How then do we escape conventional models of the global
digital economy as well as their critique? Part of the problem in
India is the limited expanse of elite technological domains in
everyday life, except as an more noumenal figure. There is however
a large technological experience in everyday life. This is a
remarkable experience marked by its preponderant non-legality!
Consider this: most computers in India are sold from the grey
market, the majority of cable television is transmitted by non-
legal, unregistered local cable, and the majority of the music and
video cassette circulation is, again illegal. ** I call this a pirate
modernity, where the technological experience is dispersed,
accelerated and embedded in locality. **
This brings us back to the figure of the 'market'. If with
Braudel we believe a crucial layer of the market is the embedded
form in everyday life, in India the experience of the technological
has been quotidian, retailed by local, often illegal small
business. This a world far removed from the dot coms and the
AOL/Time-Warner monoliths, as well as the nationalist state.
---------- The Entire Forwarded Message ----------
Date: Mon, 15 May 2000 01:43:29
From: Ravi Sundaram <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Hi
I'm appearing in Networks and Markets for the first time - as
a discussant. I live and work in Delhi, the capital city of a
country that has the largest number of non-literates in the world
as well as one of the highest domain name registrations in the
internet. This may seem paradoxical, even cruel, but I would like
to use this to raise certain issues for the forum.
The new techno-capitalism has arrived in India. The
speculative wave here rivals, perhaps even surpasses the West given
the levels of inequality. As dot coms have risen in the past year
at a fever pitch, the spatial registers of everyday life have been
remapped, almost completely. Coming from the airport a week ago I
saw that almost every billboard was that of a new dot com emerging.
The experience of shock and spectacle that this phenomenon has
generated surely rivals what must have obtained with the first
experiences of the cinema and the railway in India.
I think it is important not to get carried away. This new
structure of elite technological capital is a certain modal form
that is being retailed on the basis of the US model. This is how
the 'market' works. A dot com is set up, conjuring up an imaginary
market with venture capital from the US West Coast, sometimes of
diasporic origin. Content providers are recruited, at large
salaries with tied stock options. This is an unremarkable mode by
today's standards, which could be reproduced in any part of the
West today. As an imaginary this mode is shot through with a new
temporal acceleration, which in the Indian case was once the
privilege of nationalist-style developmentalism. This is also
something that hides the more conventional commodity chain of
technocapital in India:data processing for Western companies which
provides the volume of 'software' exports. This includes processing
aeroplane reservations in the West in real time, medical records
etc.
I am gesturing to the conventionality of this model because it
is often used to build a politics of translation between
Western/Third World critics. Here one can offer a basic critique of
the global commodity chain of techno-capital from the arsenal of
Marxisant critiques of development/globalisation. Such critiques
are important and necessary, but are not enough to build a language
of translation.
How then do we escape conventional models of the global
digital economy as well as their critique? Part of the problem in
India is the limited expanse of elite technological domains in
everyday life, except as an more noumenal figure. There is however
a large technological experience in everyday life. This is a
remarkable experience marked by its preponderant non-legality!
Consider this: most computers in India are sold from the grey
market, the majority of cable television is transmitted by non-
legal, unregistered local cable, and the majority of the music and
video cassette circulation is, again illegal. I call this a pirate
modernity, where the technological experience is dispersed,
accelerated and embedded in locality.
This brings us back to the figure of the 'market'. If with
Braudel we believe a crucial layer of the market is the embedded
form in everyday life, in India the experience of the technological
has been quotidian, retailed by local, often illegal small
business. This a world far removed from the dot coms and the
AOL/Time-Warner monoliths, as well as the nationalist state. And it
is a world that all actors in the elite technological economy
regard with horror and disgust.
The important issue for me is to build a new East-West cultural
politics of translation which speaks to this world.
--------------------------------
/:b
