Search

If social media are generally considered workplace distractions, how does Meta promote their enterprise social medium, Workplace? Analyzing Meta's corporate communication, I explore their emphasis on "connectivity" as Workplace's key selling point, aligning with existing research on Meta's self-construction. Highlighting three pertinent themes in the corporate communication, I explore how Workplace is promised to (1) subsume the gray media of corporate life (2) turn companies into communities where workers share information boundlessly, even about their personal lives and (3) that these streams of communicative data are ultimately used as a datafied proxy for corporate health via Workplace. I propose that the productivity claimed to result from Workplace's connectivity hinges on a subtle merging of personal and professional aspects in employees' lives, which is in line with broader Silicon Valley trends and Meta's own organizational image. I discuss the implications and limitations of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the role of big tech in becoming an engine of capturing public power. We focus on tech capitalist classes and their determination to capture both the economic benefit and the political decision. First, the article does so by bringing to the fore input from Weber's political capitalism to explain the linkages between state and tech capitalists as the illustration of a structural dependence where lobbying activities are intensified. Second, pushing further the generally admitted idea of states and markets being co-constitutive allows to broaden the concept of political capitalism to include not only rent seeking, property rights' issues, and surplus extraction mechanisms but also models of governance. The study suggests that in the case of digital capitalism, property rights on productive resources, originally private while also publicly subsidized, can make big tech not just shapers of common values but also providers of public goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, American tech actors express optimistic ideas about how to fix the Earth and halt climate change. Such "green" initiatives have in common that they capture the world in systems and propose large systemic, and mostly technological, solutions. Because of their reliance on techno-fixes, representatives of Silicon Valley express an ideology of ecomodernism, which believes that human progress can be "decoupled" from environmental decline. In this article, I show how "whole-systems thinking" has become a key discursive element in today's ecomodernist discourses. This discourse has developed from the 1960s onwards – inspired by cybernetic, ecological and computational theories – within the tech culture of California. This paper discusses three key periods in this development, highlighting key publications: the Whole Earth Catalog of the 1960s, the Limits to Growth report in 1972 and the cyberspace manifestoes of the mid 1990s. These periods are key to understand how techno-fixes became a popular answer to the climate crisis, eventually leading to a vision of the world as an ecosystem that can be easily controlled and manipulated, and of technological innovation as harmless and beneficial. I argue that "whole-systems" thinking offers a naive and misleading narrative about the development of the climate crisis, that offers a hopeful yet unrealistic perspective for a future threatened by climate change, built on a misconception of Earth as a datafied planet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The success of startups is intricately linked to the ecosystem they operate within. It is thus critical to unpack the concept of the startup ecosystem, a task that demands scholarly and professional insight. There is a keen interest in dissecting the dimensions and components of these ecosystems, with a particular focus on those known to be startup-friendly. The motivation for this scrutiny comes from patterns showing that high-performing startups are predominantly clustered in specific global regions—a hardly coincidental phenomenon. This paper aims to explore these thriving ecosystems, drawing parallels to the Italian context, especially that of the south. R.Q.: Can comparing Italian startups with Silicon Valley reveal growth best practices? Utilizing a combination of primary and secondary interviews, this study benchmarks the southern Italian startup ecosystems against the renowned Silicon Valley. Despite Silicon Valley's occasional tumultuous phases, it maintains its stature as a benchmark of excellence. This comparative analysis seeks to extract best practices results from Silicon Valley, which, despite its challenges, continues to be a significant point of reference for emerging startup environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Silicon Valley, the Bhopal disaster led to a bitter controversy regarding poisonous gases used in high-tech manufacturing. Concerned by the potential release of deadly gases by semiconductor plants, fire departments drafted a stringent ordinance regarding their use, handling, and storage. Microelectronics firms opposed the ordinance and campaigned for a weaker set of rules. As public opinion shifted toward strict regulation, the Inter-Governmental Council of Santa Clara County forced industry to go back to the negotiating table and develop a revised version of the firefighters' ordinance in collaboration with the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, an environmental group. The toxics gas ordinance was later incorporated into the Uniform Fire Code and set the rules for the utilization of hazardous gases