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Guardian

Guardian

Can you judge the tech bros by their bookshelves? | John Naughton

Guardian
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73% Informative

Patrick Collison , co-founder with his brother, John , of fintech giant Stripe (market value $ 65bn ) made a list of 43 books.

The list included some predictable choices: Isaac Asimov’s Foundation , Richard Dawkins and Ayn Rand .

But there were also surprises, particularly James Scott's Seeing Like a State, Robert Caro's The Power Broker and most unexpectedly The Sovereign Individual .

Marc Andreessen decried it as “aspirational’; the real’ list, he maintained, simply consisted of Malcolm Gladwell's oeuvre, Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens and “assorted DEI training.

A good starting point is What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley by Adrian Daub , a humanities professor at the centre of the valley, Stanford .

Reading him gives one the feeling that there’s a good deal of virtue signalling in the reading lists of contemporary tech titans.

He locates their supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Rand.