Entrepreneurial Citizenship And The Subsumption Of Hope | Lilly Irani

Entrepreneurial Citizenship And The Subsumption Of Hope | Lilly Irani | Design@Large - Online Custom Essay Writing Service

Entrepreneurial Citizenship and the Subsumption of Hope | Lilly Irani | Design@Large

my name is stephen dowling our host for this quarter and I know it's many of you are taking this for credit I've sent emails about this but just to reiterate you afterwards any questions about the logistics right okay. today I would like to introduce Lilia rainey who is son one of us one of ours in the design lab she's an associate professor in communication and social studies she's also a member of the design lab part of the Institute for practical ethics a program lead in the critical Gender Studies program sits on the board the academic advisory board for AI now NYU and and she's gonna be talking about her new book chasing innovation how many of you guys have participated in hackathons when did this talk is going to do is really challenge how you think about hackathons and I think Lily's worked in particularly really challenges how I think about my own research and I hope that she has that that similar effect on you. with that Lily okay can folks hear me in the back okay it's okay okay I'm here raise your hand if you're having a little bit of trouble hearing me okay maybe turn it up just a touch I can also talk louder but I thought it would be nice to not if amplification was right. yeah it's really nice to be here speaking of design at large I was and Steven's place curating design at large last year for one quarter and this is a place where we get to think about how to you know think about bringing people in who can challenge us to imagine how we build and design in ways that kind of hold us accountable to the kind of challenges that the world throws at us including cultural challenges and political challenges. this talk is an anthropological talk. it's going to be a little bit different than the talks that you often get in design at large. I want to kind of give us some introductory notes. the talks gonna take the form of an argument and the argument is kind of made in the form of stories and the stories that I tell I'll explain what the significance of those stories is and what I think it has to teach us about design innovation and entrepreneurship but one thing I wanted to say is context is I started this project that is you know that culminated in this book when I was actually transitioning from working as a UX designer at Google to being a graduate student in informatics at UC Irvine. I started this project because I believed in design and I want to design to be something that accounted for the different ways that power operates in the world. as you're listening to it I have a lot of places where I kind of trouble the ways that we are taught to think about design and innovation but take this in the spirit of you know I was like sitting in your place basically for many of you 10 15 years ago and this is you know this is where I got to by studying how people were actually practicing design in the world. I'm also going to try an experiment. for those of you who are from communication or science studies or anthropology you're going to be very used to the kind of talk that I'm going to give but I'm also going to do something new with y'all. um at different points during the talk I'll be sharing stories with you that helped me figure something out that was important to me about design and. I'm gonna ask for a show of hands at certain points about you know who's resonating with this story whose experience something that seems similar to this and I'm just curious what will happen if we sort of recognize that the things that happen in one place are also things that happened to a lot of us and how did that help us find people that we want to get together with to try to fine better ways to do design and support kind of democratic processes. okay with that I'm gonna start with my first question how many of us have heard the message that entrepreneurship is how we're supposed to make the world a better place raise your hand okay raise them high all right own it all right well the center that my talk today is the figure and the ethos of the entrepreneur or what I'll loosely referred to as entrepreneurialism as well as the political work it does on the ground in post liberalisation belly if you don't know what liberalization is don't worry I will explain in a little bit this is drawn from my larger book chasing innovation in this talk I'm gonna explain why innovation with entrepreneurship as its putative engine has become. central to Indian imaginaries of development entrepreneurial citizenship promises that citizens can construct markets produce value and do nation-building all at the same time in this talk I'm going to show the practices by which people adopt in champion this entrepreneurial ethos in Delhi articulating entrepreneurship a new set of practices are being told to adopt with long-standing hierarchies and systems of meaning that are part of Indian society. I'm gonna argue and this is a little heavy I'm gonna argue the entrepreneurial citizenship colonizes social life as it asks the people who answer the call to entrepreneurialism to scratch together any resources they have whether it's their family ties and kinship the finance that they can access through those ties or through their environment rahmatullah raw material or other people's labor to create investable opportunities the promise value for investors all this is done in the name of development for quote unquote real India the India that is posed as needing the kind of improvement that entrepreneurs are said to be able to offer on this real India consists not of entrepreneurs but as customers as workers in these entrepreneurial enterprises or as targets of uplift and development projects and this that I'm calling entrepreneurial citizenship as a way to kind of help us see it working in the world it turns citizens towards nation building but nation building as the exploration of potential value financial value and the thickening of capitalism's infrastructures. that's the argument I'm making it'll be clear what I mean by that one actually show you the stories of what happens on the ground. in this process one of the things that I want to point out is when we think about entrepreneur the entrepreneurial citizens becoming resourceful and trying to bring about development I'm talking not only about entrepreneurial citizens and what happens to people in India who try to do that work but I'm also arguing in this talk that entrepreneurial citizenship also posits a relationship between the entrepreneurial citizen and those others who are the ones who they're supposed to employ the ones that are supposed to sell - or the ones are supposed to serve and govern. I'm arguing the entrepreneurial citizenship is actually a new way of creating hierarchies among citizens and is putting private citizens in charge of what the government used to be responsible to do and what the government used to have kind of democratic accountability as it was as it was undertaking it. to give you an overview of how I'm going to work through this this talk is going to begin by showing the political and economic transformations that