The silicon future

Abstract

This article proposes the concept of the silicon future—a privileged temporal position that functionally precedes the present—to argue for an increased focus on temporality and the role it plays in technodeterminist discourse. By interpreting how Silicon Valley firms employ this silicon future as an inevitability that they themselves have already reached, the article describes a temporal paternalism—a claim to authority that validates itself not according to arguments or facts, but to temporal supremacy—that executives and venture capitalists rely on to justify their actions and investments. In kind, this article shows how this idea of an already-existing future is used by big tech to frame its own inventions as inevitable, unregulatable, and beyond critique. Using news reports and other publicfacing technophilic materials, it traces the temporal forms that underwrite the power of Silicon Valley’s technodeterminism.