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Rahul Mukherjee, "Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution" (MIT Press, 2026)
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A
It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4 through June 9, you can get 50% off nearly every single print, ebook and audiobook from Princeton University Press. Just go to press princeton.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation and Beyond Belief How Evidence Shows what really Works. There are so many fantastic books you can get an incredible deal on go to press princeton.edu and use the code spring50 that's S P R I N G50 press princeton.edu the sale only lasts for a month, so go and get some books welcome to the New Books
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B
Network so welcome to New Books Network. I am Priyam Sinha, the host of Today's interview with Dr. Rahul Mukerji to discuss his recently published book Unlimited Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution. Rahul Mukherjee is Associate professor of TV and New Media and Graduate Chair in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at University of Pennsylvania. His teaching and research focus on the logistical and environmental dimensions of digital infrastructures and platforms. Rahul is the author of the monograph Radiant Infrastructures and his work has been published in Critical Inquiry, New Media and Society, among other journals. He has edited a special issue on Media power in Digital Asia for for Media Culture and Society Journal.
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A
So welcome Rahul hi Priyam, Good to be here.
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B
So a little bit about the book before we journey into its details. Around 2016, buoyed by so called Data Kranti, which is Data Revolution, an aspirational new middle class of users in India accessed Internet for the first time on their mobile phones. Unlimited Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution tells the story of digital infrastructures that are being created by state corporations for content and money. To move and reach such users, it interrogates how their design impact the forms of inclusions and exclusions enacted, as well as the horizon of social behaviors and expectations in digital India. The book contends that to understand the possibilities and limits of India's aspirational politics, media studies scholars should attend to infrastructures of aspiration. The distributional logics of streaming content and mobile money are the infrastructural backbone that recalibrate thresholds of aspirational goals. Digital content media distribution is also shaped by how user practices get entangled with particular affordances of platforms and hence the need to study both participatory cultures of circulation and logistics of distribution together. Drawing on in depth interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, critical discourse analysis, and participant observation, the book traces the supply chains of content delivery networks, enabling streaming video on demand services, and informal ways of circulating vernacular music videos through memory cards. Unlimited does not restrict itself to formal media infrastructures, but also researches online phishing and lending scam assemblages to understand how such scams perform critical boundary work to reveal the cracks in and workings of financial distribution networks. This book offers a systemic examination of distribution considerations, including localization strategies required for imagining mobile phone users across the varied regional geographies of digital India. So first of all, heartiest congratulations on the publication of this very thought provoking book and thank you so much for accepting our invitation on being interviewed for New Books Network.
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A
Thanks Reem. It's an honor to be with the New Books Network and thanks for reading the book so carefully. And I hope we'll have I know we have intersecting research interests, so this will be a conversation definitely.
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B
So I felt it would be best to start with a very powerful insight that you share in the introduction. And I quote, unlimited becomes a way to explore the imaginaries of abundance and mobility that are enabled by the contemporary mobile phone, which as a media market, by the rapid convergence of technologies has purportedly broken all limits, moving from basic cellular mobile phone to a dynamic and ever mutating mediascape of complex assemblages. I'm very curious to learn, and similarly, a lot of our listeners also would be about the imaginaries of abundance and mobility that you explicitly pinned down in this book and what are the complex assemblages that shape or inform these imaginaries?