posed development as a problem and entrepreneurship and innovation as a solution to that problem I'm gonna look I'm gonna look to policy and law and institutional shifts in India to locate how this shift happens and what are the kind of political causes of this happening I'm not gonna move to ethnographic cases. I'll introduce the design studio in Delhi as an entrepreneurial collective I'll then move on to showing how the politics of entrepreneurial innovation are not only about the kind of knowledge that gets to be in the room but also about how time is organized and how time affects who gets to collaborate and participate in civic innovation and then I'm going to move to middle-class encounters that I'm gonna move to encounters that middle-class Indians who are doing design research have with rural Indians that they're trying to help to show how people who are working in the design studio interpret the creativity of people who don't have the kind of privilege that they do producing in this process I'm gonna argue that like when these design practitioners go out in the field it's in the field that they actually kind of produce the difference between innovators and their others or they kind of mark out why other people's creativity is not as good for nation-building as their own and I'm gonna conclude by arguing for the concept of rendering entrepreneurial as a way of naming how private citizens are being called upon to make markets and to extend you know capitalist firms connections as a condition of being a good citizen and belonging to the nation. the work I want to present here is ethnographic and historical I conducted fieldwork over 14 months dated day to day in a design studio I learned Hindi and what was spoken in the studio was English. kind of mix of Hindi and English is really common in urban areas and. I worked as an observer but also as a team member over these 14 months to understand how state priorities and understandings of innovation and entrepreneurship shifted over time I also read and did text analysis of these five-year plan documents that the government of India has been producing since independence in 1947 and I also look to other kinds of government and Industry Association planning documents and reports to see when does the entrepreneurship come to be posed as a solution to the problems of you know how to develop India and develop it well. now I want to dive into the context of what was going on as I was doing my fieldwork and as the people that I was studying were answering this call to become entrepreneurs belly at the time in my fieldwork seemed a development boomtown since before independence belly has been a center of development planning to modernize when Prime Minister Java Harlow called a needy nation the central government's pre liberalisation five-year plans and import controls with ideals of socialism and dealing with kind of power imbalances from wealth inequality those policies had given way after liberalisation to facilitating public-private partnerships where the government said how much of our work can we outsourced to private industry and also these policies have given way to the government asking how can we get more capital to be invested in India by private industry and by bankers and. there's a big shift that happened in India with liberalisation where socialist ideals where the state wasn't responsible for building schools and hospitals and infrastructure and making sure rural people were not treated and equitably that was kind of considered to be unsustainable and that there were policy shifts to ask the private sector to become more involved in development okay. I have another question for you. how many of us you know and kind of thinking about ourselves as going into technology or design have hope that something like Civic innovation or tech for social good can be a more meaningful way to actually have a job that we feel like is ethical okay yeah that wasn't that's me that has been me too that was me uh-huh at the age of 24. in the context of India kind of shifting the Indian government shifting the burden of development to the private sector the private sector and investment banks also gotten really interested in India as a business opportunity. it's not just. this call to do social good came at a specific time when banks like Goldman Sachs were directing global investors to the potential of emerging markets in what was called BRICS Brazil Russia India and China Michigan Business School professor CK Prahalad directed business leaders to seek their fortunes at the quote bottom of the pyramid I'm sorry I actually meant to be showing you this slide. the bottom of the pyramid books this middle book here is the idea that companies could make a profit while serving the poor the poor at this time were framed as both entrepreneurs and potential consumers at a time when a kind of American and European consumer markets were flagging and companies were then looking to Brick's in order to find new markets Ananya ROI is an urban studies scholar who has called this move poverty capital when the poor come to be seen as a source of bank interest as a source of consumer revenue rather than people who are exploited and need policies to help them you know get more power in you know as workers safe RS citizens. to give you a sense of the anxieties for which entrepreneurial citizenship in India was a solve I'll quote directly from a 2013 Planning Commission report exploring scenarios for India's future these threatening scenarios were frequently invoked in many of the government and civil society workshops I attended as well as elite news elite news and publications that were published in English in India okay. I quote this is from a planning document written by government consultants and planners. quote extremism infects more areas of the country governments try to win popularity while increased by increasing handouts civil society protest movements take up non-negotiable stances the political logjam becomes worse handouts train government's finances investments lack in employment needs do not grow as rapidly as the workforce and. India's demographic changes become a ticking time bomb handouts do not incentivize innovation and entrepreneurship but instead create dependency a cash-strapped government is unable to achieve its goal of poverty alleviation through subsidies. this is a planner saying if we don't encourage if we don't have policies to encourage innovation we're going to be stuck with all these political threats and log jams and a dependent population. this report gives a technocratic view from Delhi this does not represent how all Indians or even all Delhiites saw the problem of development but I just want to kind of dwell on what this report is saying civil society activists here are not key Democratic watchdogs but instead they're seen as too India's poor are not dispossessed by development processes but instead are seen as dependent on handouts the poor are not vigorously engaged in democratic politics over resources but they're simply staging popularity contests among popular among politicians and young people who are frustrated with the growing inequality amidst what's called jobless growth they're recast as a ticking time bomb the kind of needs to be channelled. that this report argues that