Geography of digital hope: An optimistic perspective on digital labor and infrastructure from the Global South

Abstract

This article frames digital infrastructures as “geographies of digital hope,” to propose new epistemologies rooted in everyday digital practices of the marginalized majority in the Global South. We critically examine the prevailing pessimistic bias in contemporary media scholarship, with an overemphasis on the extractive and exploitative dimensions of digital labor and infrastructures, and the underemphasis of the enablement and empowering aspects of these digital terrains. This commentary calls for reassessing the value of infrastructures from the everyday digital negotiations and lived realities with media of communities in the Global South. We propose a conceptual counterforce to dominant pessimistic and deterministic narratives—surveillance capitalism and algorithms of oppression—with alternative framings of surveillance of care and algorithms of aspiration, to uncover how marginalized users leverage emergent and existing digital spaces, despite the harms and risks, to create new forms of livelihoods, solidarities, care-giving, and agencies to carve their everyday futures.

This article is a part of special theme on Infrastructure, Labour, & Social Change. To see a full list of all articles in this special theme, please click here: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/bds/collections/infrastructure_labour_social_change?pbEditor=true

Introduction

In the last decade, media scholarship has increasingly become pessimistic, where gig workers, rural entrepreneurs, and diasporic migrants are dominantly framed as the subjugated “embodied precariat” (Popan, 2024). Their labor with and within digital infrastructures are largely looked at in terms of exploitation. Content creators and users, especially from the Global South, are typically seen as victims of “data colonialism,” where their data is extracted, harvested by Big Tech, perpetuating historical patterns of resource control and inequality (Couldry and Mejias, 2019). We recognize the critical need to confront the harms and risks propagated by digital infrastructures. These are not exceptional failures but are increasingly understood as systemic outcomes of platform architectures designed for maximum engagement and profit, with possible devastating consequences in the Global South. This critical scholarship builds on past critique of social media, for instance how Facebook fueled ethnic genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar (Vaidhyanathan, 2018), and how WhatsApp accelerated moral panics with lynchings in India (Banaji et al., 2019). Antonio Pele and Caitlin Mulholland (2023) term it as “data necropolitics” to uncover the slow violence of precarity and exclusion mediated by algorithms.

These critical perspectives, while essential for exposing structural power imbalances, risk creating a “pessimism paralysis”—a sense of impotence that forecloses possibilities for future-making with and within digital spaces. Such a politics of despair leaves little room for understanding why many of these very populations, despite the risks and harms, see deep value and are optimistic about these platforms (Arora, 2019, 2024a, 2024b). This impasse presents a critical conundrum: how do we reconcile the structural critiques of digital platforms with, for example the “labor of reinvention” undertaken by Chinese rural entrepreneurs (Zhang, 2023), the “entrepreneurial solidarity” Filipino workers build on social media amidst precarity (Soriano and Cabañes, 2020), and the ways digital labor in Latin America becomes embedded in local systems of care and kinship (Posada, 2022).

This commentary confronts this analytical impasse that pits structural oppression against user agency. Our aim is not to replace a deterministic pessimism with a naive optimism, but to unpack and move beyond a “binarized analysis” that frames digital infrastructures as either totalizing forces of exploitation or untroubled geographies of hope. Rather, we argue this perceived binary between oppression and optimism obscures a fundamental reality: precarity and hope can and do coexist, often becoming co-constitutive in the digital practices of Southern communities. For many, the digital space is experienced not as a simple choice between empowerment and exploitation, but as a complex, contested terrain of “critical hope.” This hope entangled with, rather than separate from the realities of everyday precarity, is a practical, lived, and politically necessary orientation for those who must engage with these systems to survive and aspire.

Drawing from the empirical data and a growing scholarship grounded in the Global South, this commentary proposes a critical epistemological shift to reassess infrastructural value from the lens of communities of practice, especially from the Global South, and those “at the bottom of the data pyramid” (Arora, 2016). We develop the concept of “geographies of digital hope” to analyze how aspirations for a better life are shaped amidst the structural constraints of the digital economy. Following Furlong (2021), this perspective understands digital infrastructures not merely as material and technical systems, but relational and affective formations embedded in everyday data production and exchange, which shape and are shaped by values, cultural norms, and everyday communicative acts. Our approach intentionally moves beyond a Western-centric data universalism that often portrays the Global South as a singular entity (Milan and Treré, 2019). We also resist a simplistic Chinese exceptionalism, grounding our analysis in a broader South–South conversation. Within this framework, digital infrastructures are revealed as sites of both inclusion and exclusion, empowerment and exploitation.

This article is structured as follows. We ground our perspective in two key concepts, “algorithms of aspiration” and “surveillance of care,” to uncover how digital infrastructures are used, played with, and reclaimed by marginalized groups in the Global South. First, we approach algorithms as tools for visibility and creativity as a counter-framing of algorithms of oppression and data colonialism; second, we explore the affective, informal, and collective dimension of surveillance to challenge deterministic critiques around surveillance. This agenda calls for a new epistemology rooted in the agency, resilience, precarity, and creativity of Southern subaltern groups, urging us to rethink the use of digital infrastructures as contested spaces where hope, too, is infrastructured.

