Silicon Valley Cinema

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. Joe Street is an Associate Professor in American History at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne.