This talk focuses on the political economy of venture capital as context for “technological innovation.” Successful startups grow from concepts into companies reaching billions in valuation within a few short years despite making little or no profit. Drawing on ethnographic perspectives from the U.S. and long-term fieldwork with venture capital investors and startups in China, Wong argues that venture-backed companies can only achieve these drastic transformations through institutionalized rituals—without which they cannot exist, let alone capitalize on technologies they often credit for their success. In describing the indefinite deferral of corporate profit performing these rituals entails, Wong develops a notion of “temporal capital” to account for a capitalism that is not oriented around corporate profit, but in which time itself is a decisive resource. Finally, she shows how the widespread adoption of these “growth rituals” means that societies in which they operate have to bear their costs and live with the risks and inequalities that stem from being in a state of protracted liminality.  

Bio:

Jamie Wong works at the interface of science and technology studies, political and economic anthropology, and China studies. She has been appointed assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. She joined Princeton in Fall 2025, after completing her postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.

Wong’s research broadly focuses on the relationship between computational technologies and governance in China against the backdrop of emerging global systems of technology and finance. Through fieldwork among venture capital investors, startup founders, and their government partners in China, she ethnographically investigates how their understanding and practices of nested logics of “scale” shape subjectivities and configurations of Chinese state and society. She is currently completing her first book, The Weight of Scale: Venture Capitalism, Big Data, and Contemporary Chinese Governance. She also studies the implications of China’s internet culture and digital economy for governance and civil discourse.

She obtained her Ph.D. in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2023. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

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This talk will not be livestreamed or recorded.

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