Book Talk: What Tech Calls Governing

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 a neo-feudal worldview, 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 seek to dominate?" 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 influence with none of the responsibility.

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.