in the American West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War, the authors recount the efforts made by the US Department of Defense beginning in 2015 to engage with the commercial-technology sector by opening a new office, Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), in Silicon Valley. The authors led DIUx from 2016 to 2018 and broke from established Pentagon acquisition practices to make cutting-edge technology developed in the private sector available to soldiers and military civilians. Despite early failures and intense bureaucratic resistance, the office eventually secured significant funding and delivered key innovations, including drone-hacking techniques and cloud-penetrating radar satellites. The book emphasises ongoing tensions between traditional military-procurement practices and the need for rapid technological adaptation, using the Pentagon's response to the war in Ukraine as an example and considering how it may respond to advances in artificial intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the role of big tech in becoming an engine of capturing public power. We focus on tech capitalist classes and their determination to capture both the economic benefit and the political decision. First, the article does so by bringing to the fore input from Weber’s political capitalism to explain the linkages between state and tech capitalists as the illustration of a structural dependence where lobbying activities are intensified. Second, pushing further the generally admitted idea of states and markets being co-constitutive allows to broaden the concept of political capitalism to include not only rent seeking, property rights’ issues, and surplus extraction mechanisms but also models of governance. The study suggests that in the case of digital capitalism, property rights on productive resources, originally private while also publicly subsidized, can make big tech not just shapers of common values but also providers of public goods.

This article explores venture capital (VC) as a means and process of accumulating future social necessity. It explores the mechanisms of growth that make VC-backed firms distinct. I argue that a distinctive feature of surplus value capture through VC is valorization via socially necessary contracted space-time, a corrective to Marx’s theorization of socially necessary labor time, which appears incomplete in the context of VC. First, extending Marx’s general formula for capital, I develop a general formula for VC, demonstrating how the VC investment upends traditional theories of capitalist accumulation. Second, I argue that VC invests in firms seeking to capture ‘human capital’ resources and uncapitalized market ‘space’ (noncapitalist social logics of exchange) with the aim of achieving ‘product-market fit’. Third, I demonstrate how time and space are contracted under the VC process as a value capture (VC) mechanism relating to future social necessity. VC is, I argue, about accumulating today what we will all need to be consuming tomorrow, just to keep up with social norms. Finally, I explore how the valorization of crisis (VC) demonstrates the accumulation of future social necessity in practice. I conclude with thoughts concerning the possibility of alternatives beyond the overdetermined rapacity of ‘VC’.

This article explores venture capital (VC) as a means and process of accumulating future social necessity. It explores the mechanisms of growth that make VC-backed firms distinct. I argue that a distinctive feature of surplus value capture through VC is valorization via socially necessary contracted space-time , a corrective to Marx's theorization of socially necessary labor time, which appears incomplete in the context of VC. First, extending Marx's general formula for capital, I develop a general formula for VC, demonstrating how the VC investment upends traditional theories of capitalist accumulation. Second, I argue that VC invests in firms seeking to capture 'human capital' resources and uncapitalized market 'space' (noncapitalist social logics of exchange) with the aim of achieving 'product-market fit'. Third, I demonstrate how time and space are contracted under the VC process as a value capture (VC) mechanism relating to future social necessity. VC is, I argue, about accumulating today what we will all need to be consuming tomorrow, just to keep up with social norms. Finally, I explore how the valorization of crisis (VC) demonstrates the accumulation of future social necessity in practice. I conclude with thoughts concerning the possibility of alternatives beyond the overdetermined rapacity of 'VC'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As technology chief executive officers have become public figures, their personae operate as loci for journalistic discourse about the intersection of moral responsibilities, regulation, and political-economic power of the tech industry. They possess a power often construed as beyond the reach of politics or civil society to address. This study considers how the ubiquity of tech power has become a kind of common sense in journalistic discourse, specifically looking at news, commentary, and analysis that has circulated around Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg since 2016, arguing that even as critiques of Zuckerberg's moral fitness and leadership capacity proliferate, they construct the epistemic bounds within which tech industry power over American public life is understood as legitimate, even as journalists and commentators question certain executives' ability to wield the tech industry's infrastructural and cultural