Every Tuesday afternoon while we sit in class and engage in critical discussions of technology and its role in society, a very different conversation regarding technology is taking place just down the street. Incorporating the culture of tech directly into the university experience, University of Waterloo's Velocity Residence is a dormitory style residence for students passionate about technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship. As the Residence's webpage states, "Velocity Residence provides a unique opportunity for University of Waterloo students to live in an innovative and entrepreneurial environment right on campus." An extension of the institution's start-up incubator, Velocity serves as a feeder program to many larger technology companies including: Google, Kik, BufferBox, and Thalmic Labs. Using terms such as collaboration, creativity, and innovation to recruit students on their webpage, Velocity promotes and reinforces the commonly accepted discourses and rhetoric surrounding tech companies. As the video above reveals, Velocity Residence attempts to make the potentially mundane and exploitative practices of tech companies appear fun, organic, and people-oriented.
Velocity Residence, and the discourse surrounding it, presents an interesting insight into the ways that the culture of tech has been integrated into institutions of higher education. On the one hand, Velocity Residence is praised within the University of Waterloo, and larger Waterloo, communities for its forward thinking role in developing student's passions and setting them up for employment success in the future. Aligned with capitalist ideals of education as being training for employment, Velocity Residence is widely accepted as a progressive program adapting to lucrative business opportunities to ensure the continued success of University of Waterloo students. In contrast to this, Velocity Residence can also be critiqued as employing cultural techniques of organization of education and labor that constitutes and normalizes our capitalist technological environment of cognitive capitalism. Velocity Residence serves as a means to "program the programmers." Drawing from Parikka's notion of bioproduction, and Foucault's discussions of subjectivity and power, Velcoity Residence can be understand as an apparatus within the institution of higher education which serves to create a particular subject- the entrepreneurial subject. The entrepreneurial subject takes responsibility for themselves, accepting exploitation and precarious labour as "natural" to the culture of tech. They subscribe to the American Dream, reinforcing the capitalist notion that if you'd just "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" you'd succeed. Whether intentional or not, programs like Velocity Residence constitute subjects that are productive to capitalism.
Thus, this left me to question the complex role of institutions of higher education in constituting particular subjectivities of students. Programs like Velocity has provided a vast array of students with progressive experience and successful careers, yet they largely reinforce problematic understandings of labor and technology productive to cognitive capitalism. Thus, how can we negotiate the benefits and drawbacks of a relationship between higher education and the tech sector? What should the relationship between institutions of higher education and the tech sector be? Is there a place in higher education for programs like Velocity Residence?
I look forward to hearing your responses!
Interesting post, Haley! I worked at Velocity (the residence and Garage) during my first co-op job. As students, we are often exposed to the university's messages regarding mental health awareness and the importance of our overall health in order to be successful at university. However, this is very different from the messages and discourses embodied at the Velocity residence. The Velocity residence is associated with the university and its members are required to be full-time students. In regards to this notion of the "natural" tech culture, most of the students at the Velocity residence would go days without sleeping or attend classes in order to work collaboratively and independently on their start-up projects. These students are not only praised for their initiative and dedication but also encouraged by the Velocity corporation to complete their start-up projects within limited timespans – academic expectations are still in force. The contrast of public attitudes and the social atmosphere from one end of the University of Waterloo to the other is definitely interesting to note.
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