Where do the limits of the platform economy lie? Though digital labour platforms are often framed in Global South contexts as powerful tools of economic inclusion and an innovative 'fix' for the problems of underdevelopment, in this paper I put forward a more critical perspective on their inclusive properties and potentials. Drawing on a case study of digital ride-hailing in the Ugandan motorcycle-taxi sector, I develop this perspective in three steps. First, I show that over time the terms of workers' inclusion in the ride-hail platform economy have decayed into widespread conditions of adverse (digital) incorporation. Second, I highlight the multiple ways in which moto-taxi riders have gone on to contest this arrangement, emphasizing a core logic of digital refusal and de-automation that in many cases culminates in riders exiting back into a now-destabilized world of 'analogue' moto-taxi operation. And finally, I suggest that these particular 'afterlives of adverse incorporation' represent an under-appreciated yet powerful challenge from below to the apparent inevitabilities of digital transformation.
This paper analyses public distrust and popular refusal surrounding Jamaica's proposed biometric, digital, national identification system (NIDS). While such responses have been interpreted in relation to the afterlives of slavery, this paper argues that distrust and refusal must be situated in relation to more recent and concrete interactions between citizens and state institutions, notably in the context of clientelism, organized crime and state incapacity. The paper then teases out a vernacular rejection of the ideals of speed, optimization and productivity among Jamaican citizens, ideals which drive and define biometric identification and financial inclusion initiatives globally. The paper thus argues that Caribbean history, theory and ethnography provide a critical set of conceptual tools that can inform broader studies of the biometric transformation.
Declassification is an important mechanism by which democracies seek to legitimate state secrecy. This paper eventalizes declassification by looking at one of the historical contexts in which it was born: the Manhattan Project in 1945. I make two arguments. First, declassification is more than unveiling; it is a transformative and constitutive practice that brings a new material object into existence. That object is the declassified secret whose formation and features I trace. Second, within the Manhattan Project declassification was not conducted by a centralized authority unilaterally determining what is to be disclosed. Instead, the Project's experts invented a game that I call request-review. In this game interested actors, such as scientists and corporate contractors, appeal to the relevant authority to have particular scientific reports de-secretized on a case-by-case basis. This bespoke, targeted approach to the governance of secrecy anticipates the general practice we now recognize as the freedom of information request.
