Silicon Valley Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

A growing and widely held assumption is that digital communication technologies enable average citizens to participate in politics more easily, actively and directly than in traditional ways. The Internet in this framework, from blogs and video post to social media and mobile apps, breaks down barriers for political participation. The idea is that the Internet is a non-hierarchical democratic space where people can access, create and act on political information in a broader range of activities, whether as part of election campaigns, online petitions, digital activism or even revolutionary change. In this thinking, it is increasingly the individual who participates in digital politics without the involvement of a civic group or political party. Put together, this creates a more democratic scenario in which individuals exercise freedom of expression in a networked, horizontal and participatory digital network without bureaucratic, organizational or state intervention. I call this philosophy around the Internet ‘Silicon Valley Ideology’, which has proliferated along with the mass diffusion of social media technologies. The contradiction in this ideology, however, is that these institutionalized beliefs in egalitarian political participation mask the realities of structural inequalities. Silicon Valley Ideology builds on theories that challenge the folly of free markets, Internet utopianism, and egalitarian citizenship. The rise of the Internet has not only coincided with the rise of technological advancements, but it has also run parallel with the rise of neoliberal, market-based politics and economies in which individual rights are at the core of neoliberal ideology. However, class-based capitalist societies are not based on the individual but on hegemonic forces linking the market, the state and civil society. Yet part of the Silicon Valley Ideology is to keep the state’s hands off the Internet and not to intervene, censor or monitor personal Internet activities. Yet this philosophy is in conflict with any state support for full social citizenship, Internet or otherwise. Citizenship in a neoliberal age of digital politics often marginalizes the poor and working class, resulting in a digital politics gap.

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- Digital Divide, Technology, Ideology, Social Media

This paper investigates the possible disappearance of the screen with the evolution and design
pressures of viewership in mind. It begins with the complexities of the screen. This includes
the aspect ratio wars of cinema’s widescreen and the square television standard which changed
in favour of the cinematic. This leads onto the constraints and imposed aspects formed from
the additional orientation change of smartphones and tablets. The successive changes have led
to an attempt at established forms of viewing with wearable screens which provide relief from
the health risks of using handheld devices which are unique to the current generation.
Augmented reality, an extension of the real world with additional overlays provides new
experiences with practical uses to visualise new and unseen possibilities. One of the earliest
forms established for consumers is the overlaying of information onto live sports broadcasting
to increase user’s enjoyment and understanding. Smartphone cameras augment reality using
their cameras for user created visual content, with new possibilities for location based mobile
games in real-time user environments. The educational values of this form of viewing are
investigated, including the latest and future heads-up displays and head-mounted devices.
Virtual reality is mediated with immersive screens for three-dimensional experiences in 360-
degrees. The potential exists for a new medium of 360-degree video and photography for
consumer content creation. Real world applications of virtual reality are investigated beyond
the established gaming genre of this form of viewing. Head-mounted displays include motion
controls for new interactive screen abilities with potentially limitless possibilities. The screen
is in fact not disappearing as future technologies appear to suggest. It has evolved into the next
dimension, beyond the screen as it is known.

- by Adrian Langtry
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- Design, Film Studies, Film Theory, Television Studies
- by J T
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- Innovation statistics, China, Myth, Silicon Valley

What is the political theorist to make of self-characterizations of Silicon Valley as the beacon of civilization-saving innovation? Through an analysis of "tech bro" masculinity and the closely related discourses of tech icons Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, we argue that undergirding Silicon Valley's technological utopia is an exploitative work ethic revamped for the industry's innovative ethos. On the one hand, Silicon Valley hypothetically offers a creative response to what Max Weber describes as the disenchantment of the modern world. Simultaneously, it depoliticizes the actual work necessary for these dreams to be realized, mystifying its modes of domination.

- by John McMahon
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- Technology, Masculinity, Silicon Valley, Labor

The growing use of military AI has amplified an already heated debate in which proponents and opponents of lethal autonomous weapons clash over the legal, ethical, and practical upshots of this new technology. Yet these debates still lag behind accelerated efforts to replace human decision making with AI wherever possible in military operations. This chapter argues that such developments in military AI reflect a prioritisation of 'know-how' over 'know-what', which in turn jeopardises not only global security, but also the very integrity of human ethical reasoning. In particular, the chapter tracks present-day forays into full lethal autonomy in weapons systems, noting their deleterious impact on the ability of military personnel to take responsibility for acts of technologically-mediated violence, whether intended or accidental. The chapter closes by noting important linkages between the 'know-how' perspective and the private sector, arguing that the growing prevalence of such a perspective is likely to lessen the restraint on harm in warfare going forward.

