Stanford Public Humanities invites you to join an event and lively conversation that takes you on a journey to the everyday landscapes of Silicon Valley. How do the technology companies in Stanford’s backyard shape the sub/urban worlds of the larger Bay Area? What spatial formations and new cultural paradigms are prototyped on San Francisco’s sidewalks? And what urban worlds are imagined to emerge in Google and Meta's planned “villages”?

The flaneur is a figure at the cusp of new conjunctures of capitalism, Walter Benjamin writes. If we follow her in and out of town halls and tech offices, new forms of capture and capital expansion come into view. In conversation with Charles Petersen, Katja Schwaller will discuss everyday life and urban struggles unfolding in the fragmented landscapes of the Silicon Valley region. 

Please RSVP at this link to attend. 

Katja Schwaller is an Urban Ethnographer and a Public Knowledge Fellow at Stanford Public Humanities. Her work examines the spatial and cultural paradigms of digital capitalism through the built environment. She is the editor of Technopolis, a volume on Big Tech and urban struggles in the San Francisco Bay Area (Seismo/Assoziation A 2019). As a PhD Candidate in Stanford’s Modern Thought and Literature Program, she is currently working on a book on Silicon Valley urban formations.

Charles Petersen is the Harold Hohbach historian at Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford. He has served as an editor at n+1 magazine for more than 15 years and has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Review of Books. He is currently working on a book around meritocracy in America, building on his Harvard doctoral research and his expertise on the history of Silicon Valley and the history of the U.S. political economy from the Gilded Age to the present.