Algorithms of aspiration

Safiya Noble's “Algorithms of Oppression” (2018) offers a crucial critique of how search engines and other algorithmic systems reinforce structural biases, particularly against marginalized groups. Its merit lies in exposing the ways digital platforms embed and amplify social inequalities rather than functioning as neutral technologies. However, the very power of this framework can lead to a deterministic view that risks overlooking the agency of users, especially from the Global South. Data is culture. This framing fails to capture the pluriversal ways in which communities intervene, repurpose, and reimagine these algorithms and technologies, where they can be a source of both harm and hope.

Rather than viewing algorithms dominantly as instruments of oppression, a more generative approach would be to conceptualize them as “algorithms of aspiration” (Arora, 2024b). The concept is not as a simple counter-narrative to oppression, but as a lens to examine the complicated and contradictory strategies for survival, creativity, and future-making that unfold within platform ecosystems. It acknowledges that digital systems reflect societal conditions but also holds that they can be reconfigured in ways that empower users. This shift allows for a more dynamic understanding of technology, acknowledging both its constraints and its transformative possibilities as negotiated by its users.

Consider Kuaishou, a short-video platform with 600 million active users, which has reshaped China's media landscape. Its infrastructure is engineered to algorithmically prioritize what it terms “authentic rural life,” enabling an “unlikely creative class” (Lin and De Kloet, 2019) of marginalized, self-employed creative workers to document their quotidian experiences. For these “grassroots entrepreneurs,” creativity and individuality are constantly mobilized and calculated according to the workings of the platform to democratize content creation. They become savvy at hacking the algorithm in ways to become visible and heard through intuitive interfaces and algorithmic amplification of grassroots content. For migrant youth in particular, Kuaishou's monetization tools and algorithmic visibility mechanisms offer pathways to e-commerce “micro-entrepreneurship,” turning aspirational creative labor into a viable alternative to traditional industrial work (Zhou and Liu, 2022).

However, this opportunity is predicated on what Lin Zhang (2023) terms the “labor of reinvention.” Zhang shows how rural-to-urban migrants and village artisans engage in a grueling process of self-branding, content creation, and algorithmic navigation to build e-commerce livelihoods. This entrepreneurialism, while aspirational, is fraught with contradictions. It often deepens existing inequalities, relies on the unpaid labor of family members, particularly women, and is subject to the whims of both platform logics and state developmental goals. Hope, in this context, is not a gift of the algorithm but is produced through precarious labor.

This dynamic of navigating precarity through collective support is further illuminated by Soriano and Cabañes’ (2020) concept of “entrepreneurial solidarities.” They explore how Filipino online freelance workers use social media groups for sharing strategies, negotiating rates, and providing mutual care. This solidarity is crucial for their social and economic survival. However, these collectives can inadvertently “undermine their resistive potential” and reinforce the very neoliberal and individualistic logics of the platform economy they seek to mitigate. It shows the potential of solidarity is often compromised; it is not a monolithic force but one entangled with capitalist logics that provide coping mechanisms at the expense of structural change.

Here, digital infrastructures do not merely extract value; they redistribute opportunity, enabling users to renegotiate their position within national and global hierarchies. These communities are not surviving the algorithm; they are reframing their logics, proving that aspiration, when infrastructurally enabled, can also create an empowering digital order. Centering their practices is not just a moral imperative but a methodological one: it forces us to ask who gets to decide the nature of “value” from such digital tools? What is the starting point of our investigations—for instance, in what ways are laborers oppressed, which will reify the conceptual notions of digital oppression, versus a more open-ended and context-sensitive approach that asks how do different people engage and negotiate with these infrastructures, and how do they perceive such tools for their wellbeing?

Surveillance of care

“Surveillance” has a dominant and negative connotation in Western scholarship. The everyday experience of big data suggests a “surveillant anxiety” that renders people passive under the pervasive monitoring (Crawford and Schultz, 2014). The concept of “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff, 2023) focuses on how people's personal data within digital infrastructures are harnessed by Big Tech to predict and manipulate behavior for profit. It has become a dominant framework for understanding our relationship with digital platforms and labor, highlighting corporate surveillance as a key threat to autonomy. However, its focus on Anglo-Saxon anxieties about individual autonomy sidelines how communities in the Global South experience and negotiate surveillance in relation to safety, security, and the high need for visibility. In many countries in the Global South, capitalism has emerged from communist and socialist structures and remains within paternalistic regimes, giving it its own character that needs consideration (Peck and Zhang, 2013). As a counterbalance, we propose a “surveillance of care” (Arora, 2024b), not as a simple, overly optimistic alternative, but as an analytical lens to recognize how communities repurpose tracking technologies for mutual aid, solidarity, and protection. It pivots from a paradigm of fear to relational transparency and trust, where surveillance can become a means of “watching over each other” rather than “watching each other” (Arora, 2024b: 74).

