Acceleration, development and technocapitalism at the Silicon Cape of Africa

Abstract

A lot has changed in the global machine of international development since its inception, but the language of technological acceleration remains ubiquitous today. In this paper, I trace one of the lineages of this new acceleration in the post-dotcom boom Silicon Valley. Informed by the technophilic culture of what Richard Barbrook and the late Andy Cameron described as Californian ideology, technological acceleration offers both a language and a model for antipoverty experiments hinging on the elusive market subject of the African entrepreneur. Drawing on the writings of three Silicon Valley evangelists who have produced a written culture of what I call poetics of acceleration, and on four years of ethnographic research in Cape Town, this paper charts the frictional interfaces between technocapitalism and African development, suggesting that these frictions, while vital in the production of new profit frontiers, are also the site of more ambivalent engagements with in-between futures that perhaps outstrip the predictable ends of these entrepreneurial market experiments.

Keywords:

• acceleration
• development
• Africa
• technocapitalism
• Silicon Valley
• Cape Town

Acknowledgements

Over the years that it took me to write this paper, several mentors, colleagues and friends read or offered feedback on earlier pieces of writing: while mistakes remain mine, I wish to thank Donald McNeill, Sarah Barns, Gay Hawkins, Ilia Antenucci, Fran Tonkiss, Nancy Odendaal, Tsvetelina Hristova, Michele Mioni, Liam Magee, Simone Vegliò, and the four generous Economy and Society reviewers who helped me finalize the paper. The paper is based on fieldwork conducted, at different times, between March 2015 and December 2019 in Cape Town’s entrepreneurial scene. Throughout the paper, I have used fictional names where possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There are several competing definitions of development, both with capital D and otherwise (cf Hart, 2010). In this paper, I refer to development as the machine of knowledge and intervention that, by taking poverty as its entry point, inscribed former colonies – and colonised peoples – in a teleology of modernity, by which they were constructed as ‘underdeveloped’ and, therefore, in need of a capitalist transition to a modern economy (Chakrabarty, 2000). Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (1997) have thus defined development as a ‘technocratic architecture’ that informed the political geography of the world in the aftermath of colonialism. For James Ferguson, development was also an ‘anti-politics machine’ (Ferguson, 1990, p. 250), a technocratic order that, by making poverty a matter of managerial expertise, allowed post-colonial states to at once establish and depoliticize their bureaucratic power.

2 But note that a few historians have highlighted the linkages between modernization theorists and the origins of Silicon Valley capitalism (cf. Mirowski, 2002; Gilman, 2003; Lepore, 2020).

3 The Californian (or Silicon Valley) ideology is a catchphrase that captures the market fundamentalism of the culture that surrounded the technology boom in Silicon Valley. For Barbrook and Cameron (1996), these libertarian views are based on a ‘utopian vision of California [that] depends upon a wilful blindness towards the other – much less positive – features of life on the West Coast: racism, poverty and environmental degradation’. In this paper, I am using both Silicon Valley and California as metonyms of geographies that exceed these two physical locations. As Gill and Larson (2014) put it, ‘Silicon Valley is mobile, or ‘transferable’ to other identities and places; the metonym offers a ‘local’ manifestation of high-tech culture that has come to transcend Silicon Valley itself’ (p. 532).

4 Keeping with the Silicon Valley metonym, one could think of Silicon Savannah in Nairobi and Yabacon Valley in Lagos (cf. chapter 7 of Friederici et al., 2020).

5 The research underpinning this paper began in 2015 as an ethnography of expertise, in which I shadowed and interviewed several technocrats and economic development experts whose work involved rendering anti-poverty experiments more entrepreneurial and market oriented. I was interested in how the idea of digital social entrepreneurship had become a powerful technopolitical configuration shaping millennial development. I participated in conferences, hackathons, training sessions and entrepreneurial competitions. I also explored several archives, intended here in the broad sense of the diverse filing systems that even short-lived startups utilize to organize their knowledge and sense-making activities. Given the digital nature of the work that many of my informants were involved in, in between my first (March-October 2015), second (September-December 2019) and third (December 2020) fieldwork in Cape Town, I kept attending online events, read local tech newsletter, and received constant updates on the WhatsApp groups that Cape Town tech entrepreneurs use as community boards to post anything from job ads to memes. These sector-tracking activities have been complemented informal conversations with experts who have since become friends, and who have been instrumental in tracing some of the lines of analysis that I am pursuing in this paper.

6 With notable exceptions, such as Lilly Irani’s Chasing innovation (2019). For an overview of digital entrepreneurship in Africa, cf. Murphy & Carmody, 2015; Friederici et al., 2020.

7 For a different interpretation of the relationship between redistribution and neoliberalism in Southern Africa cf. Ferguson, 2015.

8 For Berndt (2015), however, this move has not really displaced neoclassical economic tenets of individual utility, but simply translated them into a more appropriate paradigm for modelling a rational yet poor economic subject. For a different take on African economic philosophies centred on the individual as a response to systemic collective failures, cf. Monga, 2016.

9 With major exceptions, for example, in the work of Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter. In the social sciences too, entrepreneurship has occupied a complicated place (cf. Swedberg, 2000).

10 For Barbrook and Cameron (1996), Toffler (1980) is a particularly emblematic forefather of the Californian ideology, for his capacity to create a bridge between hippy countercultures and Newt Gingrich’s New Right movement.

11 For a much more in-depth discussion of randomized experimentalism in development economics see Donovan (2018).

12 I have narrated and analyzed this story in more detail elsewhere (cf. Pollio, 2021).

13 I should clarify here that venture capital is a very specific type of equity investment. It is distinct from other forms of early-stage capital, although venture capitalists often diversify their portfolios with different kinds of early-stage funding, and therefore, in popular parlance, venture capital is a catchphrase for any kind of risky investment in startups. I am using ‘venture capital’ in its narrower sense.

14 Most but not all accelerators are themselves seed investors in the startups that they accelerate. Publicly subsidized accelerators sometimes do not, and only offer in-kind support to access private funders. Corporate accelerators (that is, acceleration programs run by large corporations) may mix the two strategies and only invest in selected startups. It goes without saying that I am simplifying a very complex landscape of organizational and financial architectures.

15 As argued by economic geographers who have charted the making of ‘startup states’ (cf. Moisio & Rossi, 2020; Rossi & Wang, 2020).

16 https://www.siliconcape.com/resources/list-of-accelerators/ [Accessed 10 March 2020].

17 Albeit arriving to a somewhat different conclusion. What they suggest is that the appeal of BOP experiments that nurture entrepreneurial hopes lies in their capacity to equip their ‘recruits with the skills to confront and seize the potential inherent in the precariousness of the market, and turn its very insecurity into a bankable opportunity in the medium term’. Relatedly, Birla (2016) has suggested that these failure-prone markets are innerved by a ‘necroethics of adaptive business competition, of inhabiting uncertainty, precarity, and volatility, and so of enforcing a temporality of obsolescence in the name of survival’ (p. 665).

Additional information

Funding

During the last phase of writing, the author enjoyed the financial support of a Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship, grant number 886772 (SURGE).

Notes on contributors

Andrea Pollio

Andrea Pollio is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Department of Urban and Regional Studies of the Polytechnic of Turin, and at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town.