My name is Zane Kripe.

I am a PhD student at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and

Development Sociology at Leiden University, the Netherlands.

I research ethnographically the Southeast Asian technology startup scene and the making
of digital businesses. Trying to understand what does it mean to be an entrepreneur in the
new economy I focus particularly on Singapore as the regional centre of Southeast Asia.

Following the quest of building “Asian technology for Asia” and “Silicon Valleys of
Southeast Asia” I examine the position of geeks, entrepreneurs, investors and others
involved in the tech startup space in relation to state, economy and globalisation. At the
intersections of technology and business cultures I explore the aspirations and ideas about
the future linked to the so called knowledge economy.

My Phd research is part of a “The Future is Elsewhere: towards a Comparative History

of Digital Futurities” project funded by the Dutch National Research Foundation (NWO).
The project is an exploration of various forms of future, their histories and cultural
grammars. Read more about it here.

May you lose weight, stop drinking, and

pay off your debts!
Posted on January 20, 2014 in Global economy and culture

By Dipankan001

Or should I say - Happy New Year!? New Year’s greetings for those celebrating it and
some musings about the genre of New Year’s resolutions: what do they tell us about the
future and the present?

The Aspirational Self

The most popular New Year’s resolutions are unlikely to take many people by surprise.
Your aspirational, better self spends quality time with family, exercises regularly, learns
new languages, has smoked only to quit, never exceeds the recommended half glass of
wine with a healthy dinner, and has a healthy savings account to match.

The arrival of the New Year, marking the end of one cycle and the beginning of another,
is the perfect rite of renewal, where one can imagine a break with the past and a fresh
start. Starting anew. For the better. Except, of course, that we can never really start from
scratch.

The lazy underachiever

Blue Monday, notoriously the most depressing day of the year, falls roughly in the
middle of January - right at the time when many New Year’s resolutions start to
crumble. That oh-so-glorious new year turns out to be just yet another year, and the
resolutions that were to lead towards the better self slowly fade into the background of
everyday concessions and compromises (or to put in another way - you “embrace the
lazy underachiever you really are").

Imagining the Future and the Present

Nevertheless, imagining how life could be remade is exciting. From Socrates and Plato,
to the whole genre of utopia writing that emerged in 16th- and 17th-century Europe,
right up to phenomena such as the current reality tv show Utopia.tv, human beings seem
to have a deep-seated fascination with imagining futures and exploring alternatives.
Such explorations are revealing not only in what they show, but also in what lies behind
them.

It seems to me that, just as Thomas More’s Utopia can be read as a critique of medieval
Europe, New Year’s resolutions can be read as a list of normative priorities in society.
Even if the resolutions are seemingly individual, they arise from complex social,
cultural, economic and political pressures. It would be fascinating to see a longitudinal
study of changing New Year’s resolutions: I suspect that ‘spending less time on social
networks’ or ‘taking better pictures’ are rather peculiar resolutions, which speak to very
contemporary issues faced by particular groups in society.

Imagining Futures and the Future

Explorations of various versions of the future are revealing not only with regard to the
present they relate to, but also with regard to the nature of the future as a category, and
the changing relationships we have with it. For example, it has been argued that during
the Middle Ages in Europe, with a world view based on Christian teachings, the future
was largely understood as predestined and determined by God: Man had very little say
in the matter. With the Enlightenment, our relationship to the future changed
dramatically - the future became open for man to explore and change. Belief in the
notion of progress meant that in the future everything was possible, and it all depended
on humankind itself. Isn’t it interesting that the most widespread New Year’s
resolutions are geared towards personal improvement?

May the future be the same and better!

Anthropologist Sandra Wallman, writing about the human relationship with the future,
notes that most people seem to want to live better and to live the same as before. This
seemingly contradictory aspiration combines a desire for positive change and for
reassuring continuity. And that is what I wish for you and for myself as we enter the
new 2014!

The mindless knowledge economy

Posted on March 11, 2015 in Global economy and culture , 2

IMDb

We often assume that a technologically advanced economy is all about a highly skilled
labour force engaging in creative forms of self-expression. However, the dream of
getting rid of dull and boring jobs through automation seems to be a utopia.

