The new patriarchs of digital capitalism : celebrity tech founders and networks of power

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: The New Patriarchs 1 Theorising the Patriarchal Network 2 Elon Musk: Geek masculinity and marketing the celebrity founder 3 Jeff Bezos: Beyond the American frontier 4 Mark Zuckerberg's Corporate Household 5 Peter Thiel's technological frontiers 6 Endorsed by Sandberg: Resilience not resistance 7 The limits of liberalism: Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin Conclusion

"This book offers an original critique of the billionaire founders of US West Coast tech companies, addressing their collective power, influence and ideology, their group dynamics and the role they play in the wider sociocultural and political formations of digital capitalism. Interrogating not only the founders' political and economic ambitions, but also how their corporations are omnipresent in our everyday lives, the authors provide robust evidence that a specific kind of patriarchal power has emerged as digital capitalism's mode of command. The 'New Patriarchs' examined over the course of the book include: Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, Elon Musk of Tesla, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Peter Thiel and Sheryl Sandberg. The book analyses how these men legitimate their rapidly acquired power, tying a novel kind of socially awkward but 'visionary' masculinity to exotic forms of shareholding. Drawing on a ten million word digital concordance, the authors intervene in feminist debates on patriarchy, masculinity and postfeminism, locating their power as emanating from a specifically racialised structure of power tied to imaginaries of the American Frontier, the patriarchal household and settler-colonialism. This is an important interdisciplinary contribution suitable for researchers and students across Digital Media, Media and Communication, Gender and Cultural Studies"--