Rethinking Our Tech Mythology
“Disruption is premised on creative amnesia,
on a productive or at least profitable disregard for details.”
— Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking
When I first started writing about micro business, I did so with the energy of a cheerleader in front of the Friday night lights. I imagined a near future when many more people could support themselves with meaningful work, creative control, and flexible schedules. I extolled the virtues of dreaming bigger and forging your own path. I believed that micro-business owners could constitute an economic movement guided by more than the accumulation of wealth.
I not only believed the hype. I helped produce it.
It would be easy to look back on this thinking as a naive fever dream. And, frankly, I do. But I also look back with a much better understanding of the context for my naiveté. The world was still in the throes of the Great Recession. The iPhone promised to unlock a new technological era. Facebook and Twitter were exciting places to be on the web. Venture capital poured into the bank accounts of any nascent company that used the right set of buzzwords.
The tech industry told a story that I—and millions of others—wanted to believe.
It was a story I wanted to see myself in, to see people I cared about in.
It is a story that has shaped the last quarter of a century and likely will continue to shape the social, political, and economic landscape for another quarter-century.
So what is this story? How does it color our language, relationships, identities, and work in ways we may not notice, given the story’s ubiquity?
When I want to answer these questions, I inevitably rely on What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub. It’s a brilliant overview of the tropes that make up this story—and an incisive argument for how this story has become a mental model we have difficulty interrogating.
I had already planned on sharing some ideas from this very funny and very serious text when I listened to Daub and his co-host Moira Donegan discuss Mark Zuckerberg’s embrace of, shall we say, masculine energy in a recent episode of In Bed With The Right. Donegan asked Daub about his characterization of a particular Silicon Valley trope in the book and, as preface, he explained:
“I should say it's a book that is by now five years old, and I wouldn't really change a word. These people have largely borne out what I said about them then.”
I completely agree. It’s a book that explains so much about the present and future because it is rooted in themes that far pre-date the rise of tech's latest batch of wunderkind.
Before I get into the three ideas I want to share with you from What Tech Calls Thinking, I want to put in a plug for reading this book in full. This book is a delightful reading experience—yes, in a nerdy way, but also because it’s just a fun read. While its subject matter is high stakes, its insights are the kind I always aspire to: relieving rather than gloomy. As an Adrian Daub fan, I will happily admit that he does a much better job of this than I do.
Now, without further ado, three ideas for rethinking our tech mythology:
1. Silicon Valley is a mythology.
“Somehow the sudden heights of success to which these young people climb make people fixate on biographical data points that are, upon reflection, absolutely unremarkable.”
Myths are stories told to explain, validate, describe, or inspire. Some draw on events that actually occurred or people who actually lived. However, the goal of a myth is to transcend the distinction between fact and fiction to elucidate a greater truth. They become a form of knowledge that doesn’t rely on getting it right to be true.
Throughout What Tech Calls Thinking, Daub illuminates the myth-making central to how we relate to the tech industry. These stories scaffold the way we receive the “wisdom” of entrepreneurs, whether it’s the myth of “the dropout” (e.g., Zuckerberg, Holmes, Jobs, etc), or the myth of disruption (e.g., ‘We’re the Uber of X’), or the myth of failure.
The predictable beats of each story are replicated again and again, becoming culturally truer than the true events of a single instance of the story. At some point, living (and learning from) the story becomes secondary to hitting those beats in a legible—and brandable—way.
Of “the dropout” myth, Daub writes:
“Suddenly, you didn’t have to experience work life, family life, and adult life to grow disillusioned with it. You could be disillusioned even before you joined the machine.”
Of the disruption trope, he observes:
“There is a tendency in Silicon Valley to want to be revolutionary without, you know, revolutionizing anything.”
Of the virtue of failure, he notes:
“...by degrading failure, anguish, and discomfort to mere stepping-stones, they erase the fact that for so many of us, these stones don’t lead anywhere.”
Anyone who has scrolled through the sales page of a life coach, marketing guru, or make-money-online course (and I assume that includes you) is familiar with the way these stepping stones get appropriated into the stories non-billionaires tell, too. Books about small business and leadership development peddle these same tropes. Our gurus might have “dropped out” of a corporate job, disrupted their old goals, or failed at the work we actually weren’t born to do. Instead of being red flags for potential customers or clients, these tropes become imprimaturs of success and effectiveness.
When we learn to read stories meant to sell or influence without grokking the myth at their core, we can’t contend with what’s actually being communicated.
We’re born myth-lovers and myth-makers. It’s not the myths themselves that are problematic; it’s what the myths facilitate, conceal, or explain away.
These same myths, after all, are wreaking havoc in Washington right now. People are losing their jobs, kids are losing their medical care, and communities are losing their support because when a billionaire says, “we need to disrupt government,” an already disillusioned public believes him.
When you can spot these stories, you can save yourself from getting caught up in their influence and help others make sense of what they’re seeing on Instagram or The New York Times or CNN or that sales page for a $2997 online course.
2. Gender is encoded in every value judgment.
I recently heard white masculinity described as whatever set of traits we associate with power, authority, and value. That set of traits evolves alongside social and cultural norms. In other words, a trait that’s considered masculine now may not have been 20 years ago or may not be 20 years from now.
