Software Masculinity: Remaking the High-Tech Mythos at the End of the Twentieth Century

In the late 1970s, the press had anointed Northern California’s microchip entrepreneurs as the heroic saviors of American manufacturing and masculinity alike. But a decade later, Japan was poised to overtake Silicon Valley’s dominance in microchip production, causing an existential crisis for the industry and its animating mythologies. This talk shows how, at the turn of the 1990s, Silicon Valley leaders articulated competing visions of the industry’s future. In the media, they battled over these divergent paths, linking their hopes for American success to differing technologies, industrial policies, and ideals of masculinity. Ultimately, the talk will show how a vision of “software masculinity” emerged, and how it revived the heroic mythos of the high-tech industry even as Silicon Valley lost its manufacturing edge.