This care can become a radical practice of hope. In China, existing academic research on Chinese feminism predominantly focuses on state repression and systemic suppression, with little attention paid to how feminist activists support each other through practices of self-care and collective wisdom. The personal politics of hope is critical for understanding the persistence of feminism in China. Shao and He (2024) have illustrated how digital feminists have carved out safe zones online, transforming public expressions into private ones, visible only to chosen friends. In this way, they seek resonance with like-minded networks, and share legal resources and mental health support, turning state-monitored spaces into sites of mutual aid. For marginalized labor communities, surveillance becomes an act of collective reciprocity. Female Didi drivers in China and women Uber drivers in India form women-only closed groups to exchange experiences, seek support on the road, and address gender-based violence together (Bansal et al., 2023; Kwan, 2022). In Jakarta, platform drivers build what Qadri (2023) terms “distributed solidarity” through hundreds of WhatsApp groups, combating the alienation of gig work. Similarly, transnational Filipino domestic workers use TikTok to document abuses, transforming leisure platforms into archives of counter-memory (Cabalquinto, 2024).

However, a critical application of this concept of “surveillance of care” requires qualifying the nature of “hope.” The solidarity we observe is not a pure or untroubled force, but one that is deeply embedded with local power dynamics and structural precarity. The “relational trust” built in these groups must be contextualized and examined critically. For instance, Julian Posada's (2022) research reveals how Latin American data workers offload risk, and their survival depends on local, trust-based networks of “embedded reproduction.” Yet they simultaneously place a disproportionate and often gendered burden on communities to absorb the costs of social reproduction that both the state and the platform abdicate. Therefore, the “care” in surveillance of care is also a form of burdened, necessary labor that can reinforce the very asymmetries it seeks to mitigate.

Furthermore, the agency of these users should be understood not as simple resistance but as what Lilly Nguyen (2016) calls “infrastructural action.” For those on the margins, digital practices are often delicate strategies for breaking into global technoculture, not just breaking out of it. When Chinese feminists use politically neutral hashtags to survive censorship (Wang and Tavmen, 2024), or when Filipino workers repurpose TikTok's logics of visibility, they are engaged in infrastructural actions (Cabalquinto, 2024). They are skillfully infrastructuring their own politics and presence within the spaces afforded by the systems that might otherwise exploit them. These contradictions are palpable. In India, women working with the salon service platform Urban Company speak of gaining new forms of “respectability” as the platform disrupts the entrenched “master-servant” relationship of informal domestic work (Komarraju et al., 2022). While they are critical of algorithmic management, they still see the platform as a positive force offering more dignity. Platform infrastructures, in this sense, are sites of complicated negotiation, not just simple oppression.

As surveillance scholars Murakami Wood and Rodrigo Firmino (2009) argue, “The fear of anonymity and being ‘lost’ is far stronger than any concern about surveillance or control” (p. 299). Surveillance of care requires dismantling the binary between security, safety, and control and that of freedoms by situating context, conditions, and cultures at the center (Arora, 2019) to redefine its meaning. We make the case to take seriously surveillance systems of care for communal needs, where we can transmute anxiety into agency, extraction into care, and isolation into collective solidarity. These examples, in turn, speak to the diverse ways in which the Global South envisions and practices hope and care, reflecting the plurality of experiences, aspirations, and forms of resistance across the region.

Conclusion

Drawing on geography's critical legacy of analyzing power, space, and inequality, digital infrastructures should be understood as more than technical systems; rather, they are spatial, relational, and affective artifacts embedded in the contested terrains of global power. Shaped by (post-)colonial legacies, extractive capitalism, and geopolitical hierarchies, these infrastructures, while creating spatial inequalities, also enable grassroots reimagining of technology across spaces. Grounded in practices of communities from the Global South, we have conceptualized these digital infrastructures as “geographies of digital hope,” which are not static technical networks but dynamic social-techno ecologies co-constituted with social frictions, grassroots creations, and plural aspirations of progress. The concepts of “algorithms of aspiration” and the “surveillance of care” have served to rupture the oppression/resistance binary, centering instead the ambivalent and nuanced strategies that define the lived experience of the digital for much of the world. As we have shown, these are not utopian spaces free from exploitation. Aspiration is often a form of precarious “labor of reinvention” (Zhang, 2023); care can also be a burdened form of “embedded reproduction” that mitigates market risk while potentially reinforcing local asymmetries (Posada, 2022); and solidarity can manifest in entrepreneurial forms that may also dampen the potential for collective structural change (Soriano and Cabañes, 2020).

Acknowledging these complexities is not a retreat into pessimism. On the contrary, it is a call to reconsider the everyday, small, and creative practices through which alternative digital futures are being and already built. We have the chance to believe this “agency-based optimism” (Danaher, 2022) is not driven by blind optimism but by collective labor that reminds us that an alternative digital world is possible and happening. It is worth reminding us that, as Arora (2024b) argues, “pessimism is a privilege for those who can afford to despair”—the rest of the world has little choice but to be optimistic if they want agency over their digital futures.