160: Very Special Boys feat. Adrian Daub
Ordinary Unhappiness
In this episode, hosts Abby Kluchin and Patrick Blanchfield interview author Adrian Daub about his new book, 'What Tech Calls Governing.' Th
Key takeaways
- Tech leadership has shifted from a 'don't be evil' ethos to a self-serving rhetoric of technological inevitability.
- The current era of tech governance is driven by the radicalization of a very small, highly influential group of 5,000 to 10,000 people.
Main topics
- Silicon Valley culture
- Tech-driven governance
Notable quotes
What tech calls governing... is being ruled by someone who actually has no interest in ruling you.
Conclusion
The episode provides a sobering look at how the neuroses of a tiny tec
Transcript preview
Speaker 3 (0:00) Adrian, I did not realize that my childhood reading science fiction would Speaker 1 (0:07) have Speaker 3 (0:07) prepared me so well to understand Silicon Valley. And I have to start our conversation with this quote from you. This is from towards the end of the book when you're getting into like long-termism and, you know, a little bit of effective altruism and all that stuff. Okay, here we go. When AI companies speak of the future, whether imparting dire warnings or brimming with hope, the narrative sounds like half-remembered films and science fiction stories. Part of the undignified nature of tech domination is that one finds oneself in a situation where one is forced to seriously warn against the Gotham system invented by Palantir, a jumble of words that sounds like it came straight from my bookshelf when I was 14. I was dying. Yeah, Speaker 2 (0:57) but it's true. I'm like, all my childhood lodestars have returned in this, like, fucked up new configuration where they're like, like, this is how we're gonna, like, you're... your adolescent fantasies are how we're going to run your planet into the ground. And you're like, that's, I would have much rather kept it in the 80s along with He-Man action figures and, you know, whatever else it was. I Speaker 3 (1:24) kept hearing in my mind, because there's some part of this that is just sort of like, and this is the story of how people who thought they were very special boys. came to impose their belief in that specialness upon all of us. The little like Ron Howard, it's arrested development kind of sound. Speaker 2 (1:43) It's arrested development. Speaker 1 (1:45) It's so fucking unserious, right? I mean, it's so, it's so inferior. Like it's, it's serious in the sense that. Yeah. It's consequences. Yeah. That Speaker 3 (1:54) it's our, the texture of our lives. Speaker 1 (1:56) Yeah. I mean like mass incarceration runs on Peter Thiel platforms now. Right. Right. But it's still, there's something about the. generational cadre kind of reference in it that feels like additionally sort of, again, I'm not demanding dignity of institutions that perpetrate evil. I'm just registering the stupidity of the fact that, well, an analogy might help here. We definitely, we, the U.S., definitely could have destroyed the world at various points in the middle of the 20th century using technologies that were, you know, horrible. still exist in some cases, but they were like, you know, the Minuteman rocket, right? Or the Davy Crockett. And yeah, these are icons of settler colonial shittiness, and they'll be terrible to be nuked by those things. But it wasn't like, I'm trying to like subtract 20 years to what those assholes were listening to on radio, but like the Buck Rogers like Zappo. Yeah, yeah. Like if there is that additional kitschy infantile twee sort of self, it just Oh, Jesus Christ. Speaker 2 (3:02) Yeah. And I think there's two ways of reading it, right? On the one hand, one could say, like, I think it's in certain parts of the book, I wrote myself into almost a place of kind of conservative dudgeon, where I sort of said, look, shouldn't institutions, even shitty ones, have a certain degree of dignity and seriousness, right? Like, I would like for people that I hate and criticize to still have a certain degree of seriousness. Like, are we fucking kids here? What's going on? But of course, we could also sort of like put on our Zizek hat and say like this reveals the fact that institutions were fucking infantile always. And just like these people are much worse at sublimating that. Right. Like it was, you know, it's the best and the brightest. But instead of like having, you know, the imprimatur of like whatever silly games they played at Harvard. Now it has the imprimatur of like Warhammer 40K. And it's like, honestly, if that feels to you obscene, it's just making obvious what was always inherent in sort of liberal institutions. I don't know how to read it, but I definitely found myself being like, be better enemies. Like, be more serious. Like, you know, Speaker 1 (4:10) I can't believe we're losing to this shit. One thing I really appreciated