UC San Diego

In contrast to approaches that study a single social world, such as that of hackers, this dissertation addresses the tensions between hardware developers and other middle-class tech entrepreneurs’ claims of ownership rights over technological infrastructures and workers’ claims of personal rights over their bodies that produce them. These tensions are often unaccounted for in traditional Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Information and Communication scholarship. This dissertation contributes to these fields by introducing a broader research program that considers the materiality of digital information, showcasing the relationships between workers and technological entrepreneurship while examining the political dimension of sociotechnical systems. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, this dissertation addresses three research questions: (RQ1) Why do middle classes construct computing as an instance of sovereignty, that is, tecnología propia? (RQ2) How and against what do they create, expand, and defend new forms of political participation built around computing? And (RQ3) What are the limits of technological sovereignty as a framework for political participation at sites of global supply chains like the Mexican Bajio? To answer these research questions, I adopt a postcolonial STS perspective to analyze “technological sovereignty” as a category within a broader popular geopolitical discourse connected to computing in the Mexican Bajio, the largest industrial corridor in North America. Through a case study in which workers’ construction of their bodies as sites of sovereignty challenged small tech entrepreneurs’ construction of technology as one, this dissertation makes three contributions. First, it establishes a more extensive research framework for exploring the political dimensions of sociotechnical systems. Second, it places discussions around technological sovereignty within broader historical debates on labor, lean and modular production, and extraction in Mexico, especially in the context of global capitalism. Third, this dissertation examines the limits and possibilities of technological sovereignty as a framework for political participation that has computing as its locus. Hence, it sheds light on the political consequences—forms of representation, participation, and exclusions—of innovation, lean organizational styles and technological authorship.