Bøker av Joe Street

Silicon Valley corporations such as Facebook, Google, and Apple now dominate our daily lives to the extent that they might even be dictating the entire future of humanity. The 2010s saw a sequence of Hollywood films debate how these corporations achieved this position of dominance. This sequence included biopics of key Silicon Valley figures Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, science fiction action extravaganzas like Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Venom, and Terminator: Genisys, the dystopian thriller The Circle, and extended to The Internship and Why Him?, whimsical comedies that warned us of the profound dangers of Silicon Valley capitalism. Silicon Valley Cinema argues that these films undercut the messianic pretensions of our Silicon Valley overlords and encourage us to end our immersion in Silicon Valley's technotopia. Releasing ourselves from Silicon Valley's grip, they suggest, will make our working lives more pleasurable, our world a better place, and might even avert a cataclysmic war with genetically enhanced apes or a robot-led apocalypse. Joe Street is an Associate Professor in American History at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Argues that the Dirty Harry series sheds critical light on the culture and politics of the post-1960s era and locates San Francisco as the symbolic cultural battleground of the time. Joe Street maintains that the films themselves became active participants in the culture wars, paying particular attention to the films' representation of crime, family and community, sexuality, and race.

From Aretha Franklin and James Baldwin to Dick Gregory and Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement deliberately used music, art, theater, and literature as political weapons to broaden the struggle and legitimize its appeal. This work encourages us to consider the breadth of forces brought to bear as weapons in the struggle for civil rights.