The Rhetoric of Big Tech

Josh Landy
Are tech companies really making the world a better place?

Ray Briggs
Does it take a genius to found a startup?

Josh Landy
How can Silicon Valley believe its own hype?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from our respective living rooms via the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Josh Landy
…continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the Philosophy and Literature Initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re thinking about the Rhetoric of Big Tech.

Josh Landy
You know, Silicon Valley may be full of so-called techies, but they sure have a lot of storytellers in their ranks.

Ray Briggs
I’m sensing some disdain for the tech industry there—I would have thought a literature guy like you would appreciate storytelling.

Josh Landy
Oh, I love fictions, Ray, but you fictions are stories everyone knows aren’t true. Whereas big tech companies talk about making the world a better place, doing no evil, caring about social issues. That’s all fiction. That’s just lies.

Ray Briggs
But isn’t some of it true. I mean, we have whole libraries at our fingertips, and we get to teach online while we shelter in place. And hey, we can talk to like-minded people from all over the world.

Josh Landy
Great. So you can find a global community of people who share your addiction to with funny cat videos or whatever? Big whoop!

Ray Briggs
Hey, what have you got against cat videos? I mean, that one we’re the kitten plays the piano—it’s really cute. Anyway, I don’t think you can dismiss Internet communities as frivolous. I mean, what about people from marginalized groups who live alone and isolated? And thanks to platforms like Twitter, they can find each other connect and organize politically.

Josh Landy
Yeah, and with the same technology like-minded extremists can find each other to share their toxic ideologies and an organized violent riots.

Ray Briggs
Oh, you can’t blame the internet companies for violent extremists. When terrorists send letters to each other, do you blame the post office?

Josh Landy
I don’t know—is the post office also sowing political division, selling outrage and spreading this information while raking in the big bucks?

Ray Briggs
They’re definitely not raking in the big bucks. But come on—don’t you think it’s really politicians who are to blame for our political division?

Josh Landy
Well, as far as I’m concerned, there’s plenty of blame to go around, Ray. I mean, yeah, politicians, sure. But tech companies actively encourage trolling and bullying, or as they call it, “engagement.” And then they turn around and say, it’s not their responsibility when people do those exact things.

Ray Briggs
Whoa—I think you need to zoom out a bit and not get so caught up in what’s happening right now in politics. I mean, why don’t think about the way software has transformed medical record keeping or library access?

Josh Landy
If you can get past the paywall…

Ray Briggs
Oh, come on. If it wasn’t for the latest technology, Philosophy Talk wouldn’t be on the air during a pandemic.

Josh Landy
Touché—okay. Fair enough. Look, I’m not saying everything that comes out of the tech industry is bad. I just don’t like the way they talk. It’s all dropping out, disrupting—whatever happened to stay in school and preserving stuff that’s good?

Ray Briggs
What’s wrong with disrupting the status quo?

Josh Landy
The status quo includes drivers and food delivery people who now can’t get employee benefits or on a decent wage.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, okay. I see how tech has some bad consequences. But aren’t techies just regular people just trying to get by in an economy that’s hard for everybody?

Josh Landy
That’s not how they describe themselves, Ray. There’s this whole mythology they built up—all those archetypes they appeal to, like the genius iconoclast with a bold vision for the future; the plucky little startup taking on an industry Goliath.

Ray Briggs
Aha, there you go again, complaining about narratives. Admit it—that’s what’s really bothering you.

Josh Landy
Well, yeah, I mean, these aren’t fun fictions. They’re dangerous deceptions. And all that mythologizing—it allows them to dodge responsibility for the problems they’ve helped to bring about.

Ray Briggs
Well, that’s just what our guest thinks—it’s Adrian Daub from Stanford. We’ll be talking to him in just a bit. His new book, “What Tech Calls Thinking,” looks at the way Silicon Valley hides rapacious behavior with a veneer of shiny rhetoric

Josh Landy
Like for example, Uber and Lyft. In 2020, they bankrolled initiative in California, allowing companies to treat workers as independent contractors, giving them fewer benefits. But they phrased it as—get this—a civil rights issue. And they won.

Ray Briggs
So we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to find out more. She files this report.

Holly McDede
Sam Harnett is a tech and labor reporter at KQED in San Francisco—although he sort of takes exception to the phrase “tech reporter.”

Sam Harnett
If you’re covering the extractive capitalism happening at a major corporation that’s just using the internet to make money and profit.

Holly McDede
Many of the people who consider themselves tech journalists aren’t really reporting on technology,

Sam Harnett
Like, what technology does Uber have? It has an app. I mean, even Google—I mean, Google’s search algorithms, okay, you can construe that as technology. But really, they’re gathering data and running an advertising business. So I think it’s a stretch to call these journalists “tech journalists” when really what they are reporting on are corporations that are using the internet to make money.

Holly McDede
Harnett is also the author of a paper entitled “Words Matter: How Tech Media Helped Write Gig Companies Into Existence.” He’s covered companies like Lyft for seven years—almost since it was founded. Lyft gave drivers fuzzy pink mustaches and marketed itself as a tech company that put the power of sharing rides directly into people hands.

