Media Ecology Association, Toronto, June 20, 2014 “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” John Culkin, SJ Technogenic cultures, such as ours, demonstrate tightly-coupled economic systems with cultural production. This has become a self-reinforcing societal process, where the production of technological efficiencies becomes an inviolable social good desirable as product of culture.

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Technogenic Cultures
How Innovation Regimes Reproduce Culture
Peter Jones, PhD
OCAD University, Toronto
Redesign Network
Media Ecology Association
June 20, 2014

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What seems to be the problem?
No Growth:
We’re All
Greek Now

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Are startups the answer?
We have been enchanted by the cultural furnishings of startup culture:
Energy, youth, lifestyle, get-rich drive, freedom, opportunity.

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Globalization has exported and socialized the technological culture of
economic growth values associated with Silicon Valley venture capitalism.

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We are all advised to become as entrepreneurs
• The once-protected: Universities, researchers, profs
• The “social”: Non-profits, “Sharing businesses”
• The vulnerable: Emerging economies, immigrants
Placing the outcomes of research, and increasingly culture, into
the realm of global markets & competition.

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Embedded quickly in new curricula …
• Universities are promoting entrepreneurial careers
• (Not a critique in itself, but - when did an MBA become the
key to small business?)
• IP regimes designed to commercialize student inventions
• Do we (academy) offer guidance
on the social value of innovation?
• We defend ethical research.
Do we defend “good business
outcomes?”

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The Evil Genius - Voice of Silicon Valley Culture
“Strangely, it is the very implausibility of straight talk that makes it astoundingly
effective for disqualifying all the other modes (of existence). Once one makes the
mere supposition of a transfer … of information without any transformation, of
displacement without any translation, all the other ways of speaking are
suddenly subject to deep suspicion. And, even more strangely, the other modes
start to doubt themselves and their own capacity to distinguish between truth and
falsity. (Including and especially, Science)”
modesofexistence.org
If Double Click managed to discipline political speech, to rectify it, he would only produce
a much worse monster, since one could no longer obtain the proper curvature that
outlines the collectives in which we learn to protest, to be represented, to obey, to
disobey—and to start over. Add some transparency, some truth (still in the sense of
Double Click), and you still get only dissolution, stampede, the dispersal of that very agora
in which the fate of all categories is judged.”
(Heading & text from)
Bruno Latour
An Inquiry into Modes of Existence

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Cultural shifts?
Enhances
The Pitch
Selling Solutions
“App tasking”
Reverses into
The Answer
Networks as instrument
“Yo”
Obsoletes
Community Intimacy
Service Clubs
“Tenure”
Retrieves
Founder as Great Man
Initiative
Cottage industry

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Yet we have real concerns this
culture doesn’t cope with.

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Entrepreneurial Social Systems
Entrepreneurship as “skill of cultural innovation”
• A deeply democratic approach to innovation
• History making – from the everyday to new futures
• Exploiting anomalies discovered in practices
Jane Jacobs – Diversity-enhancing, import replacement & shifting within current
economic regime
• The small business has solidarity with its community, supplier
networks, customers
• And must achieve some level of “sustainability”
Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus . (1999). Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity

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Gunderson, LH and Holling, CS. (2002). Panarchy: Understanding Transformations In Human & Natural Systems.
Panarchy as Tetrad.

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Sustaining a true place-based
SME ecosystem.
• Can we envision the adaptive cycle in social systems
of small enterprise?
• With hundreds of startups & new small firms …
• How can we develop supportive ecosystems?
• Rather than just rewarding individuals with profit –
Can we reward business risk-takers with support?

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Thank you.
Peter Jones, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Faculty of Design,
Strategic Foresight & Innovation program
Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab)
@redesign