- by Elke Schwarz
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- Military Ethics, Norbert Wiener, Silicon Valley, Lethal Autonomous Weapons

Instafame is a pioneering study of the impact of social media and digital culture on graffiti and street art. Using 23 million pieces of publicly available data from Instagram, it paints a picture of the global networks of attention and... more

- by Nari Rhee
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- Urban Studies, Labor History and Studies, Labor unions, Silicon Valley

In response to civil unrest, many U.S. police forces in the 1960s and 1970s adopted more aggressive postures, including "militarized" uniforms and tactics. A few, however, directed reform efforts toward "demilitarization." This article focuses on the Menlo Park Police Department, in California, led by the maverick reformer Victor Cizanckas. It analyzes his attempts to change relations between the police and the public in his municipality, especially by decreasing incidents of abuse in one predominantly poor, black neighborhood. He instituted, for example, new uniforms and a nonhierarchical bureaucracy in the department. The article details how Cizanckas used emerging networks of law-enforcement professionalization to disseminate his ideas. It also analyzes the failures and challenges of these reform efforts. The article concludes that even radical police reform efforts in the period could not overcome racial inequality or a right-wing backlash against progressive ideas in policing.

- by Stuart Schrader
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- Race and Racism, Police Reform, Militarism and militarization, Silicon Valley

an architectural undergraduate design thesis Silicon Valley is reinventing our future constantly, yet the architecture of the Bay Area is not responding to the increase of jobs, traffic congestion and corporate campus dominance. The... more

- by Amy S
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- Silicon Valley
- by Poh Kam Wong
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- Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital, Silicon Valley

In May 2009, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders of Google, Inc., were trying to determine how they were going to navigate Google through the worst recession since the Great Depression. Their primary problem was how to maintain the company’s culture of corporate entrepreneurship and innovation in the face of stagnant profits and a host of other issues. Google sought answers on how to increase corporate entrepreneurship and innovation during the worst economic environment that the company had ever experienced.

- by TODD A FINKLE
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- Entrepreneurship, Technology, Corporate Entrepreneurship, Silicon Valley

This case study examines the background, start up,
and growth of one of the fastest-growing companies
in the United States, AdRoll. It explores the various
strategic factors related to the growth of AdRoll and how
these issues must be addressed in order to maintain its
level of growth.This case study is especially interesting not
only because it focuses on one of the fastest-growing firms
in the country, but also because it addresses on an understudied topic within the field of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial growth.
Keywords: entrepreneurship, technology, Internet, entrepreneur, entrepreneurial growth

- by TODD A FINKLE
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- Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media, Open Innovation
- by Charlotte Jones
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- Technology, Urban Planning, Gentrification, California History
- by Neta Alexander
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- Critical Theory, Finance, Technology, Digital Media

Les promesses des technosciences contemporaines s’appuient sur les success stories de celles qui façonnent actuellement l’économie et la société. La Loi de Moore, fonction exponentielle qui décrit et prédit la cadence de miniaturisation et de réduction des coûts des composants électroniques depuis un demi-siècle, constitue un de ces récits. Ce chapitre interroge la Loi de Moore comme matrice historique du régime actuel de l’économie des promesses technoscientifiques. Devenue métaphore du progrès technique en général, la Loi de Moore délimite le périmètre de ce qui, des technosciences, peut être interrogé et discuté. Parce qu’elle trace un cadre temporel pour l’innovation, sa construction même est hors-cadre, et relève du non négociable.En donnant à voir la fabrique de ce récit, ce chapitre entend construire et instruire une position critique générale sur l’économie des promesses technoscientifiques actuelles. Cette critique porte moins sur la faisabilité de ces promesses (sur leur caractère spéculatif, non crédible, non tenable) que sur leur désirabilité. La Loi de Moore montre en effet que ces promesses peuvent devenir crédibles, réalisables, tenables – mais à quel prix ?

This academic thesis takes into consideration the startup ecosystems of Silicon Valley (United States) and Bangalore (India). Bangalore is a city where considerable efforts have been dedicated to the promotion of the innovation since more than one decade. Today, in India, the city of Bangalore exemplifies a successful and world famous ecosystem of innovation which was comparatively set up decades ago in Silion Valley. Therefore, I took the opportunity of doing an internship at swissnex India in Bangalore to explore this startup ecosystem and depict its features in comparison with Silicon Valley’s. Even though there are differences between United States and India based on culture, society and economy, as to the structure of their respective startup ecosystem we can for sure draw points of analysis to identify and understand the levers by which innovation and entrepreneurship can be fostered to make a startup ecosystem successful and drive economic development in a region: high-impact entrepreneurs, community and culture, government and regulation, universities and education, incubators and accelerators, and capital sources.