Lyft ad
Drivers with spare seats should be able to share em—make extra money, get paid on their own terms, and give out giant pink mustaches for the front of every car. Whoa, cowboy!

Holly McDede
Food and grocery delivery companies like Instacart, DoorDash and Postmates also emerged into the gig economy. Harnett remembers watching with alarm as words like “pivot,” “rideshare,” and “collaborative consumption” began to appear in news stories.

Sam Harnett
Sometimes these terms and rhetoric come out of the companies, and a lot of the times it came out of bad journalism. You know, like the term sharing economy, for example. Uber and Lyft weren’t running advertisements with, you know, we are the sharing economy,

Holly McDede
But they didn’t need to. Reporters and pundits began describing this for them.

Sam Harnett
Companies like Uber and Airbnb and Lyft ran with it. They’re like, alright, that’s great. You want to call sharing? We can accept that.

Holly McDede
These corporations had a kind of futuristic utopian glow about them. And Harnett says journalists are always looking to write about something new. Framing these companies as new and innovative platforms have convinced lawmakers that they were different from other corporations.

Sam Harnett
Therefore we should not be held by the laws that regulate employees because those are old laws and we’re new companies. They can argue that they deserve an entirely new regulatory scheme—which is exactly what they got in {roposition 22 .

Holly McDede
In November 2020, California voters decided to pass Proposition 22. It exempts a handful of gig companies from following a state labor law so they can continue classifying their workers as independent contractors. Gig companies pumped over $181 million into this ballot measure. In their advertising, they billed this effort as a social justice issue.

Maya Angelou
Lift up your eyes upon this day, breaking for you. Give birth again to the dream.

Holly McDede
in one ad for the measure, you can hear Maya Angelou reading “On the Pulse of the Morning.”

Maya Angelou
Good morning.

Holly McDede
Then these words appear on the screen: “Every day is a new chance to lift each other up. Lyft up provides free rides to communities who lack access to jobs, food and basic services.” Prop 22 Supporters argue workers want to be independent and being an employee would take away that freedom.

Prop 22 ad
Protecting more flexibility and providing historical benefits are what we’re fighting for. Vote ‘yes’ on Prop 22 to help create a better path forward for drivers.

Holly McDede
And the measure passed. Lyft’s CEO celebrated, saying prop 22 would be a model for other states. Uber and Lyft drivers and labor unions have sued to overturn it and President Joe Biden has said he’ll move to classify these workers as employees. As for reporter, Sam Harnett, he still struggles to stop himself from using terms and rhetoric that paint gig companies in a favorable light.

Sam Harnett
I’m still getting the point and be like, Wait, why am I calling this company a startup? Like what does it even mean to call it a startup? These terms are often loaded against workers. And the rhetoric benefits those in power.

Holly McDede
In response to the lawsuit, companies like Uber and Lyft say voters across the political spectrum spoke loud and clear. But when the rhetoric of big tech is so loud, it’s hard to tell who’s doing the talking.

Silicon Valley
It’s like you need both halves of the brain, right? The Jobs and the Wozniak, the ying and the yang.

Holly McDede
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly Chima deed.

Josh Landy
The rhetoric benefits those in power. Thanks for that important report. Holly. I’m Josh Landy and with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs. Today we’re thinking about the rhetoric of big tech.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Adrian Daub, who’s a professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Stanford University, and the author of What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry Into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley.” Adrian, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Adrian Daub
Thanks for having me.

Josh Landy
So Adrian, as a Stanford professor like us, you’ve obviously taught a lot of students who went to work in the tech industry. Is that what first got you interested in thinking about the rhetoric of Silicon Valley?

Adrian Daub
Yeah, absolutely. The book kind of grew out of conversations with students of mine, who were, as I felt, too kind of starry-eyed in approaching these companies and what it meant to work for them and to bring about their visions. But as I kept working on the book, I felt that my students vision or idea of these companies was also changing was becoming far more critical. So in the end, while I may have written it for them, I ended up learning a lot from students who went to tech as well.

Ray Briggs
So Adrian, Josh, obviously has a pretty low opinion of Silicon Valley, which it sounds like you might be sympathetic to. But tech is still held in pretty high regard, like it’s still, you know, considered respectable, or even prestigious to get a job with Twitter or Google. So why do you think that is?

Adrian Daub
Yeah, that was one of the questions that I really wanted to address in the book. I think that there is something very interesting about the tech industry sort of being able to pretend not to be an industry in some way, right? That means that working there doesn’t mean the same thing as working for BP or something like that. And I sort of think of it as kind of like, you know, you’ve heard of regulatory capture, where a company kind of takes a hold of the mechanisms that are meant to impose order on it. I think this is imaginative capture: these companies have, in some ways, transformed our value systems on a broad societal basis—far outside of the Bay Area, far outside of Silicon Valley—and have have sort of created this way of thinking that that makes what they do seem a lot more innocuous, and a lot more self-evident than it really is.

