Acceleration, development and technocapitalism at the Silicon Cape of Africa

Abstract

A lot has changed in the global machine of international development since its inception, but the language of technological acceleration remains ubiquitous today. In this paper, I trace one of the lineages of this new acceleration in the post-dotcom boom Silicon Valley. Informed by the technophilic culture of what Richard Barbrook and the late Andy Cameron described as Californian ideology, technological acceleration offers both a language and a model for antipoverty experiments hinging on the elusive market subject of the African entrepreneur. Drawing on the writings of three Silicon Valley evangelists who have produced a written culture of what I call poetics of acceleration, and on four years of ethnographic research in Cape Town, this paper charts the frictional interfaces between technocapitalism and African development, suggesting that these frictions, while vital in the production of new profit frontiers, are also the site of more ambivalent engagements with in-between futures that perhaps outstrip the predictable ends of these entrepreneurial market experiments.