Hackerspaces as Entrepreneurial Anarchy

Claims that hackerspace anarchy may be a potentially comparatively efficient form of governance for proto-entrepreneurial information about market opportunities in the early stages of new technologies. An analytic narrative over secondary data of hackerspaces reveals private governance mechanisms including graduated social ostracism, costly signalling to facilitate ordering, collective action processes and nested hierarchies of rules. Agents in hackerspaces eschew, at least temporarily, organising in firms, markets and states, in favour of their own privately developed rule systems. There are two main comparative institutional drivers for why anarchy may be a more efficient solution for the problem of entrepreneurial coordination of distributed information. First, the institutions of firms and states may be comparatively ineffective at dealing with highly uncertain and distributed Hayekian information. And second, collective action processes may through time increase the comparative efficacy of private institutional solutions. The implication of this are that policy attempts to integrate these autonomous independent innovation organisations into the entangled system may either: impurify the spontaneous order processes underpinning hackerspaces and thereby distort the emergent ordering of entrepreneurial information into market opportunities; and decrease the institutional ‘robustness’ of the innovation system writ large.