Josh Landy
But okay, look, some of our most wonderful students, some of my best friends, work in tech. I mean, surely these aren’t all bad people, right?

Adrian Daub
Not at all. And I should say that I am not really even interested in like—this is not a book of sociology. I did not ask a rank and file, you know, Google employee, what they thought. It’s about how these industries present themselves to a broader public. And some of the most important and interesting critiques that I confronted while—or that I sort of engaged with while writing the book come out of these companies themselves. These are brilliant people, in many cases, they’ve thought about this. And they’re often deeply troubled by what’s going on in these companies. You know, they go at it from a gender and sexuality standpoint, they think about how race functions in Silicon Valley, they think about class functions in Silicon Valley, all that. But, you know, when when you’re opening a nice big spread about some new app that’s going to, you know, disrupt X or revolutionize Y, all that’s gone, right? Like if you’re opening, you know, Wired magazine, or if you have a feature in your local news program or something like that, it’s once again, this kind of glitzy future of of disruption, failing better, etc, etc.

Ray Briggs
So when I say that, like, the tech industry or a company has a problem, which people am I attributing that problem to? Like any of them? The CEOs? Like, everybody who works in the industry?

Adrian Daub
Well, it’s, I think it’s a mix of both right? On the one hand, and there are definitely structures that are imposed from the top down. But there is also a kind of ethos that some of these people subscribe to, often without, I think, fully realizing it, or realizing that it’s not ultimately good, but feeling they have no choice in the matter, right? Especially when it comes to questions of gender and race, right? A lot of these companies understand they have a problem there. And yet they hold on to these kind of value judgments about what’s, you know, a typical techie, what counts as a tech worker, who counts as a full time employee, who counts as working on the main business—the main mission of the company, as opposed to, you know, all the other cool stuff like HR, etc, etc, that reinscribe these kind of inequalities. And so I don’t think it is just about, you know, the sort of leaders of these companies. It’s to some extent, the fact that the people working under them accept that this is kind of plausible, to some extent.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about the rhetoric of big tech with Adrian Daub, author of “What Tech Calls Thinking,

How does the tech industry talk about what it does? Who are their intellectual influences? And do they get them right?

Josh Landy
From Ayn Rand to high-tech brands. Along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Techies talk a big game, do they think they’re the Son of God or something? I’m Josh Landy and this is philosophy, talk, program questions, everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about the rhetoric of big tech, with Adrian Dowd from Stanford University, author of what tech calls thinking.

Josh Landy
With COVID. still raging, we’re pre recording this episode from the safety of our respective homes. So unfortunately, we can’t take your phone calls, but you can always email us at comments at philosophy, top dot orgy. Or you can comment on our website where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Adrian, you’ve written the techies like to quote a bunch of intellectuals, but that they often misuse the ideas they’re citing. So what’s a good example of that?

Adrian Daub
So it’s, often it’s not so much about misusing as adapting to their purposes, and often kind of evacuating parts of what made that thinking interesting and generative in the first place. A good example of this is the way they sort of draw on the legacy of the counterculture of the 60s, right something Timothy Leary, to tune in, turn on drop out, that kind of thing. There’s a lot of that sort of that that’s been been kind of absorbed by the tech industry. And yet, of course, they they have retained some of those sort of social promises of that age, but have in no way kind of made good on those. Instead, it’s all about personal betterment, and being better connected to other people, which by which they mean you know, your significant other, your work colleagues or something like that. Another example is iron, Rand, who, you know, I don’t think they misunderstand her so much as they they’ve managed to give her this kind of almost countercultural sheen, they’ve given her this kind of Northern California flip flop, kind of veneer that makes that makes her a lot more appealing than then she would be if you heard you know about her from Paul Ryan, that say,

Ray Briggs
I feel like she would have had deep fashion objections to flip flops.

Adrian Daub
Yes, I believe that she’s on record on this, I think she she really hated the hate of the hippies. And that’s what’s so interesting, right? These are often very contradictory influences. And that that sort of get bundled together in these kind of discourses that I’m tracing?

Ray Briggs
Yes. How do techies make use of the ideas of Timothy Leary, who, if I understand him correctly, was all about dropping out of society to do acid and have beautiful feelings and not make a lot of money?

Adrian Daub
Yeah, well, I mean, I think that’s a that’s a really good question. There is, of course, for one thing, this anti institutional bent to Leary start, right, dropping out means largely to disengage from the institutions of society that might deform you, right? If you think about how much time we spend talking about all these, you know, tech leaders dropping out of college, that’s a very clear echo of that, right? The reason why we view that with this kind of totemic power, is that we still think of it in that 60s way. Right. And I think that that’s, that’s a pretty good example.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s really interesting, the way in which these tech companies often think of themselves as being countercultural is somehow living outside of the society. Some of these companies are enormous now, right? And yet, they’re still, according to you, and I like your thought about this. They’re still seeing themselves as kind of heroic underdogs taking the powers that be