about both your books in this one kind of. returning not to twist the knife, but to reflect on the ways in which reality has kind of twisted the knife. Is that attention to, again, I don't want to sound like I'm advocating, I guess it would be the contrapositive or whatever it is where it's like, well, if only the fascists had PhDs, because, you know, actually, you know, most of the upper echelons of the SS had PhDs and they were the fucking SS, right? So that doesn't mean that this is like good, but that there's, Well, as you yourself very, I think, as Julian painfully described, there's something about the, again, like the sheer stupidity of it, like the trollishness of it, which has this kind of closed circuit of communication within the people that are doing it. I think like Menchus Moldbug or whatever, Curtis fucking, whatever. He looks like the guy from Party Down. Curtis Darwin, yeah. Yeah, thank you. Wait, Speaker 3 (5:09) which guy from Party Down? Speaker 1 (5:10) The one who is actually the struggling science fiction writer. Speaker 3 (5:13) Oh, yeah, Roman. Speaker 1 (5:14) Roman. Yeah, he looks like Roman, but with long flowing hair. Speaker 3 (5:17) Is he Adam Scott Speaker 1 (5:18) or who plays him? No, he's Adam Speaker 3 (5:20) Scott is much hotter than this guy. Speaker 1 (5:21) He's Speaker 3 (5:22) like Speaker 1 (5:22) dialed in as a creep. He's the guy who goes around to Speaker 3 (5:25) everyone being like, no, it's hard sci-fi, not fantasy. Speaker 1 (5:30) I'm Speaker 2 (5:31) Roman. Speaker 1 (5:31) I'm a Speaker 3 (5:32) writer. I write movies and books. I have a blog. It's pretty cool. Speaker 2 (5:39) That's a guy. Speaker 1 (5:39) That's a type of guy. He's just like saying, he's just dropping the N-bomb on Twitter. Yeah. Like he's just doing slurs. And we're Speaker 3 (5:47) talking about Curtis. Speaker 1 (5:49) Yarwin, not the amazing guy from Party Day. Okay, Speaker 3 (5:53) real Speaker 1 (5:53) person now. And I'm sure I've dunked on the guy before. Like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Right? But there's something at which like, this is not, it is an in your face, in your eye kind of communication to everybody. But it's actually, as you say, it's not really about. the bystanders or like the people who would nominally be part of the enterprise of democratic culture and governance. Instead, it's just like a signal to a group of people who are in that set that look how angry I make these other people. We all must be onto something because of that. Speaker 2 (6:22) Yeah. I mean, I think that that's the big difference, right? Like the PhDs within the Nazi establishment still cared deeply about persuading people around them. Right. And were anxious to and thought that they would. Whereas for the tech creep, other people are people outside of their own bubble are to some extent epiphenomenal there or maybe not even quite real, maybe virtual simulacra or whatever. And they're Speaker 3 (6:52) NPCs. Yeah. Speaker 2 (6:53) Yeah. And I think that's their NPCs. Right. And that's I think a really that's an important part of this. In the end, I mean, to me, the biggest sort of aha moment in writing the book was. You know, what tech calls governing is. you know, what it feels like is being ruled by someone who actually has no interest in ruling you, right? Like you don't matter. You're not even the object of oppression. Your oppression is the side effect of someone else's circle jerk, basically. And so I think that there's, that's so key that like in some way, the relationship to whatever you want to call it, Speaker 1 (7:30) the demos, but also the mass or whatever is like really theoretical for them, Speaker 2 (7:34) right? It can be, Just it can be likes on Twitter. It can be anger on Twitter. It can be just a feeling of having said something that jukes the normies out of their boots, you know. And in some way, it matters only sort of in the negative as background noise, as kind of a confirmation of your own specialness. And that to me, you know, that breakdown of the way. leadership used to be thought in the 20th century above all, I think is what's characteristic of this elite. And you can sort of see it whenever like, I mean, J.D. Vance is the one lab experiment that escaped contagion. But like, look at Blake Masters in Arizona, right? Like Peter Thiel is like, this is this is the guy, right? And Arizonians are like, like, I'm sorry, this man is wearing a skin suit. What is happening? Right. And it's like the moment they sort of test this in the field, people like, I mean, no, right? That guy's a lizard. Right. It's like, I don't know. Have you ever seen that old SNL skit? I think with Bill Hader. but these sportscasters, one of whom is very obviously an alien and they're trying to like discuss, they're trying to discuss the NFL, but like all the, it's a call-in show and everyone's like, but