June 20-21 2024. University of Lausanne
Workshop Report
The author would like to thank Tanja Schneider and Loïc Riom for their assistance in producing this report.
What do a secret music concert and a vertical farm have in common? The workshop on Capitalization and the Startup Economy1, led by Loïc Riom and Tanja Schneider at the University of Lausanne in June 2024 took this question as a point of departure. With the aim of examining practices related to venture funding and startups, over twenty researchers from all over the world came together to participate in a critical, interdisciplinary exploration of venture capital, entrepreneurship, and the startup economy. How do practices shape the entrepreneurial project and what makes a startup a particular kind of actor with particular values and practices? What is the infrastructure of the startup economy and why does it exist in the shape that it does?
The workshop began with an investigation of finance, capital, and entrepreneurial startup practices. Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism (2020), edited by Kean Birch and Fabian Muniesa, was one of the works that sparked this conversation. The volume examines the ways in which contemporary technoscientific capitalism reduces virtually every element of social life to a financial entity that can be capitalized and thus controlled. Another influential starting point was Capitalization: A Cultural Guide (2017), which contained essays by Fabian Muniesa, Liliana Doganova, Horacio Ortiz, Álvaro Pina-Stranger, Florence Paterson, Alaric Bourgoin, Véra Ehrenstein, Pierre-André Juven, David Pontille, and Basak Saraç-Lesavre. This collection uses ethnography to explore what a socio-economic turn towards capitalization means when viewed as a practice and a culture. Discussions throughout the workshop critically engaged with the human practices and macro institutions that contribute to assetization and capitalization. Participants went beyond critique to investigate the ways that financial technologies are not merely confined to specialist financial spaces but contribute to a philosophy of contemporary everyday life. This was especially prominent in Paul Langley’s distinction between financialization in general from Venture Capital (VC) financialization; a broader socioeconomic phenomenon that extends beyond the activities of VC firms. This prompted questions about the durability of financialization as an object of research, and “financial sector” as an analytical category. By critically investigating assetization within concrete pockets of the contemporary economy through empirical, conceptual, and normative inquiry, the discussions questioned the seeming inescapability of the increasing financialization of contemporary societies.
Exploring these questions from an empirical angle, some researchers followed the ways in which different actors participate in assetization and financialization. Although Langley highlighted the analytical importance of separating different types of financial actor, David Kampmann implored attendees to explore structures of continuity in the startup economy. Indeed, capitalization cannot be studied without rigorous attention to institutional powers and their development over time. In her keynote, Liliana Doganova engaged with capitalization as obscurement of temporalities. That is, as a way of crafting a dangerous relationship between the priorities of today and those of the uncertain tomorrow. She presented her study of the way systems of financial valuation appraise the future in an age of urgent environmental and socio-political problems, recounted in her book Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (2024). There, she shows how the financial valuation practice of discounting (understood as a method of valuation valuing projects through likely future, which dis-counts their negative effects on the world in the present) has become an essential political technology, used to create market systems where the future is worth less than the present. What is the role of capitalization in the collective creation of better futures if the value of the future is discounted by capitalization?
Taking up the call for attention to infrastructure and public systems, Akshaya Kumar investigated new forms of value in digital education, opening an inquiry into the relationship between capitalization and the public sector. He stressed the importance of researching capitalization’s interactions with social networks, the public, and the state. Questions of locality and the production of social boundaries were also explored by Sandra Faustino and Jonna Antonia Josties. Jacob Hellman examined social belonging by tracing the construction of quantitative evaluation practices various actors in the startup economy, and how those same actors cope with uncertainty through performative acts. Janja Komljenovic drew attention to the structural transformation of education wrought by the involvement of Big Tech, and the challenges this poses to the sector. What kinds of collective values are being constructed through the increasing capitalization of public sectors in the digital, assetized economy?
Tanja Schneider and Lena Rethel’s study of capitalization of trade returned the workshop from questions of the economy to questions of the human. Drawing attention to the actualization of markets under digital capitalization, Schneider and Rethel’s talk inspired workshop participants to ask, what is really being constructed through assetization and capitalization? If it is not (necessarily) new financial technology, nor the solution to climate change or financial freedom, then what novelty is capitalization really creating? The group wondered about the constitution of the human who is at once a consumer, producer, investor, creator, and participant in the capitalization process. Capitalization, ultimately, is about identity making. Before adjourning, the workshop probed the new imaginary of workers in a financializing world, and considered the political, institutional, normative, and social stakes of this collective identity.
