When he opened the seminar that prompted these essays, Fred Turner said that Silicon Valley built more than semiconductors or search engines or smart phones or sharing platforms. Indeed, he suggested that Silicon Valley’s true product is ideology. In my notes, I wrote and underlined, “Silicon Valley creates and retails visions of the future.”
This resonated with my own research. Money—the main technology I study—is one way to do futurity, as I (and many scholars including Finn Brunton, another seminar participant) have argued. We only accept money from other people today because we think that someone will accept it from us tomorrow, and so on, into multiple tomorrows. When we invest, we are laying bets on particular visions of the future. [click to continue…]