Silicon Valley's reading list reveals its political ambitions by Henry Ferrell. Henry Ferrell is the Stavros Niarco's Foundation, Agora Institute, Professor of International Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and the author with Abraham Newman of Underground Empire, How America Weaponized the World Economy, read by Pamela Lawrence. In two thousand eight, Paul Graham mused about the cultural differences between great U S cities. Three years earlier, Graham had co founded why Combinator, a start up accelerator that would come to epitomize Silicon Valley and would move there in two thousand nine. But at the time Graham was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which, as he saw it, sent a different message to its inhabitants than did Palo Alto. Cambridge's message was you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those book books you've been meaning to. Silicon Valley respected smarts, Graham wrote, but its message was different, you should be more powerful. He wasn't alone in this assessment. My late friend Aaron Swartz, a member of Why Combinator's first class, fled San Francisco in late two thousand and six for several reasons. He told me later that one of them was how few people in the Bay Area seemed interested in books. Today, it feels as though people there want to talk about nothing but tech luminaries seem to opine endlessly about books and ideas, debating them merits and defects of different flavors of rationalism, of basic economic principles, and of the strengths and weaknesses of democracy and corporate rule. This fervor has yielded a recognizable Silicon Valley canon, and as Elon Musk and his shock troops descend on Washington with intentions of re engineering the Gold government, it's worth paying attention to the books the tech world reads, as well as the ones they don't. Viewed through the canon, Doge's grand effort to cut government down to size is the latest manifestation of a long standing Silicon Valley dream to remake politics in its image. Last August, Tanner Greer, a conservative writer with a large Silicon Valley readership, asked on X what the contents of the vague tech canon might be. He'd been provoked when the writer and technologist Jasmine's son asked why James Scott's Seeing Like a State, an anarchist denunciation of grand structures of government, had become a Silicon Valley bookshelf fixture. The prompt led Patrick Collison, co founder of Stripe and a leading thinker within Silicon Valley, to suggest a list of forty three sources, which he stressed were not those he thought one ought to read, but those that roughly covered the major ideas that are influential here. In a later response, Greer argued that the Canon tied together a cohesive community, providing Silicon Valley leaders with a shared understanding of power and a definition of greatness. Greer, like Graham, spoke of the differences between cities. He described Washington, d C. As an intellectually stultified warren of specialists without soul, arid technocrats who knew their own narrow area of policy but did not read outside of it. In contrast, Silicon Valley was a place of doers who looked to books not for technical information, but for inspiration and advice. The Silicon Valley Canon provided guideposts for how to change the world. Said, Cannon is not directly political. It includes websites like Less Wrong, The Home of the Rationalist move and Slate Star Codex Astro Codex ten for members of the Gray Tribe who see themselves as neither conservative nor properly liberal. Graham's many essays are included as our science fiction novels like Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Much of the canon is business advice on topics such as how to build a startup, but such advice can have a political edge. Peter Teal's Zero to One, co authored with his former student and failed Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters, not only tells startups that they need to aspire to monopoly power or be crushed, but describes Teal's early ambitions, along with other members of the so called PayPal mafia, to create a global private currency that would crush the US dollar. Then there are the Carlylean histories of great Men. Most of the subjects and authors were male who sought to change the world. Older biographies discret decribed men like Robert Moses and Theodore Roosevelt with grand flaws and grander ambitions, who broke with convention and overcame opposition to remake society. Such stories in Greer's description provided Silicon Valley's leaders and aspiring leaders with models of honor and examples of the sort of deeds that brought glory or shame to the doer simply by being done. The newer histories both explained Silicon Valley to itself and tacitly wove its founders and small teams into this epic history of great deeds, suggesting that modern entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, whose biography was on the list, were the latest in a grand lineage that had remade America's role in the world. Putting Musk alongside Teddy Roosevelt didn't simply reinforce Silicon Valley's own mythologized self image as the modern center of creative destruction. It implicitly welded it to politics, contrasting the politically creative energies of the technology industry set on remaking the world for the better to the Washington regulators who frustrated and