Michelle Venetucci is an economic anthropologist with a focus on the technology industry in the San Francisco Bay Area. After leaving her corporate job in the tech sector in San Francisco at the height of the techlash, her research is situated in a post-techlash Silicon Valley and asks why sustained public critique didn’t translate into social and material change. Approaching the industry as a collective financial project as opposed to a collection of technology projects, her research directs attention towards the structural conditions that shape the outcomes and societal impacts of these corporations. While many studies of the industry centrally engage with technology, technologists, or ideologies and discourse, this project finds that the industry is more productively understood through speculative finance and material relations.

Silicon Valley was born in a single-family home garage, and instead of writing off the assumed peculiarity of technology workplaces nestled in the heart of suburbia, this project takes this proximity seriously. Engaging with both the home and workplace as relational spaces of social reproduction that feed into corporate production, her dissertation, titled Stuck in Silicon Suburbia: Privileged Positionalities and Constrained Materialities in Silicon Valley, shows how actors get stuck reproducing extractive systems as a way to maintain the basic social and material foundations of their own lives. Departing from public narratives about techno-utopian ideologies and innovation-obsessed subjects, this project argues that middle class expectations condition the continued participation of industry professionals in corporate projects that produce outcomes of inequality, addressing questions about agency and privilege, whiteness and property, and innovation and maintenance.

Her ethnographic work was conducted between 2022 and 2023, starting inside small to medium sized tech companies and moving outward into thirdspaces and the homes of corporate employees and startup founders. Before graduate school, she spent the 2010s working at Lyft and Github while watching her husband build two venture capital-backed tech startups in Silicon Valley.

She holds a bachelor’s in anthropology and urban planning from the University of Washington, Seattle, and a MPhil in anthropology from Yale. She's currently a PhD candidate in the Yale anthropology department. Sometimes she does fiber arts.

Contact

michelle.venetucci@yale.edu / GitHub / Instagram / Twitter / LinkedIn

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