Back in April, Johns Hopkins’ Center for Economy and Society and Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences held a workshop on the political ideologies of Silicon Valley. It was a great event, in large part because it brought together a somewhat disconnected community. People had been thinking about Silicon Valley in history, in sociology, in cultural studies and political science among other disciplines. They had read across disciplines out of necessity, to keep up with the ideas – but they often hadn’t had a chance to meet the people they were reading. So this gave them an opportunity to talk. And as an unanticipated by-product of the meeting, we invited people who attended the meeting, and a couple of others, to write short pieces about their understanding of the ideology or ideologies of Silicon Valley.

If you want to read the seminar as a PDF, it is available here. If you want to remix it (it is made available under a a CC BY-NC 4.0 DEED AttributionNonCommercial 4.0 International License ), then click here to download the .tex file. If you want to link to the entire seminar, it’s all at https://crookedtimber.org/category/silicon-valley-seminar/If you want to read the individual posts online, you can find them all below.

The participants in the seminar are as follows:

• Shazeda Ahmed is a post-doctoral fellow in the Transatlantic Digital Debates at the Global Public Policy Institute at Princeton University. From Algorithmic Monoculture to Epistemic Monoculture? Understanding the Rise of AI Safety.
• Finn Brunton is a Professor of Science and Technology Studies at UC Davis. The Agar Plate of Cryptocurrency.
• Henry Farrell blogs at Crooked Timber. The Religion of the Engineers; And Hayek Its True Prophet.
• Maria Farrell blogs at Crooked Timber. Silicon Valley’s Worldview is Not Just an Ideology; It’s a Personality Disorder.
• Louis Hyman is the Maurice and Hinda Neufeld Founders Professor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial & Labor Relations. Silicon Valley is the Detroit of the Future.
• Dave Karpf is an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. The Church of Moore’s Law.
• Tamara Kneese is a Senior Researcher and Project Director of Data & Society Research Institute’s AIMLab, and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. Observers Observed: The Ethnographer in Silicon Valley.
• Neil Malhotra is the Edith M. Cornell Professor of Political Economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Silicon Valley Liberal-tarians.
• Lana Swartz is an associate professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. If It’s a Ponzi, Get In Early”: The Ideology of Scam Futures
• Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. Silicon Valley Fairy Dust.