Making Community Work: Constructing Singapore’s Start-Up Community

Abstract

Based on an ethnographic study of technology entrepreneurs in Singapore between 2011 and 2015, this article explores ‘community’ as an emic concept for those involved in the production of web technologies. One major area in which the concept was used was in the organization of social relationships amongst those who saw themselves as occupied with technology start-ups. However, successful applications were not free of contradictions and required significant investment. This article then takes issue with the often-implicit understanding in academic as well as popular discussions of (digital) communities as organically emerging and self-organizing. Looking at how the notion of ‘community’ operates in practice makes it apparent that in the digital economy it is applied strategically and is considered a highly productive concept in capital production and extraction.