A vivid look at China’s shifting place in the global political
economy of technology production How did China’s mass manufacturing
and “copycat” production become transformed, in the global tech
imagination, from something holding the nation back to one of its key
assets? Prototype Nation offers a rich transnational analysis of how
the promise of democratized innovation and entrepreneurial life has
shaped China’s governance and global image. With historical
precision and ethnographic detail, Silvia Lindtner reveals how a
growing distrust in Western models of progress and development,
including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial
crisis of 2007–8, shaped the rise of the global maker movement and
the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation.
Lindtner’s investigations draw on more than a decade of research in
experimental work spaces—makerspaces, coworking spaces, innovation
hubs, hackathons, and startup weekends—in China, the United States,
Africa, Europe, Taiwan, and Singapore, as well as in key sites of
technology investment and industrial production—tech incubators,
corporate offices, and factories. She examines how the ideals of the
maker movement, to intervene in social and economic structures, served
the technopolitical project of prototyping a “new” optimistic,
assertive, and global China. In doing so, Lindtner demonstrates that
entrepreneurial living influences governance, education, policy,
investment, and urban redesign in ways that normalize the persistence
of sexism, racism, colonialism, and labor exploitation. Prototype
Nation shows that by attending to the bodies and sites that nurture
entrepreneurial life, technology can be extricated from the seemingly
endless cycle of promise and violence. Cover image: Courtesy of Cao
Fei, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780691204956
Publisert
2020
Utgiver
Vendor
Princeton University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter