The Global Lab

Abstract

Abstract The Global Lab maps out the political, institutional, and ethical coordinates of a new experimental movement operating across the Global South. It tells the story of how a group of organizations, foundations, and corporations are increasingly using developing countries, local communities, and refugee camps as live laboratories to experiment with untested technologies, biometric humanitarian solutions, new drugs, and radical methodologies for social change. The book asks where and how this movement works, laying bare the human, ethical, philosophical, and political consequences of its practices. The Global Lab takes the reader through Silicon Valley, Africa, and Asia to understand the tangible and transformative implications of experimentation, following a set of main protagonists, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to experimental economists known as the randomistas, to humanitarian organizations and pharmaceutical companies. Deeply entrenched in contemporary experimental practice, these actors form a movement inspired by core logics emanating out of Silicon Valley about the need for fast-paced radical change and societal disruption, technological innovation as progress, and the privatization and commercialization of the human mind and body. Ultimately, the book examines the inequality of experimentation that is found in the erection of imaginary walls between us and them, and the imagined universal and often unquestioned value of scientific and technological progress in the name of development.

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