But when dropouts like Elizabeth Holmes deliberately invoke earlier successful tech dropouts as they pack up their dorm rooms, they also tap into a much longer history of dropping out—one that they may be less aware of.
Origin stories are ubiquitous in Silicon Valley. Companies have them, founders have them, even random employees seem to engage in mythmaking. Such stories are probably necessary because the products made in Silicon Valley, and the places where the magic happens, are not that spectacular to look at—but investors, journalists, and the public nonetheless need something to gawk at. Society is fascinated by the dropout because most people, almost by definition, did not drop out. Fetishizing the break allows journalists and the public to turn a couple of fairly random, and frequently predictable, decisions into a coherent narrative. But in a strange way, maybe it has the same function for some of tech’s protagonists too. In an industry that idealizes independence but relies (as most industries do) on by-now-well-established pipelines, there must be considerable cognitive dissonance between how you’re asked to present yourself and how you really are. You’re encouraged to present as risk-taking what was really just adherence to rules, as eccentricity what was actually widely shared common wisdom, and as a late triumph after incredible adversity what was in fact basically inevitable.
It is in this context that dropping out of college became the shiny, distracting object it is today. The founders themselves are much less likely to bring it up, relying on others to do it for them. And those others always do. You can almost hear desperate journalists seizing on the minor biographical variances of upper-middle-class white youth in order to be able to say something about these people. In their narratives, line-jumping of any kind becomes the mark of genius. When Elizabeth Holmes was still on the cover of Fortune, profiles of her would make much of the fact that as a first-year she talked her way into a lab with Ph.D. students. (How many labs without Ph.D. students are you aware of, and should we maybe shut them down?) Having taught oneself to code in high school is a staple. Holmes’s knowledge of Mandarin (she took summer school classes) was another detail trotted out with a feeling that surely somehow it had to be significant and interesting. All these things are perfectly ordinary, and no two people move through their collegiate experience in the same manner. Somehow the sudden heights of success to which these young people climb make people fixate on biographical data points that are, upon reflection, absolutely unremarkable.
It’s probably not an accident that people who begin and then ostentatiously reject an elite education more often than not eventually find themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area, a place where the phrase “dropping out” carries certain historic echoes, connotes certain unfulfilled promises, that are both related and entirely different. “Turn on, tune in, drop out” is the famous mantra Timothy Leary made popular at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in 1967. It’s worth keeping this sense of dropping out in mind when one considers the mythology of famous tech industry college dropouts.
Like our modern dropouts, Leary frequently linked dropping out to mythmaking: “To drop out, you must form your own religion.” Sure, it might put you in touch with some preexisting energy, the “ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,” as Allen Ginsberg put it. But to some extent you were supposed to invent the connection, Leary thought: “You select a myth as a reminder that you are part of an ancient and holy process. You select a myth to guide you when you drop out of the narrow confines of the fake-prop studio set.” Selecting a myth is a key idea here: you give up a certain amount of control when you drop out, but you retain control over the meaning of what’s happening to you. Dropping out is at once a return into the self and an opening toward the world.
In Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf, which had been published in 1927 but came back into fashion with the beatniks, the saxophonist Pablo, who lures the main character, Harry Haller, into a mind-expanding magic theater, speaks of another world that exists “only within yourself.” He hands Harry a looking glass through which the latter sees “the reflection of an uneasy self-tormented, inwardly laboring and seething being—myself, Harry Haller. And within him again I saw the Steppenwolf, a shy, beautiful, dazed wolf with frightened eyes that smoldered now with anger, now with sadness.” Dropping out severs you from the “robot performances on the TV-studio stage,” as Leary put it. It instead orients you toward your inner Steppenwolf.
Aldous Huxley thought acid put you in touch with “the antipodes,” areas of your mind that are eclipsed in normal functioning. But in Harry Haller’s case, withdrawing into your own individuality is about casting off parts of the self that are constructed or deformed by outside forces, by societal expectations, and above all by educational institutions. Hesse had had a miserable time in school, and many of the countercultural thinkers who rediscovered him in the 1950s and ’60s, from Jack Kerouac to Ken Kesey, similarly hated the conventions of thought and living that were imposed by formal schooling. This is what Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) calls simply “the nation-wide Combine that’s the really big force.” So even though Leary’s sense of dropping out wasn’t explicitly about school, the consonance isn’t an accident either.
It is central to the idea of dropping out that by withdrawing into your own particular self, you actually get tuned in to a broader, more global consciousness. This was what the counterculture had over those earlier texts that are more resigned in their rebellion. Rejecting the Combine, rejecting conventional authority, will not drive you insane the way it does Chief Bromden, will not isolate you the