thwarted entrepreneurial change. Mightn't everything be better if visionary engineers had their way, replacing all the messy, squalid compromises of politics with radical innovation and purpose engineered efficient systems. One book on the List argues this and more. James Davidson and William rees moggs the sovereign individual cheered on the dynamic wealth creating individuals who would use cyberspace to exit corrupt democracies with their constituencies of losers and create their own political order. When the book, originally published in nineteen ninety seven, was reissued in twenty twenty, Teel wrote the preface. Under this simplifying grand narrative, the federal state was, at best, another inefficient industry that was ripe for disruption. At worst, national government and representative democracy were impediments that needed to be swept away, As Davidson and rhys Mogg had argued. From there, it's only a hop, skip and a jump to even more extreme ideas that, while not formally in the cannon, had come to define the tech right. In twenty thirteen, Balagi shrine Vasen, a homegrown intellectual and entrepreneur, gave a y Combinator speech arguing that Silicon Valley had to escape or subvert the control of the East Coast paper belt, which deployed government bureaucracy to stifle innovation. He was quickly offered a job by venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz. The neo reactionary Curtis Jarvin argued that all government employees should be retired, an entrepreneur should become monarchs. Jorvin was plucked from blogging Obscure City by Teal and is now interviewed by publications like The New York Times and cited as an influence by J. D. Vance. We don't know which parts of the cannon Musk has read, or which ones influence the young techies he's hired into Doge, but it's not hard to imagine how his current gambit looks filtered through these ideas. From this vantage, Doge's grand effort to cut government down to size is the newest iteration of an epic narrative of change. Musk, a heroic entrepreneur, will surely make history as his tiny team of disruptive engineers takes on the Leviathan and cuts it down to size. One Doge recruiter framed the challenge as a historic opportunity to build an efficient government and to cut the federal budget by one third. When a small team remakes government wholesale, the outcome will surely be simpler, cheaper, and more effective that, after all, fits with the story that Silicon Valley disruptors tell themselves. From another perspective, hubris is about to get clabbered by nemesis. Jasmine's Son's initial question about why so many people in tech read Seeing Like a State hints at the misunderstandings that trouble the Silicon Valley canon. Many tech elites read the book as a denunciation of government overreach, but Scott was an excoriating critic of the drive to efficiency and simplification that they themselves embody. Scott expanded on Friedrich Hayek's criticisms of the religion of engineers. Hyak, a darling of libertarians, wrote harshly about engineering by social democrats, but was willing to praise dictators like Augusto Pinochet who were enthusiastic about privatization. Scott, in contrast, was willing to indict all forms of social engineering, quoting for example, a description of the military engineer's bulldozing habit of mind, one that sought to clear the ground of encumbrances so as to make a clear beginning on its own inflexible mathematical lines. Musk epitomizes that bulldozing turn of mind. Like the Renaissance engineers who wanted to raise cities with their squalor and inefficiencies and start anew Doze proposes to flens away the complexities of government in a leap of faith that artificial intelligence will do it all better. If the engineers were not thoroughly ignorant of the structures they are demolishing, they might hesitate and lose momentum. Seeing like a state properly understood is a warning not just to bureaucrats but to social engineers. Writ large from Scott's broader perspective, AI is not a solution, but a swift way to make the problem worse. It will replace the gross simplifications of bureaucracy with incomprehensible abst distractions that have been filtered through the hidden layers of artificial neurons that allow it to work. Doje's AI fueled vision of government is a vision from Franz Kofka, not Friedrich Hayek. Doje's attempt to remake government in the image of Silicon Valley will not be the apotheosis of the engineering ideal that Musk hopes for. Even some sympathetic Silicon Valley elites, including Graham, are visibly nervous that it will end in calamity. It may become an object lesson in the importance of all the questions that should be asked by the canon but are not. Canons create miniature universes of discourse which emphasize some values and choices while de emphasizing others, or even concealing them altogether. So what does the Silicon Valley Canon's sideline or leave out? In short, a respect for pluralism and a suspicion of grand projects, both of which used to be quite common among technologists. A better version of the Cannon could take inspiration from two of its anomalous members, Seeing like a state an Anna Wiener's memoir Uncanny Valley. Scott's book sets out to defend Jane Jacob's celebration of the plurality and diversity of self organized human societies against Robert Moses's bulldozers. Wiener's