just to get this out of the way, Greg's an alien, right? And that's the kind of, that's the kind of politics they often, like when they, when they still need our approbation, like that's what it looks like. You're like, you're like, here's Greg, he's great. And they're like, we're all like, but just to get out of the way, Greg's an alien, right? And, and it's just, it gives you kind of a sense that like, both the brittleness of this kind of politics, but also, you know, what it says about our material conditions. The fact that so much governing is possible while everyone is like, get a load of these fucking dweebs. Speaker 3 (9:43) You're listening to Ordinary Unhappiness, a podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. Ordinary Unhappiness is completely made possible and kept ad-free for everyone by the generous support of our Patreon community. If you'd like to support the show and get two additional episodes of Ordinary Unhappiness per month, including our journey through Freud's Standard Edition, and our takes that are too spicy to be in front of the paywall, please come find us at patreon.com slash ordinaryunhappiness. I'm Abbey Kluchin. I'm Speaker 1 (10:21) Patrick Blanchfield. Speaker 3 (10:22) And today I am so pleased to welcome back to the show Adrian Daub. Adrian is J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, where he serves as the Faculty Director of the Klayman Institute for Gender Research. He's the author of What Tech Calls Thinking and The Cancel Culture Panic. And he is also the author of the hot off the presses What Tech Calls Governing, which is a follow up of sorts to What Tech Calls Thinking. And you also may know him as the co-host with Moira Donegan of one of our favorite podcasts, In Bed With The Right. Adrian, welcome. We're so excited to talk with you about the book. Speaker 2 (11:03) Thank you so much for having me. I was thinking to myself, it's the first day of my semester at Stanford, my 18th year there. And, you know, the world's going to shit. And I just dropped my daughter off at kindergarten. I was like, what better podcast to appear on than one named Ordinary Unhappiness on a Monday morning, 8 a.m. Speaker 3 (11:22) Yeah, I mean, if we can get to Ordinary Unhappiness, I feel like Speaker 2 (11:25) we're all doing great. I'm not necessarily complaining. It's true. Okay, Speaker 3 (11:29) so before we get... into specifics. Like I said, the book is brand new, so most of our listeners will not have had a Speaker 1 (11:37) chance to get their hands on it. Can you Speaker 3 (11:39) tell us a little bit about the overarching argument of the book and also how it relates to its predecessor, what tech calls thinking? And I mean, I'm also interested, you've already dropped the nugget, as did I, that you have been at Stanford for. It will be now your 18th year. But perhaps Speaker 1 (11:58) that has some Speaker 3 (11:59) bearing on the origin story of this project. Speaker 2 (12:02) Some, some. Yeah. So sometime in the early 2010s, I can't quite reconstruct when, people sort of started approaching me, most European editors saying like, hey, do you want to write for us about Silicon Valley? And two things happened. One was I knew a little bit. Because mostly not from my students at the time, but from friends who worked in the Valley. And I had opinions and I had things that I had observed. And it made me realize, the question made me realize just how connected, how intimately really connected my institution was with this and was getting more so as I was observing and I was looking around. And so that was something that made me want to write about it. The other thing, though. And this is in some way exactly the way the cancel culture panic started is I got to I got asked topics that sort of, you know, how editors pitch you. Right. They have an idea of what the article will say. And I would often sort of like end up writing back being like, you're framing is super interesting to me. Like, I think this would be a terrible article and I will not write it. Why are you asking me this question? Like, what is Speaker 1 (13:11) it? Yeah, Speaker 2 (13:13) exactly. And they're always like, thanks. You should Speaker 3 (13:15) definitely do that to your editor. They'll love it. Speaker 2 (13:18) This is career advice, guys. It's fantastic. Yeah. But, you know, it was also the fact that like it in some cases, people were willing to be corrected. In some cases, I was like, I'm really glad in hindsight that I didn't take the 250 euros to write that fucking thing. Because like I would look at back at that and be like, well, that's a miss, you know. But it was a time when. you know, certain promises of Silicon Valley that it was going to be doing capitalism differently, that it was that technology was going to transform all these things, et cetera, were taken on very, very uncritically. And, you know, if