SCORCHED EARTH, DIGITAL UTOPIAS: IDEOLOGY AND HISTORY IN SILICON VALLEY
Name: ARNON MANHÃES CEOLIN
Publication date: 16/12/2021
Advisor:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| LÍVIA DE CÁSSIA GODOI MORAES | Advisor * |
Examining board:
| Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| GUSTAVO MOURA DE CAVALCANTI MELLO | Internal Examiner * |
| LÍVIA DE CÁSSIA GODOI MORAES | Advisor * |
Summary: For some decades now, the Santa Clara County region of the californian United States has proven itself as one of the main centers of technological research and development of the world. There, in the so-called Silicon Valley, large corporations associated with the Internet and the computer hardware and software industry emerged and expanded, such as Microsoft, Apple, Intel and Google. More recently, Facebook, Twitter and Uber have appeared, all of them managers of decisive technologies for the reproduction of contemporary society. What this work analyzes, at first, is the system of libertarian ideas that emerged along with the rise of the Internet and personal computers in the 1990s, ideas that remains active to this day for the purpose of political legitimization of these corporations and their respective technologies. Here is what is called Silicon cyberlibertarianism, an ideological system composed by the technological determinism characteristic of technological managers added to an amalgamation of fragments from the utopias of the communalist,
countercultural and New Left movements with injunctives of US laissez-faire
libertarianism. To better describe it, five phenomenons that synthesize the
origin of cyberlibertarianism in Silicon and that are still influential in
contemporaneity were analyzed: the cyberspatial colonialism of John Perry
Barlow and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the media optimism of
Louis Rossetto and Kevin Kelly through WIRED magazine, the Burning Man
festival`s gift economy, Timothy May`s cypherpunk crypto-anarchism, and the
entrepreneurial apology of George Gilder and the Progress & Freedom
Foundation (PFF). In the second part of the dissertation, some of the
assumptions of Silicon cyberlibertarianism are called into question and a
window is opened for the analysis of the historical formation of Silicon
Valley as a strategic instrument for the defense of US state sovereignty in a
century marked by world wars. In this sense, we work with the thesis that the
formation of the technological system of Silicon Valley derived from a ample
effort of mobilization of public war budgets, a process that refers to the
beginnings of the western colonization and the territorialization of the
californian state in the 19th century and which extends throughout the 20th
century, when the most important angel investor of Silicon Valley emerged:
the military-industrial complex.
