Investment "Heat Maps" and Other Devices for Knowing and Performing High-Tech Investment

• In Event: Organizing Technoscientific Capitalism: Epistemic Values, Practices & Assets - I

Abstract

This talk examines the production of “market intelligence” about high-technology investment, and considers how such information shapes market behavior. Venture capitalists have conventionally relied on idiosyncratic intuition and personal networks to assess innovation trends and select startups to fund. But recently, large corporations and sovereign wealth funds have launched VC arms, blowing open a once-niche field, and rendering incumbent methods of knowing the market ineffective. I present research on CB Insights, a business which aggregates and then sells data about high-tech investment — an area for which, unlike stock markets, no public information exists. Instead of static data tables, CBI offers customizable search and visualization analytics, which allows users to see and know startup funding activity by amount, geography, and sector. While financial traders use “scopic devices” to watch flows of capital and extract profits (Knorr-Cetina), CBI’s representational instruments track the slower temporal patterns of financing commercial technoscience — and afford a more totalizing view than VCs’ locally situated expertise. Building on STS research into the performativity of economic knowledge, I argue, first, that CBI hails a new variant of investor-subject for whom playing with visualization analytics is the method for gaining insight — descriptive and normative — into the organization of high-tech capitalism. Second, I argue, CBI’s representational tools indeed mediate market actors’ choices about which technologies to pursue: abandoning reasoning based on imagined needs and uses — and relying instead on data-derived correlations.

Author

• Jacob Hellman