Looking forward to presenting at the upcoming annual conference for the Society for Utopian Studies at UC Berkeley. This year’s theme is “Disruption, Displacement, and Disorder” in the Bay Area, and I’ll be presenting on my research into the Google Buses, the history of BART, and the push for self-driving cars.
Abstract
“The Transit Network Society: Urbanism, Mobility, and the Bay Area in the Silicon
Age”
The Bay Area is popularly imagined as a science-fictional ecotopia, home of technological wizardry that has freed information and leveled global hierarchies through networked data. Its engineers are speeding towards midcentury dreams of autonomous transport and artificial intelligence, if not the jetpacks we were promised. It is a good question, however, whether this futurist urban imaginary corresponds to the increasingly contested lived experience of the region. Extracted from my ongoing dissertation research, this paper will focus on intertwined histories of mobility, transportation, and information technology in the Bay Area, including the midcentury BART campaign, the private tech company shuttles—the so-called “Google buses”—in the early 2000s, and the current race to develop the self-driving car. Each phase of the region’s modern transportation history responds to the growth of a science- and science fiction-influenced urban imaginary, as well as socio-political conjunctures that have contributed to increasing economic stratification, gentrification, displacement, and privatization of public space and systems. The growth of the Silicon Valley tech industry, in particular, is rooted in an ideology drawing on cybernetics and network thinking, which nominally values open data, rhizomatic design, and a globalized flow of information, people, and capital. I will explore how the “Californian Ideology,” however, devalues ideas of the public sphere or commons even as it argues for open-source information. To this end, my research interweaves critical urban and transportation studies, mobilities literature, and research on the tech-utopian ideologies that have shaped the Bay Area’s form, self-concept, and public perception.