Postcolonial assembly protocols for unnamed automation projects

This creative contribution offers a sardonic manual to navigate the exuberant world of the startup economy in Bangalore, India, once known as a backend site of technological labor. As Bangalore fashions itself to become a “new” StartUp City, this manual continually tacks between the material sites and discourses of these seemingly new practices to bring into focus the persistent and revised forms of inequality that undergird them. Adopting the form of annotated keywords allows the manual to recast the circulating buzzwords of startup capitalism within their larger social and cultural histories. Each index entry expands a site of ethnographic investigation and cultural critique to allow the reader to explore the manual across registers: as a sardonic text, as a movement between words and their histories, and as an introduction to academic work that contextualizes technological experimentation.