Next, a panel of empirical researchers examined collectivity by exploring the role of (micro)politics in systems of collective valuation. Julien Migozzi interrogated financial subordination in Cape Town housing markets, and the intertwining of datafication and capitalization in the production of discriminative systems. Ulises Navarro Aguiar discussed the prioritization of design in the startup economy, which claims to make technology more inclusive for users but risks depoliticizing innovation. Franziska Cooiman further interrogated the political language of transformation, suggesting that economic concerns reproduce and redistribute value in the climatetech startup economy. While actual ecological transformation is not happening through technological entrepreneurship, she argued, something is happening. People do invest, create, and transact. They are doing something, and that “something” constructs shared political futures.
Cornelius Heimstädt’s participant-centered research interrogated the ways that actors give meaning and value to entrepreneurship and capital. Mylène Tanferri’s work on agriculture startups sparked a discussion of narratives about sustainable practices, and their potential to transform the environment of assetization. Probing the insider-outsider boundary of startup economies, Manon Piazza drew on a niche community of cryptocurrency participants to trace how financialization and venture capital enter technological spaces specifically designed to resist them.
STS is a fitting analytical space in which to explore these questions of identity, participation, and collective action. While investigating the systemic, institutional forces that drive capitalization, this group of researchers also took seriously the human practices that real people perform in, with, and against macro forces. In his keynote, Kean Birch articulated the need for “mid-level” STS work. His is a vision for STS research that goes beyond the case studies that the field often prioritizes. While not advocating for large-scale theory building, Birch does call for more attention to be given to political economy. A “constructivist political economy” is one that allows researchers to interact with the reflexive social actors who perform the economy, investigate the occasionally eerie, hard-to-track character of power in a global economy, and all while engaging seriously with private science and technology markets, where money (and capitalization) is integral to our collective reality.
When workshop participants engaged with questions of legitimacy and valuation, they did not speak of financial systems alone. They also addressed the ways that networks are changed, questioned, and institutionalized. These were networks of capital, but also of technology, politics, markets, and ultimately human actors. The deeply empirical, boundary-questioning work of these researchers shed much needed light on the networks of humans, technology, money, and politics that are constantly (re)created by capitalization.
During the informal part of the event, one attendee wondered why a workshop on capitalization seemed to have happened rather late – almost a decade after all the startup economy boom. It is the piercing relevance of what is at stake in such phenomena – that “something” of human practice – that retains tremendous relevance in today’s world. The questions that apply to the startup ecosystem in which music concerts and vertical farms are produced in techno-financialized frameworks are not just questions of the economy of the last few decades, but of a broader assetization of life that has come to shape human activity. Beyond description and critique, the workshop asked how financialization and assetization intersect with new technology in the creation of political economy, human collectivity and daily practice.
Recent Publications by Workshop Participants
Anvarro Aguilar, U., Palmås, K. (2023). The designification of futures: Emergent practices in the construction of economic fictions. 7th Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop. Edinburgh, UK. July 2023.
Athique, A. and Kumar, A. (2022). “Platform ecosystems, market hierarchies and the megacorp: the case of Reliance Jio.” Media, Culture and Society 44 (8), 1420-1436.
Balsiger, P. (2022). Commercialization Environmentalism and the capitalist market. In The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Movements (1st ed.), Grasso, M., & Giugni, M. (Eds.). Routledge.
Bieler, P., Cubellis, L., Josties, J., Klein, A., Niewöhner, J., & Schmid, C. (2021). Collaboratively adding ethnographic theory. Hamburger Journal für Kulturanthropologie (HJK)13, pp. 522–555.
Birch K. (2023). Data Enclaves. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Perrig, L. (2021). Manufacturing Consent in the Gig Economy. In: Augmented exploitation: artificial intelligence, automation and work. Moore, Phoebe & Woodcock, Jamie (Eds). London: Pluto Press, 2021. 75–87.
Boenig-Liptsin, M. (2022). Aiming at the good life in the datafied world: A co-productionist framework of ethics. Big Data & Society, 9(2).
