Seeing Like a Valley: Locating the Moral Visions of Silicon Valley Culture

san francisco

Like modern states, the industrial region known as Silicon Valley has developed through attempts to regularize, rationalize, and codify the world. These ways of knowing have favored emerging technologies and new modes of organization. But what are the effects of this developing view to the world?

The "Seeing Like a Valley" Matrix Research Team will bring UC Berkeley affiliates in contact with others who are studying or intervening in Silicon Valley to understand the place of this unique region in shaping not just new technological practices, but new moral visions. The team will experiment with practices for theoretically-informed events and interventions, and will convene an international group of scholars, policy makers, technologists, journalists, artists, and activists to explore the moral visions emerging out of the world’s tech hub.

The team’s work will include a series of “public encounters,” monthly field trips and bi-monthly salons that promote an active public intellectual culture across and beyond UC Berkeley, as well as monthly planning meetings on campus. They ultimately hope to produce an edited volume designed for a general audience.