What Silicon Valley's War on Education Has in Common With the Taliban

OPEN SOURCE by SSQRD

I’m the daughter of Afghan immigrants who left Kabul in the 1980s, before the Taliban’s first rise to power. My parents left a country that had been building something: women in universities, girls in schools, a generation of educated Afghans who believed knowledge was the foundation of the future. They also left a country that had been destabilized by decades of superpower interference. A Cold War proxy conflict in which the United States funded, armed, and trained the Mujahideen to fight the Soviet Union, and then walked away when the war was over, leaving behind a collapsed state, a traumatized population, and the conditions that allowed the Taliban to fill the vacuum. Afghanistan’s destruction was not incidental to American foreign policy. It was a foreseeable consequence of it, and the people left behind paid the price for a strategy that was never designed with their well being in mind.

Since seizing power in August 2021, the Taliban have implemented more than 70 decrees targeting the rights of girls and women. Afghanistan is now the only country in the world where girls are banned from secondary and higher education. 2.2 million girls are currently barred from attending school beyond the primary level. I’ve been thinking about this alongside Elizabeth Spiers’ recent piece in The Nation on Silicon Valley’s anti-intellectualism, and the comparison I keep returning to is one that will make some readers uncomfortable: the structural logic propelling Silicon Valley’s war on education is not categorically different from the logic driving the Taliban’s. Both are projects of powerful men who understand, whether consciously or not, that an educated population is a population that asks questions, organizes, and becomes harder to control. The methods may be different, but the underlying fear is the same.

The Taliban’s justification for banning girls from school has shifted repeatedly since 2021, citing dress codes, Islamic law, culture, and administrative readiness as the rationale at various points. One senior official insisted the Taliban had not reneged on promises to reopen schools but needed more time to decide on a school uniform for teenage girls, a justification so transparently inadequate that it functions as evidence of the pretextual nature of the entire project. The stated reasons keep changing because they were never real.

Of the total 80 edicts issued by the Taliban until January 2023, 54 specifically target women. The education ban is not an isolated policy. It’s one component of a comprehensive project to remove women from public life, from economic participation, and from the ability to accumulate the knowledge that makes civic engagement and organized resistance possible. An educated woman is a woman with options. She can evaluate the conditions of her own life, understand her legal rights, participate in professional and civic institutions, and articulate demands. The Taliban’s education ban is not primarily about religion or culture. It’s about eliminating the conditions under which women can contest their own subordination, dressed in the language of religious obligation because that framing is the most politically durable one available to the men imposing it.

Before the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, from 2002 to 2021, 3.8 million girls enrolled in grades one through twelve, and over 100,000 Afghan women were enrolled in universities. The Taliban didn’t close schools through gradual policy reform. They dismantled two decades of educational progress in a matter of months, because that progress represented the most direct and credible threat to their authority. An educated Afghan woman in 2021 was someone who had spent twenty years accumulating exactly the kind of knowledge and institutional access that makes authoritarian control difficult to sustain.

The Silicon Valley version of this project arrives with considerably better branding, but the underlying structure is recognizable to anyone who has spent time thinking about who benefits when large portions of the population become less educated, less analytically capable, and less able to evaluate the conditions of their own lives critically. Peter Thiel has built a program that subsidizes high school students who want to forgo college. Marc Andreessen has publicly boasted that he actively avoids introspection. Palantir CEO Alex Karp has made the prediction that AI will hurt educated women the most, framing a structural displacement of women from the workforce not as a problem requiring remedy but as an outcome with a certain satisfaction.

As Spiers notes in The Nation, the irony of this posture is that all of these figures are themselves beneficiaries of elite education. Thiel attended Stanford, Andreessen attended the University of Illinois, and Karp holds a doctorate in social theory from Goethe University Frankfurt. The credential they received is one they now work to deny to everyone else, framed as a service to the people being denied it, a concern for the economic burden of student debt that conveniently aligns with their interest in a less analytically equipped general population.

The argument that higher education is overpriced and overvalued is not wrong in every particular. Tuition costs are genuinely unsustainable and the credential market has real structural distortions. But the tech oligarchs making this argument are not primarily interested in reforming higher education or making it more accessible to the people being priced out of it. They are interested in delegitimizing it as a path to social mobility and critical thinking, because both of those outcomes threaten the concentration of authority they benefit from. As Spiers writes, “an informed populace is a civically active populace. You can’t preach automatic deference before a caste of tech savants to a group of workers schooled in understanding their own role as agents of social progress.” The Taliban arrived at the same conclusion through a different ideological route, but the destination it points toward, a population kept strategically limited in its analytical capacity to serve the interests of those holding power, is a bit obvious across the two contexts.

