Search

Through a hauntological frame, this article investigates how the ghosts of colonial pasts are re-emerging in India's national universal biometric identity system, Aadhaar, and a software infrastructure built on top of it, India Stack. It shows how Aadhaar and India Stack facilitate the extraction of data as a form of 'data colonialism.' Examining data colonialism through an enquiry of how the multifarious and unstable relations of colonialism are bound up with the extractive processes of digital data, the article uses a historical approach considering the shifting trajectories of identity ecologies in India to see what is dispossessed through Aadhaar and India Stack. In doing so it continues a trend in spectral writing – forcing an intervention between colonial pasts and presents. Detailing a specific chronology of events, the article reveals how 'data relations' have been co-produced by the Indian state and corporate fintech bodies over the last decade to coerce populations into a 'digital financialisation.' Using the metaphor of 'structural-shape-shifting', it shows how colonial relations continue within data relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue through the double entendre of ‘data‐bility’ that how dateable one is on a dating app relies on data. This techno‐social framework enables an understanding of how dating apps are reconfiguring a politics of sexuality, circumscribed by digital technologies and data. Drawing on research with middle‐class women and gender‐minority dating app users in Mumbai and one dating app executive, the paper investigates how algorithms and users' digital behaviour together constitute data‐bility in three ways. First, dating app algorithms are designed to match those of similar social identities to one another. Second, dating app users engage with others' digital data on profiles and through message chats, reading class through these processes, deciding who to match/reject and correspondingly who is data‐ble. Third, users and algorithmic infrastructures come together to create new regimes of verification, through deeming some users ‘real’ and others ‘fake’ on dating apps, extending violent legacies of categorisation. Together, these processes result in data‐bility, a techno‐social order of digital dating oriented around the exclusion of those labelled ‘creeps’ along class and caste lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of on-demand domestic work sectors in cities across the world has been called the 'Uber-isation of domestic work'. In India, the sector and its surrounding hype was short-lived as some of the country's key on-demand domestic work providers were unable to maintain sufficient profit margins and were forced to change their models or shut down altogether. This paper examines the rise and fall of the on-demand domestic work sector in urban India, drawing on 22 interviews and 2 focus groups with 32 women domestic workers across Delhi and its surrounding National Capital Region (NCR), and 2 interviews with experts in Delhi and Mumbai. Through these narratives, the paper reveals the factors which govern the failure and absence of the sector. Using Uber as a heuristic, the paper unsettles the concept of 'Uber-isation' as a universally applicable framework to understand platform economy activities, exposing the intersectional gender and class assumptions built into this conceptualisation. It argues that the techno-masculinist logics of on-demand domestic work platforms, which are built into the attempt to 'Uber-ise', have disregarded the socio-spatial relations of the city. An empirical case of what Leszczynski has called 'glitch as surprise', when the platform economy unexpectedly fails to manifest, this case reminds us that the city, rather than a simple site of economic practice, is socially reproduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many of the ex‐colonies of European empires, biometric technology systems are being built under an ethos of welfare and financial service delivery. One case in this broader trend of postcolonial governance is India's Aadhaar and India Stack. This paper uses this case to explore how the in‐sourcing of technology into means of governing, behind a front of participatory "good governance," is contributing to the historical trajectory of citizenship regimes in India. Through claims of reducing financial "leakages," Aadhaar, a biometric identification database consisting of fingerprint, iris scan, and photograph, has become compulsory for accessing welfare in India. The Indian government makes a case for Aadhaar using a propaganda discourse of its success, based on weak evidence. The India Stack, a set of cloud‐based application programming interfaces (APIs) built on top of the Aadhaar database, offers a digital infrastructure for private companies to verify identities using Aadhaar data and to offer other "services" including "financial services." The ability to access data, paired with a "revolving door" of individuals between state and corporations, points to an ulterior goal of both Aadhaar and the India Stack: creating winners in the corporate and financial technology sectors. The Indian corporate‐state run through a "governtrepreneurism" uses Aadhaar and the India Stack as new digital technologies of governmentality to transform populations into subjects or customers. This paper uses the case of Aadhaar, a biometric identification database consisting of fingerprint, iris scan, and photograph, and the India Stack, a set of cloud‐based application programming interfaces (APIs) built on top of the Aadhaar database, to explore how the in‐sourcing of technology into means of governing is contributing to the historical trajectory of citizenship regimes in India. It argues that Aadhaar and the India Stack manifest as new technologies of governmentality, pushing populations further into a status of subjects or customers of the Indian state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on COVID-19 has been spreading rapidly across the globe and spread through close contact, many countries have enforced a form of lockdown requiring populations to stay at home unless for essential travel. Topics include the lockdowns have had severe effects on the global economy on footfall, and the same time, parks, theatres, gyms, malls, streets and other public and semi-public spaces have been left vacant in the effort to keep people apart.