I asked my friends in the Valley about it, they'd be like, well, yeah, the background here is we're out of money and we need more money and we have to promise you something like the technology is pretty good, but like it's nowhere near what they're saying, right? Like this is a sales pitch. I don't understand. why you'd be asked by a major newspaper to reprint a sales pitch, right? We don't do that for vacuum cleaners and or household cleaning products, right? Like why do it for a phone, right? At the same time, what happened was that my students were sort of, around 2012, 2013, it really started to be the case that as the Bay Area was recovering from the 2008 recession, that the only way to stay in the area was to go into the tech industry. And a lot of my students went there. And, you know, I have nothing against that. I understand the imperative to make money. You know, I wouldn't be working for M2 if I didn't have to make money. But what I was noticing is that they were imbibing more than the FDA approved, you know, quantity of bullshit from before getting to these companies. They were like, oh, I want to go to Google and make the world a better place. I want to go to Palantir because the tech is so interesting. And I was like. I'm sorry, what? Like I taught you in a door no seminar and that's the shit you serve me. If you're like, look, I, I have huge loans to pay off. I'm going to work for Satan for three months. I'd be like of three years. I'd be like, look, I, I wish you'd make it, make it, make a different choice, but at least you go in an open eye. But I was like, you're going in spouting the bullshit. Speaker 1 (15:24) Right. I love Speaker 2 (15:24) that. Can Speaker 1 (15:25) wrong life be lived rightly? Yes. There has to be a better way. Yes. Speaker 2 (15:30) Yeah. You don't have to live wrong life as wrongly as humanly possible. You don't have to don't have to max that. What is that called? And like you should shoot the moon, you know, when you're like, right. You're just like, I'm I'm going for it. I will be as evil as I possibly can. I'll be the Frank Reynolds of of of don't be evil. Right. Like, oh, this get real weird with it. So I started writing sort of both to sort of explain what. I saw happening in the Valley and to kind of make a claim about the way traditional forms of humanistic inquiry could put pressure on those claims and on that arrangement and to explain in what ways they were starting to take over our politics and our world and in what ways that was worrisome and or not foreordained and definitely something that you should push back against. So those were the first sort of articles that began the process of writing that book. By the time I got around to writing that book in 2018, 2019, a funny thing had happened. The same students that had gone to Palantir, Facebook, et cetera, et cetera, often had quit and or very much adjusted their positions. And they often came by and told me about it. And so I suddenly had this group of very smart people who I... whom I taught Adorno to, whom I taught Hölderlin to, sitting in my office hours or meeting me for coffee and being like, oh my God, you don't even know the half of it. Like it is far worse than you thought, right? And so a lot of that book was about this particular capture of the imagination that happened in between 2010 and 2016, I want to say, of the tech industry, but really written in its wake, right? At a moment when the middle management to... normal workers of these companies, however privileged they were, were starting to turn on and against the leadership and saying like, look, we need to professionalize this workplace. We don't want to be here until 11 p.m. Look, we, this is still, this is not a family. This is a company. You need to like have rules about sexual harassment because it is happening all the time. Like, why are there no women in this boardroom? Does that seem weird to anyone, right? Maybe we should, you know, have a walkout over that, right? We don't want to do business with this, you know, trumped up dictator somewhere. We think when you said, don't be evil, you meant it and we're going to hold you to it, right? And the easiest way I can pitch what tech calls governing is what happened in reaction to that. It is the radicalization of tech leadership against pretty much... everyone else, but above all against their own middle management and their own employees, right? In the wake of COVID, in the wake of the 2020 election, in the wake of Black Lives Matter, in the wake of Me Too. And a lot of this is, one way of putting this is that like the, I obviously wanted the, I wanted the titles to kind of rhyme, Speaker 3 (18:31) but Speaker 2 (18:32) tech actually means something slightly different in both titles. being perfectly honest, right? What tech calls thinking, the thinking I was sort of making fun of or trying to explore in what