Both the Taliban and Silicon Valley’s tech oligarchs have a specific and documented hostility toward educated women that exceeds their general skepticism of education broadly. The Taliban’s education ban targets girls and women specifically. Boys’ schools reopened in the weeks immediately following the Taliban takeover. The ban on girls’ secondary education was maintained for years, and the justifications for the asymmetry were never coherent on their own terms because they weren’t designed to be.

In Silicon Valley, gender targeting is less legally formalized but structurally present in the pattern of who gets identified as the threat to be neutralized. Alex Karp’s prediction that AI will hurt educated women the most was not framed as a warning or an expression of concern about a regrettable outcome. It was delivered as a statement about the natural order of things reasserting itself, with a register that signals approval rather than alarm. Now that women are getting more master’s degrees than men, it has suddenly become a consensus position in certain tech quarters that graduate education is essentially useless. Right?

The tech oligarchs’ consistent emphasis on physical strength as a meaningful vector for masculine credibility, their dismissal of emotional intelligence and humanistic disciplines as feminine and therefore not serious, and their framing of meritocracy as a system that naturally produces male dominance all draw on the same foundational assumption the Taliban relies on. Which is that women’s subordination is a natural condition rather than a political one, and that education represents a threat to that natural order because it gives women the tools to demonstrate that the entire premise is false.

Both systems ultimately depend on an information environment that insulates the men at the top from meaningful challenges. The Taliban enforces this through law, violence, and the systematic elimination of any institution capable of producing organized dissent. Silicon Valley’s version of this insulation operates through the social dynamics of extreme wealth and the professional incentive structures it creates.

As Spiers writes, tech oligarchs “proceed to surround themselves with yes men and peers who affirm everything they say; the beta version of the cringy displays of great-leader sycophancy that break out in every Trump cabinet meeting was perfected in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley.” The Taliban’s version of this is more physically coercive: dissent is not tolerated, and the information environment is controlled through the elimination of free press, civil society organizations, and educational institutions that could serve as sites of organized opposition.

What makes the Silicon Valley version interesting is that it’s now being exported outward through the tools tech oligarchs are building and deploying to the general population. An MIT Media Lab study titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT” found that LLM users “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels,” and researchers found that nearly a dozen leading AI models were highly sycophantic, taking the users’ side in interpersonal conflicts 49 percent more often than humans did, even when the user described situations in which they broke the law, hurt someone, or lied. The tools designed to replicate the sycophantic bubble the tech oligarchs have constructed around themselves are now being distributed at scale to a population that is simultaneously being told that the educational institutions which might provide a framework for critically evaluating those tools are not worth attending.

A population that is less capable of rigorous independent thought is a population less capable of identifying and articulating its own interests in opposition to those of the people controlling the information environment. This isn’t some sort of conspiracy theory, but rather a description of a structural incentive that applies to both the Taliban and tech oligarchs.

I am writing this as the daughter of people who fled a country that the Taliban and decades of American intervention destroyed not once but twice. The first time, my parents left. The second time, millions of people had nowhere to go, and the international community that had spent twenty years in Afghanistan departed with a speed that made clear how conditional its investment in Afghan futures had always been.

The comparison I’m drawing here is not an equivalence in terms of violence or legal coercion. The Taliban’s methods are brutal in ways that Silicon Valley’s are not, at least within the domestic context where most of the tech oligarchs’ influence is currently exercised. The comparison is about a shared pattern of reasoning: both are projects led by men who have identified education, and specifically women’s education, as the primary threat to their authority, and who are using the levers of power available to them to undermine it while framing that project as something else entirely.

What watching Afghanistan after August 2021 reinforced, is that the dismantling of educational infrastructure does not require decades to accomplish. It happened in Afghanistan within months, and it happened after years in which the conditions for it, the concentration of authority, the elimination of accountability structures, and the cultivation of a population without the institutional access to organize against it, had been developing quietly. The Taliban did not announce in advance that they intended to ban girls from school. They announced the opposite, made promises about reopening schools, and then reversed those promises after girls had already shown up at the gates, having believed the promises because there was no information environment available to them that would have suggested otherwise.

The tech oligarchs are not announcing that they intend to produce a less educated, less civically capable population. They’re framing the process as innovation, as disruption, as concern for working-class people who were failed by elite institutions that charged too much and delivered too little. Those concerns are not entirely invented, but the people most affected by concentrated power have historically depended on access to education and information to identify that power for what it is and to contest it. Anything that systematically reduces that access, regardless of the ideological justification offered for doing so, serves the interests of the people holding the power. It’s true in Kabul and it’s true in Silicon Valley.