What Tech Calls Governing - by Adrian Daub (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Expanding upon the work begun in What Tech Calls Thinking, Adrian Daub explores which ideas of politics, power, and dominance characterize the tech industry, and how those ideas came to be.

Tech companies increasingly determine who regulates and who governs. And the tech elite increasingly wield political power, seeking to remake your workplace, your child's school, and the federal government in their image. But what do they mean by power?

Taking readers from investor meetings to lecture halls, from science fiction to feudal imaginaries, Daub acerbically explores how tech culture approaches hierarchy and dominance, and what role a very specific form of masculinity plays in tech culture's ethos. From billboards to social media, Daub interrogates the way the tech elite exert power in their families and offices, but also in gyms and on YouTube channels, in courtrooms and on their commutes. As What Tech Calls Governing shows, to ask "how do they exert power?" is actually to retell the history of Silicon Valley as the story of a fragile--and precisely for that reason domineering--masculinity intent on all the power with none of the responsibility.

Review Quotes

"What Tech Calls Governingis sharp, engaging and deeply researched. Accessible without sacrificing rigor or complexity, this book helps us decipher the strange and often contradictory messaging coming out of Silicon Valley. An invigorating read." --Wendy Liu, author ofAbolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism

"[Daub's] plausible description of that nasty blend of arrogance and immaturity--observable in the demeanor of tech bosses--explains very well why it is precisely such buffoons who have managed to attain ridiculous wealth and political power."--Harald Staun, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung

"Adrian Daub [delivers] a sober yet stimulating plea for the argument that technological dominance must always be inextricably linked with social responsibility."--brandaktuell.at

"Daub is the consummate chronicler of Silicon Valley's autophagia. In this book, he shows it reaching its limit. A bracing exegesis from a wry and watchful observer." --Quinn Slobodian, coauthor of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed

"Daub traces Silicon Valley's transformation from imaginative force to dominant power, illuminating its increasingly troubling role in shaping politics and society. A lucid and important book that deserves a wide readership." --Veena Dubal, University of California, Irvine

"Few writers probe the pathologies of Silicon Valley's boy kings with greater wit and ruthlessness than Adrian Daub." --Ben Tarnoff, coauthor of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed

"One day, when the bubbles have burst and we are surrounded by the rusting ruins of the shiny new tech, we will look back on the clownish posturings of the Silicon Valley overlords and murmur quietly to ourselves, what a prophetic poke in the eye Adrian Daub gave them."--Bruce Robbins, author of Atrocity: A Literary History

"With Silicon Valley embracing the extreme right, What Tech Calls Governingprovides an insightful picture of how tech billionaires understand their power and the many ways they wield it against everyone else." --Paris Marx, author of Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech's Data Empires

About the Author

Adrian Daub is J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, where he serves as the Faculty Director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. He is the author of What Tech Calls Thinking (2020) and The Cancel Culture Panic (2024), and writes for numerous US and European newspapers and magazines.