Activity

Venture labor stood in for venture capital—both in the real sense of resources needed to build companies and in terms of seemingly being an accessible option for wealth accumulation of middle-class knowledge workers. This plays into the political right’s rhetoric of the “ownership society” that emp…

My fieldwork uncovered the cultural frames that workers used to calculate value in their jobs—and by extension to frame and manage the risks they perceived they faced. Their acceptance and management of risk served capitalist functions by supporting the growth of companies and industries. In effect…

Venture labor gives us a conceptual hook to understand changes to the nature of work and to understanding evolutions in new media. Venture labor, work that entails bearing entrepreneurial risk, is an explicit continuation and intensification of trends that began with deindustrialization. While “ven…

The dot-com crash also shows how people revert to a lens of individual experience to explain changes to economic structures. For people in Silicon Alley, their aspirations were quite different from the notions of the “American Dream” for a previous generation—they valued creative and economic freed…

Neither top financiers nor industry watchers could predict when, by how much, or for how long the markets would fall. West Coast venture capitalist Tim Draper dressed up as Batman for the March 2000 launch party of Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s $100 million “Gotham” fund, only weeks before the crash.8 …