The creative knowledge worker

One of the ideas that underlies the promotion of new technologies is that automation
liberates people from manual, repetitive, and boring jobs. With the mindless jobs taken
care of by machines, the new knowledge worker will have a chance to focus on more
meaningful work in the more exalted spheres of ideas and thoughts. In the knowledge
economy people will work creatively, engaging with their passions. This aspiration and
belief was expressed as strongly in the works of futurists from the previous century as it
now is in advertisements for new sophisticated gadgets that will supposedly make your
life easier and allow you to focus on the things that really matter. Is this really the case?
Let’s take a look at a group of not so visible workers for whom the knowledge economy
has come to mean a very different thing.

The app-ranking manipulation farms

Earlier in February an image depicting a lady sitting in front of rows and rows of
smartphones was circulated across Chinese social media with a caption “Hard-working
App Store ranking manipulation employee”. According to TechinAsia who reported on
this phenomenon, developers can pay roughly $76,000 a week to make sure their app
gets into the ‘Top App’ list and stays there. Such manipulation is supposed to ensure
that the app in question is visible to many more potential users. While this image may
itself be a manipulation, I nevertheless find it striking. Imagine downloading an app on
all these phones, deleting it, and downloading it again – all day long, from the start of
your shift until the end. This hardly seems to fit the image of the creative, empowered
worker in the new economy.

From fake likes to gold-farming

In fact it seems that the technologically enhanced economy provides a lot of

opportunities to earn money precisely by doing repetitive jobs such as clicking on links,
giving likes, sending spam messages, or ‘farming gold’ in online games. Not all, but
many of these jobs rely on exploiting gaps in technological systems, and their legality is
questionable. Such gaps can be abused by technological means, such as by creating little
pieces of code that would do the same function over and over again. Yet, such internet
bots are rather easy to identify and counteract. Most companies who are targets of such
practices, such as Facebook, Google, and Apple invest in protecting their services from
such practices.

As a result, many of these exploits are carried out by humans. App-ranking

manipulators are just an addition to the list of gold farmers, email scammers, click
farmers, and many others. Paradoxically, in this case it is automation that prompts this
repetitive and boring human work in the supposedly new and exciting economy.

Working from home

On the one hand working from home seems to be the knowledge worker’s privilege –
we imagine a cool graphic designer working happily from a fancy café, or a
programmer coding from his cabin in the woods. On the other hand, ‘work from home’
has also come to stand for the kind of low paid, repetitive jobs that are now available. A
quick search for ‘work from home’ will reveal myriads of advertisements inviting you
to make money by watching advertisements, clicking on online adds, answering survey
questions, etc.

Yet, these jobs won’t come with decent pay, social insurance or chance of self-
expression. For example, recently some Amazon Turk workers started an online protest
asking to be “recognized as humans, not algorithms”. It is not only people in developing
economies who find such jobs attractive enough - the new economy’s manual labourers
are also right ‘here’ - here in the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, and Canada.

How high tech is the high tech economy?

There is no doubt that technological change has brought about opportunities for creative
thinkers, designers, developers, researchers, architects and other professionals
commonly associated with knowledge work. What is often overlooked, however, is that
at the same time new niches have also been created that thrive on the manual, boring,
repetitive, and mindless work that these technologies claimed to eradicate in the first
place.
How robots took over our lives and we
failed to notice
Posted on July 5, 2016 in Global economy and culture , 1

Robots taking over the human race: an apocalyptic future or everyday reality? From
dystopian science fiction imagery to reflections on algorithm culture.

The dystopian vision of a future in which robots take over the human race is as old as it
is powerful—and is always in ‘the future’. Or is it? Could it be that we already live in
such a world, but the robotic domination is less spectacular and much more mundane?

