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Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation

What if everyone could make their own technologies, intervening at scale and challenging dominant economic and socio-political structures of inequality, exploitation and injustice? Based on multi-sited research in experimental workspaces in China, the United States and other places, Silvia M. Lindtner traces the often highly contradictory “affect of intervention” attached to “making” (p. 2). Her focus is the global “maker movement,” which has its origins in ideas of open-source hardware and electronics hacking that began to circulate in the 1990s in the alleged global centres of innovation such as Silicon Valley. The movement gained traction after the financial crisis of 2007–08, amidst a growing sense of precarity as well as disillusionment with digital technology and the idea that technology would provide solutions to everything. The movement’s central promise was that “prototyping – the testing and modelling of a technological alternative” was for everyone, not just scientists, designers or engineers (p. 2). On the threshold of the 2010s, the maker movement gained rapid popularity in China. In her unique and fascinating account of this movement, Lindtner investigates the (non-linear) displacements of technological promise from the US to China, explaining how China – long perceived as a backwards “other” incapable of innovating – has recently become seen as a “prototype nation,” a “place to prototype alternatives to existing models of modern technological progress” (p. 6). Drawing on feminist anthropology, critical race studies, and science and technology studies, Lindtner analyses the genealogies of these discursive shifts and highlights their material consequences, including sexism, racism, colonialism and labour exploitation. She argues compellingly that “attending to the labour that is necessary to nurture and support the neoliberal project of self-economization (of converting the self into human capital) challenges the notion that neoliberal processes and capitalist expansion are inevitable” (p. 31). The book unpacks with great ethnographic and historical detail the promises and ambivalences related to making, innovation and entrepreneurship. Chapter two describes the first Chinese coworking and hacker spaces, founded in Shanghai by a group of Chinese artists, bloggers, designers, engineers and entrepreneurs. Experimenting with American ideals of making, they aimed to prototype a future-oriented, innovative and entrepreneurial Chinese citizen, freed from images of lack and low quality. While this paradoxically aligned the interests of both the makers and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), it simultaneously obscured the precarities of these “new” ways of working, masking the CCP’s own neoliberal agenda. Focusing on leading actors related to Western networks of investment, opensource hardware, the arts and design, chapter three describes shifting attitudes in the global tech imaginary of China. Delving into the Special Economic Zone and shanzhai (“China’s partially illicit and experimental production culture,” p. 79), it shows how Shenzhen became rescripted as particularly promising for foreigners, 602