In the research and commentary around ‘fake news’, there has been growing attention
to the way the phrase evidences a growing field of technology industry critique,
operating as a shorthand for understanding the nature of social media companies’
power over the public sphere. This article interrogates elite and popular discourses
surrounding ‘fake news’, using the tools of critical discourse analysis to show how
public commentary constitutes a discursive field that renders tech industry power
intelligible by first defining the issue of fake news as a sociotechnical problem, then
debating the infrastructural nature of platform companies’ social power. This article
concludes that, as commentary moves beyond a focus on fake news and critiques of
technology industries grow more complex, strains of elite discourse reveal productive
constraints on tech power, articulating the conditions under which limits on that power
are understood as legitimate.

- by Brian Creech
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- Information Technology, Communication, Media Studies, Journalism

This paper investigates the coloniality of contemporary digital nomadism, an identity that numerous Western tech workers use to describe lifestyles of location independence in which they travel the world while maintaining Silicon Valley salaries. Specifically, I assess colonial genealogies of digital nomads and more problematically defined “digital Gypsies.” It was during the height of 19th-century Western European imperialism that Romantic Orientalist texts proliferated, celebrating the racial and sexual “free and wandering Gypsy.” This deracinated figure was used to allegorize colonial desires and imperial violence alike. As I suggest, nomadic racial fantasy undergirds contemporary freedom desires today emergent from the heart of a new empire—that of Silicon Valley. In describing Silicon Valley imperialism and its posthuman digital avatar, I assess how nomadic fantasy transits technologies of gentrification into new frontiers. For instance, sharing economy platforms such as Airbnb celebrate the digital nomad, bolstering contexts of racial dispossession while continuing to deracinate Roma lifeworlds. Might nomad exotica in fact index coloniality and its ability to traverse time and space? How has this fantasy been abstracted over time, also entangling with posthumanist nomadic onto-epistemologies?

- by Erin M B McElroy
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- Information Technology, Technology, Feminist Theory, Race and Racism

This paper studies the arrival of digital nomads in Cluj, Romania. I focus upon double dispossession, in which ‘digital nomads’ allegorise technocapitalist fantasies by appropriating Roma identity on one hand, and in which Roma are evicted to make way for the arrival of Western digital nomads and tech firms on the other. While Roma are materially dispossessed as Cluj siliconises, they are doubly dispossessed by the conjuration of the deracinated digital nomad/Gypsy. As I suggest, this figure discursively drags with it onto-epistemological residues of 19th-century Orientalism – a literary genre that emerged within the heart of Western European empires. The recoding of the nomad today, I argue, indexes the imperiality of technocapitalism, or techno-imperialism. Double dispossession, as a phenomenon, illuminates that prior histories bolster, and are consumed by, globalising techno-imperialism. Postcolonial and postsocialist studies offer frameworks for understanding this update, as well as the accumulative and multifaceted dispossession that siliconisation inheres. I thus argue for a connected rather than comparative approach in understanding double dispossession, one focused upon connections across time, space and genre. A connected approach remains rooted in community organising and housing justice struggles.

The standard narrative of the emergence, rise and decline of Silicon Valley companies focuses on the evolution of institutions and technological waves, not the mentality of the innovators and entrepreneurs. This article argues that this type of explanation of the rise and decline of the Silicon Valley firms and institutions can hardly be sufficient. The suggestion is that a neo-Khaldunian theory could shed light on the issue. This article is an attempt to, first, distinguish between the medieval and modern aspects of Ibn Khaldun’s theory and second, to use the latter to examine Silicon Valley as a social phenomenon. It will be argued that Ibn Khaldun’s theory is of most contemporary relevance when we read it as a general account of a cyclical replacement of the untrained with the trained, while over and above the specific, environmentally deterministic cycle he identifies between ‘city-dwellers’ and ‘Bedouins’. In the case of Silicon Valley, these could be read as metaphors for, respectively, the established tech firms versus the garage-based start-up ‘geeks’.

- by Morteza Hashemi
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- Ibn Khaldun, Pierre Bourdieu, Sociology of Technology, Silicon Valley

This essay provides a concise reappraisal of the philosophical discussion on technology of the last 30 years in the light of the technologically induced political and cultural crisis of our present time. It starts with a philosophical assessment of popular discussions on transhumanism and interprets the more backwards-oriented mindset of this movement as a symptom of the cultural decline of liberalism. After a short genealogy of this decline, it concludes with an outline of the real anthropological challenges of the digital revolution and its implications for the Christian image of man.

