The Education of the Broligarchy
The Education of the Broligarchy
Author: Blake Smith, a historian and translator who lives in Chicago Publication: Colossus magazine, Issue 05 URL: https://colossus.com/article/education-broligarchy-silicon-valley-canon/ Published: January 2026 One-line: The “Silicon Valley Canon” is a real tradition doing real work — it balances books that inflame personal ambition against books that dissolve the individual into systems — but because it is read almost entirely in adolescence, it equips young men to win power and leaves them unprepared to hold it.
Summary
The framing question. Smith opens on a paradox: tech elites have, almost alone among contemporary Americans, “some experience of sustaining our inherited greatness, and of foreseeing and building a better future” — and yet they cannot seem to convert that competence into political skill. He argues the canon they read is the best available evidence for both halves of that.
Where the canon came from. Smith traces it to a specific conversation: “First posited by Stripe CEO Patrick Collison in dialogue with China-watcher Tanner Greer, and enriched in an ongoing dialogue that included Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Marc Andreessen, Tyler Cowen, and several others.” He is agnostic about whether it was ever descriptively true. Either it was “powerfully accurate, or had the force of a self-fulfilling prophecy” — the list became real through the cumulative influence of arguing about it. What matters is that even the canon’s critics agree it exists, shapes a worldview, and consists of more or less those books.
A canon is a mark of maturity, not of taste. The word originally meant the rules governing a religious community, then the texts essential to an intellectual one. Smith’s structural point: “A canon can form only where a group of people has already gone through a long course of common experience.” So the fact that the most innovative sector of the American economy now has a canon means that sector, “now three or four generations old, has become, in its own way, traditional.”
What the canon is engineered to do — and does well. A working tradition has to make its young members the right mix of dangerous (hungry, independent, capable of innovating) and safe (aware they are custodians of an order they must transmit). Smith thinks the canon pulls this off by accident: “Although no one designed it to do so, it balances books that awaken personal ambition to excel against books that chasten and overawe callow desire with broader perspectives on the forces that shape our lives and exceed our mastery.”
He reads the list as three counterweighted registers:
- Biography — Jobs, Musk, Rockefeller, Roosevelt. Smith refuses the easy read that this is a great-man cult: “For every biography of an individual, there are two or three books about institutions, groups, networks, and systems.”
- Institutional history and practical theory — Hiltzik’s Dealers of Lightning, Waldrop’s The Dream Machine, Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, Ries’ The Lean Startup, Burnham on managerial power, Davidson and Rees-Mogg’s The Sovereign Individual. These teach the reader that “individual brilliance being commonplace at the technological frontier, what matters most are the specific structures that channel this accumulated brain power.”
- Abstraction and fiction — Carse, Hofstadter, Girard; then Tolkien, Rand, Gibson, Stephenson, Banks. Smith’s sharpest observation is that the fiction’s real appeal is inverted: “just as Satan is the most exciting character in Paradise Lost, in the novels of the Silicon Valley Canon it is often the system itself, not the protagonist, that most excites the reader.”
The thesis about what the canon does to its readers. Moving among these books “is, ideally, an education in maintaining equilibrium” — pulled toward exemplary personal accomplishment, then pulled back by the thought that real agency runs through merger into structures larger than a lifetime. That, Smith argues, is why Valley politics look incoherent from outside and aren’t: the same reader can be a libertarian one day and an advocate of an imperial presidency the next, “individualist humanism of the crunchiest variety” one day and “post-human accelerationism” the next, because the canon holds both poles at once. The Valley is not unusual in reading these books; it is unusual in still having the power to act on them. “What makes the Valley and its inhabitants special is not so much that they have absorbed these ideas, but that amid a broader crisis of American collective and individual agency, they still possess, almost alone, the power to act on them.”
The failure mode, which is the argument’s real payload. The canon’s books are “memorable and formative for their readers in large part because they are first encountered mostly in adolescence — and particularly by teenage boys.” Smith is not sneering about this; he defends it. At fifteen you should not stumble over Caro’s sententiousness or Tolkien’s thin characters: “It is an age for hunger, not taste.”
The problem is that nothing in American adulthood, and less in Valley adulthood, moves a reader from hunger to taste. Cultivating taste requires the craftsman’s patience or the aristocrat’s leisure, and America has never valued either. Twenties are for the grind; time is the scarcest capital. So: “The Valley’s canon may offer many useful mental resources for young men entering a competitive world in which they may win great power. But it offers far less orientation by which such men, as they grow older, can learn to occupy new roles beyond the anxious quests of adolescence.”
