“Open Innovation” has become a dominant label to describe the work ethics of creative communities that embrace a Do-It-Yourself (D.I.Y.) approach to independent technological development. The movement leverages traditions of craftsmanship with open source culture to promote experimentation through tinkering, the bricolage of old and new and a questioning of the current status-quo in global technology production. Lindtner explores in ethnographic detail how these values of tinkering, open source and hands-on technology production are taken up and mobilized in a hacker and co-working space in Shanghai, China.
In this talk, Lindtner traces how the theme of maker and D.I.Y. technology production is often seen as a translocal phenomenon and rendered as a progressive and “cool” force in Chinese modernization. She illustrates how what is produced in the hacker and maker space are not only material objects, but also cultural imaginaries of alternate futures for organizational structure, infrastructures for international collaboration and technoscientific exchange. ICT and digital development in China broadly are often rendered by national political discourse as an ideal path towards modernity, as a move to transform „made in China“ into „made by China.“ Lindtner’s research focuses on the complex and entangled paths of material and semiotic production around maker culture that emerge at the frictions of modernization discourse, foreign investments and transnational migration. She illustrates how the hacker and co-working space in Shanghai employs the framework of D.I.Y. making and sharing of technology to position itself as participant in Chinese Internet counterculture and as strategically aligned with free culture and open innovation projects in the U.S. In this process, Lindtner addresses the following questions: what models of global citizenship are embedded in the discourses of maker culture? Why do maker and D.I.Y. constitute such an attractive framework for the discursive and material practices of transnational collaborations? What forms of governmentality are inscribed in constructions of a technologically savvy, self-creating and transnational citizen?