Adrian Daub
exactly mean, that’s how Uber and Lyft portrayed themselves in the campaign against Prop 22 That you were talking about earlier. It’s really to take some doing to to think, well, we may have a valuation that’s larger than most country’s GDP. But obviously, we are David in this David V. Goliath scenario, right? And whereas the bad guys are taxi drivers, you know, a bunch of taxi drivers. And I think part of the interesting thing is that one of the things I didn’t realize as I started writing the book, but a fellow colleague of ours at Stanford, Fred Turner’s worked a lot on his part of it is that the counterculture, at least in Northern California, was not actually anti corporate. They were really anti government. And they hated corporations insofar as they made sort of common cause with the government, they were not that suspicious, ultimately, of, of the corporation as a kind of self organization. You think about, it’s how these hippie communists did very, very well for themselves, and that’s not an accident. So the idea is, there are some institutions that are bad institutionally, and then there are other institutions that don’t really count as institutions because they’re more organic, or they’re more nimble, or because they’re more creative, or because they’re, they’re less sort of soul crushing. And so while Leary, I don’t think would have been like, drop out and join IBM or whatever, you know, think of the targets that a lot of these people had, right? If you think of Ken kz, right, like it’s the medical establishment, it’s the army. It’s, you know, it’s the military industrial complex. It’s the university. It wasn’t so much your office.

Ray Briggs
That’s really interesting because I have trouble separating a lot of those institutions. From the tech industry, like the military industrial complex, just, you know, has to pay tech companies to help them do their surveillance. And a lot of techies are trained at universities like Stanford, like we have this ongoing problem that we have so many computer science majors in comparison to the number of other majors we have.

Adrian Daub
Yeah, absolutely. It’s, it’s, it’s entirely, I think, contradictory in that sense that there is, on the one hand, this is this idea, we can do it better. And we don’t need this kind of support. And yet this industry has grown up largely because of these kinds of structures, right? I mean, Silicon Valley is where it is, because of investments of the Department of Defense and because of Stanford University, right. But But that’s, of course, how a lot of this works. Think of the fact that, you know, not just that Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college, but you know, where he went to college. And it’s important for both Mark Zuckerberg and the people telling you about him that you know, both of those things, right? You could imagine if someone didn’t really care to go to college, they may not tell you where they went. But that’s not how these kind of billionaire CEO dropouts operate. They both want the kind of glamour that comes with having gone to a place and then the additional glamour of not even having had to finish there. Right? Is there’s a whole kind of vision of, you know, the underdog that’s entirely divorced from class issues, the fact that like, you know, dropping out of college, it really depends on on what your financial resources at home are. There’s a kind of mythology that allows people to occlude the bases on which these companies actually function and on the basis of which they actually succeed.

Ray Briggs
I want to ask more about this, this idea of underdogs, which you’ve mentioned a couple of times, there’s something right about this observation that you’ve kind of been hinting at in making the book that there’s a difference between being an underdog and feeling like an underdog. Yeah. And so this makes me think about, like James d’amour, that that guy who wrote a long kind of send my coherent screen to Google about how women don’t belong in tech, and then got fired for sending this giant screen to his colleagues, and then sort of made a big deal about how oppressed he was for getting fired. Yeah. How? How do I understand this gap between sort of the amount of advantage somebody perceives themselves to have and the amount of advantage they actually have? Yeah, I think

Adrian Daub
that that’s actually one of the through lines. In most of the thinkers that cover in the book, there seems to be a interest among certain tech leaders and certain employees of the tech industry, in telling us that the common sense picture of how power is distributed in our society, right, though the way it would seem to us that the person for instance, who signs your paycheck is more powerful than the person receiving the paycheck is not actually right. Right, that actually, you know, there’s a little bit a little bit of an up is down kind of scenario that we can read, describe the world in new ways. And I think that there’s an abiding love of, of tech leaders, the more powerful the better, for narratives that allowed them to portray themselves as underdogs, as victims really, as as beset by these kind of Lilliputians that sort of try to tie them to the ground, right? The fascination that these companies often have with canceled culture, quote, unquote, canceled culture, right? That that the fascination that they have with, you know, the kind of free speech, absolutism, the kind of fascination that can often exist along the lines of, you know, fascinations with wanting to advantage viewpoints that really tell some of your, you know, fellow employees that like you don’t actually belong here. And then you know, yelling about the fact that you silence that people are like, I think that’s kind of insulting to me, frankly. Right. I think that that’s, that’s a very strong through line that that in some way. The powerless are powerful, and that the the powerful are the actual victims,

Ray Briggs
you’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about the rhetoric of big tech, with Adrian Dowd from Stanford University. And Adrian, we’ve got some email. So we have one from Bob, who’s a former Facebook employee, and who writes, the issue we should be addressing is not how our weather data is collected, but how it is used and for whose benefit, there is an enormous amount of data out there. It could have been harnessed to help with a pandemic, it could be used to make our lives better. We try to prevent it from being collected, rather than monitoring how it’s used. Perhaps that seems impossible, but we audit companies financial transactions, and be also possible to audit their data transactions, instead, says Bobby throw data away and with it the chance for knowledge. What do you think of that, Adrian?