The spectacular robotic takeover

The imagination of robots taking over humankind is often based on images of large,
powerful, and animated entities taking power, typically through violent and dramatic
struggle. Just think, for instance, of early examples such as Leonardo Da Vinci’s knight
robot of late 15th century, Mary Shelley’s famous Frankenstein (19th century), or the
more recent versions of Terminators and Transformers. But maybe these images blind
us to the really significant forms of relationships that humans already have with
technology? Could it be that we are already living in a world run by robots, and that
they are governing our lives on a daily basis? Instead of humanoid robots with antennas,
or huge, screeching transformers from the outer space, the really significant takeover
could be much more mundane, boring, and way less spectacular.
 R.U.R., a 1920 science fiction play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek

Algorithm Culture

In recent years scholars in the social sciences are becoming concerned with what is
often called ‘Algorithm Culture’—the idea that our lives are increasingly regulated and
shaped by complex computer systems and algorithmic equations that classify, sort, and
channel user behaviours.

The easiest way to think about an algorithm is as a device that draws conclusions: ‘if x,
then y’. For example: ‘If you watch a lot of movies classified as “historical drama”, the
new episodes of Game of Thrones are likely to appeal to you.’ And indeed, algorithms
shape a lot of routine choices and actions we make on daily basis—what to read or
listen to, or which route to take following Google Maps. When you look for a movie on
Netflix, a book on Amazon, or a song on Spotify, the choices presented to you are
calculated by algorithms based on particular assumptions about the world and human
behaviour. To a large degree these seem like welcome conveniences.
 ‘Binary’, by bykst (Pixabay)

The mundane rule of robots

Algorithmic governance doesn’t stop with entertainment though. Instead, one could say
that algorithms play a role in every aspect of life that is subject to automation. The uses
of algorithms range from regulating traffic, detecting plagiarism, identifying possible
threats in public spaces, or dynamic pricing of airline tickets, to matching people in
online dating sites, estimating your creditworthiness, or determining which of your
friends’ updates on Facebook you see—such algorithms deeply shape the ways in which
we understand and interact with the world.

Most of us, however, have no idea about the various ways in which we are classified, on
what basis, and what kind of consequences this has for our lives. While being identified
as a ‘fan of indie movies with strong female leads’ may seem to have little significance,
being labelled as a ‘potential terrorist’ and having your house searched because you
happened to look up ‘pressure cooker’ and ‘backpack’ online in the aftermath of Boston
bombings puts it all in a rather different light. Harvard professor of law Frank Pasquale
calls this the ‘Black Box Society’ and argues that while for many the algorithmic
automation is a matter of ‘convenience', it is those who are already most vulnerable in
society who suffer most from such opaque classification practices.

Robots in and out of control

While much of the concern about algorithmic rule stems from the recognition that the
majority of such algorithms are designed primarily to serve the economic interests of
companies rather than users, it seems equally clear that algorithmic governance doesn’t
have a single, overarching ideology. When many algorithms interact, the kind of effects
they create cannot be fully predicted or understood—even by the people who develop
them. The workings of high speed trading and the infamous Flash Crash provide a good
example. In 2010 the U.S. stock market collapsed and recovered in a matter of 36
minutes, in the process wiping out ‘nearly $1 trillion in market value’ and leaving all
involved in puzzlement about what had happened. On a smaller scale we can see similar
volatility when we stumble upon a weirdly priced book on Amazon—as happened to
Michael Eisen, a biology graduate student, in 2011. He wanted to obtain the biology
classic The Making of a Fly by Peter Lawrence and found out it cost a mere
$23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).

Scene from the motion picture ‘I, Robot’ (Alex Proyas, 20th Century Fox, 2004)

How robots took over our lives and we failed to notice?

By comparing the rather abstract notion of an algorithm with the culturally charged
image of a robot in this blog post, I hoped to provoke readers enough to reflect on their
relationship with the automated systems. Systems that make many of our daily decisions
and define available options. Together with my colleague Hanna Schraffenberger, I am
interested in exploring how can we better understand the various ways in which
algorithms play role in our lives and how we as scholars can study this phenomenon.

Get involved!

