Prof. Dr. Eugenia Siapera (University College Dublin, Ireland): "From Disruption to Reaction: The Logical Endgame of Silicon Valley's Ideology"

• Datum: 11. June 2025
• Time: 16:15
• Street: Linzer Str. 4
• Room: 60.070

This talk traces the ideological evolution of Silicon Valley from its 1960s countercultural roots to its current alignment with reactionary politics, arguing this shift is not a break but a logical outcome of its founding beliefs. Drawing on Barbrook and Cameron’s Californian Ideology, it identifies two central tenets: libertarian individualism and technocratic governance. The former rejects collective notions of the good life in favour of unbridled individualism, while the latter prioritises expert-led, algorithmic control over democratic engagement. These beliefs intersect with an affinity for eugenics and biological determinism among figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel (Smyrnaios 2025; Benjamin 2024), reinforcing racial, gendered, and class hierarchies under the guise of meritocracy. The myth of the self-made billionaire obscures the systemic exploitation underpinning tech wealth, including land dispossession and global labour extraction. Technocracy and technosolutionism (Ferrari, 2020; Morozov 2013) furthers this logic by treating technology as the most efficient way to govern and mitigate risk, including its own harms. The apparent contradiction between libertarian freedom and pervasive surveillance dissolves when viewed through capitalism’s lens: surveillance becomes part of a broader security apparatus (Foucault 2004; Viejo-Otero 2024), or another form of technocratic governance, that facilitates market efficiency by removing friction. While once masked in progressive language, Silicon Valley’s ideology has become more explicit in the age of Trumpism. This talk argues that its core has always contained a deeply hierarchical and anti-democratic impulse, now laid bare..

CV

Eugenia Siapera is Professor of Digital Technology, Politics and Society and Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Policy at University College Dublin, Ireland, alongside Elizabeth Farries. Her research focuses on digital technologies and media, political communication, journalism, technology and social justice, platform governance and the study of hate speech, racism and misogyny. She has led several research projects funded by organizations such as the IRC, SFI and Horizon, and has contributed extensively to the academic literature with numerous articles and book chapters. Eugenia will collaborate with the ZeMKI Labs “Platform Governance, Media and Technology” and “Datafication and Mediatization” during her fellowship.