innovation and entrepreneurship and the institutions that sustain it are the solutions how did it become a solution and who deserves the state support I want to approach this question by contrasting three different prescriptions for entrepreneurial citizenship from three elite policy actors their visions are varyingly capitalist naru vien and Gandhian yeah they share a belief in entrepreneurial innovators as a vehicle for national growth and distribution differences among these policy actors signal varied historical strands of development that still animate Indian politics and are still debated today. I'm not trying to say everyone agrees on entrepreneurial citizenship in the form it takes but I am saying that even among those who debate entrepreneurial citizenship there's things they have in common okay. the first person I want to focus on is Arvind Subramanian he's a former International Monetary Fund economist and he served as the chief economic adviser to India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi from 2014 to 2018 addressing a UPenn India innovation conference subramanian speculated about India's future envisioning an India that exported information services like programming and tech support and trained skilled entrepreneurs and managers it's well you know these wealth these wealthy people from the kind of highly skilled areas of Indian economy were he imagined them investing their capital not only in India but also in other countries for Subramanian innovation emanated from gleaming office towers filled with highly educated people accumulating profit that could register as economic growth statistics and job creation and therefore the argument went developments he prescribed policies to empower those elites through easing restrictions on land labor and trade and foreign direct investment to let people who run firms kind of do what they would like Pitroda is who's on the left on the right here is like Subramanian a non-resident Indian deeply involved in central government policy he headed the national knowledge commission during the more centrist party Congress has ruled from 2005 through 2014 and during a televised parliamentary panel for the Indian Institutes of Technology Pitroda spoke about the poorest Indians at the bottom of the pyramid not as potential workers for elites producing jobs but as Indians who live in villages who are in need of technical solutions the market alone Pitroda argued and finance capital bankers for example in particular Pitroda argue that they simply extract value in his words through finding vehicles for investment and then taking interest or you know taking ownership and selling off companies my contrast Pitroda saw the images argued that engineers have the capacity to innovate by actually going to people identifying their problems and creating value by solving those people's problems Pitroda himself is an icon of the forum in the 1980s he'd actually led a central government project that brought rural telephone all over India through building custom hardware and figuring out schemes where each village would actually have a telephone box that would be run by independent entrepreneurs. each village would have like one telephone station instead of every house having a telephone and that's how a country that was trying to be socialist and its development may do with for spreading resources across 1 million people. petronas vision was not about inventing for export but rather of dedicating professional Indian inventiveness to domestic consumers and citizens needs a vision that included a role for the state and not just private industry. the third person I want to focus on is dr. Anil Gupta who's a professor at the Indian Institute of Management on the. for those who don't knows it's kind of like the Harvard Business School of indium actually was started in collaboration with Harvard and the 50. a new Gupta he saw rural India not engineers not people in cleaning office towers rural India as the true hotbed of innovation as he called it he evangelized his cause through TED Talks a trade book called grassroots innovation and even working in the Indian government as head of a National Innovation foundation for decades onion Gupta led annual yatras or walking trip pilgrimages through rural India with groups of students and researchers looking for appropriate technologies inventions and inventors that brought traditional knowledge brought that the broad traditional knowledge to bear on people's problems and his hope was that by doing the Sierra and finding these inventors that he could bring the resources of the government to bring those inventions to scale and to market these rural innovators which Gupta argued they made affordable reparable and clever technologies driven by their impatience to make life easier Gupta and his team publicized and scaled up these inventions even inventing new kinds of patents that respected rural innovators rights to share with each other for free while making sure that companies who use the innovation would pay royalties to the rural innovators he'd also run a newsletter for decades kind of educating people kind of spreading knowledge from one part of India about its kind of rural innovations to other parts of India and translating it into a bunch of different languages. he's been walking the walk long before innovation was cool and trying to make innovation accessible in a way that's pretty rare I think. these are three starkly different visions of who is an innovator what innovation looks like and by consequence what policies and practices locate and support these special kind of innovative people but they agree on a basic vision of the inventions of the few replicated by workers for the benefit of the masses all while producing what is recognizable as as exchange value or profit economic growth understood as you know how much kind of profit is generated in the economy. if innovation was to fuel development entrepreneurs were those who championed managed and drove it this figure the entrepreneur was not quite the one who anticipates economizes competes and invests in the self as analyzed by Carla Freeman Michael fair Wendy brown these are social theorists who think about the ways that we're all asked to become entrepreneurs we're all asked to see how we can kind of make opportunities for ourselves by investing in ourselves and our human capital that scholarships really important but this image of the entrepreneur I'm talking about is different than that this is the image of the entrepreneur that I'm talking about here is also a manager of others through organization through know-how and through resourcefulness this is the other directed vision of the entrepreneur put forth by economist Joseph Schumpeter in the mid 20th century as a creative agent that generates novel sources of profit within the economy who here has heard of Schumpeter raise your hand high okay and who's heard of creative destruction as a phrase okay creative destruction comes from this economist Joseph Schumpeter because the entrepreneur for Schumpeter was an agent of innovation who figured out how to make new arrangements of existing resources relationships and technical know-how to figure out new ways to make a profit and. for Schumpeter the entrepreneur was the way that the economy could keep