#Methodology
The aims of this dissertation – to describe the operation of a complex assemblage of value-defining activity, social knowledge production and technical–design labor which is structured by a particular set of ideological commitments on the part of its participants – are admittedly broad, and, furthermore, need to be addressed through a set of theoretical and methodological approaches which are adequate to the challenges that ethnographies of high-technology elites pose. In this instance, the close relationship between this study and the existing reflexive discourse of Silicon Valley requires that a methodological orientation to an expert population be adopted which is essentially non-reductive with regard to participants’ – notably VCs' and other entrepreneurs’ – construction of their own activities. This collaborative enterprise must, it is argued, be undertaken in ways which produce knowledge which is legible to, and to some extent integrated into, the autopoetic discourse of Silicon Valley itself. Particularly in the context of my own entrepreneurial activity, this implies a collaborative mode of ethnographic investigation which, while requiring a particular sensitivity to questions of bias and positioning, nonetheless has the potential to yield insights into the operation of this mode of capitalist production which would be unavailable by other means of inquiry. The sense in which this project is collaborative is, as we will see, structured primarily by a reaching beyond the boundaries between ethnography as a critical practice of knowledge production to engage with the more pragmatic processes of para-ethnography found in Silicon Valley.
###Collaboration and complicity with techno-economic elites
At the broadest level, the agenda of this study is defined as much by the conditions in “the field,” that is to say the unique confluence of ideas which shapes activity in Silicon Valley, as by any neatly defined prior disciplinary lines of inquiry – as the drawing together of economic history, material culture studies and complexity theory outlined above may have already made apparent. Commitment to an ethnographic method which is open to the unexpected, coupled with an attention to “the mutually constituting relations between technology and social change, the cultural foundations of the economic ‘material,’ and the subtle ways that social relations affect business both at the helm as well as the frontiers of the New Economy” (Fisher & Downey 2006: 4), particularly when combined with the ethnographer’s own involvement in a necessarily high-risk early stage venture, requires a singular methodological flexibility. Furthermore, an ethnography of high technology development and business/investment processes such as those found in Silicon Valley must, it is argued, be one which “advances… by deferring to, absorbing, and being altered by found reflexive subjects” (Holmes & Marcus 2012: 129).
The orientation to the subjects of ethnography which characterizes this project, along with many of the most successful of anthropology’s engagements with the new worlds of scientific and technical development, is one of collaboration and complicity with the other entrepreneurs and investors, as well as users and workers, who will be encountered in this study. This position is itself shaped by the “present becoming the near future,” which acts as “a common orientation of ethnographer and [his] subjects, and provides the negotiable basis of mutual concept work – a shared, baseline imaginary for it – on which the collaborative experiments with form…[depend]” (Marcus 2012: 435). Thus this mode of ethnographic collaboration which Marcus proposes, with its attention to the “emergent present,” is one in which the engagement between the ethnographer and a group of highly expert, reflexive subjects is both aesthetically and epistemologically sensitive to the becoming of sometimes surprising futures. This sensitivity, it is hoped, will contribute to producing an account of Silicon Valley which is resilient in the face of the inherent instability of this site at both the micro-scale (through engagements with sometimes rapidly growing, but also often short-lived firms) and insofar as the “tech sector” remains subject to macroeconomic turbulence and sociopolitical developments, as well as technological advances.
A radically collaborative ethnography of science and technology, as Rabinow and Bennett indicate, “entails a common definition of problems (or at least the acceptance of the existence of a problem-space) as well as an agreement to participate in the development and implementation of techniques of remediation:” it “anticipates the likely reworking of existing modes of reasoning and intervention, adjusting these modes to the topography of the emerging problem-space” (2012: 5-6). While the theoretical bounds of the present problem space can, to some extent, be delineated – the significance of a certain school of economic philosophy to venture capital’s orientation to emerging technologies, or of a highly circumscribed mode of ethnographic inquiry to user interface design, for instance – the attempt to remediate the para-ethnographic processes which, it is argued, constitute a surprisingly pre-eminent mode of knowledge production in Silicon Valley will require that existing disciplinary modes of reasoning, from anthropology, media studies and elsewhere, are adopted provisionally but remain open, like the products of the startups in question, to continuous iteration.