Adrian Daub
Yeah, that’s I mean, that’s an interesting idea. I do think that part of what I argue for In the book is precisely that we need to have as a society, we need to develop a more muscular understanding of how we can interact with tech. And what Bob is suggesting. Here is one example of this. Not so I mean, I’m not a specialist in this. So I, you know, I can’t talk through the the ins and outs of it. But the idea that, you know, I didn’t want to write this book to say, you know, delete your Facebook, you know, never go on social media again, it’s all terrible. I wanted to say, but don’t let them tell you that X or Y is coming anyway. And there’s nothing you can do about it. And you know, any amount of interference, any attempts to interfere is foolhardy. And it’s so new anyway. And so like the old systems of governance and regulation don’t work. I’m trying to say, no, let’s, let’s ask creative questions about how one would regulate how one would govern how one would limit these companies or support them. And in some way, it’s this kind of mystification where you know, the data is out there. It just happens to be there. And we have to deal with it one way or the other, I think is exactly something that that I think we need to get away from. I think what Bob is suggesting is that data is a political site. It’s a place where society has to decide as to make certain decisions, right. And currently, we’re being told stories that tell us that there’s nothing to decide here. And I think that’s what I’m very worried about.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. So one, one kind of interesting connection I see with Bob’s question is this issue of how to frame ethical puzzles about tech in the first place. So a while ago, I remember there being like some academic debates about self driving cars that focused on this thing called the trolley problem, which is an example from Philosopher Philippa foot, where you have a choice between sort of letting a trolley barrel or runaway trolley barrel down a track and run over five people versus moving a lever that will divert it so that it runs over one person. And so then there’s this question, well, if it ran over the one person who would cause somebody death, but if you ran over the five people, you would have merely let them die? And is this does this matter? And so the thing about the trolley problem in relation to the self driving car debate is that it kind of seemed to be like a giant red herring. Because there are lots of other sort of more pressing, pressing issues about the self driving car debate, like, can you get like, nevermind, killing versus letting die? Can you get things to reliably work? And can you trust that they work enough to let them on the roads? And like, who’s responsible when they kill people? Or let people die? I don’t know. Like, how do you hold enough people responsible? That doesn’t keep happening?

Adrian Daub
Yeah, and I think that that’s, that’s an interesting point, too, right? That often the people warning us against these technological innovations, tend to share with the people trying to sell us these same solutions, that kind of sense that that this technology is omnipotent, right? facial recognition software is another example of this, where you know, all these interesting ethical questions occur. And then when you talk to people in the field, they’re like, Well, gee, we’re not. Not sure that’s ever going to happen. Right. And I think that’s an interesting, interesting question, too, that in some ways, we risk handing off. If we if we if we try to frame everything in these broad ethical terms, we sometimes risk the, you know, co signing basically a kind of vision of what’s possible with these technologies that are largely shaped by the people trying to sell us these technologies right. Now, that’s like going by the sales pitch that someone gives you an infomercial, like, you should take that with a grain of salt, you know. And I think that’s another interesting thing, that these things are often Messier. There’s a lot more, has a lot more granularity to them on the ground. I want to come back to something

Josh Landy
you were saying earlier, Adrian about the this free speech absolutism. That seems like a great case in point for getting a philosopher wrong or half right. John Stuart Mill, obviously, was a fan of free speech, but he also had the harm principle, right, there are limits to the things we can do, including speech. So that seems like a pretty good case. Another case I really like in your book is Rene Girard, who’s a French theorist who’s really interested in people copying each other’s behavior and desires, and also very interested in the scapegoat. And you make this lovely argument that talking about scapegoats is one of the mechanisms by which some people in Silicon Valley present the powerful as victims, because suddenly a CEO that CEOs people are criticizing that CEO for doing horrible things, that poor CEO, he’s become a scapegoat. Rene Girard can help us understand this. You want to say, Jesus? Yes.

Adrian Daub
I think that’s absolutely true. And I think that this is exactly the kind of theory that really seems to have incredible pool among among a certain group of Silicon Valley bigwigs I think There’s another aspect to this Gerardi in theory, which I was I was alerted to by a brilliant essay by a philosopher that I’m a big fan of, namely, you, Josh, which is I, you know, you take apart why, really thinking about this idea that all desire is copied from other people can’t quite work. And that article got me thinking about like, Well, why then would someone believe that? Right? What’s the use of them? Believing it to them? Right? What’s the utility? And one thing that that struck me was that, you know, a lot of these stories also that they tell a lot of these mythologies to kind of restrict what’s true of human beings. Right? They often, you know, I say in the book that, in the end, maybe the one place where Gerards theories might be literally true is among a bunch of, you know, young men in their mid 20s, who start a startup together, right? Like, it’s a way to say, if you say, everybody knows, or everybody wants, or everybody has these desires, or something like that, or this is true of everyone’s desire, you know, you can say, which would you do in the article? Well, that’s not true for everyone. Or you can say, well, then we have to restrict who everyone is. And I think that that’s often kind of the unspoken kind of sub operation of a lot of these claims in the sense that they may kind of work in this very restricted space. And they often serve to restrict that space and make invisible people who are very, very different, and for whom this may not be true. And to sort of tell you that the very, very small group of people that you surround yourself with is the universe you’re trying to sort of set the circle very narrowly. And that seems like a problem for an industry that is, for better or for worse, affecting how vast swathes of people live, many of whom they’ll never come into contact with. You need that kind of industry, to have a moral imagination to have acute sense of curiosity about what other people are like. And in fact, what I found is that a lot of their philosophies tend to reward them for not being particularly curious.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about the rhetoric of the tech industry with Adrian Dowd author of what tech calls thinking,

how do we call the tech industry out on their rhetoric? What questions should they be made to answer and whose job is it to ask?