power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of MATRIZes is the property of Universidade de Sao Paulo, Programa de Pos Graduacao em Ciencias da Comunicacao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The historically ambiguous relationship between journalism and Big Tech can be traced back to the late 20th century, when news organizations started to recognize the potential of the Internet as a distribution platform. While a growing body of literature is concerned with power asymmetries between Big Tech and journalism, the role of place in shaping the layered histories of journalism remains underexplored. This study uses a framework of place—conceptualized as material and geographic, a setting for action and lived experiences carrying the legacies of their past, and a site of accumulating histories of cultural meaning and power (Usher, 2019)—to examine how Silicon Valley and Fourth Estate ideals converge. Empirically, the study analyzes job advertisements of four US and UK print-legacy news outlets serving as a window into shifting expectations, skills, and values that news organizations seek in their employees, reflecting broader trends in journalism. Findings show that journalism draws on Silicon Valley ideals, merging datasolutionism with Fourth Estate narratives of audience access. Some news organizations are not only tech-oriented but frame themselves as tech companies with a Fourth Estate mission. While both Silicon Valley and Fourth Estate narratives promote ideals of equal power distribution, findings indicate the reinforcement of hegemonic power structures in the news industry. We conclude that the influence of Silicon Valley on journalism is one of consolidating power through location, action, and cultural meaning, as news organizations construct datasolutionism as a pivotal novel layer to achieve long-standing Fourth Estate ideals. This analysis contributes to our understanding of the historical context and evolving nature of the relationship between journalism and Big Tech, highlighting the significance of place in shaping the dynamics between these two increasingly intertwined industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we explain the success of cooperative networks of firms which share innovations, such as Silicon Valley or the Open Source community? This paper shows that if innovations are cumulative, making an invention publicly available to a network of firms may be valuable if the firm expects to benefit from future improvements made by other firms. A cooperative equilibrium where all innovations are made public is shown to exist under certain conditions. Furthermore, such an equilibrium does not rest on punishment strategies being followed after a deviation: it is optimal not to deviate regardless of another firm's actions following a deviation. A cooperative equilibrium is more likely to arise the greater the number of firms in the network. When R&D effort is endogenous, cooperative equilibria are associated with strategic complementarities between firms' research effort, which may lead to multiple equilibria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital technologies are rapidly transforming economies and societies. Scholars have approached this rise of digital capitalism from various angles. However, relatively little attention has been paid to digital capitalism's cultural underpinnings and the beliefs of those who develop most digital technologies. In this paper, we argue that a solutionist order of worth – in which value derives from solving social problems through technology – has become central to an emerging spirit of digital capitalism. We use supervised learning to trace the relative importance of different orders of worth in three novel text corpora. We find that solutionism is indeed central to the normative beliefs of digital elites and the broader digital milieu, but not to capitalist discourse at large. We illustrate the importance of these findings by discussing how the spirit of digital capitalism motivates, legitimates, and orients the actions of digital capitalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Muitos empreendedores no mundo das startups de tecnologia buscam financiamento de capital de risco para estabelecer e expandir seus negócios, mas esse pode ser um processo repleto de desafios e carregado de consequências a longo prazo. A maioria das tentativas de obter financiamento de capital de risco falhará, e a maioria das startups financiadas por capital de risco não terá sucesso. Além disso, as startups que conseguirem esse tipo de financiamento tenderão a seguir uma trajetória de desenvolvimento muito diferente da de muitas empresas tradicionais. Este artigo busca esclarecer a relação única e especial entre o capital de risco e as startups de tecnologia, com foco em um subconjunto específico: aquelas relacionadas à indústria editorial de livros. A análise abrange tanto a perspectiva de um capitalista de risco bem estabelecido no Vale do Silício e financiador de startups de tecnologia, quanto a perspectiva dos empreendedores que buscam garantir financiamento de capital de risco. Ao examinar essa relação sob ambas as óticas, podemos entender por que alguns empreendedores conseguem captar recursos enquanto outros não. Também podemos compreender por que as trajetórias de desenvolvimento das startups financiadas por capital de risco são significativamente diferentes das de muitas empresas tradicionais e explicar por que algumas dessas empresas financiadas por capital de risco falham, enquanto outras, competindo em um mercado semelhante e em condições aparentemente equivalentes, sobrevivem e prosperam.

