Tech allure undeniably abounds. The pioneer journey, the migration from east to west with the dreams of wealth and utopia is eternal. Novelist Edward Bellamy once had dreams of a socialist utopia, writing in Looking Backward about a man who wakes up at a future time of peace, prosperity, and equality. But unlike the novel, it’s not clear where reality begins or ends. 

A history of tech is the living dream; the 49ers and the Gold Rush and the aesthetic brilliance, the flowing pastures and valleys of Central and Northern California. It’s the confluence of money and poetry straining against the likes of Steinbeck and Kerouac, as if it occupies a deeply poetic place but the words just don’t fit. And as the words have slowly failed, the poetic energy has risen and is burning off with the many hopes of action, change and revolution. This is the pioneer myth. 

Myths express nonsense and truth and can be socially positive when this tension persists. The Silicon Valley tech mythology is however increasingly alluring because it denies the tension, making the myth lived or literal. This literal interpretation of the tech mythos likely originates in the word “innovation.” Innovation dates back to Ancient Greek word kainos or “new” and the later Latin verb innovare. It appears in 13^th century legal documents with negative connotations, implying to renew or alter, presumably to change needlessly or corrupt. By the 16^th century, it is simply a noun that expresses action—the act of introducing, typically something new. It was popularized in technical reports from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, where it is used in the context of a new method or technique.

But what is new? When we look closely at common examples of innovation, in retrospect, many appear to be inevitabilities. The experience of “new” results from perceptual limits. The logical conclusions could have been drawn by seemingly anyone at some point in that era, and while history records winners and obscures or leaves out losers, there are a few notable accounts of losers that had similar ideas or inventions, losing only because of unfavorable circumstances—chance events, a lack of resources and networking possibilities, or a combination of both, that failed to properly frame the idea or invention as important. Reimann and Minkowski are not popularly aligned with the General Theory of Relativity though their mathematical work on extra dimensional spaces and non-Euclidean geometries anticipated it, bringing to the forefront questions about the geometries around us (if time becomes another special dimension, a mathematical construct, time, like space, must be malleable, and so on).

The internet seems remarkably revolutionary too. But was it just the next iteration? Industry had invented the means to communicate over great distances with the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, and the television. And what of the PC? Hundreds of years ago Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, and even the Ancient Greeks far earlier, had discussed or created programmable, gear-driven computing machines. Ideas don’t change, in other words, it’s the interpretation or realization of those ideas that has changed. As with human behavior/psychology, interpretations may be popular and revolutionary because of randomness or authorities, knowingly or unknowingly, that make it so.  

I was recently reading the Paper Belt on Fire, a book that exploits this tech mythos and a good example of the modern spiritualization of innovation, straying from its rather mundane technical usage and avoiding any suggestion of its once derogatory usage. The book is a capitalistic hymn that praises the virtues of a technologized world. And it’s alluring. It always has been. This is why people flock to tech, binding capitalistic interests to dreamers; an old story that endlessly cycles, digitized Westward moving pioneers in search of a better world. But as with the pioneers before, this world was, on arrival, less perfect than imagined; in fact, it could be downright oppressive, yet some did find gold, and it’s to them that people look with lonely, admiring eyes as they hold the myth high up, forever in sight and far off. In its details, the book’s argument doesn’t seem mythical. It’s quite reasonable as if it’s outlining unassailable facts. And that’s the problem.

While I don’t have an anti-capitalistic philosophy—in fact, capitalism is, I think, the most efficient method to organize human behavior (that’s what economies do: organize humans, better than governments, which are largely subordinate)—I began to see the worries of philosophers like Jacque Ellul, Herbert Marcuse, and Allan Bloom throughout the book. More on that later.

For one, what makes money needn’t be very imaginative or impactful. It could be as the historical usage implies a needless renewal or rehashing of an idea or product that was fine as is. That’s the dream of the entrepreneurial or capitalistic space that the book would have you believe. To live this tech dream, move from the university, don’t let it profit from your talents, and change the world with your brilliance. Innovate as in the newfound spiritual sense of the word.

It is well meaning. And, as I’ve said, alluring. It begins by generalizing a debate that began with collegiate athletics. That debate has focused on whether the “student athlete” label is exploitative branding; in that athletes participating in major sports aren’t students in any traditional sense since they construct a very profitable brand for the school and yet don’t share in the profits. Paper Belt on Fire reframes this debate for the academically or intellectually gifted non-athlete. Is this also exploitative? Have we unfairly stigmatized alternative career paths? —needlessly relegating talented students to training grounds. If the reader accepts this, the author suggests that an entrepreneurial fellowship may be a suitable substitute.

I’m unwilling to immediately accept this, unlike the athlete’s position. Throwing a 100-mph fastball is a strong financial predictor. Solving a Rubik’s cube in record time may predict something, but it’s not future financial success. The opportunity cost, the money one misses out on, in opting to attend a university is negligible for even the most talented student unless they are from wealthy families or are famous and already well connected, at which point the university benefits more from their attendance (economically). And it’s these individuals, really a small percentage, that would benefit most from the author’s proposed alternative path. Of course, this isn’t agreed upon; elites are elite because of conspicuous status symbols, and the university degree is a classic example.

This might be changing in Silicon Valley, the main topic of the book, with its odd mixture of elites that can easily flaunt status while simultaneously attacking the institutions that create and support it. What we’ve observed in the past 50 years or so is that while the oil magnate, for obvious reasons, desires stable institutions, the tech culture has spawned comparably wealthy individuals from a unique “disruptor” culture. And from this almost occult source, an individual may have no problem benefiting from institutions and later outwardly undermining them. The tech world, however, never asks for permission to disrupt; that’s slow and archaic. It quietly changes the world without anyone’s permission, confident that the technologized world of apps, gadgets, and wearables magically overcomes basic human psychology and frailty, all but guaranteeing a utopian techno civilization.

Since I work in tech, and have maintained, I think, a healthy distance from the hype, I’m both sympathetic to the book’s message, the tech culture, and fear its broader societal implications. I will get into this below