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A
Yeah, thanks. That's maybe the place to start. Yeah, I was looking at the kind of transformations in mobile phone to what scholars now call something like a mobile media. That is, the phone functions are there of talking at a distance and while traveling, but it's also a set of apps. And it's so many of these functionalities that the mobile phone has become a kind of mobile media and several other media are within the mobile phone now in that sense. So what that does in terms of say, the kind of storage facilities that are possible, also video playing possibilities that are possible. And I was very interested in not only questions of kind of logistics, of kind of storage and bandwidth, but also what it was doing in terms of to see for a content creator, their content sort of moving across time and space with that kind of spread, what it did in terms of for users to kind of take in the abundance or the overwhelming information that was there. And so it's also working at a kind of experiential level and it's also working at the level of kind of logistics. And that's where this question of the imaginaries of abundance and mobility come in. They have a history where it's not the first time with mobile phones that this is happening, but various transportation and communication technologies, including anywhere from cars and trains to radio and television, every one of them has been associated with these notions of freedom and mobility and movement, sometimes problematically so. So I was interested in kind of charting out those aspects. Of course, this book is called Unlimited, but it's very much a kind of search for limits, to use a term from the philosopher of science, Langdon Winner. As much as it is about kind of unrestricted, unconstrained aspects of mobility with mobile phones and mobile media, it is about kind of both logistical limitations of bandwidth and storage, of resource scarcity, of environmental issues, and it's also about the limitations of, in some ways, sociopolitical hierarchies. So these are all part of that kind of imaginaries, I believe, of abundance and freedom, where there's abundance, as the behavioral economist Herbert Simmons said many years ago, that as much as if there's an abundance of information, there's a scarcity of attention. And so that's a long time back. We didn't need streaming for that quote to be told. So, yeah, I think there's a history to all of this as well.
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B
That's very interesting. And that also brings me to the next question. Eventually, you also highlight that mobile media not only provides a perception of an optimistic future, but also introduces new vulnerabilities, births, exploitation practices, and new hierarchies, especially in the context of India. I'm sure our listeners would be similarly intrigued to learn more about what these new vulnerabilities are and what makes it central to understanding India that is the site of your investigation.
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A
Yeah, I think it's. Yeah, you're right. Like, they almost come hand in hand together. Yeah. When I thought about, you know, new vulnerabilities, I was thinking of aspects of underemployment and unemployment, of the kind of means and trolls, which could lead to, say, more vigilantism. And amidst all this, there is also this notion that mobile phones both stoke desires and can be bridged to a better economic or a social position and of a socioeconomic mobility. But they could also introduce new gaps between what seem like kind of hopeful desires and hopeful futures and kind of unrealized goals. Mobile phones can also seem like they can erase socioeconomic hierarchies, but actually they can also end up Building on socioeconomic hierarchies and kind of in a way make them even more inflexible. So there are these kinds of almost contradictions or double binds that the phone introduces. And I was very interested in questions of not just with the object of the mobile phone or the mobile media, but with how distributing both content and money to mobile phones, or circulation of content and money across mobile phones said something about questions of access. And there's long debates about not that easy equivalence between access and empowerment. They're never equivalent to one another, one does not lead to the other per se, but there's always that kind of equations being made at times. So yeah, these were some of these questions, for example, to be more concrete, say a small town content creator never had the chance before to see their content move so spread so widely, get so many followers and likes. But at the same time, that spread also leads to maybe upper caste, upper class elites kind of trolling that content creator, talking derogately about their aesthetic senses, so on and so forth. So, so these are the kinds of new vulnerabilities as much as there are these kinds of promises and desires that get more and more stoked up with the introduction of mobile phone and with these kinds of mobile media distribution networks that allow for that kind of access.
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B
So you also mentioned about the relative lack of scholarship for grounding media distribution, while suggesting that you adopted a multiscaler methodology in order to facilitate the data collection for this study. And I'm sure a lot of listeners and early career research scholars like me would like to know more about it, but also about the challenges that emerged in doing so in this day and time.
