The Education of the Broligarchy

2026-05-18 · page · source summary

Blake Smith's January 2026 Colossus essay reads the "Silicon Valley Canon" — the books Patrick Collison, Marc Andreessen, Brian Armstrong, and others pass around — not as a reading list but as a tradition's self-education curriculum. The canon balances ambition-inspiring biographies (Jobs, Musk, Rockefeller) against humility-inducing systems-thinking (The Sovereign Individual, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Girard), training readers to oscillate between grandiosity and fatalism. Smith's central diagnosis: these are books first encountered in adolescence by teenage boys, and nothing in American adulthood — especially Silicon Valley adulthood — ever pushes those readers to develop taste beyond hunger. The result is an elite class stepping into middle-aged stewardship roles with an intellectual toolkit frozen at 15.

The Canon's Origin

The canon wasn't designed. Patrick Collison posited it in dialogue with China-watcher Tanner Greer; it was enriched by Brian Armstrong, Marc Andreessen, Tyler Cowen, and others. What started as a descriptive claim either accurately captured reality or became a self-fulfilling prophecy through the cumulative weight of discussion. Smith observes there's now broad consensus about its existence and content, even among critics.

The books number "a few to several dozen" — readable by a busy person in a year, an unoccupied person in a summer (excluding the collected blog posts of Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky). They cluster into biographies, histories, novels, and theory. The authorship is "much more white and male than almost any curriculum outside of Great Books colleges."

Crucially, Smith insists the canon won't teach you to succeed in tech: "Reading the canon will not equip you with the skills to invent or invest your way to wealth in the Bay Area (or even in Austin). At least it didn't do so for me." Its function is worldview-formation, not skill-acquisition.

Key Quotes

On the canon's balance:

The Silicon Valley Canon fulfills this complex task surprisingly well. 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.

On adolescence and arrested development:

Fifteen is not an age to stumble over the absurd sententiousness of Robert Caro's musings about "power," or scoff at Tolkien's cardboard imitations of Walter Scott. It is an age for hunger, not taste.

Unfortunately, little about American adulthood — and especially little about Silicon Valley adulthood — encourages readers, as they grow up, to move on from adolescence and acquire taste.

On the fiction — systems as the real protagonists:

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. (Tolkien in particular was a master of world-building far more than of writing convincing dialogue or lively characters.)

On the double imperative of the canon's fiction:

As the dramatic tension of these novels thrums in the danger that the powerless individual might at any moment be crushed by the systems opposed to his freedom, they awaken a double imperative to evade or acquire power — the typical dilemma of the American confronting politics, unsure whether he must escape or master it.

On the tech-MAGA alliance as adolescent rebellion:

Seeing our Vice President debate the pope about the ordo amoris, and Vance's own mentor Peter Thiel invoke the katechon, one has the impression that the leaders of the fragile tech-MAGA alliance resemble nothing so much as middle-class suburban American teenagers protesting the uninspiring and uncompelling culture of their parents by adopting an edgy, esoteric belief system seductively removed from reality and from responsibility.

On the courtiers (perhaps the essay's most savage line):

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.

On what Silicon Valley should offer, not "move fast and break things":

What the Valley's leaders can offer — and what America's institutions desperately need — is their example of individual ambition channeled into larger structures, and long-term planning that aligns tactical flexibility with the resolute commitment to a strategic vision that may take generations to achieve.

On the closing imperative:

If these elites, as they weigh their options a year into their alliance with MAGA, mean to learn how to get what they really want out of politics — and if the rest of us are to survive their self-education — they will need new books, new teachers, and new virtues.

The Canon's Architecture

Smith identifies a dialectic across the canon's categories:

Biographies (Jobs, Musk, Rockefeller, Theodore Roosevelt) incite ambition. But Smith pushes back on the lazy "Great Man theory" critique: biography is one of the most popular genres among all reading publics, and for every biography of an individual, there are "two or three books about institutions, groups, networks, and systems."

Histories and business books like Hiltzik's Dealers of Lightning, Waldrop's The Dream Machine, Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma, and Ries' The Lean Startup teach that "individual brilliance being commonplace at the technological frontier, what matters most are the specific structures that channel this accumulated brain power towards the cooperative realization of a vision (rather than towards over-elaborate tinkering or a quick hit of profit — the professional vices, respectively, of engineers and financiers)."

Theory (Burnham, The Sovereign Individual, Carse's Finite and Infinite Games, Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, Girard) serves as the Valley's "own version of the social sciences or French Theory" — the seductive idea that obscure systems comprehensible only to a perspicacious few govern everything beneath the buzz of individual action.

Fiction (The Lord of the Rings, Atlas Shrugged, Neuromancer, Snow Crash, The Player of Games) does double duty: it trains readers to imagine alien worlds (classic sci-fi function) and, crucially, "equips readers to return from an imagined elsewhere with a new set of eyes, capable of seeing their own cultural context as something specific, contingent, and changeable. It is a kind of critical theory." But the novels also embed the American political dilemma: every protagonist is a small individual facing vast oppressive systems — escape or master, the two urges that produce libertarian one day, imperial the next.

