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 Spru th Magers
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