An array of software apps, from fitness to finance, enrolls behavioral economics, and economists, in their product designs, value propositions, or else sales pitches, to make products more engaging and to afford users new capabilities in their daily lives. Drawing on 30 interviews with product strategists, designers, and user researchers who work on these self-styled 'behavior change apps,' this paper empirically studies the behavioral economic proposition and its operationalization in routine practices of software development and design. Setting aside the behavioral addiction and manipulation frame that critical work on app design typically summons, I approach behavioral economics applications as market work and tease out the different, co-existing logics of attachment between products and their users, that emerge from how market actors decide what product to build, which features to have and how to design the user experience. In doing so, I show that strictly focusing on the frequency of repeated interaction is also empirically inadequate. The product is rather strategized, developed, and designed to become something that the user 'cannot do without,' not because it is addictive, but because it is made indispensable to the distributed action universe of the behavioral problem that it addresses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper investigates the transformation of startup-style norms due to the expansion of the internet, contrasting these with traditional business norms like etiquette, professional appearance, and punctuality. The paper argues that the emergence of the internet fostered a shift towards an inclusive, value-centric, empathetic, and productivity-focused startup culture, largely supplanting profit-driven objectives. Silicon Valley, as the epicenter of startup culture and the birthplace of influential startups, is analyzed. The paper recounts how business norms evolved from stringent practices in rigid workspaces to more relaxed, effective ones after the internet's rise, propelled by pioneering tech entrepreneurs. The key conclusion is that the internet has enabled entrepreneurs to access information, connect with diverse audiences, and scale businesses more efficiently, cultivating a risk-tolerant, innovative startup culture that prizes rapid prototyping and experimentation over conventional practices. This shift has disrupted industries and spawned new markets. The paper is of particular importance for tech startups, tracing the evolution of startup-style norms and emphasizing the role of Silicon Valley in sparking this change. It adds to the sociological understanding of how technological shifts shape social structures and norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the innumerable suggestions of the book-prism Understanding Media, one of the most significant legacies, strongly re-presented as a key to analysing the relationships between technologies and the metamorphosis of society, coincides with technological determinism. Strongly contested in subsequent media studies as a manifestation of reductionism, technodeterminism appears to be a highly topical and useful conceptual tool for observing the conceptions of the main actors in Platform Society and Artificial Intelligence. Through Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan transforms the determinism of the Toronto School into a philosophy of history of the same intensity as Marxian determinism. Technological determinism can thus be regarded as the "ultimate ideology", the one professed by the Big Tech tycoons, who place themselves in relation to public discourse and media system in the guise of prophetic leaders indicating new horizons of destiny for humanity. In this context, McLuhan's general conceptual perspective can be interpreted as an original matrix of the "Californian Ideology". This article, with a focus on discourse analysis and the framing of the topic from a sociology of communication and social theory perspective, aims to analyse the genesis and characteristics of the technological determinism elaborated by McLuhan by comparing it, in terms of long duration, permanence and returns, with that expressed by the Californian Ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the small peripheral town of Yoqneam became one of the largest high-tech centres in Israel. It does so by using official data analysis and in-depth interviews with key figures to construct a holistic model that explains the town's phenomenal success in upgrading its socioeconomic level from 3 to 7 in 25 years. Four major success anchors have been identified: a) Employment opportunities that include high paying jobs in innovative clean industrial parks that enable personnel mobility and experience sharing; b) High standard of living that includes an excellent education system, along with various housing opportunities and beautiful surroundings; c) Growth accelerators, such as technological incubators that can contribute towards the transformation of this peripheral area into a technological centre; and d) Efficient transportation system that connects the town to the country's business centre, as well as to knowledge centres such as universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Startup entrepreneurship, understood as innovative venture creation and development, has gained a strong momentum under current capitalism, and startup cultures are being developed all over the globe. In this article, I examine startup culture as a global form and investigate the relationship between Silicon Valley – often seen as the cradle of current technology and startup entrepreneurship – and local manifestations of startup culture. I argue that Silicon Valley is an ambivalent, emblematic