This description leveled up how I understood the function of gender (and I sadly cannot remember who said it or where I heard it). It made something I understood in the abstract become crystal clear in practice. The tech industry offers a fascinating look at the practice of gender—specifically, how gender and value relate to each other.
It’s important to note here that while I focus on gender in this section, these patterns also cut across other marginalized identities such as race, disability, and sexuality.
In the tech industry (as elsewhere), labor is highly gendered. That is, different forms of labor are valued in drastically different ways. What’s masculine is building, disrupting, visioning, optimizing, making deals, taking on entrenched power, etc. What’s feminine is maintaining, preserving, communicating, regulating, limiting, relating, etc. Or as Daub puts it: “Men build the structures; women fill them.”
What’s masculine earns more money and—more importantly—accumulates more wealth. What’s feminine is often not perceived as work at all. What’s masculine generates status and power. What’s feminine is ignored, contracted out, or even downsized.
In the world of online business, what’s masculine is often what owners, no matter their gender, are willing to invest in. What’s feminine gets the smallest budget and the least time on the calendar. Take “community” as an example. When the concept of community revolved around relationships, listening, and customer/follower care, it was coded as feminine and low-value. It was something that women used to distinguish their brands or offers. When “community” morphed into a revenue stream, when it became a “membership” rather than a support network, the concept started to evolve into something more masculine.
In the corporate world, women tend to suffer disproportionately during downsizing. Even with “gender neutral” guidelines for layoffs, the positions most often cut are those that are feminized and held by women and minorities more often than white men. Think human resources, customer support, administrative support, etc. And if you’re thinking, ‘Well, those positions are more expendable,’ then you’ve just landed on the gender of it all. Feminized positions are considered less valuable and more expendable—whether that’s “objectively” true or not.
Again, this is the same dynamic playing out in Washington right now. It’s easier to convince a disinterested public that feminized roles are unnecessary for the functioning of the government. It’s easier to see those roles as nags and killjoys preventing the real work of governance from getting done. In the tech mythology at the heart of the US government right now, the whole bureaucracy is female.
Does feminization lower the financial value of a role or a function? Or does a lower financial value make a role or function more feminine? It’s largely a chicken-or-egg kind of situation. What matters most is recognizing that these two conditions are always linked unless we take structural pains to unlink them.
3. Money does not follow merit, nor vice versa.
“The genius aesthetic that rules the tech industry relies again and again on this purely gestural kind of courage, on hyping everyday things into grand acts of nonconformism and even resistance.”
The idea of meritocracy is that the best and the brightest can work their way to the top. Positions, status, and compensation are doled out based on skill and hard work. On the surface, this concept seems so fair, so just, so very American that it’s become an integral part of the American mythos. The idea that we can work our way to the top is part of our cultural DNA.
The message of meritocracy clearly acts on us when we aspire to bigger goals, better pay, and higher status. What’s perhaps less clear is how the message of meritocracy also invites us to imagine that the people at the top got there through their own hard work, their own superior skill, and their own innate talent. We assume their merit because merit is how get what they have.
The billionaire oligarchs must be tireless geniuses because how else would they have achieved that status? The business and marketing gurus with hundreds of thousands of followers must have the best ideas and most effective strategies because how else would they have generated the wealth and influence they now have? Columnists in fancy newspapers and magazines must have the most insightful analysis because how else would they earn that position? This company must have the best product because how else would it have a trillion-dollar valuation?
It’s not that hard work and superior skill can’t earn money and power. It’s that it’s no guarantee. And if it’s no guarantee, then we can’t assume that those with money and power got there through hard work and superior skill. Hard work, skill, talent, creativity, etc., all exist in an ecosystem with inherited wealth, social connections, luck, and privilege. If you have more wealth, connections, privilege, and luck, you need less work, skill, and talent to succeed.
Again, you can see the danger of these assumptions in today’s headlines. Elon Musk is the world’s wealthiest individual, so surely he is also the smartest, most talented, and most qualified person to remake our system of government. The message of meritocracy is so pervasive that even Musk seems to believe that’s true.
And again, this also plays out throughout the tech industry and the online business world. The most successful companies and people get credit for having the best ideas, smartest insights, and most effective strategies, whether or not that’s demonstrably true. But who or what we trust with our money and time is just as likely to be the product of preexisting wealth, connections, or privilege. And even more likely to be some hard to replicate combination of all of those traits.
The Last Word
These aren’t the only useful ideas from What Tech Calls Thinking, but I think they’re valuable ideas to be equipped with in our present moment. With the tech industry entangled in every facet of our lives, it’s critical to empower ourselves with frameworks that can help us remain clear-eyed and steadfast. And that’s exactly what Daub delivers in this book. As always, I’ll give him the last word:
“The tech industry ideas portrayed in this book are not wrong, but they allow the rich and powerful to make distinctions without difference, and elide differences that are politically important to recognize. They aren’t dangerous ideas in themselves. Their danger lies in the fact that they will probably lead to bad thinking.”