Josh Landy
Answers and accountability, plus commentary from Ian Scholes, The 62nd philosopher, one Philosophy Talk? Well, of course, they’re going to say don’t be evil. Was that ever more than just rhetoric? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and our guest is Adrian doub. from Stanford University. We’re thinking about the rhetoric of big tech.

Josh Landy
So everyone, we’ve got another email. It’s from Stephen Oakland. And Steve says, public corporations legally exist for only two reasons to shield investors from personal legal responsibility for the potential harm of their investments, and to maximize profit for their investors. All else is nothing but public relations designed to maximize profit, whether it’s going green stopping contributions to some Republican representatives, taking down Trump’s personal Twitter account, or claiming support for free speech, nothing these corporations do is for the public good, even when the effect produces a public good. What do you think about that?

Adrian Daub
Yeah, I mean, I think the question to what extent this is a new form of capitalism, or just a slightly more slightly different varnish on good old capitalism is a really good one. I think Steve was right to raise that question. And I think that what’s really kind of noticeable, though, is that, you know, for a long time, the tech giants got away with this kind of rhetoric of don’t be evil, right, with this idea that we’re actually making the world a better place. I think that that’s what what made the prop 22 campaign kind of revealing in a way that like, it was kind of Uber and Lyft and DoorDash, and a bunch of them acknowledging, yeah, we’re just basically a tobacco company, right? The same way as your company doesn’t want you to look into what tobacco causes in the long, right the same way VP doesn’t want you to look too closely at the numbers from on global warming, the same way they don’t want you to look too carefully at who is an employee, right? Like, in some way, it is kind of the moment when a bubble bursts. And where we find out that like, no, they are just like any other corporation. But what’s remarkable, and what I would say to Steve is precisely that for for quite a long time. That was not taken to be obvious, right? For a long time. There were powerful actors within society, within politics, within the media that were willing to grant that there was something different about these companies. And there were people in these companies themselves who seem to genuinely believe that.

Ray Briggs
So Adrienne, imagine that you were chosen to serve on a congressional committee, and you get to ask some tough questions of big tech CEOs, what’s the first thing that you’d ask?

Adrian Daub
I think, I think one question. So first question I’d probably ask a tech CEO is, um, you know, you talk about about things like, you know, flexibilization, and you talk about failing better, and about the sort of creative self expression both for the people making these products and the people using and being governed by them. So I’d like to ask someone from Uber, for instance, what leeway does an Uber driver have to fail better, right? Sounds to me that like the person writing the code may have some leeway to fail better. But, you know, if a driver ever falls below four stars, they’re basically out of the app. Right? So So is failing, better only available to some people? And what distinguishes these two kinds of people? I really

Josh Landy
like that question. Adrian, you guys, I think a little bit about Sebastian Thrun, the CEO of Udacity, which is one of the one of these MOOC companies or companies for massive scale online learning, which has a lot to be said for it. But you know, they did a trial run for some high school kids, I think they were learning math. And they did really bad, they did much worse than then students had done who were having face to face instruction. And as far as I remember it, this CEO basically just said, Well, now that I guess that failed, and I’ll do something else now. Which is fine. For someone in that position, I won’t just get a new job. But what happens to the people who are, you know, who were the sort of guinea pigs? Who were the sacrificial victims on the altar of sort of, you know, move fast and break things and disrupt everything? You know, what is there? There’s sort of two classes of people in Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley understanding of the world.

Adrian Daub
I think that’s true. And the second question I think I’d ask, the tech CEO would be, you know, in, in what ways has disruption personally affected you? Because that’s the other funny thing, right? They’re like, Well, okay, that’s just our world, it’s gonna keep changing, it’s gonna destroy jobs, it’s gonna, you know, things are gonna always be turning. And yet, disruption is a kind of chaos that always seems to miraculously not affect those in power, right? Disruption is always the disruption of other people’s lives, right? There’s very rarely do you hear from a CEO being like, well, that really messes with my life. Disruption is a particular way of telling a story of change, and that that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it can be very, very destructive and dangerous, because it casts the disrupter as this rebel as the outsider as this kind of plucky, you know, underdog who’s shaking things up. And you know, who doesn’t love a person who’s shaking things up. And it also casts the disrupt T the person who’s on the receiving end of this disruption as kind of the big bad monopolist. Now, when that’s what Blockbuster video, I have no problem with that, that seems to have been a big bad company, and it kind of sucks, frankly. Right, like, and Netflix is better. Okay. Um, but I find that weird when we start talking about like, when, like, the big bad is like, your local laundromat, right, like I am. They are not a big populace. And bookstores, right, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And I think that that’s a real problem if we are deprived of our ability to, to tell stories accurately, but instead are fed these kinds of stories that in some way, distort our world and, and force people into these positions that that they don’t actually occupy,

