Maker Made: Creating a Silicon Place in Berlin, Germany

Abstract

Drawing on the inspiration that Silicon Valley provides, this dissertation is about the way Silicon Allee in Berlin Germany is made by workers, students, bureaucrats and even the larger population of Berlin. Silicon Allee is a community; it’s a matrix of interconnected people, machines, ideas, places and words that are changing, connecting, disconnecting, and reconnecting; maintained through webpages, text messages, classrooms, university spaces, meetups, camps, tweets, coworking sites, coffee shop talk and offices. In this age of ultra-information and continuous connections that can span the globe in seconds, Berlin’s Silicon Allee is also embedded in a larger culture of computing that both ignores and reinforces boundaries. I use this dissertation to explore the way that these boundaries are made, unmade and revised both locally, nationally and globally through discourses on and practices of work.