Magical Thinking & Thought Terminating Clichés

There's a specter haunting Silicon Valley—the specter of magical thinking. While tech's true believers (particularly among the brahmins of the investor class) like to imagine themselves as enlightened, hyper rational stewards of humanity's best interests, their public statements increasingly betray such a lack of self awareness and broad perspective that what's meant to come off as irrefutable logic can start feel more like religious zeal. Consider this recent statement by Paul Graham for example:

When you accuse Silicon Valley of x, you're implicitly saying x works well, which doesn't seem smart if you're against x.

In addition to being the founder of startup accelerator Y Combinator, Graham is an essayist who is often regarded as something of a venture capitalist philosopher king. He is the creator of Hacker News (a bastion of conspicuous young male smarty pants-ness) and someone who, in his previous career as a programmer, concerned himself a great deal with topics such as whether it's possible for various computer languages to be objectively proven more powerful than one another. Given that his personal brand is so heavily invested in analytical rationalism, it's a bit stunning that he would make an assertion so lacking in the kind of rigor its own pseudo-formal packaging would lead one to expect.

At the center of this and pretty much everything else Graham writes is a proposition that he clearly feels needs no further consideration: that Silicon Valley represents an unassailable force for progress, and that anyone who questions its divine right to disruption is at best deluded and at worst corrupt. In many ways, the tweet above is simply an even more aggressive reframing of something Graham tweeted in defense of Uber, which had just begun to run afoul of regulators back in 2012:

Uber is so obviously a good thing that you can measure how corrupt cities are by how hard they try to suppress it.

As with the word "implicitly" in that first tweet, the word "obviously" serves here as a proxy for an entire unexamined worldview—the tip of a technocratic, Rand-ian ideological iceberg that regards what "works" (as defined first by engineering achievement and second by success in the market) as self-evidently correct. It's a software engineer's view of capitalism as a kind of genetic algorithm, gradually advancing society through a massively parallel search for product-market fit. Regulators, politicians, pearl-clutching social commentators and other unenlightened busy bodies who would seek to place limits on this process are bugs in the system, perverting its just course. Never mind that we've seen this algorithm operating at full efficiency before and found that, left unchecked, it tends to exhibit some problematic biases (toward income inequality, exploitation of labor, and disregard for public safety to name a few). Silicon Valley is different because unlike the robber barons of the last industrial revolution, the Titans of Silicon Valley are "smart" (a word used almost totemistically by Graham and his acolytes) and thus implicitly benevolent.

The kind of haughty sentiment evinced by these two statements has long been a staple of tech's response to criticism. In their reductive glibness, blinkered certainty, and "us-against-them" mentality they're a prime example of what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton described in his book “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism” as “thought terminating cliches":

The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.

This almost sounds like a description of Twitter in 2015 and, sure enough, industry thought leaders have increasingly embraced the "tweetstorm”—a sort of Twitter soundbite blitzkrieg—as a favorite way of defusing criticism. The Platonic tech insider tweetstorm is condescending, sanctimonious, and aphoristic, with a hint of magical thinking ("X is probably untrue because I don't want it to be true"), a healthy serving of self-righteous outrage, and just a dollop of clubby ass-kisserey. When the Wall Street Journal published a story questioning the science behind startup darling Theranos, for example, VC Josh Elman took to Twitter with a variation on a number of familiar themes:

I would bet that the real Theranos story is a ton of people working really hard to change medical tests and are close to something amazing" "The question is only whether they fully achieve that amazing potential and can deliver to the market or if they just remain close." "The accusations of fraud, impropriety are probably nonsense. Instead, People working very hard to try and will something new in reality.

Former Path CEO Dave Morin pretty much exactly echoes this sentiment in the comments of a story about Theranos on The Information:

Taking a step back, this entire situation smells of a smear campaign by the incumbents in "big health." Isn't it time as Millennials that we try to use the Internet to unearth deeper facts and see through these traditional smear campaigns and defend our generations desire to improve the status quo? Or do we just let business as usual continue?