Cooiman, F. (2024). Imprinting the economy: The structural power of venture capital. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 56(2), 586-602.
Doganova, Liliana. (2024). Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology. Zone Books, 2024.
Einstein, M., Yeo, SJ., Turow, J. & A. Jobin (2020). The dynamics of digital capture: How industries tie audiences to emerging technologies. Association of Internet Researchers Conference. Dublin (online), Ireland. October 2020.
Hellman, J. (2020). Feeling Good and Financing Impact: Affective Judgments as a Tool for Social Investing. Historical Social Research 45(3), 95-116.
Heimstädt, C. (2023). The exploratory assetization of a crop protection app. Environmental Science & Policy, 140, 242-249.
Komljenovic, J, Birch, K, Sellar, S, Bergviken Rensfeldt, A, Deville, J, Eaton, C, Gourlay, L, Hansen, M, Kerssens, N, Kovalainen, A, Nappert, P-L, Noteboom, J, Parcerisa , L, Pardo-Guerra , JP, Poutanen , S, Robertson, S, Tyfield, D & Williamson, B. (2024). “Digitalized higher education: Key developments, questions, and concerns,” Discourse, 1-17.
Migozzi, J. (2019). Selecting Spaces, Classifying People: The Financialization of Housing in the South African City. Housing Policy Debate. 30. 1-21.
Navarro Aguiar, U. (2023). What is Design Worth? Narrating the Assetization of Design. Valuation Studies, 10(1), 32–57.
Rethel, L. (2021). The Political Economy of Financial Development in Malaysia, Abingdon: Routledge.
Riom, L. (2024). Being a “Global Music Platform”: Platform Work in Light-Tech Capitalism. Social Media + Society, 10(3).
Schneider, T. & Eli, K. (2022). The digital labor of ethical food consumption: a new research agenda for studying everyday food digitalization. Agriculture and Human Values. 40. pp.1-12.
Vinck, D., Tanferri, M. (2020). Taking the metaphor of theatre seriously: from staging a performance toward staging design and innovation. In Staging Collaborative Design and Innovation: An Action-Oriented Participatory Approach, Clausen C., Vinck, D., Petersen, S. Dorland, J. (eds). Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 232–251.
Wajcman, J., Young, E., and Kampmann, D. (2024). “Rebalancing Innovation: Women, AI and Venture Capital in the UK Second Report.” The Alan Turing Institute.
References
Birch, Kean, and Fabian Muniesa, eds. (2020). Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Doganova, Liliana. (2024). Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology. Zone Books, 2024.
Langley, Paul. (2020). “Assets and Assetization in Financialized Capitalism.” Review of International Political Economy, October 1–12.
Muniesa, Fabian, Liliana Doganova, Horacio Ortiz, Álvaro Pina-Stranger, Florence Paterson, Alaric Bourgoin, Véra Ehrenstein, Pierre-André Juven, David Pontille, and Basak Saraç- Lesavre. (2017). Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines.
Mützel, S. (2021). “Unlocking the payment experience: Future imaginaries in the case of digital payments.” New Media & Society, 23 (2), pp. 284–301.
Faustino, S. (2023). “Web3 and the entrepreneurial imaginary of the 2022 Lisbon Web Summit.” Anthropology Today, 31 July.
Pacouret, J., Oukarat, A. (2021). Les conditions économiques légitimes de production d’une information numérique “de qualité”: Points de vue et divisions des journalistes.” Politiques de communication, 1(16), pp.53-84.
Bessy, C. (2022). Patent intermediaries: Between the technology market and the intellectual property market. Revue d’économie industrielle, 2022/4 No 180, pp. 103-124.
1The workshop was a collaboration between the STS Lab of University of Lausanne and Human-Centered Innovation Section of Technical University of Denmark. It was supported by STS-CH (The Swiss association of the study of Science, Technology and Society), the SNF and the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Author biography
Anna Lytvynova is pursuing a doctorate at ETH Zürich in the field of Science, Technology, and Society (STS). Her work examines the development of creative human labor alongside peer-to-peer financial technologies. Before her PhD, Anna conducted research on long-term futures, consulted at a financial think tank, and worked in the arts in Canada and Switzerland. She holds a BA Honours from McGill University and an MA from York University.