book, which recounts her life working for startups and the online project management site GitHub, provides contemporary evidence of how dark fantasies of control creep in around the edges of Silicon Valley's engineering vision, placing these at the center of a reformed cannon might identify an alternative to Doge's grand dreams of obliterating and building afresh. It could restart fruitful arguments among libertarians and the left that now risk being raised by the alliance between Musk's social media clout and money and Trump's government coercion. Some of this revised canon might draw on Patrick Collison's own bookshelves, which contain a far wider range of ideas than the canon itself. Collison's reading interests tend toward classical liberalism, but writers who rub shoulders on his shelves, like Carl Popper and Eleanor Ostrom, could be brought into debate with less well known liberals like Ernest Gelner and contemporary left liberals like Danielle Allen. All of these thinkers are deeply concerned with building and maintaining a genuinely plural society in which groups can get along despite their differences. Fiction, too, could help build bridges, perhaps by adding books like Ruth Anna Emers's A Half Built Garden that not only imagine dystopia's but ask how people could collectively rebuild under such circumstances. Centering the argument on books like these might liberate the energies of a different cadra of young technology GISTs than the ones Doze recruits from. There are plenty of curious, lively, and culturally omnivorous thinkers in tech, including Sun, who provoked the whole canon debate, as well as Seline Wynn, Eugene Way, Saffron, Huang Dan Wang, and Divia Siddarth. What books would they suggest be added to the canon? What would others say? In response? Silicon Valley's celebration of reading has blended very badly with the worship of power. The problems of the Silicon Valley Canon, and increasingly of Silicon Valley itself, reflect the problems of a monoculture in which people have converged on a particular definition of greatness built around engineering prowess and large scale social disruption that highlights some of the possibilities of technology while occluding others. Perhaps, instead of remaking America so that it reflects the Silicon Valley ethos, we ought to rebuild Silicon Valley's internal economy to include some of the diversity and creativity in the society that surrounds it. The engineer's focus on simplifying and Solving problems can be of great value so long as it is leavened by a deep appreciation of the richness and complexity of the systems that it looks to transform. Without that, it is liable to result in disaster.

Silicon Valley's reading list reveals its political ambitions by Henry Ferrell. Henry Ferrell is the Stavros Niarco's Foundation, Agora Institute, Professor of International Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and the author with Abraham Newman of Underground Empire, How America Weaponized the World Economy, read by Pamela Lawrence. In two thousand eight, Paul Graham mused about the cultural differences between great U S cities. Three years earlier, Graham had co founded why Combinator, a start up accelerator that would come to epitomize Silicon Valley and would move there in two thousand nine. But at the time Graham was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which, as he saw it, sent a different message to its inhabitants than did Palo Alto. Cambridge's message was you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those book books you've been meaning to. Silicon Valley respected smarts, Graham wrote, but its message was different, you should be more powerful. He wasn't alone in this assessment. My late friend Aaron Swartz, a member of Why Combinator's first class, fled San Francisco in late two thousand and six for several reasons. He told me later that one of them was how few people in the Bay Area seemed interested in books. Today, it feels as though people there want to talk about nothing but tech luminaries seem to opine endlessly about books and ideas, debating them merits and defects of different flavors of rationalism, of basic economic principles, and of the strengths and weaknesses of democracy and corporate rule. This fervor has yielded a recognizable Silicon Valley canon, and as Elon Musk and his shock troops descend on Washington with intentions of re engineering the Gold government, it's worth paying attention to the books the tech world reads, as well as the ones they don't. Viewed through the canon, Doge's grand effort to cut government down to size is the latest manifestation of a long standing Silicon Valley dream to remake politics in its image. Last August, Tanner Greer, a conservative writer with a large Silicon Valley readership, asked on X what the contents of the vague tech canon might be. He'd been provoked when the writer and technologist Jasmine's son asked why James Scott's Seeing Like a State, an anarchist denunciation of grand structures of government, had become a Silicon Valley bookshelf fixture. The prompt led Patrick Collison, co founder of Stripe and a leading thinker within Silicon Valley, to suggest a list of forty three sources, which he stressed were not those he thought one ought to read, but those that roughly covered the major ideas that are influential here. In a later