growing because the entrepreneur would always figure out new ways to make value in the economy interestingly Karl Marx actually predicted that as companies compete on costs they'll make less and less profit competing with each other which means workers looking at paid less which means revolution will happen. Schumpeter said no revolution won't happen because entrepreneurs will keep finding new ways to make value. this debates been pretty important to how people you know we think politics is supposed to work. the entrepreneurial citizen I'm talking about made sense in India by drawing on older hierarchies of citizens in Indian society. Nehru India's first prime minister posited one India that plans leads and administers and a whole other India that had to be developed through education work health and hygiene people who are too poor to properly know what they needed to poor to properly continue participate in a democracy. partha chatterjee calls this political society as compared to civil society. play for narrow planners scientists and managers these special educated people were also meant to be separate from the squabbles of politics in Parliament systematically allocating resources and regulating production to Express what's right for a fragmented nation they're due back to this belief that you had to have technocrats who could objectively determine what's best for development who are outside of democratic accountability he backed this belief by investing in the IITs and the I AMS in the National Institute of design to produce people who could do these jobs. Gandhi who's also a big part of the Indian independence effort and you know how many is anyway you're not heard of Gandhi yeah Gandhi's. Gandhi uh you also believed in elite leadership but he had a different spin on it. for Gandhi he articulated what he called the trusteeship system were the very wealthy would keep their wealth it wouldn't be taxed away or redistributed but by keeping their wealth these trustees were supposed to spend it wisely for the benefit of the wider public including their own workers. key to this was a you know Gandhi actually didn't believe that workers knew the best ways to use resources that they were given to them and that those who had wealth the wealth was evidence of their managerial acumen and cleverness and. that's why he believed in the system where the wealthy should kind of give to those who work for them and live around them but don't need to be democratically accountable to them. the entrepreneur that I'm talking about here in India is not just the anticipatory neoliberal subject but also the manager and governor of their fellow citizens. concrete shifts in the political economy kind of in policy in economic policy and political structures laid the groundwork for entrepreneurs as a solution to the problem of development the central government turned to the entrepreneur is an agent of development through this process of liberalisation that I mentioned before a process where the state ceded power to industrialists relaxed labour regulations and ended many kind of public sector monopolies and things like steel or transportation with liberalisation the once import substituting Indian state began to cite private entrepreneurs in the planning documents as those who'd have to carry for the state's work building roads creating hospitals supplying commodities people need in India turned from an import substituting economy into one that had to as Laura Behr argues be repackaged for private investment and service the debt interest that they owed to World Bank and IMF. entrepreneurs were the ones who are supposed to step in as citizens and transform the problems and struggles of everyday life into sites that could generate investment and profit in order to them be taxed by the state and kind of pay interest on these IMF loans the state I want it. and I want to say like this project of entrepreneurial citizenship it's not just about you know ideas and practices that the state encourages people to take up it's also it also ends up in citizenship law. during this time in the mid 2000 leading up to the mid-2000s the Indian government actually created a whole new categories of citizen called person of Indian origin and non-resident Indian as a way of drying the diaspora and especially Silicon Valley kind of Indians back to India as people who could invest money and as people who could kind of bring managerial and technical expertise to India. you actually have the country like redefining citizenship because they want to get those special people that you know are recognizable as having kind of innovation expertise. with this shift to entrepreneurship innovation came to signify technic technologically mediated approaches that could be reproduced at large scale you know build something and scale it up and like that's the kind of solution we value transformations an intellectual property law were actually central to this shift. in the five year if kind of before since the 1970s India had historically prioritized in its IP law giving wide access to people you know give me people wide access to to drugs or to technical knowledge. they had a patent regime where they enforce process patents but not product patents that means if you invent prozac in the United States if someone in India can figure out a different way to manufacture prozac that would be fine and you know India could produce generics and that's actually made India one of the biggest providers of affordable drugs to many countries that we would call developing but in the mid-2000s the United States led trips they were trade related intellectual property agreement kind of forced India to accept product patents forbidding the production of you know forbidding the production of goods that had already been invented elsewhere even if India figured out a different way to make it and this was a way that the u.s. kind of enforced the interests of the pharmaceutical industry and the software industry in other countries as the internet was making it possible for people to sell and ship software and pharmaceuticals abroad. part of what I want to argue here is that innovation is not just you know an idea that got popular because it made sense to people although it is that I'm also saying that innovation made sense to the government because the government got really invested in the pharmaceutical and software industries once it was kind of pressured to change its intellectual property laws to be more similar to the US and Europe. it was in this context that you know it was in this context that a bank CEO could sit on a panel at Davos where the panel included an Indian Minister it included people from Amnesty International and they were talking about political unrest in India the Arab Spring you know it was in this context of this Bank CEO could say quote in India it's the entrepreneurial spirit that has contributed a lot to growth and how can public-private partnership work together in every field health education expanding the sources of employment referring to development the CEO continued it's a responsibility for everyone an opportunity for everyone. I've been explaining to you how development came to be seen as an opportunity to make profit. through myriad practices conclaves hackathons and design research for example