The Mine Dumps of Silicon Valley: American Hegemony, South African Science, and the Global Circulation of Experts

Dr. Efthimios (Tim) Karaiyannides (University of Cambridge)

Friday 22nd November 2024, 2.30pm to 4pm

Mathematical Sciences, Lecture Room 103

Numerous commentators have drawn attention to the surprising number of Silicon Valley’s Right with connections to Southern Africa. For some critics on the Left, the Apartheid connections of tech CEOs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are enough to explain their authoritarian approach to corporate governance and their political affinity with Donald Trump. This paper will argue that the South African tech moguls are less aberrant imports and more products of American hegemony. It will show how the combination of job reservations under Apartheid and the Bretton Woods system produced a generation of white South African professionals with expertise which were suddenly at a premium in the wake of the economic shocks of the 1970s. Following the flow of expertise out of Apartheid South Africa and into American finance and tech in the last two decades of the 20th century, I suggest new ways of understanding the structural shifts and global intellectual networks which produced transformations of the global economy that are conventionally placed under the banner of “neoliberalism”.

Part of the Seminar Series “Critical Theory, Critical Practice” organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning.