Fabricating Silicon Savannah : The Making Of A Digital Entrepreneurship Arena Of Development

This book provides a comprehensive overview of technology start-up arenas in Nairobi and examines their global place. These start-ups are popularly perceived as representing future prosperity that is incorporated in the present. The author examines how developing country arenas lay bare the power asymmetries and taken-for-granted assumptions that determine which technoscientific imaginaries become globalized and universal, and are supported by legitimizing narratives, logics and institutions. A framing of ‘catch-up’ or ‘leapfrogging’ for technoscientific development that is based on capitalist modernity is regarded as incontrovertible―so much so that alternative values and approaches to technology production are rarely contemplated. This book documents how actors in Nairobi’s startup arena relate to these imaginaries and the affects, enactments and places that they produce. Acknowledgements Contents Introduction: ‘Shooting for the Moon’ References The Arena Imaginaries: ICT4D Versus ICT4VC Networks, Community and Affect Money and Capital Customer Markets Novelty and Geography Mutual Legitimation References Identities and Ways of Being Coloniality and Identifying with Entrepreneurship Gaming the System: An Adaptive Moral Economy Casualty of Calculation—Loss of Trust Technical Skills and Standards Kill the ICT Bill Makers or Engineers Local Heroes References New, Old Frontiers Risky Geographies The Cosmopolitan South Gatekeepers: Those Who Were There from the Beginning Immigrant Status Returning Valuing Peripheries Alternative Ways of Seeing References Technologies of Reform Telecoms and the Politics of Reform The Nyayo Philosophy Liberalisation and the Resistance of the Incumbent Developmental Doctrines and Their Impact on National Sociotechnical Imaginaries Regime Change and Reform Global Governance Virtual Networks Can There Be Consensus in Conditions of Power Asymmetry? References Materialising National Sociotechnical Visions ICT for Industrialisation ‘Build it and they will come’: Global Competitiveness in an Asymmetric World Economy Infrastructures of Sovereignty Technopolitical Regimes and Their Emergent Sociomaterialities References Access to Markets Eliminating Remoteness Through Inclusive Access Fractured Visions of Inclusion References The Future of Arenas of Fabrication The Underlying Technopolitics of the Knowledge Economy International Development Philosophy and Technosolutionism Entrepreneurial Strategies for Success in the Context of a Globalised Arena of Expectations Coloniality of Legitimation Regimes Collective Fabrication Materialising Philosophical and Practical Alternatives Issues for Future Research Lessons from Silicon Savannah References Index