Michelle Venetucci is an economic anthropologist with a focus on the technology industry in the San Francisco Bay Area. While Silicon Valley has often served as an exemplar of the post-Fordist flexible economy, her work highlights how individual actors gravitate towards these flexible economic contexts through attachments to Fordist family models established in post-war American suburbs. Her dissertation, titled Stuck in Silicon Suburbia: Privileged Positionalities and Constrained Materialities in Silicon Valley, shows how the expectations of a stable domestic life become incorporated into the more flexible “high risk” practices of venture capital. Drawing on time spent inside companies and moving outward into the homes of corporate employees and startup founders, this dissertation is organized around five chapters that explore the industry as a coherent, interdependent network structured by speculative finance, with ethnographic attention to growth. Her work engages with the anthropology of finance, feminist studies of capitalism, and Science and Technology Studies (STS).
Before graduate school, she spent the 2010s working at Lyft and Github while watching her husband build two venture capital-backed tech startups in Silicon Valley. She holds a bachelor’s in anthropology and urban planning from the University of Washington, Seattle, and a MPhil in anthropology from Yale. She’s currently a PhD candidate in the Yale anthropology department and a policy fellow at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
Presenter, “‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’: How Finance Shapes Hype in Silicon Valley.” 10th Annual STS Italia Conference - Technoscience for Good: Designing, Caring, Reconfiguring, Politecnico di Milano. Milan, Italy (Upcoming 2025).
Critical analyses of Silicon Valley often focus on the problem of ideology, deconstructing techno-utopian claims in an effort to address the harmful outcomes of corporate technology projects. As this focus on ideology can locate the problem within individuals and their beliefs, this paper instead directs analytic attention to the structural conditions through which these publicly circulating narratives are produced, exploring how centering analysis around institutionalized contexts can change our understanding of what drives industry behaviors. Using empirical examples from ethnographic research conducted in Silicon Valley between 2022 and 2024, I show how hyped claims are cultivated as a way to take action within the uncertainty of venture capital’s speculative financial models, representing weakly held beliefs that are subject to change in the face of shifting investor interest and market conditions. Given that the companies constituting “Big Tech” were all structured by venture capital from early stages, this paper starts with two seed-stage startups in the crypto and AI spaces, showing how founders frequently changed their narrative claims as they searched for a fit between their product strategy and a growth-oriented market that fits into shifting investor hype cycles. I then follow a third startup as they raised what is called a Series A round of funding, showing how investors made financial decisions based on a revenue chart that indicated product-market fit in a growth-oriented market. These examples demonstrate how industry actors at every level pivot around capital in order to survive, directed by structural conditions rather than ideologies about techno-utopian futures. For scholars who may hope to positively affect society with critical analysis, this paper highlights the importance of engaging with the constraints felt by so-called powerful actors in untangling how power structures continue to be reproduced in the face of critical inquiry.
Presenter, “‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’: How Finance Shapes Hype in Silicon Valley.” 6th European Technology Assessment Conference (ETAC6), Institute of Technology Assessment (ITA) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the globalTA network. Vienna, Austria (Upcoming 2025).
Critical analyses of Silicon Valley often focus on the problem of ideology, deconstructing techno-utopian claims in an effort to address the harmful outcomes of corporate technology projects. As this focus on ideology can locate the problem within individuals and their beliefs, this paper instead directs analytic attention to the structural conditions through which these publicly circulating narratives are produced, exploring how centering analysis around institutionalized contexts can change our understanding of what drives industry behaviors. Using empirical examples from ethnographic research conducted in Silicon Valley between 2022 and 2024, I show how hyped claims are cultivated as a way to take action within the uncertainty of venture capital’s speculative financial models, representing weakly held beliefs that are subject to change in the face of shifting investor interest and market conditions. For scholars who may hope to positively affect society with critical analysis, this paper highlights the importance of engaging with the constraints felt by so-called powerful actors in untangling how power structures continue to be reproduced in the face of critical inquiry.