government industry organizations investors and foundations called an entrepreneurial citizens to reimagine everyday life as a site of this opportunity I want to examine these practices both as ways of making knowledge and also ways of organizing work in collaboration and civic activity meant to translate you know culture and social relationships and the feelings people have about building up the nation and what we call effect and social theory translating that into potential financial value. the first story I'm going to share with you is about is it about a design entrepreneurship and cultural festival organised by dev design the studio with whom I did the bulk of my field work. I'm gonna introduce you to dev design the studio with Studio number between six people and 20 people over the five years that I followed their work the founding members are born raised and educated in India and of the founding and early members many had worked in corporate jobs at banks at consumer product companies and in media and big media companies but they left those big secured jobs because they wanted to create a studio where they could do work that in their words felt more authentic to who they are and offered again in their words more creative scope though you know they were also running a business while they were trying to be creative and. they're always evaluating okay how are we adding value they're always value ating are we adding the right kinds of services what makes us different from other design studios that's something I talk about in Chapter four of the book but I'm not going to dive too deep into that today well interestingly only a few of the people who worked in the studio had actually trained as designers a lot of them had degrees in business or engineering but they saw design as a way to make more locally relevant products that also gave them room to express what they thought India should be like in the future. just to give you a sense of the kind of work they did they did field work for London Global Health startups redesigning hands Asian products they would get hired to coach Indian college students and design thinking to innovate water distribution. this is actually not that dissimilar to some of the work that we do in the design lab and the studio also would refine and retool corporate products like say databases for a big tech company to see how you could find corporate social responsibility corporate social responsibility projects that we've built with that company's products. important here is the studio is not only practicing design but they were into it enough that they actually evangelized it they really saw this as a more promising way to participate as citizens and they tried to convince other people. one of the places where they tried to convince other people was a festival which I'm gonna call open lab and that festival was there to you know stimulate and showcase experiments in design innovation expression and and social change over two days in Delhi. the festival is not just about technology it also included experimental food tastings littered like panels about literature and multiple Indian languages and music events in the evenings to attract and engage people through lots of different ways of sensing and experiencing um the reason I'm telling the reason I'm talking about this is because you know the hackathon that I'm gonna tell you about was just one of the events at this festival and one of the things that I think for those of us who follow the kind of tech blowback as it's called where we talk about Silicon Valley and focusing on tech solutions we assume that people who we've seen that there's people who are pushing tech all the time but these were not people who are necessarily only into tech but they were into innovation driven social change through tech music food and beyond. the hackathon that I was I'm gonna tell you about that I participated in was just one example of a multi-day festival workshop that was meant to immerse participants in a kind of transformation of what they called hands on hearts on and minds on development activity other workshops included designing craft programs for a Gandhian NGO and Ahmedabad and developing solar power in an experimental city called Oroville. what workshops had in common is that they you brought together people who didn't know each other to spend a few days dreaming of development projects and then making those dreams concrete as demos plans or presentations. the fact. these workshops is a place to bring people together get them to work with people they don't necessarily know where trust and push them to make if you tend to kind of come up with something in the end like that's gonna be really important for what ends up happening is a hackathon teaser. anyone here not know what a hackathon is okay bless you or you know I don't know my tech world. so what a hackathon is kind of like a multi-day software production party it comes out of open source cultures where open-source programmers would get together at conferences to kind of repair software bugs that were too hard to repair when they were all distributed on mailing lists but they've been taken up by companies you know like Facebook or foundations like the Gates Foundation as a way of getting people together providing them with space takeout dinners electricity Wi-Fi and a roof over their heads and encouraging designers and engineers and sometimes community members to come up with projects that you know answered an organizers agenda whether that was you know build apps on Facebook social graph or in our case it was about building open technology for governance and it was up to us to figure out in this hackathon and Delly what we thought that meant. as we ambled into the studio at 9:00 a.m. this first morning the cook of the studio handed us some chai and some breakfast biscuits and we sat with laptops at a long open table the convener of the hackathon how does introduce ourselves and our motivations many of us spoke of the seduction of tangible action of making and doing something rather than just complaining about how things were going with politics one young bangalore software consultant wanted to quit complaining about governmental inefficiency to see in his words if we can really make a difference an iit trained designer said we i want to see if design could actually quote save the world instead of just making posters about it the convener himself a start-up founder who came from a long family of Indian bureaucrats. bureaucrat in India not being a bad word necessarily but people who were kind of serving the nation and administering his programs he saw you know like he saw the hackathon as a kind of continuity of what his family had been doing but through this private entrepreneurial effort to help citizens like him turn their energy took what he called good governance. I actually I went to the hackathon not with a critical point of view not thinking like oh man you know I'm gonna find the problems with this I went to the hackathon after I thought I'd finish my fieldwork because I thought okay what happens if I bring all the stuff that I've read in anthropology and in feminist studies and my coding and design skills to the table and I try to actually build a technology that I think would kind of go towards her