Research.

STS scholars have often separated concepts of maintenance and innovation, offering maintenance practices as an alternative to the tech industry’s visible commitment to innovation. And yet, instead of producing ruptures and changes in foundational aspects of society as promised by innovation discourse, Silicon Valley’s products have leveraged and entrenched existing structures of power, acting as a practice of social maintenance as they’ve been increasingly used to optimize financial interests. This paper proposes thinking about tech corporations in Silicon Valley as inflammable objects, with the push for innovation grounded in desires to maintain the American Dream. Building on Annemarie Mol and John Law’s notion of “mutable mobiles” that are characterized by variability without losing their identity, this ethnographic project follows innovation discourse into the industry’s center, looking at how volatile startup projects and discourse about different futures continually solidify into maintaining existing structures of power. Using a diffractive analysis to navigate between explosive critiques of corporate harms and the sleepy suburbs that shape the everyday life of corporate employees, these tensions expose how the harms of Big Tech are entangled with more widespread contexts of chronic inflammation, informing pathways to addressing seemingly acute problems that fade into chronic conditions.

Many approaches to tech policy scramble to address new company products, technological innovations, and corporate scandals. In the 2010s, the U.S. government responded to the Cambridge Analytica data scandal by organizing inquiries into Facebook’s privacy practices, while scholars produced work aimed at uncovering bias in algorithms, social media’s impacts on sociality, and labor abuses on digital platforms. But as the influence of Big Tech continues to expand despite these investigations and new hype around AI has produced inquiries into AI-specific policies, this paper asks: is this approach of tech-specific critique and policy the best strategy for broad-scale change? Using empirical examples from ethnographic research conducted in Silicon Valley between 2022 and 2024, this paper explores the foundational role of venture capital financing in shaping corporate decision-making and outcomes across the industry. As speculative financial models create the incentives for hyper growth-oriented corporate strategies, these financial structures connect Silicon Valley to much wider processes of financialization that contribute to increasing inequality and the consolidation of wealth on a global scale. I draw on participant observation at a data analytics company in San Francisco to trace how finance capital shapes the inner-workings of corporate strategies rather than tech-specific policy or technical considerations. This ethnographic analysis demonstrates how industry actors pivot around capital in order to survive, directed by structural conditions rather than technology-related motivations. While focusing on the external impacts of corporate products generates the stakes of critical research, this paper advocates for studying the inner-workings of the industry in order to better identify the root causes of harmful externalities. It may be that the best approach to “good internet policy” doesn’t direct attention towards information technology or digital platforms at all, but rather addresses the underlying financial systems that consolidate wealth and continue to shape the direction of corporate products.

This ethnographic project examines a post-techlash Silicon Valley through two, interconnected scales—the worker and the corporation—examining how material dependencies and economic relations at the level of the worker enact reinforcing logics that reproduce corporate projects. Building on scholarship that connects the industry’s contemporary data collection practices to the property logics developed through histories of settler colonialism (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996; Couldry & Mejias,  2019; Zuboff, 2018), this project follows property as a foundational relation that shapes the structure of corporate technology platforms and their extractive outputs. At the level of the worker, I spent time in the homes and thirdspaces of corporate employees to trace how the property expectations of nuclear families and home ownership motivate and normalize their participation in corporate data practices. At the corporate level, I draw on participant observation at a data analytics company in San Francisco to trace how extractive data collection is transformed into mundane corporate tasks that defy critical engagement in the corporate context. This project draws together these two scales to point towards property as a foundational aspect of maintaining relational structures of inequality, offering a new locus for addressing the harms of Big Tech.

UX roles have been increasingly integrated into the corporate development of new technologies in Silicon Valley over the past few decades, with practitioners often utilizing terms like “human-centered” and appealing to humanistic concerns to characterize their work. Companies have also adopted humanistic language, which shows up in IPO documents, public marketing campaigns, and career landing pages for highly compensated roles (Facebook, Inc. 2013; Facebook, Inc. 2019; Google, Inc. 2004; Lyft, Inc. 2021). Critical academic work has deconstructed these claims of humanistic benefits and shown how language about human-centered practices helps redirect political contestation into projects of corporation expansion, and since 2018 the industry has undergone a public reckoning with its role in the production of harm related to the widespread adoption of corporate tech products (Irani 2019; Zuboff 2019; Benjamin 2019; Eubanks 2018). Given this critical academic work as well as public awareness of harms connected to corporate products stemming from Silicon Valley activities, this paper utilizes ethnographic work in the San Francisco Bay Area conducted in the aftermath of the techlash to explore how highly paid actors narrate and understand their ongoing participation in an industry connected to these critiques. By examining the lived experience of life in the bay area and corporate work, this paper offers preliminary thoughts about the limitations of awareness-only campaigns to create lasting change in light of broad, entrenched structures of power, and utilizes ethnographic observations of contemporary tech work in the bay area as a jumping off point for discussing alternative paths forward.

In the 1980s, the literary genre “cyberpunk” became an inspirational touchstone for the newly collected technological workers of Silicon Valley. Fictional stories of networked existence promised a future in which fleshy bodies and all of their problems were transcended, mapping a path to liberation through interfacing with cyberspace technologies that leave the body behind. As fictional console cowboys who used technology to disrupt their attachments to bodily constraints and resist oppressive regimes became an aspirational model for self-described technologists, Silicon Valley workers came to understand their practices of disruption—applied to everything from bodies to business models—as core to the liberatory futures promised by new technologies. Disruption practices, however, have manifested as a cultivator of harm without accountability, perpetuated through imagining bodies as homogeneous objects that can and ought to be transcended. After tracing how key disability histories in the 20th century were obscured by cyberpunk narratives of technological cures, this paper will explore how a cyberpunk disdain for bodies made its way into Silicon Valley and became foundational to the global expansion of new technologies in the 21st century. In weaving together disability studies and STS, this paper looks at how Silicon Valley’s liberatory narratives are situated at the core of how harm has been mechanized and scaled up to global dimensions. By looking at how Silicon Valley discourses about the social benefits of technological intervention draws from the justifications for medical interventionist approaches to disability, this paper argues that the spread of Silicon Valley technologies relies on ableist approaches to solving social problems and that peripheralizing disability perspectives contributes to the ongoing threat to bodies perpetuated by new technologies. By cripping the industry’s history and humanitarian claims, this paper draws on a politics of crip futurity to both unravel how a Silicon Valley imaginary about liberatory futures led to bodily violence and asks how this can problematize our understanding of the role of science and technology in a politics of recovery and building better futures in the wake of the current global pandemic.