Presenter, “Silicon Suburbia: Growth and Maintaining the American Dream.” Money Talks: Futures for the Economic Humanities, University of Edinburgh. Edinburgh, Scotland (Upcoming 2025).
Silicon Valley has often served as an exemplar of the post-Fordist flexible economy, both in championing new corporate practices and in enabling a broader adoption of flexibilization through the production of new technologies. As anthropologists have highlighted how the economic and social are co-constituted, depictions of industry actors as dedicated to new entrepreneurial subjectivities and risk-taking behaviors reinforce this idea of new forms of capitalist practice that reconfigure social and domestic life. And yet, Silicon Valley has continually reproduced structural inequalities, revealing continuities with socialities past rather than new horizons of possibility. This paper interrogates how cross-generational hauntings shape the expansionary impulses of Silicon Valley, engaging with the suburban infrastructure that birthed the industry and the Fordist middle class practices of the tech workforce. By ethnographically tracing how risk averse aspirations for stable domestic life undergird flexible economic scale projects, I show how the industry’s global expansion is reproduced through local familial attachments to more modest economic growth. As workplace subjectivities are shaped by newer economic models as well as familial practices grounded in histories of westward expansion, this paper illustrates how future-focused regimes of flexible accumulation in Silicon Valley are facilitated by domestic contexts that stretch back across generations.
Presenter, “Pivoting Around Capital in Silicon Valley: Alternative Approaches to Tech Policy.” 75th Annual International Conference, Political Studies Association (PSA) with the University of Birmingham and Aston University. Birmingham, UK (2025).
Many approaches to tech policy scramble to address new company products, technological innovations, and corporate scandals. In the 2010s, the U.S. government responded to the Cambridge Analytica data scandal by organizing inquiries into Facebook’s privacy practices, while scholars produced work aimed at uncovering bias in algorithms, social media’s impacts on sociality, and labor abuses on digital platforms. But as the influence of Big Tech continues to expand despite these investigations and new hype around AI has produced inquiries into AI-specific policies, this paper asks: is this approach of tech-specific critique and policy the best strategy for broad-scale change? Using empirical examples from ethnographic research conducted in Silicon Valley between 2022 and 2024, this paper explores the foundational role of venture capital financing in shaping corporate decision-making and outcomes across the industry. As speculative financial models create the incentives for hyper growth-oriented corporate strategies, these financial structures connect Silicon Valley to much wider processes of financialization that contribute to increasing inequality and the consolidation of wealth on a global scale. I draw on participant observation at tech companies in San Francisco to trace how finance capital shapes the inner-workings of corporate strategies rather than tech-specific policy or technical considerations. This ethnographic analysis demonstrates how industry actors pivot around capital in order to survive, directed by structural conditions rather than technology-related motivations. While focusing on the external impacts of corporate products generates the stakes of critical research, this paper advocates for studying the inner-workings of the industry in order to better identify the root causes of harmful externalities. It may be that the best approach to “good internet policy” doesn’t direct attention towards information technology or digital platforms at all, but rather addresses the underlying financial systems that consolidate wealth and continue to shape the direction of corporate products.
Presenter, “In the Business of Resignation: The Relationship Between Narrative and Practice in Silicon Valley.” Revitalizing Applied Anthropology, Society for the Anthropology of North America (SANA) and Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA). Portland, OR (2025).
Do shifting narratives of work allow for broader changes in processes of capitalism? In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that shook up the practices of work across society, Silicon Valley-created technologies allowed many people to continue working while being quarantined at home. As this moment of global crisis shook up established norms around work, Silicon Valley’s own work cultures were doubly hit by these work from home contexts following years of sustained critique known as the techlash. Following Peter Benson and Stuart Kirsch’s (2010) call to examine the functioning of power through looking at how corporations respond to crisis and critique, this paper utilizes ethnographic work conducted in the aftermath of the techlash to explore how industry workers started changing their relationship to work. While the techlash succeeded in shifting the emotional habitus of industry workers, a subsequent collapse of techlash-inspired strategies for change manifested through resigned solidarities with capitalist interests, providing a productive space through which to understand how capitalist actions are negotiated. Looking at the mechanisms through which shifting sentiments about work were re-absorbed into corporate projects, I highlight how diverse sentiments and contradictory desires expressed by industry actors converge towards the same ends.
Presenter, “Innovation as Maintenance: Silicon Valley and the American Dream.” STS Hub 2025: Diffracting the Critical. Berlin, Germany (2025).
STS scholars have often separated concepts of maintenance and innovation, offering maintenance practices as an alternative to the tech industry’s visible commitment to innovation. And yet, instead of producing ruptures and changes in foundational aspects of society as promised by innovation discourse, Silicon Valley’s products have leveraged and entrenched existing structures of power, acting as a practice of social maintenance as they’ve been increasingly used to optimize financial interests. This paper proposes thinking about tech corporations in Silicon Valley as inflammable objects, with the push for innovation grounded in desires to maintain the American Dream. Building on Annemarie Mol and John Law’s notion of “mutable mobiles” that are characterized by variability without losing their identity, this ethnographic project follows innovation discourse into the industry’s center, looking at how volatile startup projects and discourse about different futures continually solidify into maintaining existing structures of power. Using a diffractive analysis to navigate between explosive critiques of corporate harms and the sleepy suburbs that shape the everyday life of corporate employees, these tensions expose how the harms of Big Tech are entangled with more widespread contexts of chronic inflammation, informing pathways to addressing seemingly acute problems that fade into chronic conditions.
Roundtable presenter, “Shaping Anthropological Praxis: AI, Pedagogy, and Insights from Scholars, Practitioners, and New Voices.” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting: Praxis. Tampa, Fl (2024).
Presenter, “Pivoting Around Capital in Silicon Valley: Alternative Approaches to Tech Policy.” Policy & Internet Conference. University of Sydney, Australia (2024).
Many approaches to tech policy scramble to address new company products, technological innovations, and corporate scandals. In the 2010s, the U.S. government responded to the Cambridge Analytica data scandal by organizing inquiries into Facebook’s privacy practices, while scholars produced work aimed at uncovering bias in algorithms, social media’s impacts on sociality, and labor abuses on digital platforms. But as the influence of Big Tech continues to expand despite these investigations and new hype around AI has produced inquiries into AI-specific policies, this paper asks: is this approach of tech-specific critique and policy the best strategy for broad-scale change? Using empirical examples from ethnographic research conducted in Silicon Valley between 2022 and 2024, this paper explores the foundational role of venture capital financing in shaping corporate decision-making and outcomes across the industry. As speculative financial models create the incentives for hyper growth-oriented corporate strategies, these financial structures connect Silicon Valley to much wider processes of financialization that contribute to increasing inequality and the consolidation of wealth on a global scale. I draw on participant observation at a data analytics company in San Francisco to trace how finance capital shapes the inner-workings of corporate strategies rather than tech-specific policy or technical considerations. This ethnographic analysis demonstrates how industry actors pivot around capital in order to survive, directed by structural conditions rather than technology-related motivations. While focusing on the external impacts of corporate products generates the stakes of critical research, this paper advocates for studying the inner-workings of the industry in order to better identify the root causes of harmful externalities. It may be that the best approach to “good internet policy” doesn’t direct attention towards information technology or digital platforms at all, but rather addresses the underlying financial systems that consolidate wealth and continue to shape the direction of corporate products.
Presenter, “Data as Property: Constrained Materiality in Silicon Valley.” Critiquing Big Tech. Tilburg, Netherlands (2024).
