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. Departing from popular conceptions that Silicon Valley companies are centrally concerned with the development of technologies, her work frames companies as investment vehicles structured by the speculative financial models of venture capital. Looking at how the financial infrastructure of the industry depends on the creation of frontiers that promise explosive future returns, she explores how these global-scale growth trajectories constrain actors’ ability to address particular outcomes of concern.

While Silicon Valley has often served as an exemplar of the post-Fordist flexible economy, this research highlights how individual actors gravitate towards these flexible economic contexts through attachments to Fordist family models established in post-war American suburbs. Her dissertation, titled Stuck in Silicon Suburbia: Privileged Positionalities and Constrained Materialities in Silicon Valley, shows how the expectations of a stable domestic life become incorporated into the more flexible “high risk” practices of speculative finance. Drawing on time spent inside companies and moving outward into the homes of corporate employees and startup founders, this dissertation is organized around five chapters that explore the industry as a coherent, interdependent network structured by speculative finance, with ethnographic attention to growth both in the context of speculative finance and middle-class domestic relations.

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 and a policy fellow at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. Sometimes she does fiber arts.

Contact

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

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