Project Title
Space, Time & Systems: An Intellectual History of Facebook/Meta, 2004-2021
Research Topic
Asher received ESRC funding to conduct an intellectual history of Silicon Valley in the first two decades of the 21st century. His research focuses specifically upon Facebook/Meta, examining how high-level actors in and around the company came to think and speak about time, space, and their ability to change the world around them. Asher analyses how actors in and around Facebook/Meta utilise the language and times of progress and exponentiality to produce a sense of historical time which is preoccupied with the future. Beyond this his research considers how space and spatiality was imagined by actors in and around Facebook, with a particular focus on the concepts of ‘scalability’ and ‘the global’. Finally, he considers how actors in Facebook/Meta came to view and depict problems of all sorts as systems that can be optimised.
Asher’s research not only charts the intellectual development over these two decades but seeks to historicize Facebook’s ‘thinking’, by examining these ideas within the historical and geographical contexts from which they emerged. In this sense, Asher explores this intellectual history of Silicon Valley within broader strands of Western intellectual histories.
Biography
Asher received an MA in Philosophy & Politics at the University of Edinburgh, where he focused on the history of social and political thought. He received an MSc in Theory and History of International Relations from LSE in 2019, for which he was awarded the Medlicott Prize for his research.
After graduating, he worked as a journalist for several years. In 2017, he received the Peter Kirk Scholarship to research and write on refugee integration in Sweden and Germany. He also covered Science and Technology for the Conversation UK. Between 2019-2021, he reported on British, Irish and Scandinavian politics for the Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun.
Supervisors: Professor Emerita Robin Mansell and Professor Nick Couldry