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A
Yeah, that's a helpful question. So yeah, if you're studying distribution, you have to sort of move a bit across these, across the supply chain. That seems kind of somewhat intuitive. So you have to study what's happening at the stage of say, encoding a data file or a content file, what's happening through the kind of content delivery networks, what's happening at the stage of decoding. So sometimes, and this is possible for if you're studying production spaces as well as consumption sites as well, but in some cases studying say, production cultures or consumption, there's a possibility that you could be somewhat more situated. But here, in a way, one has to always keep moving. The critique here could be that, well, once you start circulating so much or moving so much, you might kind of refine what you're studying already. But, and so there's a constant tension in this work because you can do Multi sided analysis. You could do a very situated analysis. And there are pros and cons to both. Right. And it's difficult to do multi sided analysis and then be able to, you know, with great depth, write about each of those sites. Because one is. One is kind of constrained for time, as is every researcher in that sense. How does one go about doing it? I think it's about the kind of questions one is asking in some of this kind of scholarship on media backends that Yulia Velkova and Lisa Parks and others have written. They discuss this notion of thinking across different media sites and making connections, which has been kind of important for me to think with as well. There are, of course, practical considerations of two years of this kind of research time when traveling was difficult amidst Covid. So those have their. You could do some of these interviews on Zoom or Skype and later on I've found myself going to Bombay or to Ranchi or to Jantara and then meeting people I was chatting with initially on Skype or Zoom. So there are also those kinds of considerations as well. I hope I answered that question, but I could elaborate on something.
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B
Yeah, yeah, no, no, you did answer that question. So another thing that also was definitely a point of interest was at the very onset of the book, you explained how mobile phones have benefited the masses in India. And this also connects to some of the challenges that you just discussed, while indicating that it is different from the insights derived by Robin, Jeffrey and Asadoron, of course, due to the time in which they conducted their study, but also in terms of the shifts in the industrial functioning of the networked media industries, particularly during COVID as well. And that was the time when you were also doing the data collection. So could you tell us more about the changes in the mobile media this book highlights and how different it is in these times and moments.
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A
Yeah. So, you know, like, I feel like Jeffrey and Dorant's work on kind of mobile phones in India was in a different decade, but had very important insights in a way. They say that a mobile phone was the first mass media that is widely available in that sense. And since they wrote the book in the sort of next decade, which has been something of my preoccupation, 2010 to 2020, there have been sort of significant shifts. I mean, just to even more concretely mention something like the use of memory cards extensively in the first decade of that, in the first half of that decade, from 2010 to 2015, the kind of taking up of WhatsApp industrially, kind of the way Geotelecom has expanded as both providing infrastructures and also having this kind of platform ecosystem. And that has changed things. And I think it's important to also mention and that's why I don't like to I think there's been significant change in the kind of the industrial networks, but at the same time to think of also the state and the corporations together. That's why I've often hyphenated them, say in how both Aadhaar and India Stack were developed in kind of closed public sector, private sector cooperation. But also how much to think of the India Stack and the role that the government plays in terms of encouraging fintech players, financial technology players in that space is significant, I think, and particularly also in India how with the JAM initiative, that is the Jandhan bank accounts and their linkage with Aadhaar and their linkage with the mobile phone, sort of this kind of connectivity across how questions of identification and authentication in India are very much connected to one's mobile phones, which I think also change how it's kind of in a very everyday way changed how people use mobile phones and what mobile phones are used for. Just to give you one example of how much I've heard both icebert, which was key to the kind of development of India Stack, but also top bureaucrats in the present government in India tell me just how many times they emphasize that during COVID because of the Jandhan bank accounts, because of the authentication through Aadhaar and India Stack, that they were able to send kind of this Covid relief cash directly to people's bank accounts right away, vis a vis saying the US government, the Biden government, sending checks which got lost in the way, and every time they kind of mentioned it, being very proud of the kind of achievement of the Indian government in doing that and mentioning again and again how that unique addressability was possible because of that connection between Aadhaar bank accounts and the mobile phone. So I think yes, things have changed in India and they have changed both in the way people use it, but also how state and the corporation have gotten together to kind of thinking of the mobile phone as a crucial kind of distribution endpoint for a lot of things.
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B
Definitely. So moving ahead with a couple of case studies you discuss in the book you mention about the flip side of mobile banking, especially for the category of the unbanked poor in India. And I'm sure a lot of listeners, especially also after what you just mentioned, were would be particularly interested in knowing more about this flip side as well the question of security and with mobile banking, but also how it disadvantages or further intensifies existing social hierarchies in the context of India.
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A
Yeah, that's a helpful question and also kind of a crucial part of the book I wrote. Yeah, you know, the question in India often has been that people are not concerned about surveillance, that this is a kind of western invention in India. But studies again and again by many scholars, Benny Chugg, I mentioned in the book Dwara Research and others suggest that people in India are extremely concerned about surveillance and that are as concerned as anybody else about surveillance in any other country per se. The question is that it depends on particulars of what they're fine about sharing and what they're not fine about sharing. And what are the stakes sometimes about what is the purpose for which they're sharing. And in some cases, the notion of consent just does not make sense, according to many researchers in the kind of financial technology realm I discussed when they said that when you're looking for a loan on a kind of lending platform on your phone and you really need that loan and you're being told to share information, and if you don't share that information about yourself, you will not be able to move to the next steps, so you won't get the loan. So to say that one has your consent at that kind of situation seems that the consent is not the right word. It's almost like data is the collateral that one exchanges for, you know, the ability to get to borrow some money. So I think what is consent, what is collateral would be important things to think about. There's a lot of discussion about using alternative data points and situation in a country like India where lots of people need loans. The kind of brick and mortar banks have not worked in terms of being able to extend loans, small token loans to many micro entrepreneurs. So there is a need for those kinds of loans and there is a need for this kind of mobile banking. But in some ways that's why financial technology and mobile phones are considered, as well as biometric technology like Aadhaar for authentication are considered ways in which to reach this kind of audience and users and borrowers. But the stakes are quite high about how you make these decisions. And a lot of the discussion has been that these borrowers do not have credit scores. So we'll use data which is considered alternative data of their mobile phone usage and based on that, give them loans. And these are machine learning algorithms, AI predictive analytics that are being used. But many people in the industry I chatted with mentioned that the way these Alternative data points or machine learning algorithms navigate gender and the assumptions that they make are interesting. So the assumption is that if one is looking at somebody's mobile phone, the algorithm is looking through it. The assumption is that if it's registered under somebody's name, it is the same person who is using their mobile phones. Now, in a country like India, mobiles are often used by many people at the same time, especially if it's the woman in the family whose phone is used by their husbands, registered in her name, but used by their husbands, their children. So what is the kind of data one is getting and how are these decisions being made? So there's a kind of noise in that data or noise in the way the algorithm is processing that information. This is not something that the FinTech AI folks do not know about. And when I questioned them, they gave me an enigmatic answer. They said, we sometimes assume almost that if you're giving a loan to a woman, the loan is to the family. So there is a kind of gender dynamics going on there certainly. And there are ways in which some of this way in which mobile banking is happening. I think there are kind of layers of complexity to both questions of consent, data, collateral surveillance.
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B
Yeah, that's very interesting. And you pointed out very, very interesting insights out there. So you also talk about the crucial role played by talent agents who facilitate a kind of media framing and discourse around aspirational politics, even gendered aspirational politics in India. The growing significance of talent agents in critical media studies and production cultures of streaming platforms has come up in a big way, even in the works of like Smith Mehta, Swapnil Rai. What makes the mobile media and telecom industries different from those conversations about the significance of the talent agents here.
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A
Yeah, and this is something you worked on as well, Priyam, so we can have a conversation about this. So I was very interested in talent agents because at that moment I was very interested in sort of what had happened after. Because of territorial skirmishes between India and China, there was a banning of TikTok in India and journalists who covered this sector were telling me that this is an assault on the kind of aspirations of so many content creators that they would lose TikTok as an avenue to reach their fans and followers. And. And I got interested in talent agents because it seems that TikTok was not just about the algorithm, which nobody in India and none of the other platforms over time, Mod and Josh and other short video platforms which emerged in the kind of more post TikTok era in India. And though TikTok would come back. So there's no post per se, is to say that as much as they could not in some ways build algorithms like TikTok, but they did take TikTok's point about localization and kind of finding local talent in kind of regional, provincial areas of India to be seriously. And I think talent agents were performing that role for these short video platforms, that is. And they also actively recruited content creators who were involved in college theater in some of these places in small towns like say, Kanpur, which is in a way a big town to go around and sort of find creators. And so some of the content creators themselves also became talent agents or kind of talent scouts in that sense, who could do their own kind of content creation, but were also involved in kind of trying to find people who had these kinds of skills. And they would then suggest to them that why don't you consider being part of. You know, and the kind of avenues of interest were more like that. To me, famous karatenge will make you famous or will make things go viral or you will get a kind of, you can go to Dehradun or something to be part of a workshop or make content there. So this kind of notions of also travel. So I thought that was an interesting space to also discuss the question of distribution because it was important to have those talent scouts go travel or recruit talent scouts who could recruit content creators from different regions because it seemed to be the case that things would not move in your short video platform unless you had local hyperlocal creators, influencers. So I think talent agents are an interesting. Talent scouts are an interesting part of the story about circulation and distribution were often the kind of impetus is to study algorithms. But I think this is also another side of TikTok, which the short video platforms in India kind of embraced and thought with Effy.
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B
Definitely. And that's a very interesting insight because it also in a way intersects with these conversations, but also adds another layer to it. So another facet that caught my attention throughout in the book is, is the notion of everydayness as a conceptual category, the routineness, mundaneness and diverse circuits of digital India and how that unfolds tracing the informal networks and transactional affordances in subaltern India particularly, and you gave the example of Kanpur, but also particularly the Mewati and Bhojpuri vernacular cultures. Could you pin down the novelty of these aspects or sites of investigation that emerged during your research? Because the vernacular as a category is still not as talked about.
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A
Yeah, I mean, there are concerns by linguists like GMDevi that using terms like provincial or vernacular or dialect instead of languages. And I think I share that concern. At the same time, it is also a discussion that sort of, as part of a discourse analysis, one uses that term. And yeah, I think these were important sites to study. Bhat Mewat and I studied some Bhojpuri media circulation through memory cards in Gaya also, which is not exactly in the Bhojpuri region per se, but Bhojpuri music is extremely popular there as well. Yeah, I think what one saw at that time was also just how important memory cards had become for circulation and how much, particularly in Mewat. When we were studying in 2010, 2011, local, like electronic stores would put their ads in the music video along. And so the ads would appear along with the. The kind of song and dance routine around that song. Then the. The Shire or the lyricist for that song would also appear a few times. And one. One kind of saw in that sense how distribution and representation kind of went hand in hand. The mobile phone in general is very everyday. Right. Like, using it is very much a part of every day of almost our kind of habits or microhabits or micro actions of likes and forwards are also very routine. And in that sense, the discussion of infrastructures has also been about kind of the routine. There's a lot of discussion about how we notice infrastructures when they break down. But a lot of the discussion about infrastructures is also about their kind of mundane routineness. And alongside content consumption, the question of thinking about payments and lending, which also have always been routine also, but now are very much routinized through the. Through the phone. And so I think the mundaneness is an interesting aspect and I find it very fascinating that in our definitions and our study of culture, the everyday is where culture resides. We often discuss it that way. What is interesting is that the other dimension of economy is often very abstract in a disciplinary sense, in a statistical sense. But the economy is also extremely mundane or operates in a very mundane way. And I think there is that tension, which I was very interested to also think about in this book, about how for the everyday, culture and economy, they both have to kind of come together, but culture very easily does. Economy also is very much there, but scholarly frameworks and disciplines somehow seem to keep it a bit apart.
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B
Definitely. And the everyday is often very, very difficult, ambiguous as a category to even pin down. So I'm very fascinated by that aspect that you put.
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A
Yeah, Very momentous, very kind of eludes capture, only presents itself in fragments.