response, Greer argued that the Canon tied together a cohesive community, providing Silicon Valley leaders with a shared understanding of power and a definition of greatness. Greer, like Graham, spoke of the differences between cities. He described Washington, d C. As an intellectually stultified warren of specialists without soul, arid technocrats who knew their own narrow area of policy but did not read outside of it. In contrast, Silicon Valley was a place of doers who looked to books not for technical information, but for inspiration and advice. The Silicon Valley Canon provided guideposts for how to change the world. Said, Cannon is not directly political. It includes websites like Less Wrong, The Home of the Rationalist move and Slate Star Codex Astro Codex ten for members of the Gray Tribe who see themselves as neither conservative nor properly liberal. Graham's many essays are included as our science fiction novels like Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Much of the canon is business advice on topics such as how to build a startup, but such advice can have a political edge. Peter Teal's Zero to One, co authored with his former student and failed Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters, not only tells startups that they need to aspire to monopoly power or be crushed, but describes Teal's early ambitions, along with other members of the so called PayPal mafia, to create a global private currency that would crush the US dollar. Then there are the Carlylean histories of great Men. Most of the subjects and authors were male who sought to change the world. Older biographies discret decribed men like Robert Moses and Theodore Roosevelt with grand flaws and grander ambitions, who broke with convention and overcame opposition to remake society. Such stories in Greer's description provided Silicon Valley's leaders and aspiring leaders with models of honor and examples of the sort of deeds that brought glory or shame to the doer simply by being done. The newer histories both explained Silicon Valley to itself and tacitly wove its founders and small teams into this epic history of great deeds, suggesting that modern entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, whose biography was on the list, were the latest in a grand lineage that had remade America's role in the world. Putting Musk alongside Teddy Roosevelt didn't simply reinforce Silicon Valley's own mythologized self image as the modern center of creative destruction. It implicitly welded it to politics, contrasting the politically creative energies of the technology industry set on remaking the world for the better to the Washington regulators who frustrated and thwarted entrepreneurial change. Mightn't everything be better if visionary engineers had their way, replacing all the messy, squalid compromises of politics with radical innovation and purpose engineered efficient systems. One book on the List argues this and more. James Davidson and William rees moggs the sovereign individual cheered on the dynamic wealth creating individuals who would use cyberspace to exit corrupt democracies with their constituencies of losers and create their own political order. When the book, originally published in nineteen ninety seven, was reissued in twenty twenty, Teel wrote the preface. Under this simplifying grand narrative, the federal state was, at best, another inefficient industry that was ripe for disruption. At worst, national government and representative democracy were impediments that needed to be swept away, As Davidson and rhys Mogg had argued. From there, it's only a hop, skip and a jump to even more extreme ideas that, while not formally in the cannon, had come to define the tech right. In twenty thirteen, Balagi shrine Vasen, a homegrown intellectual and entrepreneur, gave a y Combinator speech arguing that Silicon Valley had to escape or subvert the control of the East Coast paper belt, which deployed government bureaucracy to stifle innovation. He was quickly offered a job by venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz. The neo reactionary Curtis Jarvin argued that all government employees should be retired, an entrepreneur should become monarchs. Jorvin was plucked from blogging Obscure City by Teal and is now interviewed by publications like The New York Times and cited as an influence by J. D. Vance. We don't know which parts of the cannon Musk has read, or which ones influence the young techies he's hired into Doge, but it's not hard to imagine how his current gambit looks filtered through these ideas. From this vantage, Doge's grand effort to cut government down to size is the newest iteration of an epic narrative of change. Musk, a heroic entrepreneur, will surely make history as his tiny team of disruptive engineers takes on the Leviathan and cuts it down to size. One Doge recruiter framed the challenge as a historic opportunity to build an efficient government and to cut the federal budget by one third. When a small team remakes government wholesale, the outcome will surely be simpler, cheaper, and more effective that, after all, fits with the story that Silicon Valley disruptors tell themselves. From another perspective, hubris is about to get clabbered by nemesis. Jasmine's Son's initial question about why so many people in tech read Seeing Like a State hints at the misunderstandings