by
Adrian Daub
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There are plenty of people like Alice in San Francisco. People who were fed up with tech, or who found that tech no longer wanted them. Who had become wealthy enough to find something new, or who simply wanted more out of life. What Alice discovered that evening (and on many evenings since) is that many in the tech industry have an intuitive, yet all the more keen, sense of the boundaries of their sociotope. A young woman like Alice, impressively tattooed and nonwhite, especially a young woman who served them Cuervo shots and mixed good drinks, isn't part of it to them. And the suspicion that she might speak their language, know their world, comes as a shock, almost a betrayal. In other words: These people understand their own industry as both dominant and esoteric; everyone must be in its thrall, but not everyone can be allowed to be part of it.
heh
[...] One reason why we simply ignore the failures of the Boring Company, like those of the Metaverse or self-driving Teslas, and then eventually collectively forget them, is because we generally tend to talk and complain about government projects in this way. Think what you will about the California High Speed Rail, but the new system will definitely be more useful once built than the Las Vegas Loop. Even when Silicon Valley's efforts become monuments to hubris, failure, and incompetence, they are indicators of power.
Because, as is almost always the case when Silicon Valley talks about itself these days, they are based on the unspoken distinction of who is allowed what. In a September 2025 interview, Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta's investments in Al might not pay off. "If we end up having wasted a few hundred billion dollars, that would, of course, be very unfortunate," Zuckerberg said!" But it was important to be involved. He considered AI "the most important technology enabling the most new products, innovations, and value creation in history." A potential $600 billion of wasted investment, he argued, was the lesser of two evils. This was six months before the company quietly sunsetted the metaverse, another 8o billion dollar investment that failed to pay off.
Skepticism toward government power can be a very good thing. But those who criticize the capacity of government have simply redirected their childlike belief in the creative potential of the central state toward private industry. They now naively believe that the future is identical with whatever the Silicon Valley tinkerers will present at the next developers' conference. More importantly, they believe that the founders' mistakes, ruins, and failures are merely minor hitches along the path to a future dominated by them. Everything the state touches gives them cause for skepticism, a sign that the nation-state and its specific form of sovereignty are on the wane. Nothing-no Vegas Loop, no metaverse, no AI nonsense clogging every communication channel—can shake their belief that the tech giant and its specific form of sovereignty represent the future
Cartoonists, sex workers, mommy bloggers, book reviewers: there’s a pretty clear gender dimension to this division of labor. The programmers at Yelp are predominantly men. Its reviewers are mostly female—and, at least in the initial years of the company, this was even more true as you got to the most active “elite” reviewers. Early rewards for elite reviewers—spa dates and skin care events—suggest that the company was aware of this and counted on it. 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. The problem isn’t that the act of providing content is ignored or uncompensated but rather that it isn’t recognized as labor. It is praised as essential, applauded as a form of civic engagement. Remunerated it is not.
Rand presents a world in which self-reliance is easy and pure. And her work depends on an understanding of self-reliance that doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny once you’ve had to, you know, actually self-rely. She is an absolutist about things that are clearly socially conditioned, which can give her world a kind of taxidermic feel. She celebrates capitalist enterprise while ignoring the communal and moral frameworks that it presupposes in order to function. Her fiction is almost entirely about the world of adult workplaces—architecture firms, boardrooms—but it seems to have a purely aesthetic view of what work is all about. There are many moments in Atlas Shrugged (1957) and The Fountainhead (1943) in which the fun house version of capitalist society presented in these books comes into gorgeous, bizarre focus. Consider the moment when the all-powerful architecture critic (yes, you read that right) Ellsworth Toohey, who is a Marxist and also in league with monopoly capitalists and also beloved by the populace, schemes to take over Gail Wynand’s newspaper, the Banner, on the strength of (and I’m not making this up) his writing a column in it. The right pieces are there, but they hang together in baffling ways—like an economic system dreamed up by Borges.
Again and again, Pixar indulges the tropes of flip-flop-wearing Northern California but ends up with something that sounds a lot like Ayn Rand. For a big-budget Disney production, Wall-E gets pretty brutal in its takedown of consumer capitalism. Thanks to the efforts of a giant corporation, Buy n Large, humanity has been reduced to large indolent blobs, driving around in jazzy chairs in a Carnival Cruise–style spaceship, waited on by subservient robots. 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 Valley Randians: they are disgusted not so much by the manipulators as by the manipulated. This is how tech entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel manage to be both vocal opponents of elites and hugely elitist: if you’re dumb enough to buy what I’m selling, he seems to think, you really shouldn’t be voting.
The Thiel Foundation, set up in 2006, has taken an active role in disseminating Girard’s “mimetic theory”—it is one of the foundation’s three central tasks, along with the Thiel Fellowships and an incubator program for small companies. The Imitatio group within the foundation funds book series, periodicals, and conferences. Thanks to the foundation’s money, the Girardians’ reach is far. They are well connected within Stanford’s fabulously wealthy Hoover Institution. More recently, the Imitatio crew provided intellectual cover and manpower for Donald Trump’s transition team—suddenly, people you’d see around Stanford’s campus trying to put together panels to discuss Girard’s work seemed to be taking up offices in Trump Tower. A strange trajectory for any academic theory, let alone one in the humanities.
oh lol
Girard’s ideas are another flyby between tech and the academy. The Girardians may lament the marginal status of his theories within the academy; even Thiel may lament it. But secretly, or not so secretly, that marginality is what draws a man like Thiel to Girard. For in Girard you get your own intuitions repackaged as esoteric knowledge. You get a feeling of oppositionality while remaining at the center of things. You get to feel like a victim while having all the power. And this, as we’ll see, may be the most secret of Silicon Valley’s secret desires.
But the concept of disruption also tells a more covert and fundamental story about continuity and discontinuity, and it concerns capitalism. Are the changes the tech industry brings, or claims to bring, fundamental transformations of how capitalism functions, or are they an extension, perhaps a bit less varnished, of how it has always functioned? You can see why different parties would have a lot at stake in the answer to this question: it determines what regulatory oversight is necessary or desirable, what role the government or unions should play in a new industry like tech, and even how the industry and its titans ought to be discussed.
The rhetoric of disruption frequently creates solidity, stability, and uniformity where they didn’t exist. Just as kvetching over political correctness often requires the invention of the restrictions and pieties which it sees itself as engaged in a titanic struggle against, so the disrupter portrays even the most staid cottage industry as a Death Star against which its plucky rebels have to do battle. Misperceiving, misunderstanding, or simply ignoring the industry one is seeking to disrupt seems, if not necessary, then at least no impediment to disrupting it. The world is out there, stupid and driven by habits. You just graduated from college and have had a credit card for three years. You’re still on your parents’ car insurance. Would the world in that situation not seem like one large opportunity for disruption?
Disruption depends on regarding people as participating in the business cycle who insist that they’re doing no such thing—another aspect of creative destruction that actually retains a lot of the idea’s Marxist DNA. And it depends on an extension of the sense in which the terms “monopoly” or “oligopoly” can be applied. Did big taxi companies once dominate personal transportation, or did thousands of individual cabbies who were barely making ends meet? Did Yelp disrupt the oligopoly of people having an opinion? The term “disruption” makes a monolith of the particulars of the everyday, a leviathan out of structures and organizations that are old, have grown up organically, and are therefore pretty scattered and decentralized.