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B
Yeah. So you also Describe a very interesting role of platform companies as crucial mediators, but not neutral media intermediaries. Could you also elaborate on their role as mediators in navigating content moderation in this process?
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A
Yeah, you know, the platform company is a mediator in so many ways. I mean, one is its use of algorithms to move certain things, to make something visible, to spread some things, to make other things invisible. The platform company also recruits talent scouts or talent agents who have a particular role in picking up talent or content creators or influencers over time. There are also influencer marketeers who are also part of this kind of complex assemblage of platform ecosystems. So there is a lot going on in terms of content moderation. What content gets picked up even before it's moderated, what content is selected to even be made in the first place? I thought it was also interesting for me in this book was to also think about loan companies as platforms and how they navigated. And they were also very used the kind of classic platform lingua that what they were doing was just connecting lenders and borrowers and they were just an intermediary. So it's fascinating to see that kind of language being used by loan apps saying they're not the ones who are fixing these different things about interest rates and so on and so forth. Necessarily what they're doing is just connecting lenders and borrowers. So it was fascinating how similar language of what's been discussed about platforms in terms of content moderation or intermediary aspects of them has been discussed also in the context of platforms as financial intermediaries.
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B
Definitely. And that connects to the next question also in your work you've unpacked. The rich collective theater going and active audience cultures has been theorized by scholars like Purnima Mankekar, Shakuntala Banerjee, Lakshmi Srinivas. And you've referred to a lot of their work and now it has been taken over by individualized viewing habits and viewership habits and patterns. So during my interactions with directors and editors and a lot of these filmmakers also especially, I could infer a massive shift in production techniques as audiences increasingly consume content in isolation, perhaps on their mobile phones. Their attention spans are also shrinking and the pressure is on creators to use extreme hooks and explicit content to keep viewers engaged. So how does this era of individualized networked media fundamentally fracture the collective viewing experience? And what happens to the concept of an active audience that we often talked about, especially in the context of Indian cinema, Indian content, Indian consumption patterns and the way we are going to be consuming cinema entirely in private.
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A
Yeah, that's a great question. And thanks for also telling a bit about what you heard. Your internal curators in the industry while you were doing your research mentioned this. Yeah, I mean, and editors, scriptwriters are also imagining this kind of audience or are being told to imagine that one is making products or commodities or content for this kind of an audience or user. From a distribution perspective. To begin with, in a kind of early days of streaming, there was this concern that amongst distributors I chatted with, especially distribution technology folks, that it was very important for them to make sure that there was no buffering. That this kind of individualized audience was somebody. They always gave me use case scenarios and this was very striking that they would always give me a use case scenario of somebody in a public transport, like in a commuter train or an autorickshaw sharing space with others also on their phones. I mean they were always somewhat that this is somebody who is somewhat lower middle class traveling for work. And it takes time and that's when they watch. And it was very important for them to make sure that the streaming would not buffer because they were very worried that if it buffered then it was a case of people stopping to watch streaming content and sort of using an already downloaded movie file or to watch a film that they're already or on their. Which was on their memory cards to watch. So I felt like they were trying every bit possible through this kind of bitrate ladder optimization that they would change the kind of quality of the file from or like the pixel quality, so on and so forth or resolutions from. Say it would run at 720p. It could move to 480, 240. But it would still. They won't use kind of a high kind of surround sound per se. That's not required in some cases. So changing kind of the resolution of the file would still allow for a somewhat seamless streaming experience. Visually buffering was the key for them. And I cannot tell you just how many examples I heard which was kind of striking. And this is at a time when it's still not. I feel a done debate about whether people are really watching that it's so hyper individualized in that sense because there's some scholarship which suggests that they also collectively view on their phones or that it's not completely kind of taken over. So it's fascinating how those aspects, I think have become such a dominant frame of discussion. And as you're saying, not just distributors, but very much producers who are also kind of thinking about that kind of audiences are being told to think about that kind of audience. And in some cases I heard script writers and this is for some other work I was doing research who said that they really do not want to change how they make films and TV shows based on this kind of a diktat.
