Prototype Nation

China and the Contested Promise of Innovation

Silvia M. Lindtner

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Hardback

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English

Princeton University Press
23 November 2020

Media studies; Sociology: customs & traditions; Business innovation; Impact of science & technology on society; Digital lifestyle

Series: Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology

"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 2007-08, 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"

By: Silvia M. Lindtner
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 155mm,
ISBN: 9780691179483
ISBN 10: 0691179484
Series: Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 23 November 2020
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Silvia M. Lindtner is associate professor of information at the University of Michigan. She is the cofounder of Hacked Matter and associate director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC). Twitter @yunnia

Reviews for Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation

Lindtner provides a thought-provoking and persuasive critique of neoliberal capitalism. The author's greatest achievement is - far beyond the Chinese case - to render visible and to powerfully question highly ambivalent narratives of progress and techno-solutionism, and the (often-unfulfilled) promises of intervention and happiness that these entail. ---Lena Kaufmann, China Quarterly