To intervene productively in the professional discourses may, from the perspective of much critical discourse on the technology industry and its products, also require something of a re-tooling of the strategies of dissemination and engagement generally associated with these disciplines, especially given the explicit tendency of practitioners in some of the fields in question to regard culturally-focussed (as opposed to operational) ethnography as suspect, if not actually “harmful” in business contexts (Crabtree et al 2009). With this in mind, we might ask, with Fischer,
can the spread of an ethnographic sensibility become part of a general common sense that would allow the construction, evolution, or mutation of new flexible “smart” institutions of so-called second-order modernization to replace old, brittle bureaucratic forms of command and control? (2009: 229)
The description of the startup firm as a “flexible ‘smart’ institution” disrupting “brittle, bureaucratic” industry incumbents is likely to be one which is appealing to actors within the entrepreneurial field in general. Taking seriously the claim that one distinctive feature of Silicon Valley today is that an “ethnographic sensibility” to potential customers’ desires, combined with an evolutionary approach to technical product development which replaces a goal-driven approach to design with an ongoing process of discovery and iteration that is closer to ethnographic improvisation (Cerwonka and Maalki, 2008) than the “market research” function of established corporations, the significance of this project can be framed in terms of an intervention in the emergence of “second-order modernization,” that is to say, as a response to Silicon Valley’s challenge to existing forms of capitalist development which has its roots in precisely the “ethnographic sensibility” which Fischer describes. An ethnographic engagement with the techno-economic elites of Silicon Valley, then, is significant not only as a mode of scholarly writing which, at least in principle, might describe the unique social formations which characterize this particularly influential mode of economic activity, but also in the questions it raises about the role of (para)ethnographic knowledge, historical reflection, and ontological speculation in high-technology capitalist development.
###Staging the para-ethnographies of venture capital and entrepreneurship
The deployment of this mode of ethnographic inquiry in the context of a public which is continually engaged in sense-making with respect to its own world – based on a distinctive array of ontological commitments and ideological positions – represents a “doubling” of ethnography in the sense that both startups and venture capital firms are themselves committed to a process of knowledge-making which, in the central claim of this proposition, itself closely resembles the ethnographic encounter. Indeed, this doubling is further complicated by my own deployment of the conventional methods of “lean” product development in an entrepreneurial context. The theoretical sophistication of the product development and investment opportunity selection processes, in sophisticated quarters at least, is exemplary of what George Marcus has termed the “para-ethnographic.” The para-ethnographer, a technocratic or commercial actor who engages in a process of discovery and description aimed at the social formations in which their activities are implicated, is identified by Marcus as a social actor with whom the anthropologist can best engage by taking seriously their informants’ ability to form a more or less abstract but (in their mind at least) resolutely “empirical” picture of the cultural structures in which they themselves (and/or their customers, users or business partners, including investors and recipients of funding) operate.
In this context, as Marcus, with Douglas Holmes and David Westbrook, observes: “Para-ethnographies are…already out there. What they need is an anthropological staging, a mise-en-scène, to give them articulation within the complex discourse on the nature and operation of the contemporary” (2006: 8). It is proposed, provisionally, that an ethnographic account of the Silicon Valley consumer software industry today needs to encompass the para-ethnographic processes by which products are developed and investments selected – and, crucially, that such a text must not only account for and articulate the self-constructing practices of technology entrepreneurs within their broader theoretical and historical context, but should aim to do so in terms which are at least open to re-incorporation within this elite’s autopoetic discourse. Provisionally, para-ethnographic engagements can be identified in not only the entrepreneur’s exploration of the market for their product and the venture capitalist’s evaluation of their enterprise, but also the ethnographic activities of UX researchers and designers, and, in an expanded sense, the technology community’s construction of its own activities in relation to the broader economy. Bringing these interconnected para-ethnographic endeavors into focus will, it is hoped, constitute one of the significant modes of collaboration with the reflexive publics described in the previous section.
