ABSTRACT
One of the biggest paradoxes of the discursive regime on development can be illustrated by the old story of a fisherwoman who was ready to go home after two catches from a lake. Beneath the surface, however, it is precisely because of this simplistic, sometimes naïve, techno-determinism that much news coverage of technology serves as just another smoke screen that distracts the public from the many vested economic and political interests behind technological innovation, especially the perpetuation of the West's geopolitical power and its prevailing neoliberal ideologies. This chapter explains how and why this happens. The Soviet and the US-led Western narratives about science and technology in development were nevertheless distinctive in one key aspect. While the former and its allies presented it as the result of collective and collaborative work explicitly driven by an ideology that normatively claimed shared benefits, the West and its allies saw it a direct result of freedom and competition.
