Centre Coordinator and Post-doctoral research associate, Max Planck Cambridge Centre for Economy, Ethics and Social Change, University of Cambridge
Contributor, Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
About Johannes
Johannes Lenhard is an ethnographer of venture capital and homelessness and currently the Centre Coordinator of the Max Planck Centre Cambridge for the Study of Ethics, the Economy and Social Change. Having worked towards a better understanding of survival practices of homeless people in London and Paris for his PhD, he has in 2017 started a new research project on the ethics of venture capital investors He is currently preparing the publication of his dissertation monograph as well as finalising a book on diversity and inclusion in VC and tech. His writing has appeared in academic peer-reviewed journals (e.g. City and Society, Housing Studies) as well as journalistic outlets, such as Techcrunch, Prospect, Sifted, Aeon, the Conversation and Crunchbase.
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Contributions to Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
View all of Johannes's posts on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.
A Sandbox for a Specific Type of Narcissist – Clubhouse, the Allure of Live Audio and Dangerous Rabbit Holes
A nasal voice is rambling on in a long monologue about how to best pitch a startup on Clubhouse when I log on sometime in March. It is early morning UK time, late at night in California and this room is mostly populated by technology entrepreneurs, people that work at the big tech companies, and venture capital investors from the West Coast of the US. Eventually, another Californian accent interrupts the first one: (more…) (read more...)
Entrepreneurship and Technologies
Everyone is an entrepreneur – a new ethos is sweeping through our economic world. While the promises of ‘being your own boss’ and ‘deciding about your working hours’ are surely appealing to many, what is at times forgotten are the effects such an ethos has on the structures of work and labour, on relationships both economic and more widely. The flipside of this updated version of the American dream and the (false) promise of meritocracy have always been self-responsibilisation and dangers of reproducing structural inequality. (more…) (read more...)
GameStop, the Platform-Democracy-Complex and the Promise of Crypto
The trading platform Robinhood tried to wiggle itself back into the heart of the masses with a prime-time ad during the Super Bowl break the first weekend of February. The headline was simple: we are all investors. Unsurprisingly, people got mad very quickly: what were the company executives thinking? They had in fact just done the exact opposite during the recent GameStop Saga, which saw the platform (temporarily) suspend stocks and prevented people from trading. (more…) (read more...)