Autonomous Motives: Tech, Shared Mobility, Privatization, and the Utopian Imaginary in the Bay Area

As the “solutionism” of the San Francisco Bay Area tech industry infiltrates ever more of the spaces of social life and shapes when and how people interact, from remote work to app dating, it is important to question what the fates of Silicon Valley and the Bay illustrate about the transformations wrought on place and society by the cultural logics of information technology. Using the region’s transportation history since the 1950s as a lens, this research focuses on the material impacts of the tech industry’s anti-material ideology on its home region. The chapters chart a chronology of increasingly privatized and tech-influenced transportation, from the development of Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), to contestation over the “Google Bus,” to the rise of ride-hailing platforms and now autonomous vehicles. This dissertation interweaves methods, including archival research; ethnographic interviews; content analysis of visual, news, and social media; and participant observation and documentation. It employs the ethnographic practices of “studying up” and “thick description” as methodologies suited to analyzing the social effects of data-driven industries, and poses several questions: 1) How do the means of moving people through urban space reveal assumptions about who the city is “for”? Who is served by these regimes/logics: whose lives do they facilitate or exclude? 2) How does transportation materialize the prevailing political-economic logics of an era? And 3) What role does the social history and imagining of Silicon Valley, with its predilections for speculative futurisms, play in the sweeping techno-cultural transformation of the Bay, and what does it portend for regions buying into the Silicon Valley franchise? The pursuit of these questions links two principal literatures—critical urban geography and the “new mobilities” paradigm—that have different approaches to political-economic and network analyses and are not frequently read together. Both offer advantages to the topics addressed in this project, and help expand the definition of urban space and its boundaries, as well as clarify the right to the city and the meaning of mobility justice