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New Book: Silicon Valley Cinema - British Association for American Studies

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New Book: Silicon Valley Cinema

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Joe Street’s new book, Silicon Valley Cinema, will be out very soon. You can pre-order it here: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-silicon-valley-cinema.html and using the NEW30 discount code, you can get a decent 30% off! Order it for your library too: it’s the perfect book for undergrads to enjoy, for postgrads to grapple with, and staff members to read if they have space in their workload. Here’s the blurb:

Silicon Valley corporations such as Facebook, Google, and Apple now dominate our daily lives to the extent that they might even be dictating the entire future of humanity. The 2010s saw a sequence of Hollywood films debate how these corporations achieved this position of dominance. This sequence included biopics of key Silicon Valley figures Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, science fiction action extravaganzas like Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Venom, and Terminator: Genisys, the dystopian thriller The Circle, and extended to The Internship and Why Him?, whimsical comedies that warned us of the profound dangers of Silicon Valley capitalism. Silicon Valley Cinema argues that these films undercut the messianic pretensions of our Silicon Valley overlords and encourage us to end our immersion in Silicon Valley’s technotopia. Releasing ourselves from Silicon Valley’s grip, they suggest, will make our working lives more pleasurable, our world a better place, and might even avert a cataclysmic war with genetically enhanced apes or a robot-led apocalypse.

If you want to talk to Joe about the book (or indeed anything Silicon Valley-related), contact him at joe [dot] street [at] northumbria [dot] ac [dot] uk