Abstract
Global policy targeted at progress and prosperity has been predicated on convergence towards an Euro-American conception of human development (Amin 2002; Anderson 2009; Krishna 2009; Massey 2002; Moore 2001). Realist proponents of a convergence ideology for global stability and poverty reduction frame these objectives as the result of the spread of a set of universal ideals (Gavin 2004; Gavin and Lawrence 2014; John Williamson 2007), but where modernity is constructed as primarily Euro-American and technoscientific. Critical multilevel analyses, however, uncover the negative effects of a homogenising modernity that erases value of local specificities, and ways of being and knowing. This research has examined how the ability of localities to develop suitable technological fixes is limited by a hegemonic digital economy discourse that sells other locales on the primacy of a certain approach, namely that of Silicon Valley. Actors’ strategies in Silicon Savannah are shaped by the coloniality of knowledge production and the particular way it structures an innovation arena. Currently, they are incentivised to participate in a process of mutual legitimisation, where they are rewarded for enactments that seem to confirm the validity of the entrepreneurial startup as the vehicle for digital technology production. This leaves little room for creative, situated and alternative modalities for ICT technology production to emerge. Instead arenas aim to meet certain expectations in order to be rewarded for fabricating an ultimately colonising infrastructure.
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Notes
- 1.
“Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, a well-connected 19-year-old Stanford University drop-out, claimed her company, launched in 2003, could do practically any diagnostic test on a few drops of blood from a finger prick. Yet while the company grew to a valuation of $9 billion, courting breathless media coverage and TED talks, skepticism grew at the company’s refusal to disclose details on how its platform worked […] ‘It was too good to be true’, says Weissleder” (Waltz 2017).
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Wahome, M.N. (2023). The Future of Arenas of Fabrication. In: Fabricating Silicon Savannah. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34490-9_8
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