- [42:22]
B
Yeah, definitely. So. So that was very interesting. And now that also connects to the next question. You also talk about how Internet circulated content that often generate a notion of subaltern identity, adding to fears and anxiety about the often reductionist region. Centric detailing this often goes hand in hand with the desire of aspirational mobility of say Delhi that is projected as an upliftment of material and social life. So what would you say how there is also an OTT show like Delhi Crime, for example, that is also an Emmy award winning show in influencing that discourse or narrative when it comes to gendered aspirations and mobility, but also the question of public spaces and urban spaces in India. You mention a couple of examples across in the book, but this unpacking of what it means to situate gendered aspirations and gendered mobility also seems very fascinating to me across your chapters.
- [43:37]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, one of the big places and historically also the discussion of financial inclusion say in across South Asia, but across the global south in that sense has been about kind of involving women through women's cooperatives. This is the kind of Grameen bank example, Mohammed Yunus's case, and where this idea of having a woman's cooperative and then women taking loans because they were considered more responsible. This has certainly been a helpful narrative. But at the same time others have said that this only increased increases the responsibility of women to repay. And in some cases women take the loans, but their nephew or husband kind of takes the money and then they have to find a way of. What is kind of interesting is just how many times I heard from, you know, in the more corporate fintech spaces, this kind of narrative of microfinance and women's cooperatives as being the kind of inspiration for wise. There are these kind of lending platforms and loan apps in India today which are lending to woman micro entrepreneurs. But the way in which the lending happens and that story and this is discussing a continued gendered aspirational aspect, right? With loans and what one can do with the money and how that kind of can lead to socioeconomic mobility. But the ways in which this was being done in the Grameen bank model is that somebody would go and see what are the resources in the house, how many steel containers they have, how many do they have like a cow for milk, so on and so forth, how many chickens, hens, so on and so forth. But in this case there's no assessment of the kind of tangible aspects, tangible material aspects of one's life. But here it's more about whether so and so person who is going to be the borrower of that loan shows a behavioral inclination to repay. That's what this kind of alternative data points through machine learning of mobile phone activity is allowing. So it's not so much the capacity to repay, but the inclination or the behavioral tendency to repay, which is being, which is being the basis for these kinds of loans. So that's a significant difference in terms of a shift. And I've already discussed what it means in terms to give loan to a woman is almost like you're suggesting you're giving a loan to the family. So I think the question of the gendered aspiration real frame is also very much a part of the lending platform framing. It's very much a part of kind of this discourse of financial inclusion which others suggest is another way for which financial capitalism to capture more subscribers, more borrowers. So it's the story of whether financial inclusion is just another form of market expansion or it's really catering to a very large audience user space which really needs these loans. So I think gendered socioeconomic mobility is very much part of the framing of discourses of financial technologies, of financial inclusion, even as these contradictions remain and which sometimes get completely brushed away, but which are really out there to be seen.
- [47:37]
B
Definitely. So we are coming towards the end of our interview, but this one question is also there. So throughout your book I was very intrigued by the insights you made on upper caste and the emphasis in describing an almost beyond caste or caste list society. An affirmative stance of occupying the middle class position. This continues to be quite a prominent stance in often doing an ethnography on the everyday lives. And as an early career researcher who is similarly tackling these issues in navigating fieldwork, I'm sure many like me would like to learn about how does one work around one's positionality in such spaces. More so since there is always this dilemma of being an insider outsider also with the status as international researchers that are seen as perhaps as divorced from the everyday lives of India. Even more if it's subaltern India. So could you describe that?
