Davide Carpano
Visiting Lecturer
Affiliation: Visiting
Education: PhD UC San Diego; BA UC San Diego
Research Areas: Sociology of technology; digital capitalism; free and open source software; social theory
Davide Carpano is a economic and historical sociologist specializing in science and technology studies. His research focuses on investigating the disconnect between the liberatory and utopian promises that have accompanied the spread of computers and the Internet, and the realities of their application within contemporary digital capitalism.
Carpano earned his PhD in sociology and science studies at UC San Diego. Carpano's dissertation investigated the corporate adoption of free and open source software through a case study of IBM's adoption of the Linux operating system in the late 1990s. His co-authored paper "Chromium as a tool of logistical power: A material political economy of open-source," was published in Big Data & Society and received an honorable mention for the American Sociological Association's Hacker-Mullins Student Paper Award.
His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the UCSD Institute for Arts and Humanities, and the UCSD Chancellor’s Interdisciplinary Collaboratories Grant. He was a visiting doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (2019) and a PhD fellow at the UC San Diego Institute for Practical Ethics (2019-2020). He has previously taught courses on the history and philosophy of technology at NYU New York (2022-2026).