Josh Landy
I get the impression that there’s kind of a network of interrelated illusions, right. It’s not just one illusion, it’s being Yeah. hoster. Right. So there’s an illusion of underdog status. There’s an illusion of sort of independence like we don’t, we don’t need we don’t gain anything from the study we need. And we’re fully we’re self made individuals and companies, there’s an illusion of novelty. You quote the lift shuttle line, that’s a bus you invented a bus, right, just re reinventing the wheel just sort of just finding ways around regulation system. And then finally, there’s an illusion of benevolence, right, so that some of these companies sort of take credit for good developments, like the Arab Spring, or the seems at least at the time, but don’t take any blame for Trump’s use of Twitter. And, and as you point out as a kind of secular theodicy, it seems like it’s all gonna work out, don’t worry, move fast and break things safe in the knowledge, everything’s going to get better. Which think of which of these do you think is the sort of the most important one or maybe the most damaging?

Adrian Daub
I think all of the ones that, that essentially, abroad societal level, all the ones that suggest inevitability and so I think that would be more on the side of, of, of a kind of optimism of the theodicy and the idea that that in some way, these changes will happen. To us, as opposed to these are changes with which we will negotiate, right, that we don’t have perfect control over them. But we are also not out of control. And I think the most dangerous and the most important ones are the ones that allow sectors of society to abdicate responsibility, right. And some of that can come from very, very places that we met ultimately, like, I mean, I often think about, I mean, a lot of people have pointed this out, right? The way the phrase learn to code, right, the idea that like that could be the solution for the industrialization in large parts of the United States. And you kind of think, gee, this is exactly the kind of inevitability that we know, that’s not how this works, right? Like, you know, what we’re talking about is government intervention, what we’re talking about is, is it steering, but what we’re talking about is responsibility. And a lot of these myths, I think, coincide in the fact that they ultimately abdicate responsibility. And they say, this is fated to happen, right? We’re all headed towards some kind of singularity. Just let yourself drift. And don’t pay too much attention to who’s getting filthy rich on this and who isn’t? Right, who’s getting incredibly poor on this. And I think that those are the ones that we need to combat first.

Ray Briggs
So I’m wondering about some of the promise of like, tech ideals that has kind of gotten lost in the capitalism of Silicon Valley. So when I think about things like the open source movement, I think, well, that’s kind of democratic. The The idea is that we’re not individualists, you have a bunch of people cooperating and judging each other by the value of the work that they’re doing and not by like the the way they look or their station in society. Do you how much promise? Do you think that that hasn’t, how realizable are those ideals?

Adrian Daub
I think there’s tremendous promise in these technologies, and in the frankly, incredibly brilliant people that these that these technologies attract, right. Um, but I think that that’s where the where does Silicon Valley as a discursive object becomes, I think, extremely important as something that like we talked about, right? I, you know, I write a lot about about Silicon Valley for European outlets, and there’s all these places, all these people in Europe that come to the Bay Area to find out what the future is like, right? Where are we all going? Where’s the journey going? Right. And that’s that there’s, of course, a couple of interesting suppositions there, a Silicon Valley is where the future is being made. It’s the big companies because they don’t go to like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, they go to, you know, they go to the Google campus, right? It’s gonna be in these shiny glass cubes along one on one, it’s going to be done by people who get fed free burritos, who are mostly white men, or at least predominantly, right. Like, they’re a bunch of assumptions. Why don’t you go to Hyderabad? Why don’t you go to Shenzhen? Why, you know, why don’t you talk to you know, you know, weird, you know, punks, you know, coding somewhere in a, you know, somewhere in London or whatever, right? Like, they’re all these kind of narrowings that happened when we talk about Silicon Valley. That precisely sort of heighten, I think those aspects of the tech industry or of tech of technology more broadly, that we’ve been sort of complaining about, and, by the same token, often render invisible, the really interesting work that people do that can’t be monetized that, you know, don’t necessarily lend themselves to an awesome magazine cover. And yet, really point the way forward.

Josh Landy
On that note, Adrian, I want to thank you so much for joining us. It’s been incredibly enlightening.

Adrian Daub
Thank you for having me.

