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      Margaret O’Mara, The Code. Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America reviewed by Antti Tarvainen

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            Abstract

            Silicon Valley has emerged as the key metaphor of the innovation-led economic development in the 21st century. As the Valley’s technology monopolies and utopias expand, there is a growing need for critical histories that help to ground and contextualize the futures that are spreading from San Francisco Bay. In this review essay, I suggest that a settler-colonial approach offers interesting possibilities for the creation of such histories. To demonstrate how such an approach works, I develop a settler-colonial reading of Margaret O’Mara’s recent book The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (2019). By critically analysing the key metaphors in O’Mara’s celebrated book, the global and violent face of the Valley becomes visible. The settler-colonial approach, I conclude, offers one possible analytical approach to breaking the stranglehold of America-centred understanding typical of the histories of Valley.

            Content

            Author and article information

            Journal
            10.13169/prometheus
            Prometheus
            PROM
            Pluto Journals
            1470-1030
            28 March 2022
            2022
            : 37
            : 4
            : 371-381
            Affiliations
            [1 ]Global Development Studies University of Helsinki, Finland
            Author notes
            [* ] Correspondence: Antti Tarvainen ( antti.tarvainen@ 123456helsinki.fi )

            https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6545-7149

            Article
            10.13169/prometheus.37.4.0371
            51eb20e0-2805-4d5b-b55b-c0f15c70c6b5

            All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

            History
            Page count
            Pages: 19
            Product

            The Code. Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by (2020) Penguin Books, New York, 512pp., $US20.00 paperback, ISBN: 9780399562204

            Categories
            Review essay

            Computer science,Arts,Social & Behavioral Sciences,Law,History,Economics

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