Chasing Innovation by Lilly Irani;

Author:Lilly Irani; [Irani;, Lilly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691175133
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2018-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

Conclusion: Bounding Politics with the Bias to Action

This chapter has shown what the bias to action does to politics, with a hackathon as an illustrative case. At a hackathon, participants imagine themselves agents of history—of development, of social change, or of nation building—part of a larger narrative collectively produced by TED Talks and funded by large foundations, NGOs, and corporations alike. The hackathon was in part a site of speculation and in part a site of pedagogy. The pedagogy privileged a bias to action, civic responsibility, and enthusiastic speculative labor (see also Gregg 2015)—precisely the pedagogies of the Design in Education Conference spreading “design thinking” out of Ahmedabad (chapter 3). It is tempting to call these projects antipolitical. James Ferguson (1994), interpreting Foucault, calls development antipolitical for the ways it transforms conditions of politics and history into bounded problems amenable to putatively apolitical, expert technique (see also Li 2007). There are plenty of entrepreneurial projects that fit this description, attempting to mobilize expert technique in search of a social fix. The hackathon, fueled by Prem and Vipin’s fights, testifies to how the projects of entrepreneurial citizens can also draw sustenance from political hope. In this case, participants’ politics generated the epistemic friction and affective motivation that fueled the labors of innovation. The sociotemporal form of the intense, entrepreneurial projects—small groups working intensely—contained those politics and channeled them into productivity. Entrepreneurial citizenship thus does not erase politics so much as it channels and directs it toward the making of enterprises, though as it channels, it also contains. Over time, the designers at the studio started, ended, and flirted with projects, events, and start-ups. The sum of these beginnings amount to more than the debris of failure. They also amount to an entrepreneurial scene of “likeminded people” whose relationships and shared sensibilities could be mined for potential value.13 They amounted to a coalition within civil society that vied to speak for and make the nation as they worked for themselves.

The practices described in this chapter produce entrepreneurial rhythms, but they only made sense for those close to resources. Delhi’s middle-class entrepreneurs could deploy their cultural and social capital to attract funding and patronage as consultants to European cultural organizations and multinational businesses seeking a foothold in India. For these well-heeled professionals, promises of projects for “the near future” (Guyer 2007) sustained the studio financially. This ability to turn speculative investments into a steady living was not equally distributed. In his ethnography of India’s smaller cities and towns, Craig Jeffrey (2010) shows that young people with college educations, rural land wealth, but few urban social ties wait for their preparations to turn into jobs promised by economic growth rhetoric. The “bias to action” celebrated by design works because of the kinds of networks, labor configurations, tools, and systems designers can mobilize quickly, extending their agencies out into the world. The bias to action is possible only because others labor to clean, cook, and sustain the infrastructures so hackers can purify their experience of creativity.

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