{"title":"The silicon future","authors":"John Cheney-Lippold","doi":"10.1177/14614448241234864","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article proposes the concept of the silicon future—a privileged temporal position that functionally precedes the present—to argue for an increased focus on temporality and the role it plays in technodeterminist discourse. By interpreting how Silicon Valley firms employ this silicon future as an inevitability that they themselves have already reached, the article describes a temporal paternalism—a claim to authority that validates itself not according to arguments or facts, but to temporal supremacy—that executives and venture capitalists rely on to justify their actions and investments. In kind, this article shows how this idea of an already-existing future is used by big tech to frame its own inventions as inevitable, unregulatable, and beyond critique. Using news reports and other publicfacing technophilic materials, it traces the temporal forms that underwrite the power of Silicon Valley’s technodeterminism.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.5000,"publicationDate":"2024-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"New Media & Society","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241234864","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article proposes the concept of the silicon future—a privileged temporal position that functionally precedes the present—to argue for an increased focus on temporality and the role it plays in technodeterminist discourse. By interpreting how Silicon Valley firms employ this silicon future as an inevitability that they themselves have already reached, the article describes a temporal paternalism—a claim to authority that validates itself not according to arguments or facts, but to temporal supremacy—that executives and venture capitalists rely on to justify their actions and investments. In kind, this article shows how this idea of an already-existing future is used by big tech to frame its own inventions as inevitable, unregulatable, and beyond critique. Using news reports and other publicfacing technophilic materials, it traces the temporal forms that underwrite the power of Silicon Valley’s technodeterminism.
期刊介绍:
New Media & Society engages in critical discussions of the key issues arising from the scale and speed of new media development, drawing on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and on both theoretical and empirical research. The journal includes contributions on: -the individual and the social, the cultural and the political dimensions of new media -the global and local dimensions of the relationship between media and social change -contemporary as well as historical developments -the implications and impacts of, as well as the determinants and obstacles to, media change the relationship between theory, policy and practice.