Book Event with Roland Betancourt and T.L. Taylor, "Disneyland and the Rise of Automation"

Please join the Silicon Valley Archives in welcoming Roland Betancourt and T.L. Taylor as they discuss Betancourt's latest book, Disneyland and Rise of Automation, on December 2, 2026, at 4:30 p.m. Disneyland and the Rise of Automation argues that theme park rides are factory assembly lines in disguise, ones that manufacture subjects rather than products. The book traces the technological systems that made this possible, from limit switches and relay racks to programmable logic controllers and magnetic tape, revealing how innovations developed for wartime manufacturing and Cold War industry found new life in the Happiest Place on Earth. It applies insights from the history of technology to problems shared by historians, media scholars, and critics of visual culture, such as the aesthetics of automation and the politics of labor. Roland Betancourt is a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine. He is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, he has published books on Byzantine visual culture, gender, and sexuality, including the prize-winning Byzantine Intersectionality (Princeton, 2020). T.L. Taylor is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MITand affiliate faculty member in Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies. She is a qualitative sociologist who has focused on the interrelations between culture and technology in online environments for over thirty years. Her work sits at the intersection of sociology, media studies, and science and technology studies.