On its face, the phrase “Silicon Valley Contemporary” seems redundant or even tautological. For decades now the IT industries have pervasively reshaped almost all aspects of daily life on an increasingly global scale. Dinner plans, Hollywood blockbusters, presidential elections––all are now encoded, routed, and delivered to our personal screens. So quickly have we adapted to these new mediations that we easily overlook the extent to which they define our sense of the current situation and our very experience of the present. These developments are so far-reaching that it is hard to merely describe them without succumbing to technological determinism or industry hype. To residents of the Bay Area, the contemporaneity of Silicon Valley is that much more immediate, inescapable, and controversial. The successive waves of tech industry capitalization—first Apple, then Netscape, then Facebook, Google, and Twitter—have decisively altered the socioeconomic makeup of the region. San Jose, which in living memory was a farm town, is now the tenth largest American city, with six of the nation’s ten most expensive real estate markets located nearby. Rents in San Francisco now rival and even surpass those in Manhattan. Not surprisingly, the speed and scale of these shifts have led to all kinds of …