Not long ago I visited a friend who’d moved to Silicon Valley to work in the startup industry. He had undergone a baffling change: The formerly sports-jacketed East Coaster had become a gluten-free, paleo-dieting, T-shirt-wearing Burning Man.
Burning Man, for the uninitiated, is an annual week-long gathering in the Nevada desert attended by thousands—around 70,000, at last count. There are no hard and fast rules, but among the 10 guiding principles are “radical inclusion,” “radical self-expression,” and, of course, “gifting.” That last principle means you should always do your best to give something to everyone you meet, even if the only thing you have on hand is an interpretive dance performed from your bicycle. This admirably nonmaterialistic lifestyle obviously presupposes that you don’t have a family at home waiting for your next paycheck.
To a cynical New Yorker—or possibly to anyone beyond San Francisco’s cultural blast-radius—Burning Man appears to be a gaggle of grownups imitating their children in a giant box of dirt.
Attendees can reject civilization (Western, Eastern, whatever) as a whole and try to build something new and better from scratch. Religion is important, but only in the form of yoga and other self-exploratory immediacy-driven experiences. And youth is emphasized, above all and forever. If we’re too old to be kids, we can at least act like them. And while Alexandra Wolfe does not put it in so many words, we could call it a new paganism.
Curiously, this lifestyle comes not from San Francisco but from Silicon Valley. Which is where you’ll find the greatest concentration of young tech-star million/billionaires, as well as the slightly older investors who would like to remain as young as the young entrepreneurs in whom they invest. The mode of living that Wolfe describes may be a natural product of an engineer-designed society: the search for optimization and elegance in machines applied to humans, who (according to Silicon Valley) are also machines. Valleyites may optimize their diets by nixing refined carbohydrates, or optimize their relationships by ditching traditional marriage and polyamorizing instead. They think they’re hacking life, just as they’ve hacked software and hacked business.
This is the odd atmosphere into which today’s aspiring entrepreneurs tumble like water-sliders at an amusement park. The Valley is their Mecca, and they come from all over the world to start companies that will mine asteroids, eliminate death, or remind you to go shopping. Some entrepreneurs go to the Valley right out of college. Some go there instead of college; that was the idea of investor-entrepreneur Peter Thiel. His fellowship, launched in 2010, offers a few of the most imaginative aspirants $100,000 each to forgo a four-year degree and get an early start in startups. They move out West, often room together in large, jointly rented houses, and blend work and life seamlessly in an unending, value-building iterative loop.
Some don’t make it, but some do—and end up with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Some go back to college with a reawakened interest in traditional Western cultural mores.
Peter Thiel is careful to point out that he doesn’t recommend skipping college to everyone. But he maintains that certain people will learn more from four years of experience than they will from four years of college. He’s right about that. He’s also right when he draws attention to the abysmal decline in quality of American higher education: Universities are graduating more students than ever before—but with more debt, more arrogance, less knowledge, and a gaping chasm between what they are trained to do and what an employer would actually pay them to do. A recent essay on the rise of the college-educated barista was careful to point out that only liberal arts majors struggle en masse to find good jobs. But the percentage of liberal arts majors is growing and the hard sciences are, famously, in decline.
And a college education should not be—at least has not always been—a prerequisite for every job worth having. Until recently, aspiring reporters didn’t invariably need a degree in journalism; they could get experience writing for a newspaper and work their way up. Ditto for aspiring teachers and the now-ubiquitous degrees in education.
So it makes sense that if you want to be an entrepreneur, you might skip campus and go directly to entrepreneurship. Even failure, the typical outcome, will be a better teacher than current classroom offerings. And while universities pull out their gray hairs over this anti-academic barbarism, it is a useful exercise in reminding them of the distinction between having a degree and having an education. (A charming Doris Day/Clark Gable film called Teacher’s Pet discussed all this in 1958, when the academic crisis was still nascent.)
It’s easy to see why entrepreneurs wanted to go to Silicon Valley, but what accounts for their odd behavior once they got there? Since originality can’t be taught or learned, many of the young hopefuls who went West were reduced to imitating the only characteristic of the successful that they could imitate—their weirdness. “But they found out the hard way,” writes Wolfe, “that being on an all-butter diet didn’t make you a billionaire.” At the end of the day, these Valley fever victims may return to eating bread and cereal like the rest of us. They may even stop trying to improve humans and take the time to ask what it means to be human.
It is a good question to answer before we extend our lives indefinitely, put the Internet in our brains, or download our memories to a backup disk. The Valleyites may not have given it much thought. But they’re young. And they’re only human.
Daniel Gelernter, an occasional contributor to The Weekly Standard, is the CEO of a tech startup.
