Overview

Silicon Valley corporations now dominate our daily lives to the extent that many of us now question their ability to determine the direction of human life in the twenty-first century. The 2010s saw Hollywood filmmakers engaging in this very debate. Through a sequence of films ranging from biopics of key Silicon Valley leaders to science fiction action films and whimsical workplace comedies, Hollywood films probed Silicon Valley's impact on our past, present, and future. Silicon Valley Cinema analyses these films, arguing that they seek to encourage scepticism about our Silicon Valley overlords and have us step back from our immersion in Silicon Valley's world. Doing so, they suggest, might make our working lives more pleasurable, our world a better place, and might even help us avoid a war with genetically enhanced apes or avert a robot-led apocalypse.

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9781399505833

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Reviews

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. -- Ian Scott, University of Manchester 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. -- Sherryl Vint, University of California Riverside

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.--Ian Scott, University of Manchester 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.--Sherryl Vint, University of California Riverside

Author Information

Joe Street is an Associate Professor in American History at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne.

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