EP 487: Rethinking Our Tech Mythology

The tech industry has a central role in shaping our work, our communication, and even our identities. Its mythology is woven into the products and services we use on a daily basis. So understanding how the people leading the tech industry think—how they perceive their own stories and generate their own hype—is a solid step toward making sense of what can seem so nonsensical.

And there is one book I go back to over and over again when I need to make sense of our mythologies of disruption and failure, value and genius—and that's What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub.

In this episode, I share 3 ideas from that book that help me make sense of the headlines shaping politics, business, and work.

Footnotes:

• What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub
• "Mark Zuckerberg" on In Bed With The Right

Find a text version of this episode at whatworks.fyi!

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (02:00) - What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub
• (04:34) - Idea 1: Silicon Valley is a mythology.
• (08:37) - Idea 2: Gender becomes encoded in all judgments of value.
• (13:01) - Idea 3: Money does not follow merit, nor vice versa.
• (16:39) - The Last Word
• (18:07) - Credits

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What is What Works?

Work is central to the human experience. It helps us shape our identities, care for those we love, and contribute to our communities. Work can be a source of power and a catalyst for change. Unfortunately, that's not how most of us experience work—even those who work for themselves. Our labor and creative spirit are used to enrich others and maintain the status quo. It's time for an intervention. What Works is a show about rethinking work, business, and leadership for the 21st-century economy. Host Tara McMullin covers money, management, culture, media, philosophy, and more to figure out what's working (and what's not) today. Tara offers a distinctly interdisciplinary approach to deep-dive analysis of how we work and how work shapes us.