This book is “genius” on a number of fronts. The first is the writing itself. There isn’t any. With little narrative support the book is entirely made up of individual quotations grouped and stacked around the story of one Silicon Valley venture or another.
At first this gives the impression that the author played more the role of researcher and curator than traditional author. And then it hits you. Fisher, in choosing the quotes and stacking them as if they represent the conversations taking place at a group therapy session, is creating the narrative through context. And that is both ground breaking and ingenious—and that makes it a perfect way to tell the story of Silicon Valley.
By the end of the book, in fact, the individuality of the speakers begins to fade away and it begins to read like a traditional narrative. Although, journalistic to the end, the citations are never compromised. Brilliant writing, to be sure, on a par with the brilliance he writes about.
The stories are fascinating and there is little question that there is an abundance of genius on display here, or that technology really has changed the world. But did the people portrayed here drive the change or were they propelled along by it? The same can be asked of Napoleon, or Thomas Jefferson, or take your pick. The answer, of course, is a little of both, but there is always a tendency to over-personalize larger historical trends that are far more complex than that.
And I believe the choice of writing style may have been a tacit recognition of that on Fisher’s part. Individual to history to individual and back again. It’s powerful stuff from a purely literary perspective.
The Buddhists refer to “dependent origination”, the idea that nothing exists in isolation. We can understand many aspects of reality but can never know it completely, meaning that all reality must be interpreted in context and is, given the infinite number of variables that define reality, ultimately illusory.
During the Enlightenment, science and philosophy were considered two sides of the same coin. One was considered meaningless without the other. The word philosophy actually meant all knowledge, including scientific knowledge.
That, of course, isn’t the current thinking among scientists. All sense of philosophical context has been lost and, as a result, we are essentially “dumbing down” knowledge in order to make it fit the scientific paradigm of the day. Which is why so much scientific discovery is ultimately proven to be in error, or at least not complete.
Technology, it seems, is suffering a similar fate. Does AI take us to a new world beyond human intelligence or does it dumb down what it means to be human to fit the technological paradigm? Yes, autonomous driving cars will reduce the number of mistakes that human drivers typically make. But that’s within the context of human driving and that context will change. Will there be a whole new range of accidents that are enabled by the context of AI driving that don’t exist today?
At the end of the book Fisher asks the geniuses (not used pejoratively at all) of the Valley what the future holds. And to a person there are two themes: 1. We are the masters of technology because we have a culture of disruption and innovation. 2. Technology will change the world.
Fair enough. But what about context? A quick browse of any newsfeed suggests the world is imploding. And technology is certainly playing a role in that. Who is asking the larger contextual question about what that role is and how technology can become more than weaponized disruption in search of the next billion dollar payday?
If the technologists don’t address the larger issues of social context they won’t have the freedom to create the wonderful technologies they envision. Nothing, not even the Valley, exists in isolation. (And, no, I am not a Luddite. I actually went to the CEO of my first corporate employer to convince him to buy me a 128k Mac, at a cost of $4,500, as I recall, over the strongest possible objections of our corporate IT department, just because I could smell change in the air and thought we should at least understand it.)
This really is a brilliant book, brilliantly written, that everyone should read. I only hope that the genius outlined here finds context in the larger issues of social responsibility and progress. Technological progress without philosophical context will be hollow, at best, and destructive at worst.
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Great book to know the secrets of Silicon Valley
Reviewed in India on July 11, 2022
