Since July 2016 Thailand’s military rulers, the National Council for Peace and Order, have been promoting a new economic model referred to as Thailand 4.0, a designation that connotes a developmental vision of the future modelled on the incremental improvement of an IT upgrade. Innovation, efficiency, and connectivity are the buzz words of this imagined future, populated by ‘smart homes’, ‘smart farms’ and ‘smart cities’. During the same period, a series of amendments to the 2007 Computer Crimes Act have passed into legislation expanding further the state’s power to limit the circulation of ideas and opinions and exert greater control over the internet. Taken together these developments are indicative of the Thai state’s deeply ambivalent conception of connection and connectivity, in which the automated capture and circulation of data by corporate and state agencies is deemed to enhance efficiency, promising a future escape route from the ‘middle income trap’, but the circulation of diverse ideas and opinions among citizens constitutes a ‘democracy trap’ that threatens order and harmony.

This presentation offers a preliminary analysis and a methodological reflection. The analysis draws on the fertile concept of socio-technical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2015) to explore the dialectic of connection and control in state policy and action, and the migration and retooling of a Silicon Valley, post-political, efficiency rhetoric in a context of authoritarian rule. The methodological reflection envisages an ethnography that addresses the socio-technical imaginaries of connectivity through a comparative focus on two of the planned projects through which Thailand 4.0 is to be materialised: village broadband and smart cities. An ethnography of projects, as Walker suggests, implies attending to the unfolding time space through which regulatory intent engages and confronts local desire.