What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley (FSG Originals x Logic)

The ideas that tech calls thinking were developed and refined in the making of money.

This is the genius behind the kvetching about “political correctness,” for instance: you get to keep talking the way you’ve always talked, but instead of having to worry you’re being lazy, you get to tell yourself you’re actually being courageous.

And by degrading failure, anguish, and discomfort to mere stepping-stones, they erase the fact that for so many of us, these stones don’t lead anywhere.

While creative destruction is viable economically, the experience of it is too disorienting politically to allow capitalism to survive long-term.

Accelerationism advocates a surrender to the forces of acceleration instead, jumping into the river even as we can hear the roar of the waterfall.

To create content is to be distracted. To create the “platform” is to focus on the true structure of reality. Shaping media is better than shaping the content of such media. It is the person who makes the “platform” who becomes a billionaire. The person who provides the content—be it reviews on Yelp, self-published books on Amazon, your own car and

The more we are detached from communal standards and an in-group whose views validate us, the more we are alone with ourselves and the cold, unflinching gaze of society—and we have to seek validation via what we consume, how we decorate our homes, how we take care of ourselves, and so forth.

The problem isn’t that the act of providing content is ignored or uncompensated but rather that it isn’t recognized as labor.

The gig economy itself is an aestheticization of labor practices. Sure, what you’re doing may look a whole lot like what a pizza delivery guy did twenty years ago, but what you’re really doing is (according to ads looking to reel in new DoorDash drivers) being your own boss, exploring new parts of the city, paying for your wedding.