Never mind that Elman and Morin, by their own admission, have little knowledge of the science being called into question, no inside information on the story's specifics, and offer zero evidence to support the aspersions they cast on critics. Skeptical journalists who question the narrative simply couldn't possibly be anything but mean-spirited jerks trying to drum up attention by demeaning the hard work of altruistic Silicon Valley innovators. As Eugeny Morozov recently said:

The main reason why it’s okay to hate Silicon Valley is simple: because these guys have established themselves as some kind of untouchable, noble humanitarian enterprise while, in reality, they are probably a more rapacious and inhumane type of enterprise than Wall Street. My view on this has been quite consistent over the last three years: it's just very hard to make people start asking critical questions about technology companies in Silicon Valley. These companies have managed to discursively construct the field in such a manner that anybody who questions technology and their products is seen as attacking science or enlightenment or modernity itself. So, for example, any time that I attack Google or Facebook, the default assumption is that I must be this technophobe who lives in the forest and hates modern dentistry. Nobody would say anything of the kind if I was attacking, say, Wall Street or the oil companies.

This strategy of shutting down critics by portraying them as petty and anti-progress has worked fairly well—both in terms of protecting the desired self image tech entrepreneurs as heroic, promethean figures and shielding them from criticism as they amassed their fortunes—as long as it was supported by a cooperative tech press (a journalistic cohort that has traditionally been quite cozy with its subjects—some of its members having even crossed the line completely into the VC club). As the tech sector has assumed an ever greater centrality to the economy and daily life, however, the mainstream press has taken note and shifted all coverage away from admiring access journalism and toward more hard-nosed examination of tech's growing influence. As John Herrmann writes:

In recent years, but in the last year especially, the public relationship between what we can vaguely describe as "tech" and loosely define as the news "media" seems to have deteriorated dramatically. Some journalists rightly recognize that companies like Amazon are fast becoming the most important and powerful companies in the world, and their response is to treat reporting on them and criticizing them as an urgent project of our time.

This growing scrutiny and the accompanying ratcheting up of cognitive dissonance seems to be driving a lot of tech's elite increasingly nuts, and Graham in particular seems not to be handling it well. He appears to avidly monitor what people are saying about him and respond to criticism with varying levels of retribution to those who speak ill. Many get blocked by him on Twitter. One person I know received an email from him after a snarky tweet. Yet another was actually fired from his job after Graham caught wind of some smack talking.

Last year Graham stepped down from day-to-day management at Y Combinator after a series of embarrassing press statements (simultaneously insisting tech's lack of diversity is a "pipeline problem" while admitting "I can be fooled by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg" for example). His stated goal was to "get his brain back," which one might be tempted to read as a sincere effort to gain some perspective on the biases that were starting to make him feel out of touch as an industry leader. Unfortunately, as the above tweets show, 2015 Graham has, if anything, doubled down on 2012 Graham's refusal to engage with criticism in a thoughtful way.

Graham and his peers like to tout the liberalism of startup hubs, and to present tech entrepreneurship as a virtuous alternative to the nefarious traditional magnet for ambitious young talent, finance. But in their growing defensiveness, tech industry leaders are starting to exhibit a creeping, Wall Street-like conservative arrogance. It's an attitude that begins when you convince yourself "I inherently deserve this, because I am part of a special, virtuous group." This is the foundational belief through which a whole raft of cognitive distortions creep into the thinking of otherwise intelligent, rational people - even people who may have started out with good intentions. It's what causes you to believe that something must be true simply because you can't accept the implications to your self image if it's not. As Eric Giannella writes in his essay “Morality and the Idea of Progress in Silicon Valley," it's can become a way of excusing yourself from considering the consequences of your actions:

Critiques of recent scandals in Silicon Valley rightly place the blame on a culture that supports amorality, thoughtlessness, and ignorance rather than ill intent. But the problem runs much deeper, because Silicon Valley's amorality problem arises from the implicit and explicit narrative of progress companies use for marketing and that people use to find meaning in their work. By accepting this narrative of progress uncritically, imagining that technological change equals historic human betterment, many in Silicon Valley excuse themselves from moral reflection. Put simply, the progress narrative short-circuits moral reflection on the consequences of new technologies.

The more tech insiders dig into their smug, tweetstorm-defended bunkers, the more they are going to find that their wealth and ambition puts them at odds with the rest of society. If Silicon Valley truly wants to live up to its progressive image instead of becoming a bastion of 21st century robber barons, it needs to engage with the world (and critics) rather than reflexively attempt remake society in its own image through force of will. It may require a good deal more humility and reflection than the industry's titans are accustomed to mustering. But in the long term, it's the only rational course.