During the 14th EASA2016 biennial conference in Milan this summer Hanna and I will
lead an interactive hands-on laboratory where together with the other participants we’ll
try to understand some basic principles of algorithmic culture and develop study
materials that everyone can use to explore this topic. If you’re attending, please join us
Thursday 21 July, at 09:00 room 2. If you can’t join, but still want to get in touch with
us, visit our website www.livingwithalgorithms.com.
1 Comment

Posted by peter pels on July 6, 2016 at 16:06

“Algorithm culture” is an important concept that connects data science with

changes in everyday life. It can be seen as analogous to “audit culture”, which
charted in the early 2000s the ways in which a specific quantative monitoring
practice from accounting spread out into very widespread forms of social
organisation, even including qualitative forms (such as ethical codes). It should
be one of the core concepts in a new line of research usually designated as the
ethnography of infrastructure, which tells us about the often invisble ways in
which absent agents and their classifications determine what we do (as outlined,
for example, by the work of Geoffrey Bowker and Leigh Star). Leiden
anthropologists are keen to collaborate with colleagues in setting up such
research lines.

Data management and ethics: A

discussion between two Leiden
anthropologists
Posted on October 14, 2015 in Media, visual and material culture , 1

By Janneke Staaks via Flickr

Anthropologists have important insights to add to the public debate about data
management. Come join the discussion on our institute’s position paper on October
26th. Here we share some thoughts on ethics, ethnography, and data.

Data Management and Ethics Committee

Henrike: Zane, I was wondering why you volunteered for the Data Management and
Ethics Committee of our Institute here in Leiden. I know that for me a major reason was
curiosity, as I grew up academically in the US, where there is a strong infrastructure of
IRBs (Institutional Review Boards) that oversee all forms of research dealing with
human beings. I have become accustomed to the set of questions on IRB forms that ask
where I will store my data, who will have access to them, and what I plan to do with the
data at the end of the research project in which they were collected. So I was curious to
know how this issue is approached in Dutch academia.

I was also excited, because some of our Leiden colleagues are well known for their
attempts to approach ethics in less formal and prescriptive ways than is common with
IRBs. Zane, what was your reason for joining the committee? I wonder, were you
particularly interested because you work so much with digital data?

Zane: As a young researcher I definitely wanted to be part of the discussion about the
ways in which we streamline the storage and sharing of data now and in the future.
Various institutions, including funding bodies such as the European Research Council
(ERC) and academic institutions such as Leiden University increasingly require
researchers to implement ‘Data Management Plans’. This means that I need to be aware
of various strategies for preserving and sharing research data, as these will be an
integral of my career as an anthropologist.

Being part of the committee allowed me to explore the variety of ways in which the
issue and ehtics of data storage are approached in different fields. So, for example, as
part of the committee, I looked at the guidelines on ethical decisionmaking proposed by
the Association of Internet Researchers. I really appreciated the fact that the guidelines
emphasized that the data collected from the internet should always be viewed in relation
to the internet ‘venues’ (such as news websites or blogs, or social networking sites) they
were collected from. I understand this to mean we shouldn't approach all data as equally
‘private’ or equally ‘public’ we need to tread carefully in making ethical decisions of
how to treat data. Remind me which ethical codes you reviewed, Henrike?

Henrike: I looked at “The Netherlands Code of Conduct for Academic Practice” which
was last revised by the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) in 2014.
For me, one of the key points about this code was its attention to the importance of
context and changing circumstances, and the idea that as a scholar you can sometimes
have good reasons not to apply the stated ethical principles. I like to call this the
requirement to “apply or justify,” meaning that yes, often you will want to implement
the best practices expressed in the code of conduct, but that you also have the freedom
to justify why doing so would not be the most ethical thing to do in specific
circumstances.

Zane: Having that flexibility is extremely important. Data management is not

something that can be isolated from the process of doing research and being a researcher
with all the ethical conundrums that can entail. My fieldwork experiences made that
absolutely clear to me, for example when the people I worked with—aspiring
entrepreneurs in Singapore —joked about how my field notes could potentially be used
in the future to blackmail them when they would hopefully have become rich and
famous. They were worried about me retaining indefinitely information that might
potentially be compromising to them. So that really brought home to me that I need to
make decisions on what to do with my data.