that trouble the Silicon Valley canon. Many tech elites read the book as a denunciation of government overreach, but Scott was an excoriating critic of the drive to efficiency and simplification that they themselves embody. Scott expanded on Friedrich Hayek's criticisms of the religion of engineers. Hyak, a darling of libertarians, wrote harshly about engineering by social democrats, but was willing to praise dictators like Augusto Pinochet who were enthusiastic about privatization. Scott, in contrast, was willing to indict all forms of social engineering, quoting for example, a description of the military engineer's bulldozing habit of mind, one that sought to clear the ground of encumbrances so as to make a clear beginning on its own inflexible mathematical lines. Musk epitomizes that bulldozing turn of mind. Like the Renaissance engineers who wanted to raise cities with their squalor and inefficiencies and start anew Doze proposes to flens away the complexities of government in a leap of faith that artificial intelligence will do it all better. If the engineers were not thoroughly ignorant of the structures they are demolishing, they might hesitate and lose momentum. Seeing like a state properly understood is a warning not just to bureaucrats but to social engineers. Writ large from Scott's broader perspective, AI is not a solution, but a swift way to make the problem worse. It will replace the gross simplifications of bureaucracy with incomprehensible abst distractions that have been filtered through the hidden layers of artificial neurons that allow it to work. Doje's AI fueled vision of government is a vision from Franz Kofka, not Friedrich Hayek. Doje's attempt to remake government in the image of Silicon Valley will not be the apotheosis of the engineering ideal that Musk hopes for. Even some sympathetic Silicon Valley elites, including Graham, are visibly nervous that it will end in calamity. It may become an object lesson in the importance of all the questions that should be asked by the canon but are not. Canons create miniature universes of discourse which emphasize some values and choices while de emphasizing others, or even concealing them altogether. So what does the Silicon Valley Canon's sideline or leave out? In short, a respect for pluralism and a suspicion of grand projects, both of which used to be quite common among technologists. A better version of the Cannon could take inspiration from two of its anomalous members, Seeing like a state an Anna Wiener's memoir Uncanny Valley. Scott's book sets out to defend Jane Jacob's celebration of the plurality and diversity of self organized human societies against Robert Moses's bulldozers. Wiener's book, which recounts her life working for startups and the online project management site GitHub, provides contemporary evidence of how dark fantasies of control creep in around the edges of Silicon Valley's engineering vision, placing these at the center of a reformed cannon might identify an alternative to Doge's grand dreams of obliterating and building afresh. It could restart fruitful arguments among libertarians and the left that now risk being raised by the alliance between Musk's social media clout and money and Trump's government coercion. Some of this revised canon might draw on Patrick Collison's own bookshelves, which contain a far wider range of ideas than the canon itself. Collison's reading interests tend toward classical liberalism, but writers who rub shoulders on his shelves, like Carl Popper and Eleanor Ostrom, could be brought into debate with less well known liberals like Ernest Gelner and contemporary left liberals like Danielle Allen. All of these thinkers are deeply concerned with building and maintaining a genuinely plural society in which groups can get along despite their differences. Fiction, too, could help build bridges, perhaps by adding books like Ruth Anna Emers's A Half Built Garden that not only imagine dystopia's but ask how people could collectively rebuild under such circumstances. Centering the argument on books like these might liberate the energies of a different cadra of young technology GISTs than the ones Doze recruits from. There are plenty of curious, lively, and culturally omnivorous thinkers in tech, including Sun, who provoked the whole canon debate, as well as Seline Wynn, Eugene Way, Saffron, Huang Dan Wang, and Divia Siddarth. What books would they suggest be added to the canon? What would others say? In response? Silicon Valley's celebration of reading has blended very badly with the worship of power. The problems of the Silicon Valley Canon, and increasingly of Silicon Valley itself, reflect the problems of a monoculture in which people have converged on a particular definition of greatness built around engineering prowess and large scale social disruption that highlights some of the possibilities of technology while occluding others. Perhaps, instead of remaking America so that it reflects the Silicon Valley ethos, we ought to rebuild Silicon Valley's internal economy to include some of the diversity and creativity in the society that surrounds it. The engineer's focus on simplifying and Solving problems can be of great value so long as it is leavened by a deep appreciation of the richness and complexity of the systems that it looks to transform. Without that, it is liable to result in disaster.