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- Convenors:
-
Canay Ozden-Schilling
(National University of Singapore)
Emily Chua (National University of Singapore)
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- Discussants:
-
Emily Chua
(National University of Singapore)
Canay Ozden-Schilling (National University of Singapore)
- Format:
- Closed Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the remaking of capitalist relations in and across Asia through a focus on the entwined questions of economic opportunity creation and governance, and the techniques and technologies that make both kinds of endeavor possible.
Long Abstract:
From peer-to-peer lending platforms and on-demand cloud-work, to algorithmically optimized supply chains and robo-invested pension funds, Asia’s economies are being transformed by a dense succession of technological innovations. Outpacing established cultural, political and legal frameworks, the novel arrangements and practices that are emerging in these contexts bring individuals and institutions into new kinds of relational terrains. This panel explores the remaking of capitalist relations in and across Asia through a focus on the entwined questions of economic opportunity creation and governance, and the techniques that make both kinds of endeavor possible. Today’s inter-Asian techno-capitalisms involve novel, understudied modes of economic activity that center on locally and regionally constructed conceptions of value, exchange and opportunity. In contrast to earlier images of development and growth, these approaches do not stake themselves in idealized notions of freedom, fairness, and plenty, but rather, hone in on conditions of constraint and competition, and focus on negotiating and harnessing these conditions through concepts such as “efficiency” and “disruptiveness,” “leanness” and “optimality.” Through ethnographically informed engagements with the conceptual, material and virtual infrastructures that enable and shape these economic endeavors, this panel addresses a series of interrelated questions: How are innovations in digital technology contributing to the construction of new concepts and standards of value, and new problems valuation? What practices of governance are being formulated in response to these developments? How are new models of enterprise being transferred across jurisdictional boundaries? And what relations among markets, monies, persons and things are being fostered and forged in and through these networks? In examining the intersections of technology, economics and governance that are forming around these issues as they play out across Asia’s diverse and dynamically interconnected contexts, this panel offers insights into a zone of transformation where the futures of contemporary capitalism are being reimagined.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Jack Linzhou Xing (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Short abstract:
With the case of Didi, the largest ride-hailing platform in China, we explore the widely circulated myths associated with digital platforms on both individual and firm levels, and highlight the importance of such mythology to the development and maintenance of the platform economy.
Long abstract:
The platform economy is generally understood as an advanced technological innovation typically associated with reason. This study, however, examines the role of mythology in shaping the platform economy in China. Via long-term fieldwork and document analysis related to China’s ride-hailing platform, Didi, we explore widely circulated myths associated with the platform on both individual and firm levels, represented by the narratives that 1) individual workers grabbing the opportunity to work on the platform become rich, and that 2) a platform with advanced technologies will ultimately be profitable and sustainable through being listed in the stock market. These narratives sharply contradict Didi’s development trajectory, which is full of contingency and crises, but they are an important component of Didi’s development and maintenance. Compared with the myths about gambling in China, a similar set of narratives about people’s understanding of and tensions between hard work, risk and precarity, and future well-addressed by anthropological literature, the current platform myths are uniquely shaped by two factors: first, modernistic, teleological, and western-centric imaginary which equalizes hi-tech and global capital directly to success and progress; second, the heightened developmental anxiety in both individual and social levels in China, further exacerbated by the tense geopolitical atmosphere in the Asia-Pacific rim. Through this study, we suggest that the analytical lens of mythology enables us to better understand how technological innovations enabled by global capitalism are interwoven with the existing historical and cultural frames and volatile economic, social, and geopolitical conditions, especially in the inter-Asia area.
Grant Otsuki (University of Tokyo)
Short abstract:
This paper examines how researchers translate technoscientific knowledges from different disciplines to develop a model of the human which foregrounds its capacities for 'affinity," as the means for the human to be smoothly integrated into the infrastructures of near-future Japan.
