The Digital Mask of Class Power (Forthcoming: “Digitalization in India”

The Indian edition of the Research Unit for Political Economy’s Digitalization in India, reviewed by Bappa Sinha for The Wire:

“….For working-class and peasant movements confronting the daily realities of digitalisation: cancelled ration cards, deleted job cards, predatory lending apps, platform exploitation, dispossession from urban spaces, this book provides what has been conspicuously absent: an analytical framework that connects their specific experiences to a coherent understanding of the class project being carried out in the name of “Digital India.” The gig worker’s algorithmic subjection, the farmer’s data dispossession, the welfare recipient’s biometric exclusion, and the small retailer’s displacement by predatory e-commerce are not isolated “implementation failures” to be corrected by better design. They are structural features of a system that is working as intended. That the technology itself cries out for different social relations, for deployment in the service of human needs rather than corporate profit, is not a counsel of despair but a call to transform the relations of production that determine who benefits from India’s digital transformation and who pays for it.” Read more….