Drive, an eight-minute drive from CEO Tim Cook’s office. A story like this will not happen again in this place. Silicon Valley—its ethos, its creative fires, its ideas—lives on only in the surviving four or five mega-corporations that have come to dominate the headlines and the stock market. All the rest of it—the garages, the coffee shop pitches, the “change the world” missionary zeal—has guttered out.
But what a run the region had. At the end of the 1980s, the famed venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins looked back and said that we had just witnessed “the largest legal creation of wealth on the planet.” The media rebuked him for his hubris, and he quickly apologized, but the wealth generated by tech companies in the 2010s makes the 1980s look tame. As 2020 comes to a close, tech companies account for nearly 40 percent of the S&P 500.
Nevertheless, it’s hard to think of a more vilified industry today than tech. Facebook, Twitter, and the other remaining giants have attracted antitrust scrutiny from Congress and, with Google, a lawsuit from the Justice Department. A slew of new books and documentaries heap scorn on these companies’ privacy rules and custodianship of user data. These former darlings of the world draw ire from all quarters and are losing allies fast. Republicans and Democrats alike are united in condemning tech (albeit sometimes for different reasons), whether for its role in spreading misinformation, undermining political discourse, polarizing Americans, or censoring conservative viewpoints.
Adrian Daub, a professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford, believes this turbulence springs from the thin and unstable “intellectual bedrock” of the tech industry. His new book, What Tech Calls Thinking, excavates the flimsy old ideas Silicon Valley presents as intelligent and profound. According to Daub, concealing or forgetting the origins of weak ideas has allowed the leaders of tech companies to get away with far more than their peers in other sectors of the economy. Tech’s bogus philosophy has diverted the public’s attention from the socially undesirable effects of its massive private successes.
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