Silicon Valley’s Political Promise: Technoliberalism or Cyber-Liberalism?

Abstract

This text aims to analyze the political implications of a strategy associated with the widespread imposition of new technologies (big data, algorithms, artificial intelligence, metaverse, bioengineering, etc.) in social life. Starting from Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, we try to conceptualize this phenomenon as a new government tactic that involves discourses, power relations and productions of subjectivity. In this sense, the hypothesis of our text is that the discourses associated with the rise and influence of Silicon Valley, a region of the planet that brings together the main business centers of advanced technological production, is not reduced to neoliberalism, but rather advances towards an unprecedented form of government that we call “cyber-liberalism”. Also, given that there is already a critical literature on the political promise of Silicon Valley, our proposal argues with these approaches that use the term “technoliberalism”.