Long abstract:
Recent initiatives by the Japanese government to address perceived threats to economic growth and social cohesion presented by environmental degradation, population decline, and lags in innovation foreground the role of new types of information and communication technologies. These will wrap around each individual, sensing their everyday activities and translating them into data to smoothly integrate them into “Society 5.0,” an imagined near-future society which will facilitate individual well-being and economic productivity. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with scientists and engineers working on creating the “ambient” technological infrastructures for this society explore how they reimagine the human being. I focus on how researchers participating in a major nationally funded project translated knowledges from engineering, information theory, and biology into a model of the human that could become part of the infrastructure of the ‘ambient information society,’ a precursor of “Society 5.0.” While existing scholarship focuses on the body in and as infrastructure through the connection of its social, biological, and metabolically (re)productive functions with the production of economic value, I discuss how the body’s capacity for affinity with other organisms and for technologies becomes the focus of human/technology integration efforts. By doing so, I explore the tensions that emerge when this new model of the human pushes researchers to imagine it as more than an engine of economic production.
Na Fu (Brown University)
Short abstract:
This research looks beyond e-retail platforms, exploring its impacts and transformation toward manufacturing sectors. Notably, the current discussion on digital capitalism often overlooks manufacturing as a subcontracted segment within the Global Supply Chain.
Long abstract:
As the global supply chain under mass production can no longer satisfy the fast-changing world of e-retail-driven consumption, the flexible network in manufacturing is shifting toward “mass customization” (Guimo zhizhao, 规模定制). This research utilizes fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork spanning four years by following the shoe production network from the Pearl River Delta region. Through data-driven production, this process involves constant translation between human (labor, customer) and non-human (automation, data) sectors. My research identifies two types of reskilling: First of all, the reskilling with data-driven production, where knowledge of the pro-cess now resonates and is translated to a program and algorithm-based production between customer and production, human labor and machine. Furthermore, mass customization does not lead to a deskilling of labor practices. To this end, the second type of reskilling is embedded in the adaptive process of the human and machine integrative process during transformation. Thus, the human body is further exploited by the mass customization to be more flexible to the server for data-driven production.
Ke Li (National University of Singapore)
Long abstract:
Optimization—a set of mathematical techniques to find the best solution from all possibilities—has been deemed as core technical and commercial logic undergirding thriving digital platforms. In general, these platforms leverage the logic to engineer available human and non-human resources—such as labor, time, space, and digital affordances—to achieve several desired outcomes. The existing literature in media studies and anthropology has explained how optimization is not only technical but also economic and political simultaneously. It creates an economic form of life where pursuing quantification and efficiency are emphasized, it achieves so by overtly prioritizing some groups’ interests while sacrificing others.
While technical elements that constitute optimization might be generic, which typically includes optimizing objectives, input variables, and constraint variables, their configuration in specific local contexts is always unique. This paper focuses on China’s digital labor platforms, specifically food delivery and ride-hailing platforms. Drawing upon science and technology studies and China studies, I explain how China’s specific political and economic circumstances allowed the application of optimal logic to labor management in a way that was not, and arguably could not be, replicated in Western countries. I draw an analogy between the state’s framework of migrant labor as disposable resources and digital platforms’ optimal framework that treats workers as malleable robots that exist in the mechanical world. Ultimately, I show how deep socio-political logic at work in managing populations and labor shapes and is manifested in the technical designs of digital platforms.
Chongyun XIE (École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay)
Long abstract:
When social scientists focus on China's e-commerce mainly with a political economy approach, the logic of online retailers' pursuit of digital capitalism has largely been ignored. Drawing on the sociology of translation, we use the example of online florists (1997-2013), one of the first industries to conduct e-commerce in China, to present the process of constructing an Internet-based "market agencement" for remote flower delivery. Through innovative market devices in various forms of mediation, online florists have joined forces with offline florists across the country to provide individuals with floral products and commercial services of remote gift-giving. These heterogeneous and ever-changing collective entities and Internet devices have constituted increasingly complex intercity and even international techno-economic networks in which they translate each other and define their own identities through the symmetrical commercial operations of "taking" and "transferring" online bouquet orders. With the spread of the state-sponsored Internet and the rise of Taobao, an e-commerce platform backed by international capital, the online florist has been democratized from businesses or individuals in the ICT industry to ordinary people. Finally, along with the translation of the industry organization, Taobao and leading online florists on this platform, economies of scale based on exchanging orders rather than producing bouquets for profit became the primary strategic goal of online florists. This capitalist economy, departing from floristry's proximity and individuality, points out that e-commerce does not necessarily enhance the singularization of goods (Callon, Méadel and Rabeharisoa, 2002).