This undergraduate commencement season, some graduating seniors have been expressing their views of contemporary tech culture by booing the rapid expansion of AI.

Theo Baker, a graduating senior at Stanford University this spring, is registering his complaints about tech culture in a different form, a book called How to Rule the World, an education in Power at Stanford University.

Stanford is the elite school in the heart of Silicon Valley, where Hewlett partnered up with Packard, where the Google co-founders met, Sam Altman was a student there before leaving for his

first startup. Elizabeth Holmes was also a student there before dropping out to start Theranos

before she was sent to prison for misleading investors. Theo Baker says, that is part of the culture

at Stanford today, where in the rush toward the next big thing,

there's spend that rushes over inconvenient results, so it can feel less like a place of rigorous

academic inquiry and more about a place to build an irresistible investment deck.

I was a student at Stanford, a freshman in 1999,

the only student in my class from West Virginia,

and I remember there was a joke about IPOs in an early orientation skit.

I did not know what an IPO meant.

Back then, I remember the tech gold rush fever feeling disorienting and a little

insidious. Theo Baker says it has gotten much, much worse, and he demonstrated this through

investigative reporting at the Stanford Daily student newspaper. His biggest story started with a tip about problems

and then university president Mark Tessier-Levin's past academic publications,

including a blockbuster neuroscience paper that was celebrated as a breakthrough for Alzheimer's treatment.

Theo heard from sources who questioned why Tessier-Levin's results

couldn't be reproduced in the lab. It was not a good news story for Stanford and eventually led to the

resignation of the president. And through it, Theo felt the pressure from powerful attorneys,

the Silicon Valley elite on Stanford's board of trustees, even from fellow students worrying that he was hurting Stanford's brand.

And he was doing this reporting when he was a freshman, 17 years old at the start of it, because he'd skipped a grade.

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