schema for the global construction of startup cultures. Therefore, I draw attention to the shared features of startup cultures by conceptualizing the notion in a threefold manner. Firstly, I conceive startup culture as a form of governance, which I dub startup entrepreneurialism. Secondly, I discuss startup culture as the cultural circuit of digital capitalism. Thirdly, I explore startup culture as a distinct form of economic activity that is characterized by a symbiosis between venture capital and growth companies. Drawing together, I find that startup cultures are best understood as an instantiation of a privileged form of contemporary capitalist production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing demand for a highly skilled workforce in a knowledge- and technology-based economy stimulates the recruitment of international professionals, resulting in their increased participation in the total volume of international migrants. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to their integration strategies and migration trajectories. Drawing on 46 interviews with Polish high-tech professionals, this article explores their characteristics and migration experiences in Silicon Valley. Grounded theory, a biographical method, a transnational approach and the concept of social anchoring guided my data collection, analysis and interpretation. The study results indicated that high-tech professionals were well prepared for immigration to the United States and were able to integrate effectively into the multicultural environment of Silicon Valley by adopting the rules of the host society ‘only as much as necessary’ without rejecting their previous cultural affiliations. Working at the level of competence and professional experience from the moment of arriving in the United States facilitated their structural adaptation to American society. The study contributes to the existing body of literature in migration research by offering a nuanced insight into motivations, identities and values of modern highly skilled migrants and providing new ways of understanding their decision-making processes on migration and settlement.

"Sustainability" is an increasingly fashionable design criterion for celebrity corporate architects, their clients, and the governmental bodies that regulate urban development. Yet determining if and how a building is actually sustainable remains controversial, with different actors positing qualifications that are often at odds with each other. In this article, the authors explore how the ideal of sustainability is made concrete in contemporary corporate architecture, focusing on the design of one of Google's new corporate campuses in Silicon Valley that has been extensively touted and recognized as admirably green. The article draws attention to how various experts who participated in the design of Google's new campus rendered sustainability differently and argues that the temporal and social structure of the design process worked to compel coordination and compromises among these experts' different renderings. Ultimately the authors advocate for problematizing the design process as a key site where political questions about sustainability in the built form get settled pragmatically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Silicon Valley and its innovation center counterparts have come upon food and agriculture as the next frontier for their unique style of innovation and impact. But what exactly can the tech sector, with expertise in information and communication technologies, bring to a domain in which the biophysical materiality of soil, plants, animals and human bodies have most challenged farmers and food companies? Based on a detailed analysis of all of the companies that have pitched their products at events sponsored by the Silicon Valley-based convener, Foodbytes!, we show that a large proportion of tech-driven solutions are digital technologies transferred from other domains. These technologies at best inform decision-making on the ecological processes of food and farming, but do not provide tools to treat them, and otherwise provide business solutions not even aimed at major challenges in food and farming. Drawing on a small set of interview data, we additionally suggest that tech entrepreneurs migrate to food and agriculture because it seems purposeful, exciting, or lucrative, but sometimes lack a clear understanding of the problems they might solve with their digital technologies. In making our case about the mismatch of problem and solution, we bring into conversation recent critiques of digital solutionism with abiding concerns in agrarian political economy and critical food studies regarding the role of the biological in both challenging food production and spurring technological intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book review assesses "Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times." The book is a multisited ethnography that explores Siliconization or the expansion of Silicon Valley imaginaries at a global scale. The review highlights the methodological strategy and the discussions around infrastructures and entrepreneurship, alongside other topics, to connect the book with similar research. A highly critical work on the hegemonic ways to design, construct and promote technology in the context of nation-building, it unravels the possibilities of an antifascist and postsocialist ethnography, setting the grounds for expanding the role of academia in techno-capitalism critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Research Papers of the Wroclaw University of Economics / Prace Naukowe Uniwersytetu Ekonomicznego we Wroclawiu is the property of Uniwersytet Ekonomiczny we