The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites
I recently re-read Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, and now every time a reactionary Silicon Valley billionaire opens his mouth, I think about it. So I wrote about it for The Nation. Here's the column:
On Instagram, there’s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.dime) who has dedicated his account to “posting an insane thing an AI executive said every day in 2026.” I can’t stop thinking about his entry for Day 15, quoting the CEO of a company called Suno, Mikey Shulman, as he claimed that musicians hate the process of making music. “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now,” he said. “It takes a lot of time, a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think a majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”
This would be news to every professional musician I know, and I live in a part of Brooklyn that’s adjacent to a neighborhood I think of as Dad Band Land because it’s populated by a disproportionate number of aging indie rockers with kids. But it’s not the ludicrousness of Shulman’s statement that sticks with me; it’s the swaggering know-nothing elan behind it, which is symptomatic of Silicon Valley’s deep-seated anti-intellectualism.
As the historian Richard Hofstadter noted, a fierce anti-intellectual spirit has long animated American culture, but it has typically targeted the knowledge elite from below. What’s striking about today’s brand of anti-intellectualism is that it infuses the American knowledge elite; it stems from the bedrock conviction among tech oligarchs that they have mastered everything and have nothing left to learn. In this cloistered vision of tech-driven learning, they believe that deep intellectual work—the kind you do when you author a complex piece of music, for example—has little or no inherent value. Their disdain for it has fueled their attacks on higher education, the humanities, and learning for its own sake, which they believe has no purpose beyond its inevitable digitization and monetization.
The examples are everywhere: Peter Thiel’s crusade against college attendance and his program that subsidizes high school students who want to forgo it, Marc Andreessen’s boasts that he actively avoids introspection, the gleeful prediction of Thiel’s Palantir colleague Alex Karp that AI will hurt educated women the most. That all of these scourges of learning for learning’s sake are themselves beneficiaries of privileged educations doesn’t matter: As ardent monopolists, they’ve managed to believe they’ve cornered the market on critical thinking. Everyone else needn’t be troubled by the rigors of learning, since they exist solely to serve as drones in the tech regimes of the future.
The irony of this posture is that there’s almost no sector of American life—with the notable exception of the tech world’s political retainers in the Trump White House—that is less welcoming to rigorous thinking than Silicon Valley. The apostles of algorithmic dominance cheerlead chatbots and technocratic shortcuts for thinking and reasoning, and use them extensively themselves, even though the models hallucinate and have a baleful tendency toward sycophancy. “Researchers found that nearly a dozen leading models were highly sycophantic,” a recent New York Times story on the explosion in AI chatbots reported, “taking the users’ side in interpersonal conflicts 49 percent more often than humans did—even when the user described situations in which they broke the law, hurt someone or lied.” The obsequious intellectual concierges of the AI revolution also reduce cognitive strain on users, which further weakens their capacity for thinking. An MIT Media Lab study titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT” found that LLM users “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” The tech oligarchs have somehow managed to enshittify thinking.
This shouldn’t come as any great surprise to students of the dismally incurious and claustral mindscape of Silicon Valley. Tech oligarchs have erected a new cognitive technology designed to fry users’ brains after they’ve effectively lobotomized themselves with a real-world version of the same process. Our tech lords have long made a practice of outsourcing their thinking to the many people (and technologies) devoted to digesting difficult material and summarizing it for them. In their working lives, they then proceed to surround themselves with yes men and peers who affirm everything they say; the beta version of the cringy displays of great-leader sycophancy that break out in every Trump cabinet meeting was perfected in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley.
This lovingly tended bubble of privilege makes it easy for tech oligarchs to avoid any of the discomfort that comes with questioning their modes of existence or confronting even minor levels of adversity. A tweet from a few years ago neatly summarized the mental costs of this lifestyle: “Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment, it’s probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day.”
The tech lords’ ethos of intellectual secession is also rooted in two key maladies of American society: a general disdain for the intellectual class; and the overclass’s wariness toward—and not infrequent open hostility to—upward class mobility, which still largely rests on access to higher education.
Hofstadler’s 1964 Pulitzer Prize–winning book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life has aged in certain ways, but it brilliantly traces the dogmas of anti-intellectualism to our founding mythologies—most especially, to the veneration of the self-made man by the business class. The self-made man was always a self-serving fable meant to conceal the deep fissures of rule by a business aristocracy. Now that much of America’s wealth is inherited or the product of luck and equity appreciation that is wildly disproportionate to the material contributions of any founder or CEO, our billionaire entrepreneurs and business owners are even less self-made than they used to be.
