Book Review: ‘How to Rule the World,’ by Theo Baker
HOW TO RULE THE WORLD: An Education in Power at Stanford Universityby Theo Baker
If America is the strongest nation on earth, and Silicon Valley the strongest place in that nation, and Stanford the strongest establishment in that place, and a secretive community of scholars and grownup hangers-on there the hub of affect on campus (I do know that is a number of ifs, however let me end), then right here lies the rapacious, awkward middle of the world.
Theo Baker, a reluctant journalist nonetheless not sufficiently old to lease a automobile, nonetheless drives us, Jules Verne-like, into the molten core of our troubled time. He arrives at Stanford in 2022 as a bright-eyed freshman wanting to climb the Silicon Valley ladder, drunk on Big Tech propaganda about “changing the world.” He finishes that 12 months having upended Stanford’s management, jaded by a Silicon Valley the place fake idealism obscures corruption, greed and energy lust — left solely by the social obtuseness of those aspiring masters of the universe.
Baker’s first ebook, “How to Rule the World,” is a rigorous, confident, propulsive, at instances terrifying portrait of a dweebocracy that “sets the agenda for the planet.” In all ages, there’s some place that epitomizes how energy works. Baker’s Stanford is a robust candidate, and his ebook follows in the custom of Michael Lewis’s Wall Street chronicle “Liar’s Poker,” however with extra pimples and fewer eye contact.
Reader, what was your freshman 12 months of school like? How a lot of the following befeel you? Add a degree for every: (1) Losing your grandparent. (2) Losing your girlfriend. (3) Losing your virginity. (4) Bringing down a college president. (5) Overdosing. (6) Winning a George Polk Award. (7) Partying on yachts and socializing with billionaires. (8) Fending off authorized threats. (9) Becoming a meme. (10) Neglecting to full your homework.
I’ve acquired one level. Baker, poor/fortunate man, scored a ten.
There are two questions folks ask as a lot as another: “How can I belong?” and “Who runs the world?” They differ in tenor and goal. The former is weak, usually unstated; the latter fuels two-thirds of Reddit.
What Baker’s ebook provides its energy is that, on this setting, these inquiries surprisingly dovetailed. By attempting to reply what it takes to slot in — the freshman query — he Forrest Gumps his means into answering a query about the attitudes and pretensions overlording mankind. In coming of age as a younger man, he travels to the coronary heart of a dehumanizing age.
He does this by bringing a spot vividly to life. The finest nonfiction would not declaim from oxygen-deprived heights; it ports you right into a world and lets the relevance emerge.
Stanford by way of Baker’s eyes is a international nation with its personal customs, faith, mores and language. Some college students are “high-agency” super-builders or super-thinkers — techie Übermenschen anticipated to make billions. There is the “Coupa circuit,” the place shady, tech-adjacent adults spend their days at a espresso store with college students, hoping to get in early on start-ups. There are the NGMIs, who usually are not going to make it. And there are the “plucked,” extremely brilliant college students who fashioned a Stanford inside Stanford, with entry to Big Tech slush funds and events. (The liberal arts majors and others with no prospects in expertise are largely irrelevant.)
Like William F. Buckley Jr. in “God and Man at Yale,” Baker writes of estrangement from a college he as soon as revered. At events, college students recite “I am on stolen land” and “I will commit to uplifting Indigenous and Black voices” earlier than going inside to scheme about turning into billionaires.
The Stanford-within-Stanford Baker exposes issues to you even when this unique core feels impossibly distant. The college has let expertise corporations and enterprise capitalists worm so deeply into it that it now features, in Baker’s telling, as a talent-scouting system for future unicorns. Everyone else is window dressing. And this campus elite betrays attitudes — captured by Baker — so contemptuous of non-Übermenschen, not to point out these far exterior this world, that one will get a really feel for the sorts of mentalities designing AI and presuming to rewire our societies.
Silicon Valley has lengthy promoted itself as extra meritocratic than elite circles previous. Baker perforates this story. As at all times, connections, entry, shadowy brokers and whims determine who will get the keys. Many college students are sensible. But those that rise quickest usually appear the most ruthless and maniacal.
College sports activities are being regulated as a result of establishments realized that letting huge cash free on younger folks is harmful. Stanford and tech haven’t had that reckoning. It is commonplace for Valley figures to attend off-campus events with college students, pouring them with liquor in hopes of creating offers.
“Teenagers like me were a commodity,” Baker observes. “We were to be protected and preserved, cosseted and buttered up, exploited, manipulated, funded, bribed and cultivated. We were business.”
The central rigidity of this ebook is that Baker units out each to climb Silicon Valley’s ivory tower and to deliver it crashing down. At first charmed by Big Tech, he joins TreeHacks, a hackathon group the place start-ups are born. He arrives as a believer, knocking on the door of unimaginable energy, at instances even showing pluckable.
But he additionally drifts to the faculty newspaper. Because his mom and father are distinguished journalists (Susan Glasser of The New Yorker and Peter Baker of The New York Times), he arrives wanting nothing to do with the career, which he associates with over-busy mother and father. Yet he joins The Stanford Daily, chases a narrative, positive factors traction and, after a tip, finds himself investigating the college president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne.
Tessier-Lavigne’s case comes to encapsulate a college deeply entangled with trade. A famend scientist who made a fortune in enterprise, he’s accused of getting falsified knowledge. Scrutiny of his case is difficult by the proven fact that he serves at the pleasure of a board with industrial entanglements very similar to his personal.
Baker pursues the story like a campus reincarnation of Woodward and Bernstein. But for a time he continues attempting to be an insider, whilst he lobs grenades from with out. He organizes hackathons and recordsdata tales, takes coffees with expertise brokers and stakes out Tessier-Lavigne. It’s as if Woodward and Bernstein have been additionally attempting to win a few House seats.
This dual-track strategy would in all probability discredit a longtime journalist. For a university freshman who continues to be figuring himself out, it’s comprehensible — and makes him troublesome to dismiss. Baker nonetheless admires a number of the tech world. He nonetheless believes it does good and needs its approval. But he confronts his dreamland and concludes, painfully, that it’s rotten, detached, constructed on lies, craving energy for its personal sake.
Toward the finish, after a dramatic 30-hour climax involving medication, a near-death expertise, authorized threats, rapidly written information tales, start-up concepts and an ex-girlfriend, Baker comes to readability on who he’s.
Tessier-Lavigne resignsowing considerably to Baker’s work. But he lands simply advantageous, securing a big settlement, shopping for an unlimited mansion and elevating $1 billion for a enterprise. Incredibly, but in addition fittingly, an investor in the deposed president’s new firm reaches out to Baker, providing the deposer funding for any start-up he may aspire to construct.
“I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been,” Baker says. “That’s how this place works.”
HOW TO RULE THE WORLD: An Education in Power at Stanford University | By Theo Baker | Penguin Press | 320 pp. | $32
