The early fate of these ideas was bound up with institutions that had little to do with commerce: from research centers to hippie retreats, from universities to communes. The fact that the people interested in these ideas made a lot of money was almost beside the point: they founded companies because they thought of them as spontaneous, communal correctives to the overly stolid institutions of government and the university. But before long, shibboleths like “communication” and “big data” circulated less and less because of their cultural cachet and more and more because of the vagaries of the business cycle. What hasn’t changed: formal education seeming secondary to these ideas—but where previously that had meant dropping out to pursue niche projects, it soon came to mean dropping out to make lots of money. The ideas that tech calls thinking were developed and refined in the making of money.
And what tech calls thinking may be undergoing a further shift. Fred Turner, a professor of communication at Stanford, traced the intellectual origins of Silicon Valley in his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006). The generation Turner covered in that book came of age in the sixties, and if they made money in the Valley, they’re playing tennis in Woodside now; if they taught, they are mostly retiring. The ethos is changing. “As little as ten years ago,” Turner told me, “the look for a programmer was still long hair, potbelly, Gryffindor T-shirt. I don’t see that as much anymore.”
The generation of thinkers and innovators Turner wrote about still read entire books of philosophy; they had Ph.D.s; they had gotten interested in computers because computers allowed them to ask big questions that previously had been impossible to ask, let alone answer. Eric Roberts is of that generation. He got his Ph.D. in 1980 and taught at Wellesley before coming to Stanford. He shaped into the form they take today two of the courses that together are the gateway to Stanford’s computer science major. CS 106A, Programming Methodologies, and 106B, Programming Abstractions, are a rite of passage for Stanford students; almost all students, whether they are computer science majors or not, enroll in one or the other during their time at the university. Roberts’s other course was CS 181, Computers, Ethics, and Public Policy. Back in the day, CS 181 was a small writing class that prepared computer scientists for the ethical ramifications of their inventions. Today it is a massive class, capped at a hundred students, that has become one more thing hundreds of majors check off their lists before they graduate. Eric Roberts left Stanford in 2015, and today teaches much smaller classes at Reed College in Portland.
As Roberts tells it, the real change happened in 2008, though “it almost happened in the eighties, it almost happened in the nineties.” During those tech booms, the number of computer science majors exploded, to the point where the faculty had trouble teaching enough classes for them. “But then,” Roberts says, “the dot-com bust probably saved us.” The number of majors declined precipitously when after the bubble burst media reports were full of laid-off dot-com employees. Most of those employees were back to making good money again by 2002, but the myth of precariousness persisted—until the Great Recession, that is, which was when what Roberts calls the “get-rich-quick crowd” was forced out of investment banking and started looking back at the ship they had prematurely jumped from in 2001. When venture capital got burned in the real estate market and in finance after 2008, for instance, it came west, ready to latch on to something new. The tech industry we know today is what happens when certain received notions meet with a massive amount of cash with nowhere else to go.
David M. Kelley, a Stanford professor and the founder of the design company IDEO, is one of the apostles behind design thinking. He has shaped the way Silicon Valley has presented and marketed itself since at least the 1980s. He is a founder of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, also known as the “d.school,” and has been a fixture at TED Talks and developers’ conferences. In one TED Talk back in 2002, Kelley gave a series of examples of how design thinking was changing the tech industry—and an inadvertent example of what tech calls thinking. For a long time, Kelley told his audience, tech companies were “focused on products or objects.” But in recent years, “we’ve kind of climbed Maslow’s hierarchy a little bit,” focusing more on “human-centeredness” in design.
But why mention Maslow’s hierarchy? Maslow’s famous model tried to explain how certain human needs can emerge and be satisfied only after other, more fundamental needs are met. The idea Kelley is describing, by contrast, is indeed one that many philosophers—the entire school of phenomenology, for one—have wrestled with. But Maslow, specifically, did not. In context, all Kelley seems to be saying is that designers used to think about objects in one way, and now they have begun thinking about them in another, more complex way, because they now design “behaviors and personality into products.” They have recognized that how people relate to objects is more complicated than they once supposed. So far, so good. But why invoke the psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) to make that point?
This is where we start getting a sense for what tech calls thinking. Kelley doesn’t say, “The philosopher Martin Heidegger proposed that human subjectivity can be understood only as a mode of being-in-the-world,” or anything like that. He does not go for a piece of philosophy that is apropos but that might alienate the audience at a TED Talk. He adduces a bit of pop psychology that has become a kind of byword since Maslow came up with it in 1943. And the
