“The next Silicon Valley” is a phrase often used to proclaim the arrival of places as different as Bangalore, Dublin, and Shenzhen into the vanguard of the global economy. In the rush to build these future enclaves of postindustrial production, it has become accepted wisdom that the history of the first Silicon Valley represents something universal about the power of technology to transform national and global economies in the twenty-first century. While acknowledging the influence of the Silicon Valley on technologies as varied as personal computing, retail, transit, telecommunications, warfare, and government surveillance, this dissertation took a wider view of the Valley, interrogating the relationships between the politics of urban development, labor organizing, and democratic inclusion to understand how the Silicon Valley’s technology industry became synonymous with the culture of the global “new economy.”

“A New Utopia: A Political History of the Silicon Valley,” argued that social movements shaped the rise of the high technology industry in the last half of the twentieth century. It excavated the intersections of technology firms, urban governance, and economic discourse to critically examine high technology’s role in the transformation of postwar American political life. In doing so, this project demonstrated that as the industry came to be perceived as the core of the “new economy,” new meanings emerged about how communities and workers must behave, accommodate, and circulate within it. In turn, it showed that the ideological moorings of this economy were predicated not simply on the dynamism of high technology’s corporate form, but indeed through a dynamic struggle that redefined social belonging and work in the United States.

In contrast to previous scholarship on the Silicon Valley that has interpreted the values now associated with the “new economy” as largely emerging from the engineers and chief executive officers of major electronics, computer, and semiconductor firms, this project found that it was material political and labor struggles that pushed local industries to generate these discourses. Interconnected local movements struggled to improve workers’ rights, quality of public life, racial and gender equality, cultural representation, consumer regulation, and environmental protection.^{Footnote 1}

Precisely how these social movements shaped the economic discourse of the emergent Silicon Valley was revealed over the course of five chapters. Chapters were organized to show how a particular political movement’s intersection with the technology industry produced a constitutive element of this utopian thinking. Chapter 1, “Building the Valley and Inhabiting Marketized Individualism, 1945–1965,” chronicled how the individualism and unencumbered growth that came to define the high technology industry became physically embedded in the built environment of the Silicon Valley during the initial years of its rapid ascendance.^{Footnote 2} Chapter 2, “Anti-War Activism and the Growth of Anti-Statism, 1965–1980,” showed how the industry reconciled the public opposition to America’s imperial wars in Southeast Asia with its own design and manufacture of war matériel by positioning its consumer sector as an alternative that transcended state and military violence.^{Footnote 3} Chapter 3, “The Chicano Movement and the Invention of Transnational Connectivity, 1965–1975,” explained how two differing visions of internationalism powered technologists’ imaginary of stateless globalism as a modern expression of human liberation in the Valley.^{Footnote 4} Chapter 4, “Women’s Liberation and the Innovation of Flexible Productivity, 1970–1990,” suggested that the industry reformulated women’s economic claims into promises of equalization through the right to compete equally in the market with men.^{Footnote 5} Indeed, as women’s rights to contend in the corporate marketplace became a symbol of the technology industry’s responsiveness to the demands of the feminist movement, they replaced the demands for women’s greater liberation with the imperative of constant competition, for everyone, on all scales, and at all times. Chapter 5, “The Environmental Movement and the Emergence of Corporate Altruism, 1975-1995,” examined how the technology industry came to invest in a public posture of altruistic appearances and adopt a politics of corporate magnanimity after two decades of fighting environmentalists and occupational health activists.^{Footnote 6}

When taken in their totality, these fights transformed the high technology economy in its earliest moments of growth and consolidation. In doing so, actors both within the Valley’s social movements and inside the technology industry together produced a new dominant culture and ideology. As the local technology industry and its culture increasingly became a global paradigm for how to compete in a “new economy,” this contested ideological alchemy increasingly shaped American democracy, labor’s political power, and a larger public conversation about work and workers more broadly.^{Footnote 7} Thus, this local study of a global industry concluded that, by the end of the twentieth century, the economic ascendance of the technology sector had become a definitive political force within modern American life.