- by Johannes Hoff
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- Christianity, Anthropology, Philosophy of Technology, Posthumanism

My blog-post for The Sociological Review.

- by Morteza Hashemi
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- Ibn Khaldun, Sociology of Technology, Silicon Valley, Start-Up

ABSTRACT Innovation and entrepreneurship are the most important catalysts of dynamism in market economies. While it is known that entrepreneurial activities are locally embedded, mutual effects of entrepreneurs and their local regional environment have not been adequately addressed in the existing literature. In this article, we use agent-based simulation experiments to investigate the role of entrepreneurship in the emergence of regional industrial clusters. We present fundamental extensions to the Simulating Knowledge Dynamics in Innovation Networks model (Ahrweiler et al., Industry and Labor Dynamics: The Agent-based Computational Economics Approach; World Scientific: Singapore, 2004; pp 284–96) by using a multilevel modeling approach. We analyze the effects of changing entrepreneurial character of regions on the development industrial clusters in two simultaneously simulated regions. We find that an increase in the entrepreneurship of one region has a negative effect on the other region due to competition for factors of production and innovative outputs. The major policy implication of this finding is the limitation it posits on regional innovation and development policies that aspire to support clusters in similar areas of industrial specialization. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity, 2014

- by Ozge Dilaver and +1
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- Entrepreneurship, Applied Mathematics, Entrepreneurial Economics, Complexity Theory
- by Ravio Patra
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- Technology, Biography, Microsoft, Silicon Valley
- by Mark Beumer and +1
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- China, Silicon Valley, Mark Beumer, Xi Jinping

1. Una doppia premessa. A. UBI, Universal Basic Income come reddito di esistenza. B. Re Ubu/Padre Ubu: alle origini della patafisica. 2. Nuove protezioni sociali, finalmente? 3. Il reddito di base: utopia per i tempi presenti. 4. Né con la Silicon Valley, né con le sorde classi dirigenti nazionali e globali? 5. La miseria italiana: Workfare e leggi sui poveri. 6. Épater le robot et la télévision? A quarant'anni dal 1977. 7. Reddito di base: per una visione mediterranea dentro la Silicon Valley globale.
https://www.bin-italia.org/qr7-reddito-garantito-innovazione-tecnologica-algoritmi-robotica/

- by Giuseppe Allegri
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- History, Sociology, Philosophy, Social Sciences
- by Emmanuel Alloa
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- Critical Theory, Information Technology, Technology, Digital Humanities

Through examining childbearing in California’s Silicon Valley, this article describes how seeking “self-actualization” has become a rite of passage for contemporary childbearing people. This approach undermines distinctions between “technological” and “natural” approaches to birth, as people are coached to leverage both logistical and animalistic capacities to produce “self-knowledge” and enact new feminist ways of doing embodiment. Based on fieldwork conducted as a doula, this article describes new rituals, anxieties, and aspirations that draw from both the idea that self-authenticity stems from an unadulterated, primordial nature and that self-realization is enabled by a very modern, reflexive strategy of self-design. In this community, the way reproduction comes to matter has less to do with realizing gendered expectations and kinship relations than with creative self-optimization. This approach facilitates women’s self-determination, while simultaneously introducing new forms of pressure and advancing a dominant cultural discourse that minimizes thinking about structural conditions and mutual accountability.

- by Andrea Ford
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- Nature Culture, Ritual (Anthropology), Birth, California
- by Ryan Reft
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- Information Technology, Urban Studies, California, Silicon Valley

This article focuses on the history of Zhongguancun as one of the most important area used by the official Chinese narrative to promote the historical shift from the “made in China” model to the “created in China” one. We reconfigure this process through three historical phases that reflect the engagement of policymakers, business and high-tech agents in the creation of a specific social imaginary. Based on a textual analysis as well as on political and sectorial sources, this historical study argues that Zhongguancun carries a set of cultural values influenced by the Silicon Valley experience, however it still fails to achieve success in terms of creation and innovation. In detail, our article highlights three findings: Zhongguacun satisfied the conditions of creative area only during its first stage, when local industries had to adapt its services and products to the Chinese language and culture. Second, Zhongguancun shared with the Silicon Valley neoliberalists issues such as those related to the risk of a real estate bubble burst. Third, although Chinese documents show that Zhongguancun has not the same creativity outputs compared to the Silcon Valley, it shares with California its financial dynamics mainly driven by huge investments in innovation places like innovation cafes.

