I’m pretty sure that Nathaniel Hawthorne is the last thing on the minds of Silicon Valley tech-titans right now. But some of my students think he should be the first.
Let me explain.
I teach high school English in Silicon Valley, a place that I sometimes (only half-jokingly) refer to as the heart of darkness. My high school is a stone’s throw away from the headquarters of Apple, Google, Meta, Open AI. Let’s just say, for us, “Silicon Valley” is reality TV. Techno-optimsim is the water we drink and the air we breathe. It’s hard to resist and it’s hard to explain to outsiders.
But my students and I have been reading Nathaniel Hawthorne, and there’s no 19th-century writer more relevant.
Hawthorne sets his 1843 tale “The Birth-Mark” in the moment when the “recent discovery of electricity and other kindred mysteries of Nature seemed to open paths into the region of miracle.” Science enables men to “ascend from one step of powerful intelligence to another, until the philosopher should lay his hand on the secret of creative force and perhaps make new worlds for himself.”
It’s not in spite of techno-optimism, but because of it, that Hawthorne’s scientists fall (they objectively don’t fail).
Once I point out this passage, it takes my students about 5 seconds to understand that he’s speaking to them. It takes longer for them to figure out why and how.
In “The Birth-Mark,” the scientist Aylmer, whose discoveries have “roused the admiration of all the learned societies in Europe,” marries Georgiana, only to become obsessed with removing her single imperfection, a birthmark, described by some as a “fairy hand” and by others as a “fatal flaw.” Predictably, Aylmer removes the mark, but, just as predictably, the cure kills her. “Rapaccinni’s Daughter” tells an adjacent tale of the daughter of another scientific genius, who raises his daughter in his fantastical Edenic garden, on the fumes of a toxic plant that makes her as “terrible as [she is] beautiful.” After the protagonist, Giovanni, falls in love with her, the antidote that he procures from Rapaccinni’s rival Baglioni predictably kills her.
There are many ways of reading these stories: The only perfect woman is a dead one. Men of science pursue their technologies at the expense of women’s bodies. A parable about the arrogance of scientific authority. A prescient warning about impossible beauty standards, and the corresponding risks of body modification, gene selection, plastic surgery, Ozempic.
You name it, my students have written about it.
But right now, the most interesting reading comes from considering Hawthorne’s first premise: both men are scientific geniuses. Both want to crack the code of nature’s secrets. Both are widely, internationally acclaimed by their peers.
And, indeed, both are admirable.
Aylmer has “investigated the secrets of the highest cloud region and of the profoundest mines.” Rapaccinni is so driven that “he would sacrifice human life, his own among the rest, or whatever else was dearest to him, for the sake of adding so much as a grain of mustard-seed to the great heap of his accumulated knowledge.” In response, Giovanni, muses, “is it not a noble spirit? Are there many men capable of so spiritual a love of science?”
Musk, Andreessen, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Altman? Anyone?
In these stories, cutting edge technology advances humankind, protects and perfects human bodies. In Rapaccinni’s defense, I ask my students, which of you wouldn’t protect your daughter from all manner of harm (especially from men) if you could? How far would you go? How far would your parents go? Their response is complicated.
The root cause of each story’s conflict, the real horror, I suggest to my students, is the embrace of techno-optimism.
Except they already get it.
Alymer’s ambition differs only in substance from Marc Andreeseen’s claims, in his 2023 Techno-Optimist Manifesto, that “technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential…We believe this is why our descendents will live in the stars. We believe that there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.” At the 2025 Paris AI Summit, Vice President JD Vance remarked that “AI, we believe, is going to make us more productive, more prosperous, and more free,” staking out the case that our future must be focused on AI opportunity, not AI safety, because the “AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing.”
So much for the dead wife and daughter.
There was a time, not so very long ago, when our government believed it was their job to support, perhaps even compel, science and technology to wrestle with the questions that Hawthorne asks.
In November 2001, President George W. Bush convened by executive order the President’s Council on Bioethics.
Their first order of business was discussing “The Birth-Mark.”
There was much “shuddering” over the essential horror of the story, fraught talk about how capital corrupts scientific pursuits, and worry over the “arrogance of authority.” Like my students, the council struggled to understand the story’s implications.
For Hawthorne, human transcendence is not going to be found in any trans-human state. And it’s certainly not going to be found on Mars.
But what’s most interesting right now is that the Council had the prescience, the humility, and the humanity to frame their work in the context of a fiction; that they believed their work was somehow, still, in conversation with the questions Hawthorne asks.
They were willing to have the conversation in the first place.
It’s not in spite of techno-optimism, but because of it, that Hawthorne’s scientists fall (they objectively don’t fail). At the end of “Rapaccinni’s Garden,” as Rapaccinni and Giovanni look on Beatrice’s death, Baglioni cries out “Rappaccini! Rappaccini! And is this the upshot of your experiment?” Rapaccinni’s experiment doesn’t kill Beatrice. Baglioni’s scientific arms race does.
The end of “The Birth-Mark” is more confounding. Granting Aylmer’s ambition, the narrator wonders, “had he reached a profounder wisdom, he need not thus have flung away the happiness which would have woven his mortal life of the selfsame texture with the celestial….he failed to look beyond the shadowy scope of time, and, living once for all in eternity, to find the perfect future in the present.”
Hawthorne begs us to ask, what is this profounder wisdom? How can infinity be found in the finite present? The paradox that Hawthorne urges on Aylmer, and my students, is that eternity will only be found in the particularity of the fleeting present, in the acceptance of Georgiana’s perfect, imperfect body. Hawthorne’s narrator suggests the profounder wisdom comes when we recognize that we are bounded by our bodies, that we have only (what Gertrude Stein later describes as) a moment after a moment after a moment. Only by embracing our humanity can we find true wisdom, and that fullest being that Hawthorne refers to as the weaving of “mortal life of the selfsame texture with the celestial.”
For Hawthorne, human transcendence is not going to be found in any trans-human state. And it’s certainly not going to be found on Mars.
Steve Bannon understands.
When I asked my students if they thought Musk should read Hawthorne, their eyes lit up, and they laughed, and they said, yes! I asked, would he care? That response was muted.
For my students, there are some obvious takeaways, and some less obvious ones.
First, we need to center the use and development of technologies around the dignity of the human being, and perhaps, especially, in our very mortal embodiment. Second, that technology needs regulatory bodies. Third, tech innovators need to be in rigorous conversation with the best philosophical, literary, and humanistic thinkers. Perhaps most important is that we need to keep asking the questions.
My students take some comfort in realizing that the worship of technology and the questions it poses are centuries old. Maybe, I suggest to my students, the questions are the things that make us most human. And maybe the ones who keep asking these questions, including and perhaps especially them, are the ones who will keep showing us the most optimal, and optimistic, way forward.
And maybe we need to keep reading Hawthorne.
