The tech industry's growing desire for dominance: Q&A with Adrian Daub on 'What Tech Calls Governing'
What Tech Calls Governing, the new book from Clayman Institute Director Adrian Daub, examines the tech industry’s desire for dominance both in the business world and the public sphere.
As the preoccupation with power reaches beyond commerce into politics and our private lives, the book looks at boardrooms, venture capital, higher ed, and new and old media for insights. Daub, the J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of the Humanities and a professor of comparative literature and German studies, responds to questions about his research into Silicon Valley’s ascendance into governance amid the latest boom cycle.
Q: Your previous book, What Tech Calls Thinking (2020), questioned the philosophical rhetoric employed by tech industry leaders to frame their business strategies. How does this book continue that line of inquiry?
A: One of the central throughlines that emerged in writing the first book in the late 2010s was the tech industry’s persistent sense of its own underdog status. The evangelists of disruption disidentified from power as they were wielding it. Tech CEOs were dominating our lives and were nevertheless shockingly ready to regard themselves as outsiders, or even victims. That still exists, of course; at the same time I think it’s become harder for them to deny just how dominant they are. Hundreds of thousands of people are out of a job because Elon Musk briefly took over the federal government; AI companies are openly telling you they’re out to put you out of a job. In the earlier book I focused on tech “thought leadership” as a form of marketing. This time I’m more interested in it as a form of governance.
Q: In your research, tech industry leaders continually seek to dominate, whether by being first to market; fine-tuning their physiques; or gaining the most influence in Washington. Is their desire to influence law and policy linked to maximizing their performance in the business world, or is it about winning on some other gameboard?
A: I think there are a couple of stories unfolding in parallel, but at very different scales. And it’s important to keep those stories in mind at the same time, even though some will feel a lot sillier than others. There’s the fact that the tech billionaire class seems to have felt out-of-control during the pandemic, and is now hyper-fixated on asserting control. There’s a sense of backlash as this group of mostly white men feel like they have ceded dominance to others, and they’re keen to get that back. There is the fact that the industry is not as agile, nor as scrappy, as it was 15 years ago – these companies are stalwarts, and stalwarts eventually rely on lobbying and the government to maintain their dominance. And finally, there’s the psychological piece. These were once young men who are now significantly less young, and they’re not on the whole handling it particularly well.
Q: The tech industry operates with a notable gender imbalance. As its leaders increasingly seek influence in government, what role does the masculinity of the industry play in their efforts to accumulate power?
A: It is really telling that when DOGE sought to root out “corruption” and “waste” across the federal government, corruption and waste seemed to Musk and his (almost exclusively male) lackeys to come in the guise of non-white people and women (as well as gender-nonconforming people of course). Both in terms of who is doing the work – the purges of the federal government were clearly targeted at workplaces with disproportionate numbers of Black women – and who, at least in Musk’s mind, benefits from that work.
Now you might think that that’s really about Elon Musk’s own racial politics, which are public and are odious. But it’s noticeable that when AI CEOs fantasize about what jobs their technology will make obsolete, they also seem to fasten preferentially on jobs not done by men like them. Venture Capitalist Marc Andreessen was recently asked about what jobs he considered safe from AI – and the first one he thought of was his own, being a VC.
Q: Your examination occurs at a singular time in U.S. politics, with billionaires such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel deeply intertwined with government in multiple areas. What is it like to research tech and politics amid daily alarming headlines and constant declarations, then reversals, of policy?
A: Initially, it was daunting. But it’s also been really helpful to hold up my (after all fairly complex and multi-stranded) diagnosis to what the billionaires have gotten up to while I’ve been writing, translating and editing the book. These people produce an unending slew of pronouncements, in social media posts, in interviews, in court filings, and so on. Each one of these gives a writer an opportunity to check whether a particular swerve fits with your overall diagnosis of the situation, or whether there is something genuinely surprising going on. So on a day-to-day basis there is an affect of “what now?” when Marc Andreessen or Alex Karp has given yet another highly undisciplined interview, but at the same time the broad empirical basis makes it possible to be more pointed in your analysis. So I should really be thankful to them for never shutting the hell up.
Q: During your tenure as director, how has the Clayman Institute’s research raised questions and opened areas of discovery that have shaped this book?
A: Working alongside so many brilliant gender scholars has been hugely influential on my thinking. I don’t think I’d be posing the questions of how masculinity structures reactionary tech politics quite the way I did. The work of the Clayman Institute under my predecessor, Shelley Correll, has deeply shaped my thinking about the tech industry, though it has admittedly done that since my first book. Our current research at Clayman has focused on anti-#MeToo backlash, which is also an important lens for understanding what is happening in the very upper echelons of the tech industry. It’s a little ironic that an industry that has so few women at the top nevertheless managed to have a gendered backlash, but here we are.
Q: What do you hope to illuminate for readers, and how can they use your findings to inform their own participation in governing and their relationships with technology?
A: I think one of the big takeaways from my analysis is simply that the means of controlling our emergent tech oligarchy not only exist, but are shockingly old-school and boring. We tend to emphasize how new these technologies are, and how unprecedented the challenges are that they pose. Which is of course true, after a fashion. But I think that the fixation on newness can blind us to the fact that what this group of men fears most is the application of very old-school technologies of regulation, some of them centuries old: vigorous anti-trust enforcement, for one, strong unions, tighter regulation, and of course lots and lots of taxes. The last thing we should grant men like Elon Musk is that they are historically unique. It’s what he thinks, and what he thinks about himself is fairly reliably wrong.
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