Data is co-produced and co-owned

Henrike: I'm glad you've brought up the point of how data are created in the fieldwork
relationship. In fact, this was a key issue we as a committee kept coming back to. We
quickly realized we needed to conside the fact that data are co-created by the researcher
and the people she works with. Wouldn’t you say that the idea of the co-production of
data is the guiding theme in the position paper?
Zane: Yes, I absolutely agree! It might be good to talk a bit more about this issue,
because it may sound a bit confusing to say that data are co-produced and co-owned.
What does that really mean in practice?

Henrike: Well, data don’t simply appear out of thin air; they're the product of
relationships - in our case, with people we encounter during fieldwork and with whom
we often stay in contact. I don’t think co-production of data means you have to ask
permission every time you use a quote from your field notes, but you do need to
remember the roots of your data, the context and the evolving relationships that made
up your fieldwork.

Importantly, the insight that data are always co-produced also made us realize that we
could and should go beyond the problematic opposition between the 'duty to science'
and the 'duty to the people studied.' That’s what's exciting about the position paper:
we're not just talking about sharing data with other researchers. We're also talking about
finding ways of sharing data with research populations, which is something we could
and should do much more.

Zane: You know, I feel this is just one of the many exciting points raised by the
position paper. It's been great talking to you, Henrike. I look forward to October 26th
when everyone is invited to discuss our position paper on Data Management for
Anthropologists and Ethnographers.' Hope to see everyone there!

Research Workshop 'Ethnographic data and management of ethics'

26 October, 2015 at 15:30-17:00h (drinks afterwards)
Room 1.A21, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Leiden University
Speakers: Peter Pels, Igor Boog, Henrike Florusbosch, Zane Kripe, Metje Postma
More info: Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology

From Beyoncé to Markets –

Anthropologists Studying Elites
Posted on May 27, 2015 in Global economy and culture , 1
What does it entail to study elites: How do we anthropologists approach the rich and
powerful? In this conversation Erik Bähre and Zane Kripe share some experiences and
ideas.

Suits, ties and going native

Erik: During fieldwork I was invited by a business elite to join them

for dinner at the most luxurious hotel on Cape Town’s Waterfront. Fortunately, I had
packed my suit and tie. This is a necessary outfit for doing research among business
elites; you have to go native. When I arrived at the hotel I parked my small car out of
sight – there are limits to going native, after all. I entered the lobby and met the
host. We were having a polite chat when something attracted our attention. A few
people started running through the lobby; or rather, it was something more restrained
between walking and running.They rushed to the balcony adjacent to the lobby. One of
the business people from our party also ran to the balcony and I could hear a few
screams and some shouting from the crowd.

A minute or two later it was quiet again, and people started to disperse. I had been
hesitant to join them. Maybe someone had jumped and committed suicide, so I held
back. But maybe I shouldn’t have. The businessman who was part of our party returned
in great excitement saying something like: ‘My daughter is going to be so happy I took
a picture! That was Beyoncé! She is staying here and she wanted to greet some people,
isn’t that great? Security had advised her against it, but she went anyway. How cool is
that?’

So my claim to fame is that I almost met Beyoncé. That sounds a bit sad maybe. But
almost as spectacular was that Manmohan Singh, then the Prime Minister of India, was
having dinner two tables away from us. Zane, what are your experiences with studying
elites, and do you have any idea on how to do it, why do it, or why anthropologists
generally study marginal people?
 Zane: Hey Erik, your story made me laugh. Will anthropology as a
discipline change its appeal if we start rubbing shoulders with pop-stars? Even if lesser
known, the research of elites is (increasingly) common practice in anthropology. The
more anthropology leaves its colonial biases behind, the more we acknowledge the need
to study the power structures ‘at the top’ – who are the people who make decisions and
who influence thousands and millions of others? How do they feel about their roles?
What inspires them and what kind of pressures do they experience? I think these are
important questions if we are to understand the complex world we live in.