Wroclawiu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The use of innovative technologies in workspaces, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart systems, has been increasing, yet it remains in the minority of the total number of smart system applications. However, universities and technopoles are part of open innovation that can encourage experimental IoT and smart system projects in places. This research considers the challenges and advantages of developing intelligent environments with smart systems in the Technology Development Zones (TDZs) of Turkey. The growth of Silicon Valley has inspired many technopoles in different countries. Thus, the article includes first a comprehensive survey of the story of Silicon Valley and the emerging technological potential of open and responsible innovation for intelligent spaces and technoparks with rising innovative interest. The study then conducts empirical research in inspecting the performance of TDZs in Turkey. In the research, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) models are applied in the analyses of critical performance indicators for encouraging incentives and investments in innovative attempts and productivity in TDZs; the challenges, potential, and need for intelligent spaces are evaluated accordingly. This article also reports on the minority of the design staff and the lack of innovation in developing intelligent spaces in the organization of the creative class in Turkey. Consequently, the research proposes a set of implementations for deploying intelligent spaces to be practiced in new and existing TDZs by considering their potential for sustainable and responsible innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If one looks at the United States over the past sixty years, it becomes clear that religious and spiritual practices have proliferated in unexpected places and spaces. They have become thoroughly ensconced in the boardrooms, offices, shop floors, and retail spaces of business establishments. From there, they have seeped into just about every imaginable area of American life, turning schools, parks, shopping malls, sports stadiums, hospitals, gyms, health food restaurants, spas, and the very apps on our computers and cell phones into corporate spaces promising new and enticing forms of spiritual enchantment. The purpose of this essay is to document the way new forms of spirituality have become part of a much longer history of the entanglement of business and religion, a history that began in monasteries, formed the bedrock of the Puritan work ethic, and is now an established aspect of the neoliberal ideal of the privatization and corporatization of all aspects of human life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurial ecosystems (EE) are composed not only of startups but also the organizations that support them. Theory has been ambivalent about whether an EE is spatially bounded or includes distant organizations. This exploratory study uses a time series of all Internet industry initial public offerings (IPO) to explore the locational changes not only of startups but also four key EE service providers: lawyers, investment bankers, venture capitalists, and board directors. We find that while the startups became only slightly more concentrated, the EE service providers concentrated more rapidly, as an industry center in Silicon Valley emerged. Our results suggest that over the industry life cycle, industry knowledge exhibits a tendency to spatially concentrate, and this results in a concentration of industry-specific EE service providers that is even greater than the more gradual concentration of startups. As a result, startups, wherever they are located, increasingly source EE services from the industrial knowledge concentration. Plain English Summary: Using the entire life of the Internet industry, we show that entrepreneurial ecosystems are composed of local and extra-local service providers. Moreover, as the industry matured, the generic local entrepreneurial support service providers were replaced by those located in the dominant region which also had developed industry knowledge. The dominant region's support providers effectively became service providers for both local and distant entrepreneurs. The principal implication of this study is that local policymakers should understand and explain to local startups the value of EE members that are extra-local, as these actors may have intimate and current industry-specific knowledge necessary to successfully build their firm. Entrepreneurs should weigh carefully whether it is more efficient to use local EE service providers or those in the region with the greatest industry knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We estimated the off-street parking supply of the seven most economically productive cities in Santa Clara County, California, better known as Silicon Valley. Using assessor data, municipal zoning data, and visual inspection with aerial imagery, we estimated that about 14 percent of the land area in these cities is devoted to parking, and that over half the average commercial parcel are parking spaces. This latter fact suggested that minimum parking requirements, if binding, could depress Silicon Valley’s commercial and industrial densities, and; thus, its productivity. In an exploratory empirical exercise, we simulated a reduction in parking requirements from the year 2000 forward, and showed that under conservative assumptions, the region could have added space for an additional 12,886 jobs, which is 43 percent of the actual job growth that occurred during that time. These additional jobs would be disproportionately located in the region’s highest-wage zip codes, further implying a large productivity gain.

For this special issue of b2o, we explore Musk’s SpaceX, the NSA’s control room, Biosphere 2, HI-SEAS, and Apple’s new “Spaceship” headquarters. In these projects and artifacts we find highly politicized deployments of Silicon Valley-style scitech, masked as concerned with escape from planet Earth while necessarily downplaying and denying their impetus: the deleterious, long-term effects of human-induced, industrial-scale problems such as resource extraction, environmental destruction, and war. Linked theoretically, conceptually, and politically, both to each other and to their unacknowledged, obfuscated philosophical origins in accelerationism and technological nihilism, these endeavors and their proponents in government and tech sectors represent the ultimate expression of reality TV’s much-discussed “preppers,” ready to start anew somehow and somewhere else. In a final turn, this paper contrasts such endeavors with Trump-era protectionist values (e.g., increased military spending; the detention of migrant children; entrenched, ongoing structural racism; antagonism of longtime allies) seemingly in stark opposition to these manifest desires to leave, rather than defend, the nation. Yet, when read through the lens of accelerationism, such antagonism can be more accurately identified as directly aligned with the hastening of global confrontation, chaos and the deliverance of the chosen few to a fetishized future of their making.

Reseña

Klastry, zwłaszcza high-tech, są niezwykle istotne we współczesnej gospodarce. Jako archetyp Dolina Krzemowa inspiruje rządy na całym świecie do tworzenia lub pomocy w formowaniu lokalnych klastrów technologicznych. Polityka klastrowa stała się również jednym z głównych narzędzi polityki w dziedzinie planowania urbanistycznego. Bazując na podejściach do inicjowania i promowania klastrów, obecną politykę klastrową można podzielić na trzy modele: amerykański, azjatycki i europejski. W artykule dokonano przeglądu literatury na temat klastrów zaawansowanych technologii, polityki klastrowej oraz rozwoju wybranych klastrów, w tym Doliny Krzemowej, Silicon Fen, Hsinchu Science Park, Singapore Science Park and One-North, a także Akademgorodok. Autorzy opisali rozwój wybranych klastrów, wskazali główne wyzwania i zbadali rolę rządu w poszczególnych ekosystemach. Na podstawie przeprowadzonej analizy stwierdzili, iż wsparcie władz rządowych i lokalnych jest niezbędne dla trwałości klastra. Podejście polegające na łączeniu interwencji oddolnych i odgórnych może być ostatecznym kierunkiem dla wszystkich krajów tworzących klastry, a jedyną różnicą jest czas, który różni się w zależności od lokalnych zasobów, środowiska społecznego, a zwłaszcza kultury. W przypadku rządów jego rolą powinny być określenie odpowiedniego czasu na wdrożenie adaptacji w polityce, koordynowanie i prowadzenie w praktyce zrównoważonego rozwoju.

Big Tech companies are powerful global actors that wield unprecedented influence, including in the realms of governance. How these companies position themselves through media is important to their power. Architecture plays a fundamental role in representations of Big Tech as influential agents, translating symbolic capital between fields, from architecture to Big Tech, and vice versa. Our qualitative content analysis of media of Google's proposed project for a headquarters in Mountain View, California, shows how the mediatisation of renowned architects and their work helps translate the vast digital and financial power of Google into a palatable physical presence in a relatively small town with local concerns. The mediated architectural project provides a way for Google to step into governance roles while de-emphasising its global power. In this case, media representations of architecture are mobilised to construct a fictional future that a corporate actor presents as desirable locally and aspirational globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The future of Human-computer interaction (HCI) communication requires researchers to develop a strong understanding of the factors that influence design practitioners. As a step towards building that understanding, based on interviews conducted with veteran web designers, we analyze a corpus of popular web design books published during and shortly after the dot-com boom. Using a combination of ethnographic methods and discourse analysis, we identify the rhetorical strategies in these books and why they were successful in shaping our participants’ ideas about web design. We find that the books exhibit a particular style of technical writing defined by a speech-like techno-masculinity. Despite their short shelf-lives, the books and their writing style contributed to the disciplinary identity of web design which exists today. Studying the history of best practice books is an important opportunity to reflect on the genre of best practices in design, and how we should frame them in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As our planet gets hotter, California suffers the devastating effects of increasingly large annual wildfires. However, in honouring the wisdom of the trees, Berkeley architecture professor and writer Jill Stoner describes how, contrary to popular belief, such pyrotechnic events have many advantages for ecological diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]