Enshittification

We can leave aside the usual laundry list of complaints about Stanford’s (and Silicon Valley’s) wealth, privilege and exclusivity, and their implications for hierarchies of race, class, and gender. We do not need Theo Baker to serve as our muckraker on these subjects since the truly dystopian possibilities lie elsewhere. The chilling subtext of Baker’s book is the impression it conveys of Stanford as a piece of advanced pronatalist technology designed to create the optimal laboratory conditions for selecting, grooming, and developing a remarkable class of quasi-adults. These actants can then be assigned to the most exclusive tech hubs (such as Xaira Therapeutics) to create the advanced biomedical tools to further enhance the life chances and cultural dominance of the very class from which they were initially picked. Is this meritocracy, or clonocracy?

It might be argued that Silicon Valley, like the army, the church, and the American Bar Association, is free to identify, recruit, and train new members as they please. What kind of a university is this, then? A metaphor comes to mind. Stanford is the harbinger of the university-as-giant-app, a networked series of buildings, professors, classrooms, donors, faculty, trustees, and back-office staff designed to turn out a small but predictable number of next-generation tech titans. Like other apps, it feels like a highly engineered tool geared to customer convenience, though only a carefully selected group of human beings is allowed to use the program—and the real operator is Silicon Valley itself, whose screen taps summon the Stanford within Stanford, fresh from the warehouse.