Popular for insight and support

Erik: Gillian Tett wrote a book called ‘Fool’s Gold: How

Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global markets and Unleashed a
Catastrophe’. Tett has a PhD in anthropology and is a journalist for the Financial Times.
She interviewed people with key positions in the financial markets; the people who
developed the products that led to the financial crisis. And of course the Dutch
anthropologist and journalist Joris Luyendijk just published ‘Dit kan niet waar
zijn: Onder bankiers’, again about the financial crisis. So not only can anthropologists
study elites; there is a big audience that is interested in what anthropologists have to
say.
 Zane: I agree. But studying elites does require you to rethink some
aspects of interaction. For example, what kind of connections, background, qualities,
and skills do you need to get access and build up a rapport? Anthropologist Karen Ho,
who researched investment bankers, for example, was ‘accepted’ because of her Ivy-
league credentials which matched those of the people she was studying.

In my case, studying technology entrepreneurs, I often found that my informants were

not only incredibly intelligent and well versed in their own fields, but also referred to
Bourdieu, Anderson and other classical texts and concepts in anthropology to make
sense of their experiences. Quite a few openly explained that they see me as a colleague
who can support their efforts in understanding the world they are part of. Other
informants also challenged my professionalism, for example by questioning why I need
four years to write a book, when they can do it in a year. I have to admit that at the time
it didn’t boost my confidence

The people you study talk back

Erik: Haha. I recognize that. Still we do see that anthropology is well

positioned for these kind of studies. Great that your informants referred to Bourdieu and
how this leads to different forms of interaction that question the hierarchies of
academia. When interviewing people – both elites and people with a very low income –
I sometimes bring social theory into the conversation and ask: ‘Is this something that
you recognize? Do you think this kind of argument makes sense?’ Studying elites
makes us aware that scholars are not producers of magic that should be left untouched
by those outside our field.
 Zane: You’re right. This is another important aspect of studying elites
– the people you study talk back, and they talk back through power structures they share
with you. I am thinking of David Mosse’s experience after his research into an
international development project. His informants – professionals in their own right –
disagreed with his findings and thus tried to prevent his book from being published.
They subjected him to the university’s research ethics committee, involved the Dean
and the professional association. In his case, David was able to translate this whole
situation to a very productive learning experience*. 


* His experiences are described in Mosse, David. 2006. 'Anti-social anthropology?

Objectivity, objection, and the ethnography of public policy and professional
communities', in: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12 (4): 935-95

Locating Futures: what do we do when

the grass is greener on the other side?
Posted on April 14, 2013 in Global economy and culture, Media, visual and material
culture , 1

What is actually going on when we say that the future is happening here or there or
somewhere else? Zane Kripe describes ethnographic encounters in Southeast Asia
where people discuss where the future of technology and business is unfolding.
During my first, exploratory trip to Southeast Asia in early 2010 I traveled from
Indonesia to Singapore, from Malaysia to Burma, in each country meeting people
passionate about web technologies. Many of them had started, or were planning to start,
their own internet-based businesses. The goal of my visit was to familiarize myself with
the environment and get to know the people in technology communities, so that I could
start my research project on Future and Technology in Southeast Asia. Fairly quickly I
came to realize that Singapore played a crucial role in the experiences and perceptions
of technology enthusiasts around the region.

Technology geeks I met in Indonesia talked excitedly about the times they visited
Singapore and were impressed with not only the high rise buildings but also with the
technology/business community there, from which they adopted specific organization
practices. Malaysian founders of web startups explained to me that it is much more
reasonable to incorporate their businesses in Singapore, because the legal processes are
much faster there and the tax regime more favorable. One Malaysian founder, who had
worked in Silicon Valley before returning to Malaysia and starting his company,
explicitly said that running a business in Singapore as compared to Malaysia would be
like facing the real world. For him, Singapore has the predatory competition and flow of
finance that he associates with business in the real world. Some of the Burmese
technology enthusiasts told me how they aspired to move to Singapore and work there
in the future, because of the wealth this move could offer.

