UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation examines reconfigurations of home and work, public and private, in the Silicon Valley-San Francisco Bay Area technology economy, and the implications they have for gendered hierarchies and cultures of work more broadly. Using fieldwork conducted amongst startup workers, freelancers, and salaried individuals at large tech companies throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, I examine these questions: how do startups reconfigure public and private in the name of meaningful work; what formative impact do these new arrangements have on individuals’ identities, kinships, and life experiences? What are the historical specificities of how these social relations, beliefs and identities emerge through the Bay Area technology sector? What are the cultural, political, and economic shifts that make them seem natural and inevitable? The startup culture of Silicon Valley itself has radiating effects: it has become an icon of new, creative, American capitalism, and a model of urban development. Further, the platforms that it produces, which carry the industry’s dense associations of progress and innovation, have remade social, financial, and spatial infrastructures far beyond the regional reach of Silicon Valley itself. This dissertation is a close look at what this influential work culture entails for its participants, those who supposedly benefit the most from it, as well as for the broader public.