HOW TO RULE THE WORLD: An Education in Power at Stanford University, by Theo Baker
If America is the most powerful country on earth, and Silicon Valley the most powerful place in that country, and Stanford the most powerful institution in that place, and a secretive network of students and adult hangers-on there the hub of influence on campus (I know that’s a lot of ifs, but let me finish), then here lies the rapacious, awkward center of the world.
Theo Baker, a reluctant journalist still not old enough to rent a car, 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 year having upended Stanford’s leadership, jaded by a Silicon Valley where faux idealism obscures corruption, greed and power lust — leavened only by the social obtuseness of these aspiring masters of the universe.
Baker’s first book, “How to Rule the World,” is a rigorous, self-assured, propulsive, at times terrifying portrait of a dweebocracy that “sets the agenda for the planet.” In every age, there is some place that epitomizes how power works. Baker’s Stanford is a strong candidate, and his book follows in the tradition of Michael Lewis’s Wall Street chronicle “Liar’s Poker,” but with more pimples and less eye contact.
Reader, what was your freshman year of college like? How many of the following befell you? Add a point for each: (1) Losing your grandparent. (2) Losing your girlfriend. (3) Losing your virginity. (4) Bringing down a university president. (5) Overdosing. (6) Winning a George Polk Award. (7) Partying on yachts and socializing with billionaires. (8) Fending off legal threats. (9) Becoming a meme. (10) Neglecting to complete your homework.
I’ve got one point. Baker, poor/lucky guy, scored a 10.
There are two questions people ask as much as any other: “How can I belong?” and “Who runs the world?” They differ in tenor and aim. The former is vulnerable, often unspoken; the latter fuels two-thirds of Reddit.
What gives Baker’s book its power is that, in this setting, these inquiries strangely dovetailed. By trying to answer what it takes to fit in — the freshman question — he Forrest Gumps his way into answering a question about the attitudes and pretensions overlording mankind. In coming of age as a young man, he travels to the heart of a dehumanizing age.
He does this by bringing a place vividly to life. The best nonfiction doesn’t declaim from oxygen-deprived heights; it ports you into a world and lets the relevance emerge.
Stanford through Baker’s eyes is a foreign country with its own customs, religion, mores and language. Some students are “high-agency” super-builders or super-thinkers — techie Übermenschen expected to make billions. There is the “Coupa circuit,” where shady, tech-adjacent adults spend their days at a coffee shop with students, hoping to get in early on start-ups. There are the NGMIs, who are not going to make it. And there are the “plucked,” highly bright students who form a Stanford within Stanford, with access to Big Tech slush funds and parties. (The liberal arts majors and others with no prospects in technology are largely irrelevant.)
Like William F. Buckley Jr. in “God and Man at Yale,” Baker writes of estrangement from a university he once revered. At parties, students recite “I am on stolen land” and “I will commit to uplifting Indigenous and Black voices” before going inside to scheme about becoming billionaires.
The Stanford-within-Stanford Baker exposes matters to you even if this exclusive core feels impossibly distant. The university has let technology firms and venture capitalists worm so deeply into it that it now functions, 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 mention those far outside this world, that one gets a feel for the kinds of mentalities designing A.I. and presuming to rewire our societies.
Silicon Valley has long promoted itself as more meritocratic than elite circles past. Baker perforates this story. As always, connections, access, shadowy brokers and whims decide who gets the keys. Many students are smart. But those who rise fastest often seem the most ruthless and maniacal.
College sports are being regulated because institutions realized that letting big money loose on young people is dangerous. Stanford and tech have not had that reckoning. It is commonplace for Valley figures to attend off-campus parties with students, plying them with liquor in hopes of making deals.
“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 tension of this book is that Baker sets out both to climb Silicon Valley’s ivory tower and to bring it crashing down. At first charmed by Big Tech, he joins TreeHacks, a hackathon group where start-ups are born. He arrives as a believer, knocking on the door of unimaginable power, at times even appearing pluckable.
But he also drifts to the school newspaper. Because his mother and father are prominent journalists (Susan Glasser of The New Yorker and Peter Baker of The New York Times), he arrives wanting nothing to do with the profession, which he associates with over-busy parents. Yet he joins The Stanford Daily, chases a story, gains traction and, after a tip, finds himself investigating the university president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne.
Tessier-Lavigne’s case comes to encapsulate a university deeply entangled with industry. A renowned scientist who made a fortune in business, he is accused of having overseen falsified research. Scrutiny of his case is complicated by the fact that he serves at the pleasure of a board with commercial entanglements much like his own.
Baker pursues the story like a campus reincarnation of Woodward and Bernstein. But for a time he continues trying to be an insider, even as he lobs grenades from without. He organizes hackathons and files stories, takes coffees with talent brokers and stakes out Tessier-Lavigne. It’s as if Woodward and Bernstein were also trying to win a couple of House seats.
This dual-track approach would probably discredit an established journalist. For a college freshman who is still figuring himself out, it is understandable — and makes him harder to dismiss. Baker still admires much of the tech world. He still believes it does good and wants its approval. But he confronts his dreamland and concludes, painfully, that it is rotten, indifferent, built on lies, craving power for its own sake.
Toward the end, after a dramatic 30-hour climax involving drugs, a near-death experience, legal threats, hastily written news stories, start-up ideas and an ex-girlfriend, Baker comes to clarity on who he is.
Tessier-Lavigne resigns, owing significantly to Baker’s work. But he lands just fine, securing a large settlement, buying a vast mansion and raising $1 billion for a venture. Incredibly, but also fittingly, an investor in the deposed president’s new company reaches out to Baker, offering the deposer funding for any start-up he might aspire to build.
“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