The sense of Singapore being regarded as at the real-time or more into the future as
compared to the rest of region was strong during my initial conversations with people in
the field of technology around the region. Many people I spoke to noted that everything
happens much faster in Singapore- “Even escalators move faster there,” as one of my
friends in Indonesia commented. Of course people also scoffed at the Singaporean laws
and noted that Singapore is too organized to be enjoyable. Yet, the general sense was
that Singapore is a more achievable version of Silicon Valley, which is often regarded
as the ultimate location of technology innovation and business, always one step ahead
of the rest of the world.

When I arrived in Singapore, I was eager to learn how people who supposedly already
live in the future think about Singapore and other locations in the world. Many of the
Western expatriates I met in technologist circles proclaimed that this is Asian century
and Singapore is the location from which to capitalize on the emerging global future.
This belief, combined with the good living conditions that English-speaking Singapore
offers, was part of the reason why many of them had moved there in the first place.
Interestingly, the mere presence of such expatriates in the technology space was also
pointed out to me as an indicator that the future of the Singaporean tech space is bright.

Yet, many people in Singapore were also very skeptical about Singapore’s future. They
argued that when it comes to technology and entrepreneurship, Singapore needs to catch
up with the developed world if it is to compete in the global economy. Singapore was
described as too sterile for innovation, too small for starting a high growth business,
and/or the people too conservative to be willing to do what it takes to start a truly
innovative technology business. In these stories the future was located either as an
exclusive property of Silicon Valley, or seen as attainable through cooperation with
other countries in the region and/or by major shifts in the norms and values of the
society.
What these encounters highlight is that particular futures (in this case futures related to
technology innovation and business) are often imagined as unfolding or already being in
effect in particular locations. Echoing science fiction writer William Gibson when he
said “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed,” the people I met spoke
of a fragmented landscape with a variety of locations, each characterized by its ability
to actualize futures conducive to technology business. These geographical imaginaries
seem to be not only structured along the lines of what Lucy Suchman has called
reproductions of “neocolonial geographies of center and periphery” (2011:2), but also
actively inform people’s understandings of the world and the decisions they make with
regard to their lives (e.g., moving to a particular location, setting up a business in one
location rather than another, engaging in certain activities rather than others, etc.). Thus,
in my research on the aspirations linked to the so-called knowledge economy, I try to
explore in more detail how such geographical imaginaries inform the lives of
technology enthusiasts, and enable as well as disable certain social positions and
actions.

References: Suchman, Lucy (2011) "Anthropological Relocations and the Limits of

Design." Annual Review of Anthropology 40: 1-18

The problem of ‘culture’ in the New

Economy
Posted on May 27, 2013 in Global economy and culture

Next 13 speakers - by Thomas Zimmermann

Governments around the world postulate digital entrepreneurship as the key to their
nations’ economic future. Yet it seems that this call for more entrepreneurial citizens
also goes hand in hand with a request to change culture.

Entrepreneurship as the way in to the future

'At the time of economic gloom, I’m in no doubt where our hope lies - with startups,
innovators and entrepreneurs' This is how Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner
for Digital Agenda, welcomed roughly 1,500 participants at a recent digital industry
conference Next 13 in Berlin through a video message. The Next 13 annual conference
is described as the number one meeting place for the European digital industry where,
according to the website, marketing decision makers, business developers, technical
experts, and creative minds come together “to discuss what will be important in the next
12 months”. The two-day event, as I gather from the videos and the program (PDF),
was marked by inspirational talks on a range of cutting-edge technologies, speculations
about digital trends, discussions on how to create business opportunities based on these
technological and social changes, and celebration of the uncertain, disruptive future
which will open doors to greater profits.