Still, the myth persists, and you can see it in the tech oligarchy’s insistence that they owe the rest of society nothing as a consequence of their own Promethean genius. That’s the logic behind Silicon Valley’s vision of complete oligarch defection from the grubby dictates of social existence in common with fallen humanity and the dawn of a utopian “networked state” created by and for the tech elite. Less grandiosely, it’s also the tech oligarchs’ rationale for not paying their fair share of taxes, and their attempts to extract resources from the public sector via school vouchers, privatization, and regulatory capture.
On some level, our tech lords are aware that their wealth is built on the backs of others, and like other moguls who’ve built fortunes by extracting wealth from the commons, they fear what would happen if workers manage to transcend their preordained social class or otherwise become more difficult to control because they’ve used their brains to organize against their owners and managers.
You can trace the modern history of this fear in the tension between purely academic disciplines and vocational education, which arrived on the American scene alongside the advent of the modern business school. Business education canonized the training of aspiring managers to commandeer the redoubts of industrial-age capitalism and paid little more than lip service to intellectual development.
Even under this charter solemnizing an aggressively instrumentalized pursuit of knowledge, early business schools were wary of any instruction that might cause workers to evaluate the competency of the managerial class. As Hofstadter writes: “When Dean Wallace Donham of the Harvard Graduate School of Business suggested to one such school in the Middle West that it offer a course on the problems of trade unionism, he was told: We don’t want our students to pay attention to anything that might raise questions about management or business policy in their minds.”
The same self-inflicted myopia courses through the bold pronouncements of the tech oligarchs as they forecast a frictionless social order operating on the diffusion of knowledge designed to promote their own class interests. After all, much of Silicon Valley’s wealth is built on the intellectual work of others, often produced in universities and funded by the government. The STEM disciplines they hail as the vanguard of social progress are rooted not just in the sciences but the humanities as well. Yet since the unfettered quest for knowledge is anathema to them, they never acknowledge this particular intellectual debt. Instead, they hire linguists to improve the large language models of their burgeoning AI empires while disparaging the kind of people who become linguists.
They also enjoy a bit of JD Vance–style working-class LARPing on the side. Again following the faux-populist lead of the MAGA movement, tech oligarchs will wax Whitmanian on the virtues of America’s forgotten workers without of course ever sending their own children to welding school or encouraging them to become HVAC technicians. And as a matter of course, the oligarchs of Silicon Valley, who have presided over one of the most unyielding labor cartels in American enterprise, all viciously oppose unionization for tradespeople.
As the daughter of an IBEW local lineman who was still climbing power poles well into his 60s and doing contracting work on the side, I recognize a telltale attitude of patronizing condescension here—particularly when these venture capitalists mouth the words “respectable work.” It is respectable work, but it’s also work that is physically exhausting and destructive at a certain age, and has a ceiling for maximum income. Absent union organization, work in these trades offers little security or protection in a country with a weak social safety net—one that the same oligarchs would happily destroy altogether. But these oligarchs need workers more than workers need them, and they know it, despite Andreessen’s recent statement that “without us [tech oligarchs] there’s nothing but stagnation.”
This emphasis on trades and their value to working class men in particular is also of a piece with another Vance-ian strain within the tech set: the oligarchs’ reactionary insistence that gender hierarchies are simply a function of meritocracy and not patriarchy. Now that women are getting more master’s degrees than men, it has to follow that graduate education is useless.
A clear corollary of this reactionary gender ideology is the tech bros’ widespread obsession with physical strength—they view it, childishly, as a power that women cannot replicate or exceed, and treat it as a vector for measuring themselves against other men. This is not new either. In summarizing the 19th-century view toward the life of the mind, Hofstadter writes that “it was assumed that schooling existed not to cultivate certain distinctive qualities of mind but to make personal advancement possible. For this purpose, an immediate engagement with the practical tasks of life was held to be more usefully educative, whereas intellectual and cultural pursuits were called unworldly, unmasculine, and impractical.”
The tech bros’ cult of advancement serves to do much more than safeguarding the moat they’ve erected around membership in their own class. Knowledge directed toward goals other than self-advancement is a threat, for the simple reason that an informed populace is a civically active populace. You can’t preach automatic deference before a caste of tech savants to a group of workers schooled in understanding their own role as agents of social progress.
