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This book explores the lived space of Silicon Valley by focusing on the experiences and aspirations of local youth as well as the educational, social, cultural, and political contexts that shape their daily lives and strategies of aspiration management. It considers how experiences of social contradiction shape patterns of subjectification and agency involved in processes of social reproduction within Silicon Valley's social landscape. It examines the process of aspiration formation among youth from divergent class, racial, and ethnic backgrounds, with particular emphasis on the children of the region's low-wage service workers and those of its highly skilled tech and service professional classes. This chapter discusses how Silicon Valley's polarization of wealth and local increased cost of living during the 1990s sharpened social, economic, and cultural divides along lines of race, ethnicity, and class. It also analyzes the rise of a techno-civilizing process in Silicon Valley and concludes with an overview of the book's scope.

This chapter examines a pattern of aspiration among first- and second-generation, low-income Latino youth participating in a public school biotechnology academy with corporate connections to Silicon Valley industry. In particular, it considers these Latino youth's desire to “give back” to the community by pursuing careers in public service, especially those that monitor and serve at-risk communities. It also explores how students of the “School-to-Career” Biotechnology Academy at Morton High School linked their pattern of aspiration to the school's emphasis on taking responsibility for an at-risk status and experiences of social contradiction and exclusion within their everyday school and community environments. Finally, it discusses the students' aspiration management in relation to a hegemonic social order reproducing race and class hierarchies and to a project of neoliberal governance in which notions of personal responsibility converged with idealizations of the tech private sector.

This chapter examines the aspirations and strategies of self-cultivation among the children of Silicon Valley's established, professional middle class in relation to school and community environments shaped by daily exposure to techno-entrepreneurial social practices, values, and success, along with familial experiences of social and economic insecurity. In particular, it considers the aspiration management of students of Sanders High School in Palo Alto, as well as the students' view of their school as a zone of self-expression and exceptionalism. It also discusses the students' marketing of themselves as authentic, original, sophisticated youth, along with the conflicts and fears of exclusion that they experienced.

This book has investigated young people's aspirations and the surrounding politics of class and social reproduction in Silicon Valley as well as political and social dimensions of the region's public culture. It has also explored the ways in which morally charged representations of techno-entrepreneurial practices, values, and economic success have influenced the aspirations of some of Silicon Valley's middle-class youth. This concluding chapter considers the argument about a contemporary, flexible process of citizenship formation that shapes strategies of aspiration management by focusing on the dynamics of subjectification and agency among students of Sanders and Morton high schools. It also considers the conditions that determine the success or failure of a neoliberal politics of citizenship.

This chapter examines the political, social, and economic milieu of Silicon Valley's established professional middle class. In particular, it considers the ways in which these middle-class professionals channeled frustration about their eroding security and status into a politics of nostalgia for a pre-“New Economy” past, a critique of a “new entrepreneurial” present, during the boom and subsequent bust. In analyzing the political implications of this “cultural politics of class,” the chapter reveals expressions of adult middle-class anxiety and political entrapment that influenced young people's styles of self-definition and aspiration management. It also discusses the attitudes of middle-class adults toward the lifestyle and ethos of younger professionals whom they felt were usurping an older, middle-class order.