The Tech Syllabus

A month ago, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison put together—via Twitter thread—his take on a 43-book vague tech canon.

"This isn't the list of books that I think one ought to read," Collison wrote, "it's just the list that I think roughly covers the major ideas that are influential here." But then, what tech books should one read? After all, if the books and content we consume determine our worldview—and thus the things we create—then the question of what Silicon Valley reads has a ripple effect across the society they shape.

That's the question Dirt set out to answer by putting together our own tech canon, rounding up some investors and technologists to pick their brain on what books tech workers need to own before bringing their own creations to life.

—Norah Rami, Dirt Intern

Andy Weissman, managing partner at Union Square Ventures

Born Standing Up - Steve Martin (best product development book); The Master Switch - Tim Wu (history doesn't repeat but it does rhyme); Lying Awake - Mark Salzman (much of being an entrepreneur occurs inside ones head); When We Cease to Understand the World - Benjamin Labatut (madness or genius); The New New Thing - Michael Lewis (its not about what's next but what's after what's next); The Philosophy of Andy Warhol - Andy Warhol (everything we need to learn basically comes from Warhol); Hamnet - Maggie O'Farrell (you are either running towards something or running away from something)

Maya Bakhai, founding partner at Spice Capital

The Man Who Solved the Market - Gregory Zuckerman; Invested - Charles Schwab

Julie Frederickson, managing partner at Chaotic Capital

In the Beginning... Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson is a classic novella about how the introduction of the graphical user interface or GUI brought computing to the masses. It's a metaphor for how control and precision degrade as you add more abstraction and scale. Everyone who codes or who uses an operating system with a GUI should read it

Reggie James, founder, CEO, and designer at Eternal

Finite & Infinite Games - James P Carse; Embodiment - Naoto Fukasawa; Good Strategy / Bad Strategy - Richard Rumelt; The Second Self - Sherry Turkle; Understanding Media - Marshall McLuhan; Meditations - Marcus Aurelius; What Technology Wants - Kevin Kelly; Becoming Steve Jobs - Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli; Snowcrash - Neal Stephenson; Exhalation - Ted Chiang; The Medium is the Message - Marshall McLuhan; The Wisdom of Insecurity - Alan Watts; Made in Japan - Akio Morita; The Media Lab - Stewart Brand

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Ruby Thellot, founder of research and design studio 13101401 inc and adjunct professor at NYU

The Question Concerning Technology - Martin Heidegger; “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter” - Friedrich Kittler; Technological Slavery (better than the manifesto since it's more recent) - Theodore Kaczynski; Haunted Media - Jeffrey Sconce; Fanged Noumena - Nick Land; The Xenofeminist Manifesto - Laboria Cuboniks

Jose Mejia, founder of Scene Infrastructure Company

Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless should be a mandatory read for anyone working in tech, working with tech, working against tech, or being worked by tech. In 1989 it was, perhaps, an attempt to paint a picture of the future by exaggerating nuggets of truth about the then-present. Now, it reads more like miasmic retelling of stories about the present.

Charles Broskoski, co-founder and CEO of Are.na

On Dialogue - David Bohm; A Pattern Language - Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein and Sara Ishikawa; The Fifth Discipline - Peter Senge; Tempo - Venkatesh Rao; Tao Te Ching - Ursula Le Guin; The Artist as Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behavior - Stephen Willats

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• “A Little Night Fishing” by Mukqs (Spotify)

• “family and friends” by Oklou (Spotify)

• Wendy Eisenberg’s Viewfinder is gorgeously moody guitar jazz record inspired by laser eye surgery, of all things (The Quietus)

• Rob Arcand helms the Pitchfork Sunday review for an underappreciated but über-essential techno record (Pitchfork)

• New Tasteland 🆙, feat. Outdoor Voices founder Ty Haney: make $$. have fun!! (Spotify)

• Survivor season 47 just had its premiere air, and people are…less than thrilled with the first elimination (Vulture)

• They’re letting Cillian Murphy be Irish again (YouTube)

• The Romania official TikTok account is extremely Dirt-y (TikTok)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• What is Entropy? Well, “Once there was a thing called Twitter…” (arXiv)

• This is the level of thoroughness and sheer haterdom that I want in all my magazine takedowns moving forward (Current Affairs)

• “Call it an act of hetero-optimism”: Lili Owen Rowlands reviews An Honest Woman by Charlotte Shane, who Dirt interviewed last month (The New Yorker)

• Joanna Newsom hive rise up: a harp emoji is coming to iOS (Stereogum)

• How did Maggie Cheung become the patron saint of Letterboxd and the Criterion Collection? Raymond Ang tells the story of her legend in absentia (GQ)

• That Twitter-viral uncrustable painting, in the artist’s own words (The New York Times)

• Kudos to John Early for managing to lure Sky Ferreira out for a press engagement, and for giving us this exchange: “EARLY: I know, it’s so bizarre. I’m interested in your relationship to that era of Madonna, 2000 to 2005.” “FERREIRA: To be honest, I associate her with fencing, because of ‘Die Another Day.’” (Interview)

• Tickets are on sale for ARTWALK NY 2024, with Katherine Bradford as this year’s honoree (Coalition For The Homeless)

• Opening a personal essay about self-sabotage with a Miró painting is a surefire way to get my attention, and this one delivers (Alara’s Adversaria)

• Mom pick me up they’re body-shaming In Search of Lost Time (BBC)

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