horizon of justice the best way I could. I came here with a genuine hope and a kind of disposition to start building things and building fast that I got as a computer science undergrad and that I kind of reinforced when I worked in industry before going to grad school even anthropologists were kind of intrigued by this hackathon. Prem a legal anthropologist came because in his words quote anthropologist sit and critique things but they never get around to doing anything how many in the room have said something like that or just critiquing things we're not getting on to doing anything got one hand in the bag okay Stephens kind of like maybe me too actually. among us. among goes three of us were consultants who had various code consultancies design consultancies and what that meant was a lot of us had the hope that okay even if we build something at this hackathon maybe some of these consultants can go get grants or work for the government you know convince the government to take up what we build. we kind of had this hope that some of the people could carry the project forward all right. the reason I'm the reason I'm saying this is because a lot of times when people talk about capitalism they talk about you know we talked about ideologies where people believe that capitalism or that companies are the only way to make social change and that wasn't actually exactly what was happening here this hackathon was an event where it was like well maybe it could be a startup or maybe the government will actually want to maintain it and we were kind of open to those features and that'll become important lately that's important later on. we began by familiarizing ourselves of the domain the convener vipin recruited a friend from an NGO that works at parliament and that NGO director directed us to this process called the Parliamentary Standing Committee as a place where we could help citizens get involved in the legal deliberations happening in that committee I even actually recruited a Planning Commission officer I knew to go do fieldwork and get kind of contextual feedback from people who are working in that context to try to design something better during the time that we had. you the hackathon brought together not only people doing work but also the knowledge the knowledge the favors and the kind of relationships that we each had that we were kind of bringing to the table remember entrepreneurialism is about resourcefulness but these activities were interval vain' with expressions of time anxiety some someone most often the software engineers would ask how long can we talk about the law can reach forever as it turns out um you could be scoped the time of debate to assure ourselves we can get to the demo that we had to show at the actual festival. we move post-it notes around on the board and try to negotiate milestone and deadlines but the deadlines here were not just a reality check like I remember someone telling me like but doesn't everyone have deadlines but what I'm actually arguing is that the deadlines of the hackathon here the doing big things and ridiculously short amounts of time is actually a kind of moral hallmark of people who can put their differences aside learn to trust people really quickly and deliver innovations that promise potential value even if it means you have to cut short deliberation ethical debates bringing in other people into the processes fairly quickly major differences or what we may call drama emerged in how Prime and VIP and understood politics to work. from the legal anthropologist vipin was the convener who had to start up. vipin expressed kind of technocratic fantasies a website that would link dispersed Indian experts with state planners and politicians to in a sense get these kind of expert citizens to come in debug the law that was being moved through Parliament Prem on the other hand had studied the implementation of the forest Rights Act which was meant to give people in Indian forest rights to the land that they lived on and he knew that even while it does matter what the law says that on the ground police officers or local officials also use the law in power struggles where often whose interpretation of the law wins out is determined by violence or by local power. Prem didn't believe that if you just debug the code of the law you're gonna get two more justice but a lot of us actually in the hackathon shared shared premise kind of belief that we need to account for the ways that you can't have elite experts substitute for supporting the poor in their politics. these these differences generated a conflict and the deadlines disciplined us to grasp four threads of agreement Prem the anthropologist founded agonising I as a trained computer scientist and designer found it exhausting but also weirdly exhilarating like oh man I'm gonna find the third way through this um. premon Pittman got into a heated debate and many of us sided with Prem and working with and through the case studies that Prem had from his own research the interactions we felt that followed were peppered with well what could you do or what if we do this. how many of you been in these situations where you're using the you're trying to save the team from fraying apart by like finding the strands of hope of like how the project could go well raise your hand if you've been there Hey. well. vipin went away to run some errands and while he was away haha we develop we developed a concept that would allow organize a concept kind of website that would allow organizers to document face-to-face deliberations of poorer constituencies out in rural India for example or outskirts of cities to get them involved with central government issues and the way we would do it is by not assuming that everyone can use technology but by working through activist networks. Krish one of the programmers who has believe it or not really into feminist science studies he told us tales of how the technologically savvy villagers could be as he was biking through Maharashtra Prem drew on his own fieldwork to show that these people that people are trying to fight for their land rights actually are connected to each other and through activists to help us understand how our website could kind of augment their existing ways of organizing and their existing knowledge instead of trying to replace it. at the time it seemed like the hackathon could even accommodate a more leftist kind of politics not saying he should be leftist I'm just saying that's not a stereotype of how tech culture works but Prem warned us to do this it would require what he said was some real footwork to get on the street and work with existing organizations thinking in terms of political participation but as the Sun sank deeper in the sky we realized we had a little time to work with NGO or activist networks we have little time to understand those networks information practices or to build trust with them we couldn't even promise maintaining whatever demo came out of a potential collaboration. why would they invest their time in us if we couldn't promise that we were going to like sustain the thing that they invested in. how many of you have worked in situations where you felt this kind of pressure that there's not enough time to do what you feel is right by the communities that are affected by your project all right