Description
In this paper, we bring attention to the emergent imaginaries surrounding American tech-work at executive and mid levels as indicative of hypermasculine nostalgia, noting that nostalgia becomes a frame through which both Silicon Valley CEOs and engineers in NYC’s ‘Silicon Alley’ extend conservative and gendered narratives of the ideal society. Contrary to expectation, given their deep-set belief in technological possibility and an augmented future, both Silicon Valley CEOs and mid-level tech workers in New York City are deeply nostalgic for an imagined past with clearer patriarchal relations, social roles, and community, as well as ‘grander’ and more blatantly optimistic technological innovations unencumbered by bureaucratic oversight. Such nostalgia prevails despite the very real material differences between these two sets of actors. Through the affective frame of hypermasculine nostalgia, these technology-visionaires understand their sense of alienation in the present, by imagining that their life, their ideas, and their person would have been more at home in an idealised past. We argue that this phenomenon is best understood through the lens of 21st century developments of digital technology, particularly following recent backlash against technology and the corporations that produce it (‘tech-lash’) and a period of greater moral scrutiny against tech workers in Silicon Valley. In our analysis, we examine the books by tech-CEOs and findings from ethnographic field work to put forward our analysis of a new kind of nostalgia that is intimately linked to future technological innovation, yet substantially different from concepts such as ‘future nostalgia.’