This catalog essay, accompanying the "Join Who You Want" section of the 2017 Design Museum exhibition "California: Designing Freedom," argues that a central tenet of Californian design is its promotion of an ideology of "oneness"—from communes to ecology, from social justice to Silicon Valley, from freeways to mass transit. But because Californian oneness tends to extol individual freedom in peer-to-peer networking, it dissipates the potential for true solidarity and equality.

- by Simon Sadler
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- Design, Utopian Studies, Counterculture, California

Research summary: We examine the dilemma of ethnic investors in using ethnic network ties to invest by extending the 'ethnic enclave' concept to incorporate two dimensions: social network and social status. Our analysis of the first round of venture capital funding in Silicon Valley from 1976 to 2004 shows a higher likelihood of Asian venture capitalists (VCs) investing in Asian-led ventures than mainstream VCs. In addition, the valuation of their investments in mainstream ventures is higher than those by mainstream VCs in such ventures. In contrast, this premium effect is not observed when mainstream VCs invest in Asian ventures. These asymmetrical findings suggest the premium Asian VCs pay to compete in the mainstream venture market is due to their lower social status rather than their social network disadvantages. Managerial summary: Do ethnic minority investors behave differently from more mainstream investors? We examine this question by studying the venture capital industry in Silicon Valley over the period 1976 to 2004. We found that Asian venture capitalists (VCs) were more likely to invest in immigrant Asian entrepreneurs than mainstream VCs, and when they did invest in mainstream ventures, they paid higher valuations than mainstream VCs. In contrast, mainstream VCs did not pay higher average valuations compared to Asian VCs when they invested in Asian ventures. We show that two social factors—the ethnic minority VCs' social network ties and their lower social status—could have contributed to such behavioral differences.

- by Poh Kam Wong
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- Entrepreneurship, Social Networks, Venture Capital, Social status
- by Liwei Ren
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- Innovation statistics, Silicon Valley, Enterpreneurship, Firewall and network security

The ecosystems in Silicon Valley, Munich, and Singapore spark different narratives about entrepreneurship, which indicate what is common, appropriate, and successful in an ecosystem and in turn encourage different kinds of entrepreneurial approaches.
We conducted 43 interviews with successful players in Silicon Valley, Munich, and Singapore. We found ecosystem-specific narratives indicate what is common, appropriate, and successful in an ecosystem and encourage different kinds of entrepreneurial behavior and decision-making. Those narratives seem to shape tendencies towards specific strategic logics. The narratives either encourage ‘effectuation’ (i.e., when they focus on building partnerships and utilizing the networks, and when they encourage confidence and speed) or ‘causation’ (i.e., when they focus on developing systematics and structured plans, and when they encourage harmony and conformity). Narratives in Silicon Valley seem to facilitate effectuation, in Munich causation, and in Singapore both.
Our research suggests that narratives explain mechanisms how ecosystems influence entrepreneurship: the national culture, market characteristics, available resources, and networks in an ecosystem spark ecosystem-specific narratives, which in turn shape tendencies towards effectuation and causation. Thereby, we introduce a new ecosystem-focused perspective on predictors of effectuation and causation.
Our findings suggest specific strategies and success factors in each ecosystem. For example, the narratives prevalent in Silicon Valley have a sales focus, in Munich a need for detailed plans, and in Singapore value conformity. Thus, our findings provide insights for entrepreneurs for strategic location choices and on how to position their new venture at a specific location. VCs and policy makers gain from insights into how to leverage strengths and how to counteract problematic mechanisms in an ecosystem.

- by Professor Jochen Wirtz
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- Entrepreneurship, Social Networks, Culture, Causation
- by Mahnoor Syed
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- Socialist Economics, Post-Marxism, Marxism (Political Science), Silicon Valley

In Defence of Serendipity is a lively and buccaneering work of investigative philosophy, treating the origins of “serendipity, accident and sagacity”, as riddles and philosophical concepts that can be put to a future political use. Taking in Aristotle, LSD, Tony Blair, techno-mysticism and the sharing economy, Olma challenges the prevailing faith in the benevolence of digital technology and rejects the equation of innovation with entrepreneurship. He argues instead that we must take responsibility for the care of society’s digital infrastructure and prevent its degeneration into an apparatus of marketing and finance. The alternative is a situation in which the only kind of freedom that remains to us is the freedom to be exploited.

- by Sebastian Olma
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- Politics, Creative Industries, Serendipity, Silicon Valley