Ordinary Unhappiness 160: Very Special Boys feat. Adrian Daub
12 snips
Sep 26, 2026 
Adrian Daub, Stanford humanities professor and author of What Tech Calls Governing, returns for a sharp conversation about Silicon Valley’s shift from utopian promises to billionaire power. They explore tech masculinity, childishness, dominance without responsibility, AI’s promise to cancel adulthood, and the strange public fantasies of very special boys. Also: aging, vulnerability, homosociality, and resistance to technological inevitability.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Billionaire Neediness Becomes Labor Extraction
- Billionaire neediness becomes a management tool when founders extract free emotional labor by appearing lonely, incompetent, or socially helpless.
- Their personal decline invites sympathy while their wealth lets them weaponize that sympathy against everyone else.
Online Grandstanding Hides Personal Resentment
- Patrick Blanchfield searched prominent tech-adjacent posters’ histories and repeatedly found workplace, divorce, and dating grievances beneath their grand theories.
- Their public contempt often looked like personal resentment disguised as intellectual provocation.
Disruption Turns Inequality Into Moral Law
- Silicon Valley’s language of disruption encodes a moral hierarchy, treating technological losers as lazy, feminized, or undeserving.
- COVID exposed this worldview when billionaires experienced equal public health restrictions as persecution.