Josh Landy
Our guests has been every day on one of our very favorite philosophy, talk guests, Professor of Comparative Literature in German Studies at Stanford University, and author of what tech calls thinking and inquiry into the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
So I’m pretty persuaded by a lot of Adrian’s pessimism about the way things currently are. But, you know, I still hold out hope for the democratic potential of tech. You know, I visiting Stack Exchange actually fills me with hope for humanity, because it’s just all these individuals, posting practical questions and then helping each other out, and it’s massively useful. Um, I still, I guess, hold out the vague wish that net neutrality could become reality, despite despite the evidence. But I think that Adrian is right about a lot, a lot of the problems facing us,

Josh Landy
I still hold out hope for the potential of philosophy. I mean, some of these philosophers that these folks are reading, have some cool things to say like, you know, Elon Musk quoted Adam Smith talking about the invisible hand and Noam Chomsky, you know, came right back to say, by the way, you know, Adam Smith was on the side of the workers, so read a little more of these wonderful thinkers that you’re reading. But this conversation continues on our website, Philosophy Talk, or G, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments at philosophy talked about or G. And we might feature it on the blog. Now a man who launched a thousand catchphrases—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales. “It is what it is” is a popular catchphrase, but is it or not? Who knows? Take, for example, Trump’s crowd size. We couldn’t talk about it. Donald was so prickly around it. We wanted to give him what he wanted, which changed every minute. We all got nervous is what I’m saying, which was what it was, and made us vulnerable. The consensus is that we brainwashed ourselves with Q Anon and Facebook. Was Q Anon contagious? That and Trump made us all freak out about the media having too much power but it was the media freaking us out, so did it or not? Foxy Trump claimed some of the media was losing power, like the New York Times, but the Washington Post, also a loser, is owned by Amazon, which has too much power, so what is the is that is? Big Tech giants, Google and Facebook, seemed to convince themselves that they weren’t really capitalism, but something new and different, “Don’t be evil,” “Move fast and break things,” “Disrupt.” Apple, bless its heart, gave up on that. Yeah, we’re General Motors, only with smart phones, wanna make something of it? The trouble with most Big Tech is it doesn’t actually make anything. Google is just a big index. Facebook is a place to see what your high school thinks of the Godzilla movie. Twitter is passing nasty notes to your nasty friends that the whole class can read. Instagram is the place for people who hope to make money by being seen having the things other people might want to have. A bigger problem is when entities do make things, it’s either things we already have, like Teslas, which are cars, which, I don’t know, maybe we should stop making? Or computers and laptops and phones, which again we already have. Sometimes it seems like the economy is like Hollywood, but instead of making movies, they make projectors. And even when the New Hollywood DOES make movies, like Netflix, they seem like Straight To Video, only with Anthony Mackie instead of Michael Dudikoff, and we don’t have video any more, it’s all streaming, which is kind of like cable television, only more expensive and no Michael Dudikoff. Despite the big changes, everything is much of a muchness. One trouble is, the lack of authority. We’ve talked ourselves into not trusting Big Government, Big Tech, Big Daddy, Big Mama, you name it. Smooth authoritative voices, who often sounded like the scientist in a fifties science fiction movie, helped us choose everything from atomic power to shampoos. In the sixties, we phased those voices out. Now corporations all want to be our little friend. “Hi! I see you’re trying to install some software. Can I help?” The ads are all micro-ads, or in chumboxes: “Lose weight with this simple trick.” It’s all Siri up in here. Warm and fuzzy robots. And actual figures of authority, like our dentists, or gynecologists, wear name tags, and want to hug us. We have leached it from our lives, so we try to use the voice of authority when we talk to ourselves. No wonder we’re insane. Q Anon wasn’t a psyop, or Deep State prank, or even a lame attempt by a corporation to create a new mascot to encourage us to buy the new bitesized vegan weiners made from sorghum and twigs. No, some guy came up with Q to explain how weird things are right now, even though they’re not THAT weird, and it resonated with those of us who surf the Web anxiously, and before you know it, we were co-producers of the weirdest action movie of all time, with left leaning pedophile cannibal rings, and Donald Trump as the hero. Donald Trump! The least heroic man who ever lived! And in the meantime, Big Tech lumbers on, with its concerns. The cloud! Another name for a computer that’s not yours. Social credit scores! Which you worry about, if you get knocked off Twitter. Karens! They are a problem unless you accuse a Karen falsely, and then you are part of the Cancel Culture. Also. Bitcoin! Always Bitcoin! I just read about a thing called BSV. I learned from some website that “BSV is its own separate blockchain which was hard forked from Bitcon Cash.” I have no idea what that means. Except that I’ll bet that BSV stands for Bitcoin Something Vomething. Just remember. We’re not clients any more, or customers, we’re partners. On a journey. And if we ever get to leave the house again, believe me, we won’t. Why not let your phone just have it delivered? It knows what you want, it’s where your KPIs are stored. You don’t even need to know what KPI means. Bitcoin Something Vomething. That’s all you need to know. Let your phone do the rest. I gotta go.

Ray Briggs
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. Copyright 2021.

Our executive producer is Tina Pamintuan.

The senior producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research. Cindy Prince Baum is our Director of Marketing.

Thanks also to Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, and from the partners at our online community of thinkers.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed or mis expressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
…not even when they’re true and reasonable! The conversation continues on our website philosophy talk dot o-r-g, where you can subscribe to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Silicon Valley
Press the button and the lady tells Aspen when it’s time for bed, time, to take a bath, when his mother’s here to pick him up. I get to be his friend, and she’s the bad guy—I’ve disrupted fatherhood. It’s visionary technology.