tech calls thinking really was pretty widely suffused, right? People would like send me TEDx talks and be like, isn't this kind of cool? I'm like, oh my God, it's exactly what I'm talking about. And those people would be like otherwise perfectly serious, you know, thinkers. Speaker 2 (19:00) You know, it percolated down quite far into these companies and even beyond and well beyond them. But when I say tech in what tech calls governing, that really means a billionaire who is looking to buy a Senate seat near you, right? Or trying to build a data center near you. This really is a story of a very small group of people, maybe 5,000 to 10,000 people. Whereas what Tech Call's thinking really was still about like, I thought this was the zeitgeist of a pretty large swath of, you know, of a well-to-do sort of PMC Americans. And that's no longer the case with what Tech Call's governing. This is about the self-radicalization of a very small elite. Speaker 3 (19:42) Yeah, Adrian, as I was writing questions, For this, I was thinking, like, what is the noun that I'm looking for? Like tech elite, like the founders. And sometimes I just found myself writing like billionaires. So that really comes through. And one of the most notable things about, I mean, what tech calls governing and so many of the anecdotes in the book is just how weird they are, right? And how distant the fantasies that motivate these. billionaires, tech elite, whatever we want to call them, but these very powerful people, largely powerful men who serve as your protagonists, like how distant their fantasies are from anything approaching reality. I mean, the Hyperloop is an excellent example of this. And one of the weirdest things of all to me about the current moment, because you're writing about just really like a couple of years. I think, in some way. Yeah, Speaker 2 (20:41) 2020 Speaker 3 (20:41) to Speaker 2 (20:41) 2025, yeah. Speaker 3 (20:42) Yeah. Subtext is just text now, which, you know, I'm outnumbered by comparative literature scholars in this conversation today, so you all are perfectly poised to talk about this. And so here's Adrian in a passage that could have been meant just for us. Years ago... I would have had to consult a psychoanalyst in San Francisco or Mountain View to find out what image these men have of themselves. Speaker 1 (21:10) Today, I no longer need to because Speaker 3 (21:12) they will tweet this image out with some regularity, close quote. And these images, of course, are like their AI swap of, you know, Elon Musk as like, what are like a Roman centurion or whatever the, I don't know. Emperor, whatever, not just your average centurion. The guy, the important guy. But there's this sort of over-the-top pathological cartoonishness to what passes for our ruling class that, and this was something I was really trying to capture, like the sort of affective register that this all kind of puts me, and not just me, but like us in, is like, oh, this is clarifying. And yet also it's confusing. Like it makes my head spin. Can we talk a little bit about this situation, about how bewildering and dysphoric it is and what it might suggest about where we're at in terms of both political and libidinal economy? Speaker 2 (22:08) Yeah. I mean, the libidinal economy, I think what's so shocking is the level of neediness, right? That like, here's a guy who could afford to do anything with his life, tweeting out. pictures that some dweeb in a basement generated using some kind of AI tool because he likes the way his jawline looks and his actual jawline doesn't look that way. And he's like, oh my God, Speaker 1 (22:37) like this, it's just, you Speaker 2 (22:38) know, it's there. It feels bad to be ruled over by anyone like that, but it feels extra bad to be ruled over by someone like that. Right. There is something, you know, you're like, like it's the, it's in some way like. To me, one analogy that just popped into my mind is like the interesting transition from the British office to the American office where the American producers clearly said like, well, like just a shitty boss a la Ricky Gervais isn't actually the worst American boss we can come up with. The worst American boss is Ricky Gervais that you also pity. that also has these humanizing qualities and you can't even really be mad at him, but you want to be like, oh, puppy, I'm so sorry, right? Like, and that is what this feels like, where like, you're like, I both recognize that this is a, the biggest fucking tool I've ever faced, but also there's almost an empathic part of me, of my brain that's sort of being activated, like, oh, you're getting older, bud. That's, that sucks. You know, wait a minute. Like this man is destroying the world. Right. But it's but there is this kind of it's the fact that, you know, you know, you'd have to be well, you'd have to be them, frankly, to like not have empathy for like the