- [48:47]
A
Yeah, I mean positionality and two kinds of them. I think you've written about how positionality of certain creators, if they're queer, they're being asked or expected to make a kind of an LGBTQ content and not write stories about maybe straight relationships and so on and so forth. So there's that positionality of the kind of creator and there's the positionality of the researcher, as you mentioned, which comes with its own kinds of privileges and limits. And I think both are important considerations. I mean, I had my own upper caste privileges writing for technology. Kind of a press like MIT Press, which is off in the kind of. In certain circles in India. And it's. And the kind of discussion that you mentioned about aspirational framing itself, I found to be fascinating in the sense that many asked me that or told me that they were kind of suspicious of this kind of aspirational framing. That aspiration was usually leveraged by upper caste scholars, journalists, media professionals, marketeers as a way to suggest that one is in a casteless society. There were even television reports which said caste set aside by aspiration. So in a sense, aspirational framing for them was for the skeptics, who were also my interlocutors, they suggested that this was a very upper caste way of talking about kind of, in a way kind of saying that in this moment in India, we should talk about aspirations, because this is about upward mobility, where caste does not matter, but caste certainly matters. And I think that's a crucial kind of both an analytic, but also its embeddedness in the society was something I was very interested using a term like aspirational politics, which I wanted to say that as much as I'm studying this aspirational framing, I'm very critical of this kind of an aspirational framing. Yeah. And I was very struck by this aspect of how, in some ways a lot of people even suggested to me that, you know, aspirations today is an empty word anymore. It's about empty promises. Because so much of this kind of aspirational discussion over the last decade or so has led to, you know, continued unemployment even. There was a particular minister in a state government even took it far to say, as far as to say that, you know, the unemployed should be not called unemployed, but aspirational youth or something. So I think there are limits to that kind of discussion of aspiration. And I think discussions of aspiration also suggest the kind of positionalities of who is talking about aspiration and in what way. And, you know, as a researcher, I think this, the position of a researcher, I think there are certainly occasions, as much as one would like to know, there are also risks that one is extracting data or information, and there are also situations where one would have to be humble enough to understand that even as one is trying to understand something, there are limits to one's capacity as a researcher to understand. And that there are ways of being in solidarity when perhaps certain communication fails and there's a certain kind of estrangement, and that there can be solidarity even when not knowing. But one knows in some ways that one cannot know. So those things are kind of important to consider and reflect on. This lot of writing within feminist technoscience, this discussion about patchwork ethnography in the field of anthropology.
- [53:39]
B
So that brings me to the last leg of our interview. I'm sure listeners would like to know more about your future projects, books or articles you're currently working on. So perhaps a little about that.
- [53:54]
A
Yeah, I mean, I've been very interested in thinking about scale, something you've mentioned, and there are two I think the positionality of the researcher matters. And I've been thinking about what does it mean to mediate 5G across scales and kind of how 5G as a technology can be used by a telecom firm, but that telecom firm is also part of the any tech space. So, you know, I could talk about, say, Microsoft having a kind of agritech wing, or Geo having kind of geocrisy having an agritech wing. So I've been very interested in those questions when there's a lot of horizontal and vertical integration happening in corporate firms who are involved in many different technologies today. And data is the common kind of motivational movement which sort of moves around how it is both important to study things at a scale, but then scale is also about a certain kind of positionality of the researcher, their own epistemic considerations. And so there's a double bind of maybe even refining kind of industry discourse by studying them across scales. Even though to kind of bring through the contradictions of corporate discourse, one needs to study them at. At scales. So there's that kind of work that I've been very interested in working on in some ways writing about actually OTT crime dramas and kind of how they navigate both the kind of historic melodrama aspects of Bollywood alongside the kind of tautness of plot, the tightness of kind of a script for a crime drama that's required and whether there's a How do they kind of make it work. Yeah, I think those are the two things I can think of now. Yeah.
- [55:53]
B
So those are very exciting projects and very much looking forward to them as well. So thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today. It's been an incredibly enlightening conversation. Learn so much more about your book and your work, and we're very grateful for your time that you gave to New Books Network and look forward to your exciting scholarship in the coming months and years.
- [56:20]
A
Thanks, Priyam thanks for so carefully reading the book and for your very insightful questions.
- [56:26]
B
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