This is the other irony of the disingenuous posturing of Silicon Valley’s knowledge elite. The same people who like to tout their own high IQs, bemoan the lack of critical thinking in society, and complain that everyone else is too emotional betray an astounding failure to confront their own cognitive makeup. What separates humans from animals is our ability to contemplate our own existence and transfer complex knowledge down through generations. This species-perpetuating endeavor is rooted in complex neurological processes that involve the kind of intellectual capacities that these guys hold in dogmatic and ill-informed contempt.
Emotion, after all, is an evolutionary adaptation that feeds into pro-social behavior, not a just silly dispensable quality women have. (It’s also on lavish display among the self-styled logic-only apostles of the tech brotherhood, as any cursory consultation of their grievance-addled social-media accounts will readily confirm.) But in its preferred modes of public discourse, the tech elite rallies behind the clueless bromides of their chief (and literal) egghead, Marc Andreessen, who openly brags that he actively avoids utilizing any of these various forms of meta cognition to contemplate anything at all. This presumably empties his brain of all troubling reflections beyond the central organizing theme of the greatness of Marc Andreessen, and whatever constitutes the future of Marc Andreessen’s legacy and bank accounts.
We need intellectualism because we need liberal democracy. And that is precisely why these guys—they’re all guys—don’t like it. The poster boy for Valley-bred anti-intellectualism is the self-styled neoreactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, an Andreessen, Vance, and Thiel favorite. Yarvin openly embraces racist psuedo-science and promotes a tech baron’s vision of autocratic rule that in his telling would transform California into a kind of feudal monarchy where a CEO-slash-king runs everything as a benevolent authoritarian. Inasmuch as tech oligarchs have a favored thinker to outsource their thinking to, he’s it. Here’s how Yarvin would evaluate his model head of state: “We can define responsibility in financial terms. If we think of California as a profitable corporation, a capital asset whose purpose is to maximize the production of cash, we have a definition of responsibility which is not only precise and unambiguous, but indeed quantitative.” In this view, the raison d’être of the state and its government should be profit making, and a tech CEO should control all of it. The pesky Volk are granted roles only as grateful vassals of their overlords; otherwise, any effort on their part to understand their own lives as meaningful would upend Yarvin’s kingly reveries. Dictatorship, but make it business.
It’s not too hard to understand why Andreessen and his cronies think the guy who says a tech CEO should be the dictator of California is a genius. But it is darkly funny that, at the individual level, they all assume the authoritarian in this scenario would obviously be someone like themselves—not another wealth hoarder who might find their existence and their monopolist empires a threat. A single political theory or philosophy class at the intro level would force them to spend five minutes thinking about the pros and cons of this scenario and its historical precedents. But you can’t possibly expect the harried lords of Silicon Valley to spend time reading very long books and examining complex nuances and contradictions when there are podcasts to go on and memes to tweet. Time is money, after all.
In Yarvin’s view, the sinister forces of democracy are represented in a numbing bloc of consensus he calls “the Cathedral”—educational institutions, journalists, culture makers. This presumably includes me, a middle-class writer living in Brooklyn who believes in liberal democracy and sends her kid to public school. Yarvin would argue I am brainwashing you into rejecting things like his “chief executive dictator” idea, which cannot be dismissed on its own merits, but only via conspiracy.
Ultimately, this is the core of it: The anti-intellectual Yarvinites of the tech world value order over change—specifically, an order where they are in control and do not have to worry about nettlesome things like changing demographics, competition, or being wrong about anything at all. They pay lip service to innovation but hate the deep mental work and creativity that produces novelty and original thought. They care about such things only if they can be turned into a $20-a-month subscription service and then parlayed into mission-critical enterprise software.
This model of mental rentiership will make them still more galactically rich, which will continue to underwrite their endless regress of Techcrunch summits and TED talks where they can do the only tangible work they care about: one-upping each other like kindergarteners on a playground bragging about who has the best toys. They do not want to think, and when they exchange ideas, they recycle the same ones that have already won inert allegiance among their fellow members of the overclass. If they were somehow to stumble into an unfamiliar (and therefore original) thought formation, it would in all likelihood succumb to the degraded rounds of elite gossip that they’ve managed to elevate into the omniscient discourse of self-congratulatory moguldom.
This is, to put it mildly, a terrible state of affairs because these people have far too much power and they countenance far too few constraints on what they can do with it. They value their own expertise, but reflexively deride that of others—especially anyone who has the temerity to demand a voice in public life and a say in how our society is constructed without wealth as the arbiter of every social good. But for now, at least, they keep showing their hand—a useful weakness to exploit for those who wish to outsmart them.
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Elizabeth