The American technology industry of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has profoundly altered dynamics of commerce, communication, cultural production, and politics in the United States and around the world. Computer hardware and software has increased productivity, intensified economic globalization, and made entire job categories obsolete. Although the East Coast was once where the sector’s most influential firms and investors clustered, tech’s center of gravity shifted decidedly westward to the Bay Area and Seattle beginning with desktop computing in the 1980s and accelerating with the dot-com era of the 1990s.

Once hailed as rule-busting upstarts and earnest exemplars of a kinder, gentler “new economy,” the largest of these West Coast technology firms have come under intense public scrutiny and criticism in the last decade. The same period saw extraordinary growth of the sector’s market penetration and wealth, which peaked further during the Covid-19 pandemic years of working and learning remotely. Even as the NASDAQ slid and mass tech layoffs made headlines at the start of 2023, the ten richest American tech moguls retained a combined net worth of about $877 billion. The combined market capitalization of the five largest tech firms is close to $7 trillion—a figure larger than the nominal GDP of every country in the world except the U.S. and China.

Silicon Valley is no longer merely a place in Northern California. It is shorthand for a global network of high-tech places, a consequential set of labor and organizational practices, and staggering corporate and individual wealth. The occasion of the AHA Annual Meeting’s return to San Francisco presents a ripe opportunity to consider Silicon Valley as a place, industry, and sociocultural phenomenon.

This roundtable brings together leading scholars of Silicon Valley to reflect on their own work, identify new directions and developments, and discuss how historians across many fields can contribute to the study, teaching, and public presentation of this history.