The entrepreneur figures centrally in understandings of contemporary societies. Often left unexamined is its necessary corollary, the angel investor: an amateur financier who invests not just money, but self. This dissertation shows how specific financial instruments and corporate forms work to turn the uncertainty of early-stage business into a terrain where people make friends, hone knowledges, and take joy in “irrational” expenditure. While angel investing has traditionally been an elite pursuit, recent U.S. securities deregulation has encouraged its widespread uptake through internet platforms, a process which has encountered frictions. My analysis demonstrates that financialization proceeds not only through the expansion of anonymous markets and powerful institutions, but also through affective ways of knowing, doing, and relating. In doing so, I make visible a new way that capitalism accommodates critiques of perceived lacks — and in the process transforms what capitalism itself is.

Through a multi-site ethnography of a Chinese cloud computing company known as Frontier, I aim to address the following empirical puzzle: Why did the flagship digital transformation project in the United States fail, despite the company possessing significant technological capabilities and encountering minimal political pressure during implementation? Beyond this singular case, my broader objective is to extract insights pertaining to cloud computing and its relationship with informational capitalism, both within a general context and, more specifically, within the dynamic landscape of China.

My argument contends that the failure of this project cannot be solely attributed to political and cultural factors, nor can it be explained solely by the materiality thesis. Instead, it is the outcome of distinct material ecosystems, unique production regimes that underpin cloud computing, and labor resistance within the industry. At the crux, I have termed this production regime "dual agile development," and it operates as the point of convergence between political and cultural factors and the technological system and materiality present on the shop floor. Extending beyond the Frontier case, I also examine the broader development of China's cloud computing industry with reference to other places. Within this industry, the infrastructural sector exhibits considerably greater strength in comparison to the application sector. The division of labor of the government has played a pivotal role in shaping it.

Authoritarian regimes are known for their heavy scrutiny of music and art whose expressive content might challenge the state authority. Artistic creativity, therefore, is supposed to be suppressed in those places. The recent boom of the Chinese popular music industry, however, presents a perplexing puzzle. How is artistic creativity organized, regulated, and practiced in authoritarian regimes? Under what circumstances and to what extent can artistic creativity thrive in places where expressive content is supposed to be tightly controlled? How do economic incentives and political institutions shape artistic forms, and how do artists respond to economic and political pressure in their creation? In this dissertation, I answer these questions by studying how industrial development, economic incentives, political interventions, and creative personnel shape musical creativity in China through extensive platformization in the past two decades. Specifically, using computational methods to analyze an original dataset of over 190,000 songs collected from a music streaming platform, as well as collecting qualitative data from interviews and policy documents, I employ a mixed-method design to study how cultural regulations and monetization programs in authoritarian states shape the creative outcomes of popular music production and how musicians practice their creativity in response. Findings suggest that creativity is significantly influenced and channeled by these institutions: cultural regulations constrain the production and circulation of problematic styles, which are dispersed from high-profile works of the targeted community but preserved in adjacent communities; monetization programs attract new producers into the industry, while the incumbents are more prone to suppressing their creativity for potential economic returns; the musicians respond to the influence of these institutions by internalizing, naturalizing, and sometimes embracing them into their creative decisions and practices. The dissertation contributes primarily to the sociological study of creativity, highlighting the interplay between the state political economy and the creative outcomes and practices therein. It also proposes novel, computational methods to model and measure the tension between the nominal and expressive aspects of cultural identity, which can be further extended to the study of identities, categories, and organizations beyond the empirical case of popular music.