This ethnographic project examines a post-techlash Silicon Valley through two, interconnected scales—the worker and the corporation—examining how material dependencies and economic relations at the level of the worker enact reinforcing logics that reproduce corporate projects. Building on scholarship that connects the industry’s contemporary data collection practices to the property logics developed through histories of settler colonialism (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996; Couldry & Mejias, 2019; Zuboff, 2018), this project follows property as a foundational relation that shapes the structure of corporate technology platforms and their extractive outputs. At the level of the worker, I spent time in the homes and thirdspaces of corporate employees to trace how the property expectations of nuclear families and home ownership motivate and normalize their participation in corporate data practices. At the corporate level, I draw on participant observation at a data analytics company in San Francisco to trace how extractive data collection is transformed into mundane corporate tasks that defy critical engagement in the corporate context. This project draws together these two scales to point towards property as a foundational aspect of maintaining relational structures of inequality, offering a new locus for addressing the harms of Big Tech.
Presenter, “When Awareness Isn’t Enough: A Post-techlash Valley and the Role of Charismatic Claims.” 4S 2023. Honolulu, HI (2023).
UX roles have been increasingly integrated into the corporate development of new technologies in Silicon Valley over the past few decades, with practitioners often utilizing terms like “human-centered” and appealing to humanistic concerns to characterize their work. Companies have also adopted humanistic language, which shows up in IPO documents, public marketing campaigns, and career landing pages for highly compensated roles (Facebook, Inc. 2013; Facebook, Inc. 2019; Google, Inc. 2004; Lyft, Inc. 2021). Critical academic work has deconstructed these claims of humanistic benefits and shown how language about human-centered practices helps redirect political contestation into projects of corporation expansion, and since 2018 the industry has undergone a public reckoning with its role in the production of harm related to the widespread adoption of corporate tech products (Irani 2019; Zuboff 2019; Benjamin 2019; Eubanks 2018). Given this critical academic work as well as public awareness of harms connected to corporate products stemming from Silicon Valley activities, this paper utilizes ethnographic work in the San Francisco Bay Area conducted in the aftermath of the techlash to explore how highly paid actors narrate and understand their ongoing participation in an industry connected to these critiques. By examining the lived experience of life in the bay area and corporate work, this paper offers preliminary thoughts about the limitations of awareness-only campaigns to create lasting change in light of broad, entrenched structures of power, and utilizes ethnographic observations of contemporary tech work in the bay area as a jumping off point for discussing alternative paths forward.
Presenter, “Disruption as liberation? How the devalued bodies of cyberpunk shaped the violent future of the present.” Graduate Research in Science and Technology Studies (GRiSTS). Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (2021).
In the 1980s, the literary genre “cyberpunk” became an inspirational touchstone for the newly collected technological workers of Silicon Valley. Fictional stories of networked existence promised a future in which fleshy bodies and all of their problems were transcended, mapping a path to liberation through interfacing with cyberspace technologies that leave the body behind. As fictional console cowboys who used technology to disrupt their attachments to bodily constraints and resist oppressive regimes became an aspirational model for self-described technologists, Silicon Valley workers came to understand their practices of disruption—applied to everything from bodies to business models—as core to the liberatory futures promised by new technologies. Disruption practices, however, have manifested as a cultivator of harm without accountability, perpetuated through imagining bodies as homogeneous objects that can and ought to be transcended. After tracing how key disability histories in the 20th century were obscured by cyberpunk narratives of technological cures, this paper will explore how a cyberpunk disdain for bodies made its way into Silicon Valley and became foundational to the global expansion of new technologies in the 21st century. In weaving together disability studies and STS, this paper looks at how Silicon Valley’s liberatory narratives are situated at the core of how harm has been mechanized and scaled up to global dimensions. By looking at how Silicon Valley discourses about the social benefits of technological intervention draws from the justifications for medical interventionist approaches to disability, this paper argues that the spread of Silicon Valley technologies relies on ableist approaches to solving social problems and that peripheralizing disability perspectives contributes to the ongoing threat to bodies perpetuated by new technologies. By cripping the industry’s history and humanitarian claims, this paper draws on a politics of crip futurity to both unravel how a Silicon Valley imaginary about liberatory futures led to bodily violence and asks how this can problematize our understanding of the role of science and technology in a politics of recovery and building better futures in the wake of the current global pandemic.