Tag: Silicon Valley

Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America — Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, June 2

Poster by Hank Gerba

The Digital Aesthetics Workshop invites you to join us for one final event next Wednesday, June 2 (5-7PM Pacific), for a conversation with Mary Beth Meehan & Fred Turner.

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Join photographer Mary Beth Meehan and historian Fred Turner in a conversation about their new book, Seeing Silicon Valley — Life in a Fraying America, and about the power of analog aesthetics in a digital era.

Mary Beth Meehan is a photographer and writer known for her large-scale, community-based portraiture centered on questions of representation, visibility, and social equity. She lives in New England, where she has lectured at Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Fred Turner is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author of the award-winning history From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism among other books.

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More information about the book can be found here: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo90479007.html

Register for the event here: tinyurl.com/SSVDAW

What Tech Calls Thinking — Adrian Daub at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, May 11

Poster by Hank Gerba

On Tuesday, May 11th (5-7 pm Pacific), Adrian Daub will be discussing his recent book, What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley, at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop. Registration at tinyurl.com/DAWDaub. 

About the event: Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to Silicon Valley’s world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie. From the myth of dropping out to the war cry of “disruption,” Daub locates the Valley’s supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Ayn Rand, the New Age Esalen Foundation in Big Sur, and American traditions from the tent revival to predestination. Written with verve and imagination, What Tech Calls Thinking is an intellectual refutation of Silicon Valley’s ethos, pulling back the curtain on the self-aggrandizing myths the Valley tells about itself.

Adrian Daub is a professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford University, and the director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Studies. His research focuses on the intersection of literature, music, and philosophy in the nineteenth century.

Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. Made possible by support from Linda Randall Meier, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.