School of Social and Political Science

Description

We often associate the digital economy with accelerated mobility and new freedoms: the digitally enabled hypermobility of money, remote work, or e-commerce goes hand in hand with ideas about digital nomads and online freelancers who seemingly work from anywhere. Building on a critique of this digital-mobility-freedom chain of thought, this seminar talk explores the tensions and attractions between confined working populations and a hypermobile global digital economy. During this journey of thought, we will stop in Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, and Kenya to understand the experiences of digital and remote workers who live under diverse forms of geographic, economic, political, or regulatory confinement. This includes populations that live under the impact of occupation or economic crisis, as well as forcibly displaced people who are confined to camps. Like static satellites that seemingly orbit a rotating planet, these fixed and marginalized working populations become connected to the hypermobile dimensions of a global economy but lack the agency and freedom to move. Their experience foreshadows the emergence of a new hypermobile ghetto in a digital world of work.