The consequence. Elites stepping into “positions of stewardship, responsibility, and authority” arrive unprepared, and in other eras would have surrounded themselves with a varied court of advisors. Smith’s most quoted line is the verdict on the substitutes the Valley actually chose: “If the Bay Area’s equivalents of a learned courtesan and philosopher-poet are Aella and Curtis Yarvin, then a nation that depends on Silicon Valley to do what politicians cannot is in serious trouble.” Their self-education risks running not toward mature dialogue with real traditions but into “crankish, pseudo-sophisticated displays of misspent intelligence” — Vance debating the pope about ordo amoris, Thiel invoking the katechon — which Smith reads as the same mistake academics made with Lacan and Adorno.
Where he lands, which is not where the title suggests. Smith is broadly pro-Valley. He credits it with preserving American long-range agency — the ability to “set and achieve ambitious goals that are not justified simply in terms of immediate profit” — and warns tech elites off applying startup logic to the federal bureaucracy, the university and the large corporation, each of which has “its own peculiar structure, ways of instilling character, and orientation towards the future.” What the Valley owes those institutions is not another round of unbundling but “their example of individual ambition channeled into larger structures, and long-term planning.” The closing line: if tech elites want to get what they want out of politics, “they will need new books, new teachers, and new virtues.”
The canon as this essay names it
Smith never publishes a list, but these are the books and authors he actually names as canonical:
| Author | Work |
|---|---|
| Robert Pirsig | Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance |
| Ayn Rand | Atlas Shrugged |
| Michael Hiltzik | Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age |
| M. Mitchell Waldrop | The Dream Machine |
| Clayton Christensen | The Innovator’s Dilemma |
| Eric Ries | The Lean Startup |
| James Burnham | his “sociological treatises on power in 20th-century economics and politics” (no title given) |
| James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg | The Sovereign Individual |
| James Carse | Finite and Infinite Games |
| Douglas Hofstadter | Gödel, Escher, Bach |
| René Girard | his work on sacrifice and imitation (no title given) |
| J.R.R. Tolkien | The Lord of the Rings |
| William Gibson | Neuromancer |
| Neal Stephenson | Snow Crash |
| Iain M. Banks | The Player of Games |
| Robert Caro | named for his “musings about ‘power’” (no title given) |
Plus two categories named without titles: biographies of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, and of John D. Rockefeller and Theodore Roosevelt. And two authors named as an explicit exclusion — Smith notes his year-long reading estimate holds “provided, that is, you follow a version of the canon that excludes the prolific collected blog posts of thinkers like Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky.”
The canon’s size, in his estimate: “a few to several dozen” books, readable “by a busy person in a year and an unoccupied person in a summer.” Its composition: “much more white and male than almost any curriculum outside of Great Books colleges.”
Full text
Archived privately against link rot, with both Paul Blow illustrations: ../attachments/the-education-of-the-broligarchy/the-education-of-the-broligarchy.md
Connections
- Silicon Valley Canon & History (Patrick Collison) — the list this essay is arguing about. Smith names Collison as the person who “first posited” the canon; the actual list is on Collison’s own site.
- Patrick Collison — the originator, in dialogue with Tanner Greer.
- Brian Armstrong, Marc Andreessen, Tyler Cowen — named as the people who enriched the canon into existence.
- Peter Thiel and René Girard — Smith’s worked example of the canon’s institutional origins: without Stanford’s military-industrial computing money and its French theorist, no Thiel.
- Colossus — the publisher. Worth noting that a Colossus essay about a reading canon is itself a data point in the same phenomenon.
- Silicon Valley — the subject.
- Republic of Letters — Smith’s explicit frame for what a canon is: the texts essential to an intellectual community, in universities or “the more expansive Republic of Letters.”
- The Innovator’s Dilemma, The Lean Startup, The Idea Factory, Snow Crash, Atlas Shrugged, The Sovereign Individual, Finite and Infinite Games — canon entries that already have pages here.
- Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, J.R.R. Tolkien, Iain M. Banks, Ayn Rand, Clayton Christensen — canon authors with pages here.
- Xerox PARC — the institution two canon histories are about, and which Smith uses to argue that Silicon Valley came out of the institutions it now disdains.
- Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, John D. Rockefeller — the biography subjects Smith names.
- Stripe, Coinbase — the companies of the two CEOs credited with the canon.
- Reading — the underlying activity, and the essay’s real subject: what a reading list does to the person who reads it.