Silicon Valley Cinema
- Reveals how ‘Silicon Valley Cinema’ builds upon previous Hollywood trends
- Analyses three distinct subtrends in ‘Silicon Valley Cinema’: biopics, films about the workplace, and science fiction action films, all of which are set in Silicon Valley
- Demonstrates how this trend interrogates Silicon Valley’s development, impact on our present world, and its potential to determine our human future
Silicon Valley corporations such as Facebook, Google, and Apple now dominate our daily lives to the extent that they might even be dictating the entire future of humanity. The 2010s saw a sequence of Hollywood films debate how these corporations achieved this position of dominance.
Introduction
Part one: Precursors
1. Technology and Surveillance in Millennial Hollywood
2. Critiquing Twenty-First Century Capitalism
3. Hollywood’s Bay Area
Part two: Real Genius
Chapter four: The Silicon Valley Biopic
Chapter five: Constructing the Silicon Valley Icon
Part three: Silicon Valley’s Dystopian Utopia
Chapter six: Technology Solutionism and the World of Work
Chapter seven: Dystopian Diversity
Part four: Silicon Valley’s Evil Geniuses
Chapter eight: Posthumanity and Masculinity
Chapter nine: The Turbo-Capitalist Tech Bro
Conclusion: Why Him? and the Dialectics of Silicon Valley Cinema
BibliographyIndex
Taking in film, TV, surveillance culture, and the 2000s financial crash, Street roams the hallways and hot-desk hotspots of Cupertino and Palo Alto in search of the villains and the disenfranchised who were the beneficiaries and victims of the Silicon Valley boom. A terrific read for anyone with an interest in movies, the big-tech takeover, and Californian society and culture.
Silicon Valley Cinema is a timely and captivating investigation of how tech futurism has colonized our imaginations as it simultaneously truncates our material prospects. Adroitly balanced between contextual analysis and filmic example, this indispensable book maps the parameters of this new stage of capitalist excess personified in the figure of the entrepreneurial genius.