yeah a lot of fair number of hands in the room. the hackathon a foreshortened change project could only draw on the knowledge desires and relationships we brought into the room with us the time tools and skills in the room they were geared towards the work of making prototypes but not footwork not trust work even the kinds of prototype work we can undertake was limited by the political economies of Internet production in a country where only 10% of people the time had access to the Internet. for exists. Krrish the feminist software engineer explained to us okay in the long term beyond the house Thun maybe we could build the project as not just built on WordPress and Drupal and digital infrastructure x' maybe we could actually get into rural areas by using rural kiosks phone based systems or SMS based systems he said quote in under there's that woman's radio station the scope of what we want to envision is that but what we implement in five days it's probably a website this was a five day hackathon by way those very long the skills in the room were of the web and web tools were those that were at most at hand for urgent hacking. Krish continued we're gonna have to have a conversation where we'll chop off everything that we want to do cut cut cut cut cut but maybe if there's a master document accompanying are chopped up a little demo and he trailed off. zooming out the hackathon carried with it hidden pedagogy's that I argue are in common with social enterprise and much design practice leaves in the field in the field work that I did. I'm gonna focus on three here in brief a bias to action the management of the political and the reliance on others labor as infrastructure. first the hackathon celebrated a bias to action. when I say it bias to action how many have heard this term bias to action or bias for action okay. the bias to action is is a catechism thing that comes up a lot in kind of business and innovation culture but it actually comes from these McKinsey consultants for writing in the mid-80s Peters and Waterman and Peters and Waterman we're trying to figure out how do you manage corporations when rational predictive and linear modeling has failed when deliberation in some sense has failed the world they argued was one of complexity and rapid change and. they advise managers to to quickly research implement experiments and learn rather than run into what they called analysis paralysis the bias to action actually made it from the design studio in Delhi to job descriptions where I used to work at Google where Google also wanted people who have a collaborative nature comfort with ambiguity and bias to action the kind of attributes you need to survive a hackathon. this bias to action in the context of India actually overlaid with a sense of urgency that okay we've got this demographic dividend these young people if they don't get jobs are gonna become politically unstable remember those planning documents right. already in India there is a sense that democracy and deliberations too slow and these work practices from tech culture that urge doing things quickly not deliberating to democratically and I overlaid with that push to just you know act fast and break things which we can talk about in Q&A there's a lot of powerful examples of that in the last few years. to achieve this bias to action politics and conflicts had to be managed to generate creativity without hampering the actual implementation of the creativity this is the second hidden pedagogy. um conflict was useful on teams because it generated feedback about potential risks for the project or generated inspiration about potential opportunities for the project conflict could even generate new ideas. sociologist David Starck talks to talked about hetero ARCIC flat organizations where you actually do want to bring in different forms of knowledge to have friction with each other because that helps you understand potential lines of value potential lines of value and are exploring new possibilities. out of what stark calls creative friction come new understandings of where the team should go and what it should prioritize entrepreneurship channel this conflict we have our political conflict ramune between Prem and vipin for example into opportunity rather than collective deliberation or antagonism or organizing a social movement or pressure building entrepreneurial conflict could be generative. you want it on the team but it shouldn't stop action the last hidden pedagogy I'll touch on here was one of. actually salient one of the ways this manifested in design processes is you want a diversity on your teams but you didn't want the kind of diversity that would stop your project from continuing. I think is really interesting the ways that like we see diversity being included but in equality or oppression not actually being addressed in this model of diversity for creative frictions sake okay. the last tenant pedagogy I'll touch on here was one of relying on labor ready to hand to reproduce the design the generative potential of the hackathon relied on hidden labor buried in digital infrastructure x' ready to hand but maintained at a site 24/7 servers code libraries written maintained by others the Foxconn workers that made computers cheap enough that we could all have like a lot of us could have them and participate in these kinds of events and the metal mining that fuels that. as participants we barely questioned how parliamentary bills would be transcribed cleaned and formatted for the web this kind of data labor was freely available both in BPO outsourcing offices and also in micro work systems like Amazon Mechanical Turk this assumption that there was a cheap enough labor to kind of do a bunch of the work that you're trying you're gonna need to innovate it wasn't a limited to the digital it also existed for plastics. designers working in the studio developed product design plans and plastic and metal at a great distance from the kinds of factories that would be needed to make their designs actually accessible to the masses at scale but they only worried about labor questions when they brought up the product costs or affected manufacturability or threatened the kind of you know or orally made it impossible to realize the designer vision. mostly kind of labor was taken for granted as an infrastructure and that's the product of policies. the space of the space of creative freedom at the hackathon and at the design studio more broadly required the unfree labors of those who produced and maintained the infrastructures that made this form of production and expression possible. these pedagogy's of entrepreneurial time line sorry I'm actually in the interest of time I'm gonna I'm gonna skip yeah yeah exactly. I'm gonna just skip the next case study I'm gonna go to the conclusion if you want to know about rural innovation and how rural innovation compares to the kinds of creativity that was being privileged by both the government and the designers were in the deli world that I studied ask me about it in QA and I'm happy to talk about it but I want to conclude I want to kind of conclude that by zooming out even further to talk about what I call in the book the subsea of hope. I spotted this Rolex ad in the Economist in 2013 the promises that quote anyone can change everything the anyone's in