Abstract

Responding to the celebration of venture capital (VC) as a means to accelerated innovation, this paper explores the politics of ‘new’ market financing. The world-historical significance of VC is its amplifying effect: VCs produce valuable, impactful companies that change the world. I argue that while these markets should offer transcendence according to a progressive vision of human prosperity, they often immanently reproduce and intensify existing inequities. First, I develop the concept of ‘frontier legality’ to demonstrate how new markets exploit gaps in the law via innovations not yet accounted for by pre-existing regulation and capture value through monopoly formation. Just as historical encounters at the frontier rarely discovered uninhabited space but rather displaced and dominated that which is pre-existing, so-called ‘new’ markets are often simply the ‘disruption’ of pre-established social order. These disruptions are followed by an imposed framework of order that demands a continuation of the anarchic conditions preceding regulatory action. Second, I determine how new markets reflect the biases of VCs. On the one hand, a lack of VC diversity is reproduced in entrepreneurial teams and the innovations they introduce which, given the influence of technology today, amounts to a less diverse and equitable worlding process. On the other, because VCs are only interested in the financial payout of an IPO or acquisition, and not the social and political fallout of new markets, there is a moral hazard in that VCs can and do bring about lasting social disorder in the pursuit of personal medium-term financial gain.

Presenters

Mark Howard
Ph.D Student, Graduate Student Instructor, Teaching Assistant, Politics, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz, California, United States

Details

Presentation Type

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Theme

2021 Special Focus: Critical Thinking, Soft Skills, and Technology

KEYWORDS

CAPITALISM, ENTREPRENEURSHIP, TECHNOLOGY, POLITICS, REGULATION, WORLD-HISTORY, MARKETS

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