America's Last Frontier of Agency

Smith's most original argument is not about the books but about their readers. The canon's contradictions (individual vs. system, escape vs. master) are not unique to Silicon Valley — they're core American mythology, from Walden to the Apollo program. What's unique is that Silicon Valley is the one place left where people can still act on those contradictions:

The questions that our culture once posed about what freedom really meant, whether it was individual or collective, found outside or within systems of power, are now perhaps real problems only within Silicon Valley, and within its canon.

For most Americans, the frontier is closed, institutions are malfunctional, and visions of emancipatory action "inspire only longings that can find no satisfactory outlet in reality." The canon's dilemmas aren't academic for tech founders — they're operational. That's what makes the canon matter.

The Institutional Inheritance

A sub-argument that's underappreciated: Silicon Valley didn't invent itself from scratch. It emerged from three crumbling-but-still-functional institutions:

  1. DoD funding — J.C.R. Licklider dispensing far-sighted federal money to create computer science programs
  2. Elite universities — Stanford hiring René Girard alongside its military-industrial computing complex, producing the conditions for Peter Thiel
  3. Xerox PARC — A lumbering corporate titan that funded research it couldn't monetize, enabling the personal computing revolution

Smith's point: "Silicon Valley emerged from those institutions. Today it still carries forward much of what was once most vital in them." Without the tech sector, the American economy would be "a static, or shrinking, set of wealth-generating networks stripped alternately by short-sighted financial institutions, politicians equally heedless of the future, and progressive do-gooders who, intentionally or not, punish rather than reward talent."

This is the counterweight to the adolescent critique: these people actually build things. They're the only leadership class that can still execute multi-decade projects. Smith takes that seriously even as he diagnoses their immaturity.

The Taste Problem

Why does the canon's readership stay frozen at 15? Smith's structural explanation is that American adulthood is incompatible with taste development:

College, which once provided an extended period of leisure-mixed-with-study for elite formation, is now "intensive professionalization, especially in top-ranked schools." The smartest 22-year-olds go straight to the grind. Their 20s are their most precious capital, and the right moves pay off in vast fortunes. There's no structural incentive to develop taste — and no peer group that would recognize it if they did.

The Danger

Smith's closing section is the essay's most urgent. The concern isn't that tech elites are in politics — "In principle, this is a good thing." The concern is how they're going about it:

  1. They're vulnerable to cranks. Still "teenagers in spirit," powerful tech leaders are "oddly vulnerable to a sort of grooming, following guides whose eccentricity, grandiosity, or incoherence can be confused with wisdom." The path from Atlas Shrugged doesn't lead to mature engagement with diverse traditions; it leads to "crankish, pseudo-sophisticated displays of misspent intelligence."

  2. The Vance-Thiel-pope episode crystallizes the problem. Vance debating the pope on ordo amoris, Thiel invoking the katechon — this is middle-class suburban teen rebellion, not statesmanship. Smith notes that "the Christian intellectualism of Vance seems to involve no deference to clerical or even papal authority" — it's ideology as personal brand, not religion as membership.

  3. They've chosen terrible courtiers. Historically, new elites surrounded themselves with philosophers, priests, and artists who complemented their raw power. The Bay Area's answer is Aella and Curtis Yarvin. Smith's point isn't snobbery — it's that the function those figures serve (broadening perspective, maturing judgment) is going unfulfilled.

  4. The fundraising model selects against statesmanship. "The peculiarities of tech sector fundraising incentivize leaders' cultivation and display of a marketably quirky and 'intellectual' persona over the skills of the savvy politician who knows how to appear exemplary in his greatness and his normalcy."

The essay's final line is pointed without being apocalyptic: they need "new books, new teachers, and new virtues."

Critical Analysis

Smith's essay is the best single thing written about the Silicon Valley Canon because it reads the canon as a canon — not as a list of favorite books but as a tradition's mechanism for forming its young. The ambition/humility dialectic is real, and it explains the distinctive oscillation between grandiosity and victimhood in tech leadership: every Jobs bio says "you can change the world," and every Sovereign Individual says "you're a tiny node in incomprehensibly large systems." The result is someone who believes both that they're special and that they're helpless before large forces.

The "teenage boys" observation is the kill shot, but Smith deepens it beyond the obvious. The problem isn't the books — it's the structural absence of anything that would push readers past them. When you're rich enough that no one tells you no, you never have to update your priors. The canon read inside a feedback-proof bubble becomes dogma. The canon read by someone who also has to deal with a boss, a mortgage, and a community that doesn't care about their IQ would produce different people.

The essay's limitation is class. This isn't just any teenage boys — it's teenage boys who went to Stanford and Harvard, who had the social capital to treat Atlas Shrugged as aspirational rather than ridiculous. The canon is a class marker as much as an intellectual formation. Smith gestures at this (the "white and male" observation) but doesn't chase it.

The institutional inheritance argument is the essay's most underrated contribution. It complicates the "disruption" narrative that tech tells about itself, and it's the foundation for Smith's surprising optimism: if Silicon Valley emerged from crumbling institutions once, maybe the next set of institutions can emerge from it. But only if its leaders grow up.

Connections

Sources: The Education of the Broligarchy Last updated: 2026-05-18