this ad are crucially people of color rather than the white saviors that we've all learned you know not to ascend into you know into the lives of people all over the worlds in this vision of the world where you have people of color who are solving problems for both people where they live and then through the network for people all over the world social enterprise can promise a world without poles where global South elites can be presented as grassroots South South achievements colonial anthropologists going back 200 years they worked for companies or for governments to produce knowledge about people who are different in service of projects of colonialism and also projects of making profit knowledge constructing knowledge constructing what those other people are like whether it's tradition knowledge about castes or tribes helped render those unknown worlds navigable by patrons like financiers philanthropies government agencies and companies and. I want to argue that actually entrepreneurs if we if we just answer the call as its as recall to make the world a better place for goldman sachs we are acting a bit like these colonial officials who are also helping map people's everyday lives for places where we can stick innovations that primarily connect them to companies or even government that don't necessarily always respond to the political needs that the people have. do. we're used to thinking we're used to thinking about us going out into the field as a way of bringing knowledge about context and culture to try to do better for people but in my book I actually talk about one case where people tell the designers exactly what they need which is fluoride filters and the clients the foundations and the NGOs they want to make bacterial water filters and that's what they're gonna sell and. that's another example in the book where you know going out and learning how learning about people's practices is not enough to actually be accountable to them when they ask you for solidarity to actually develop in the ways that they see fit. change here in this ad is a wide open vague signifier like a Nike swoosh you can kind of project whatever you think your ideal of change is onto this sense of possibility civil society and our hopes to make the world a better place whether whatever wherever they fall in the political spectrum whatever dreams that they draw on they become engines of enterprise and surprise kind of organized through hackathons through design thinking and through social enterprise pedagogy's the promise of entrepreneurial citizenship by design I argue in the book it bends people away from the slow threatening work of building broad-based social movements around visions or demands by constraining us to see how we can bring our aspirations and produce something quickly that somebody can kind of then fund or produce an you know as a new kind of business line. this ad this ad also visualized this ad also visualizes a political strategy behind networked entrepreneur led development meant to transform potential threats into generators of opportunity. in 2000 and. if you don't believe me that entrepreneurial citizenship is meant to get people away from kind of building social movements or kind of threatening power this is how I'm going to kind of demonstrate the point to you. in 2009 President Obama announced entrepreneurship promotion programs and competitions as a key diplomacy tool and development strategy in muslim-majority countries in 2010 Hillary Clinton part of then Secretary of a positive entrepreneurship as a way of producing what she called a civilian development community abroad inoculating people around the world against the temptations of terrorism by enlisting them in the promise of entrepreneurial growth and. that's what you see in the CNN article drop entrepreneurs not bombs as a story by an entrepreneur from New York who gets sent by the State Department to the Middle East to teach people how to channel their dissatisfaction into kind of entrepreneurial into entrepreneurial efforts and Marie slaughter a prison political science professor and an associate of Clinton's wrote a book called the chessboard and the web that that argued that networked networked media Twitter snapchat the ways that people kind of share ideas and now we're kind of worried about is causing radicalization slaughter argue that this networked media remand a vision of statecraft not based on nation to nation diplomacy elect your government you elect yours and then we'll have them talk but instead creating citizens who move around the world as what slaughter calls manager integrators the ones who can travel translate and stimulate global diplomacy by creating new ventures and creating new civil society organizations. to wrap up returning to the ad and it's abstracted networks these this ad talks about agents have changed not only in towns not only in nation-states like India but also around the world and these networks these networks are vague like these networks can be the connections these can be IT and media circulation networks that get innovators visions out into the world making impact they can be on retail distribution chain the chains the designers rely on to get their products to people they can be self-help groups and community networks social movement groups that have actually been used by private companies in developing countries to move product in the last ten years. this ad makes it possible to imagine being the kind of person who has the entrepreneurial agency to attract organized and channel diverse life worlds and social relations into investable opportunities scholars of development following fook Oh might see this as an example of what's called rendering technical in the literature on development translating the world into a target of expertise and the interventions that that expertise requires in other words rendering technical is a little bit like if you are an expert and you have a hammer you go around looking for nails because you know how to pound nails in to solve problems the sites that I study however they actually organize work in these hackathons to be participatory to bring multiple knowledge ah's into the room into generative friction in the search for value. in the book I actually call this rendering entrepreneurial the making of the world into a place of experiment where many many experiments even ones done with the best of intentions to pursue social good are kind of constrained such that they don't pose a political threat but they generate new possibilities for innovation venture capitalists and corporations stand ready to harvest the most successful of these experiments. so what I'm asking for in this talk is rather rather than answering the call to become entrepreneurial when we see change that we want to see around us let us find ways to work in solidarity with those already dismantling oppression and exploitation in ways that innovation encourages us to ignore to forget or to be to time constraints or really kind of engage with and be accountable to and how do we do that that's what we have to figure out together I don't have the answers. if you're thinking about asking me in Q&A um thank you. much for your attention and I apologize in the talk was long thanks [Applause]

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