[Event in German]

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About this Lecture

Elon Musk’s much-maligned Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is just the tip of the iceberg. In recent years, Silicon Valley has seized power in the USA. Meta, Palantir and co. now decide who makes the rules and regulations, and indeed who governs. The government bodies and agencies are riddled with minions of the tech billionaires. Energy policy is now carried out almost exclusively for the crypto industry and AI start-ups. And the anti-woke agenda of these titans of tech is directly transcribed by Trump into executive orders.

In What Tech Calls Governing, Adrian Daub takes the reader into backroom investor meetings and university lecture halls, fertility clinics and BDSM basements to explore what domination means to these corporations and their leaders. They have become our de facto government. But do they even understand what governing is?

About the Lecturer

Prof. Dr. Adrian Daub is the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor in the Humanities in the Department of German Studies at Stanford University (USA). He is also currently the Barbara D. Finberg Director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research. His research interests include German literary, cultural and intellectual history after 1790; feminism, gender and sexuality studies; history of feminist thought; German Idealism and Romanticism; philosophy, gender and sexuality; post-WWII German literature and film; music and German Modernism; fin-de-siècle opera; Frankfurt School Marxism; photography and literature; visual and sound culture; structures of affect and memorial culture.

Born in Cologne, Prof. Daub studied Comparative Literature at Swathmore College, before completing an M.A. and his Ph.D in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been at Stanford University since 2013, while he has also been a guest professor at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, the University of Bern, and the University of Mannheim.

Prof. Daub has published several books, including What the Ballad Knows: Memory Culture and the German Nation (Oxford University Press, 2022), Tristan’s Shadow – Sexuality and the Total Work of Art after Wagner. (University of Chicago Press, 2013), and the forthcoming Who Killed #MeToo? How Media Made and Unmade a Movement with Moira Weigel and Alison Dahl Crossley.