While it would be easy to dismiss this, or other very similar events, as something
futuristic, marginal, speculative, elitist, and on the whole detached from the everyday
experiences of most of the world’s population, the unfolding future is created and
shaped very much by the ways in which we talk and think about it - especially when
these narratives shape the technologies we use on a daily basis and even more when
such discussions intersect with political agendas. While Neelie Kroes opened the
conference, another influential politician, Peer Steinbrück, who is the Social Democratic
Party’s (SPD) candidate for Chancellor of Germany in the 2013 federal elections, gave a
keynote presentation on the “Future of digital economy” later in the day. In the same
way as Neelie Kroes, his political vision of Germany as the centre of what he called
“the 4th industrial revolution” also to a large degree relies on encouraging digital
entrepreneurship.

The young, bright and resilient builders of the

knowledge economy
The roots of the concept of a knowledge economy (often also referred to as the ‘New
Economy’ or ‘digital economy’) go back to the USA in the 1960s, when economists
noticed that an increasing part of the economy revolves around services and information
processing, rather than manufacturing physical goods or agriculture. In the context of
the Cold War and the ideological competition in building a better society, this notion of
a knowledge economy quickly attracted a wealth of utopian expectations. Information
and communication technologies were associated with increasing productivity, and the
ability to process information real-time gave impetus to expectations that markets could
now become truly efficient. The neoliberal policies of the 1980s and 1990s were a clear
example of how these narratives about a technology-driven economy had entered
government policies, and shaped the everyday experiences of people around the world.
The birth of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s and following hype of
internet companies during the Dot-Com era of the mid to late 1990s seemed to confirm
that, indeed, a radically new economy is on the rise. It is believed that when
information and knowledge become the primary resource for economic growth
humankind enters a time of economy of abundance, since creativity is not a limited
resource, as opposed to the material resources of the past.

At the very heart of these expectations were (and still are) startups - young technology
companies typically imagined to be run by university drop-outs - young, bold people
motivated and daring to change the world, and willing to put in thousands of working
hours for low pay or none at all over multiple years, with expectations of large returns
some time in the near future. The massive appeal of technology startups lies in their
potential - while they do not require lots of resources to get started (as compared to any
industrial enterprise), the rapid high growth and massive scale they can reach seemingly
overnight due to the ‘virtual’ nature of their business makes them an attractive case for
investment. While startups can succeed spectacularly, they can also fail fairly
quickly; the estimate is that 90% of startups fail.

Young visitors of Next Berlin 13 - by Heisenberg Media, Dan Taylor

Changing the Culture

What really struck me watching the speeches at the Next 13 conference in Berlin by the
two politicians mentioned above was how similar the rhetoric about entrepreneurship
were to what I encountered in Singapore. The most peculiar, to my mind, is that in this
quest for more entrepreneurial citizens culture becomes a major issue - a problem that
needs to be overcome through transformation.
In Singapore, risk aversion is often described as an “Asian problem” - a cultural trait
that needs to be fixed. Willing to take risks also means opening the space for/door to
failure.This, however, is seen as something antithetical to Asiannness and therefore the
culture needs to be changed. It is believed that once Singaporeans are willing to let go
of their aspirations of secure employment in government or multinationals, the country
will have its technology startup success stories. Just as in Singapore “Asianness” and its
risk aversion is seen as one of the biggest threats to the success of the new economy, in
the speech by Peer Steinbrück “German perfectionism” was also positioned as a
problem that needs to be overcome, because it leaves no space for learning by failing
and risk taking. And in both cases, Singapore as well as here, the role model for a risk-
taking entrepreneurial ethos is the Anglo-Saxon world, or more precisely the United
States.
Paradoxically, in the same speech Peer Steinbrück explained that the reason why the
German economy is so strong compared to those of the UK or USA is that Germany
didn’t take the risk and didn’t get involved in the financial speculations in the years
leading up to the 2008 financial crash. The problem of Asianness in Singapore seems
similarly paradoxical, since the very same traits that are now being condemned and
described as in need of change are the traits which were praised during the 1990s as the
explanation for the “Asian miracle”.

Spaces of intervention
Moments like these, when in the name of a better future culture is defined and re-
defined are of great interest to anthropologists. When governments and regions strive to
ensure their competitive edge in the global knowledge economy, assumptions about the
qualities necessary for success have escaped the domains of infrastructure and aim to
regulate culture according to an economic rationale.