###An Archeology of the App Economy
The engagement of archeology and anthropology with material culture and the “social life of things” (Appadurai 1988) provides a repertoire of theoretical concepts and research methods that is arguably better fitted to the problem of product development in contemporary startup firms than, for instance, that of software studies – and, furthermore, one which is already interwoven with studies of the materiality of technological systems in scientific, financial and other relevant contexts. Evolutionary views of technological development in the deep past can, it is proposed, serve as a singularly productive basis for situating Silicon Valley’s discourses of iterative and competitive technological development alongside the knowledge making practices of UI/UX researchers and designers, and locating both within a wider and more critical, but still sympathetic anthropological frame. Anthropological accounts of technological artifacts and their development which focus on the material can also, it is hoped, serve as a common ground on which a rapprochement between an “anti-cultural” practice of ethnography within UX research and a more critical anthropological practice might be reached. Following the approach to the description of a political economic system which structures this study, the use of this methodological archive will integrate analysis of the shift in the commodity form which characterize Silicon Valley’s “app economy” into a broader historical and cultural field. More specifically, it will describe the ways in which the possibility of consumption is made (at least in select urban areas) ubiquitous and instantaneous – an “on-demand economy” in which the number of users who have installed a startup’s app reflects how widely distributed the equipment which affords access to a given firm’s mode of distribution has become.
Although some limited attempts have been made to integrate actor-network theory and the study of technological evolution (eg. Bruun & Hukkinen 2003), studies of contemporary technological change and material production can find a rich repertoire of conceptual approaches to “things” offered by a range of scholars who have drawn on Latour and Callon’s work, including Amiria Henare and Martin Holbraad’s radical anti-humanism (2006) and Bjørnar Olsen’s call for a symmetrical anthropology of material culture (2010, 2012) that, in many respects, goes even further than Latour’s earlier propositions. A perspective on material cultural development and the relationship between technology and society, likewise informed by the deep past, which offers obvious points of kinship to the evolutionary economics discourse is, furthermore, offered (albeit in somewhat different ways) by the work of Michael Schiffer (2011) and Ian Hodder (2012).
Hodder’s theory of “entanglement,” in particular, has clear resonances with evolutionary economics:
It is very difficult to argue that there is not some directionality to human-thing entanglements. It is very difficult to claim that overall, along with huge inequalities in wealth and access to health, the world is not more entangled in terms of the scale and intensity of human mobilization of resources, communication and inter-dependence...A non-teleological directionality is produced very simply by the difficulty of going back down evolutionary pathways. (Hodder 2012: 168)
Archeological approaches to the relationship between material technological development and sociocultural structures highlight, amongst other themes, the historically distinctive implications of the ideology of continuous improvement which characterizes startups’ orientation to the design of their products. While progressive development obviously characterizes many histories of technological change, a reading of Schiffer’s “behavioral archeology” in the context of the “Lean Startup” movement points to the contrasts between this mode of iterative development and the tendency for technologies to reach a satisfactory level of performance based on environmental constraints, after which little development is typically observed absent substantial external pressure.
Perhaps thanks to its long-standing engagement with human behavioral ecology and the evolutionary biology of human origins, contemporary archaeology’s approach to the longue durée history of technological development is highly resonant with neo-Darwinian economic theories of entrepreneurship, yet offers some strong critiques of the core assumptions of Silicon Valley’s dominant self-constructions. Mike Schiffer’s behavioral archeology (2011 and elsewhere), which describes processes of technological evolution in response to environmental and social forces as mediated by human behavior, and its adoption into Hodder’s somewhat more expansive and eclectic theory of “entanglement” (2012) offers an approach to technological change which can articulate the range of material constraints, cultural forces and path dependencies which shape the innovation process (and, equally importantly, the uses to which artifacts are put in the world) without resorting to a reductive technological determinism or, conversely, a purely social constructivist account. Schiffer both emphasizes the connection between human behavior, culture and technological change and, at the same time, warns that “technological revolution is a concept and theme nearly as problematic and value-laden as progress” (2011: 15) – pointing to the critical stance that an anthropological approach to, say, Carlota Perez’ ideas on both these topics should adopt. Likewise, Schiffer cautions that “ An invention requires an inventor; a process does not… the media fashion a technology’s creation myth” (11), usefully highlighting the tension between the distributed and collaborative process of product development in the startup and the “creation myth” of the heroic entrepreneur.