tragedy of, yeah, their own decline that's playing out in front of everyone. It's the same way that like, you know, I feel two ways when I see like videos of our president when he's clearly crapped himself. Like there is like, you know, someone who's. watched aging relatives go through that there's a moment you're like there's a twinge of just like oh no like i wish someone could be there to sort of take this person away from the cameras i'm Speaker 1 (24:19) like Speaker 2 (24:19) wait that's the fucking president that's really not an option it ought not to be right but this this this is the form of power that like it's never accountable to us but it it also takes claims on our pity and our sympathy constantly and in this very ostentatious and very kind of entitled way but at the same time it almost also deserves it right that is that is really rough i think and that's really that makes makes these guys so so so tricky that that on the one hand like there is a profound the loneliness is real the isolation is real right but like in the end The way they weaponize even that, they weaponize their own objection, right? In order to have more control. And you're like, fuck, what do we do with that? Right? One example I give in the book that I think will make this a little bit clear is that like, just to point out that this is not just like billionaires, but this is really about where they came up as businessmen. One example is that like, of course, the founder of a small startup tends to extract labor out of their employees. by being incompetent in certain ways, by being socially inept in certain ways, by not having a private life, right? Like these are methods of extraction. These are men who have since their early to mid-20s learned that they can bend the world to their will if only they become pitiable. Anna Wiener in her book, Uncanny Valley, has a really lovely sort of riff on this where... it's a form of labor extraction. It's a form of extracting emotional labor. And it's a form of, of course, also devaluing that emotional labor because you're getting it for free. You're basically pulling one over on everyone else, right? By being like, oh, guys, I would really like to stick around all day and work with me on this because otherwise I'll be so lonely, right? And in the end, like what you're getting is free labor from people, right? And I think that as these people get older, they're different from like a Howard Hughes who has the decency of just going. crazy in his Vegas penthouse and wearing Kleenex boxes for shoes, right? Like that doesn't impinge on me. He doesn't know how to extract extra labor from me from his Kleenex boxes. These are people who've made their Kleenex boxes into one more management tool. Speaker 1 (26:34) I think that's, there's like a queasy, corrosive feeling of, of like, not quite sympathy, maybe less like embarrassment and like shame. And I'm trying to think about like sitting. sitting or like having just to process this spectacle, right? I mean, I can think even of, well, I'll admit this, reading your work in particular makes me think a lot about my experiences posting online Speaker 2 (26:59) and also reach to like the German Speaker 1 (27:02) intellectual canon here, right? But on the first point, I'm thinking about some of the people who I've interacted with who are prominent enough or, you know, are prominent because they've been boosted by Elon Musk or something. And, you know, they're academics of various sorts. I'll have a back and forth with them for a little bit, generally because they're saying something absolutely terrible. Being like, well, you know, I can't wait till AI liquidates the humanities, right? Like, we'll still need it. Or Marc Andreessen being like, the only job AI can't take away is the really creative artist work of VC, right? And you're like, whatever. But like... Speaker 3 (27:35) The amount of double think that Speaker 1 (27:37) it Speaker 3 (27:38) takes to come up with that. I Speaker 1 (27:40) don't need anteriority, right? Like, it's all about this stupid shit, right? It's all the same thing. And Speaker 2 (27:46) while saying it in a way that makes everyone who's watching it think the same thing and then not say it, right? Which is like, what drug is this guy on? Like, just like talking in a way when if you, if he talked to you at a party, you'd be like. Buddy, you need to lie down. That's the thing, right? You want Speaker 1 (28:02) someone to have a human intervention, right? And so I've had these interactions with these people. And part of the reason why I'm posting less is because I started doing the thing of being like, huh, let me just search this person's username and what they've posted about either HR or divorce or dating. And let me tell you, every single fucking time I found myself sucked into one of these things, and this has happened a lot. there's always something