THE HISTORY OF SILICON VALLEY

3 credits · Undergraduate

Silicon Valley: the place where our quotidian is manufactured. The Hollywood of the digital, it’s the literal ground upon which new forms of relating, learning, and consuming are invented, tested, codified, packaged, and disseminated. Silicon Valley is also paradoxically everywhere, dependent on supply chains, laborers, and consumers that are far away. At the same time it’s a milieu of and for a new class structure that has radically altered the landscape and mores of the Bay Area. Starting in the late 1800s, we will trace the evolution of Silicon Valley and its global flows through to its enormous footprint on the present. We will consider the colonization of the American West, built environments/infrastructures, gender, class, and more.