# Discussion Notes on ‘Digital Platforms and the Global South: Reconfiguring Power Relations in the Cultural Industries’

Noosim Naimasiah

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OpenEdition
Journals

**Electronic version**

URL: https://journals.openedition.org/eastafrica/5546

DOI: 10.4000/15da2

ISSN: 2790-1076

**Publisher**

IFRA - Institut Français de Recherche en Afrique

**Electronic reference**

Noosim Naimasiah, "Discussion Notes on 'Digital Platforms and the Global South: Reconfiguring Power Relations in the Cultural Industries", *Les Cahiers d'Afrique de l'Est / The East African Review* [Online], 61 | 2025, Online since 17 December 2025, connection on 20 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/eastafrica/5546; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15da2

This text was automatically generated on January 20, 2026.

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# Discussion Notes on ‘Digital Platforms and the Global South: Reconfiguring Power Relations in the Cultural Industries’

Noosim Naimasiah

## AUTHOR'S NOTE

Noosim Naimasiah is a Pan-Africanist filmmaker, scholar, and social justice activist. Her work focuses on indigenous knowledge, political economy and liberatory politics. She is currently a lead researcher and editor at Ukombozi Library.

On 11 November, Noosim Naimasiah was invited by IFRA-Nairobi to discuss the book 'Digital Platforms and the Global South: Reconfiguring Power Relations in the Digital Industries', edited by Christine Ithurbide, Philippe Bouquillon, and Tristan Mattelart and published by Routledge in 2024. She gave an exciting talk, addressing relevant issues that encouraged us to think deeply and broadly.

1

This book, and the conversation it provokes, opens up a deep reflection on the question of *how we do interdisciplinary research*. It brings together political economists, media scholars, geographers, and social theorists, showing how interdisciplinary work is not simply a matter of mixing disciplines but of asking how each way of knowing illuminates or obscures power. It makes us think about the very communities of practice through which research is done, and what that interdisciplinarity looks like in practice. It pushes us to consider how we can study the digital, not through one lens but through the intersection of economy, culture, and the lived experience of power. Would it be possible for instance, for all the experts to engage one context, one thematic and create a real community of practice? It is a question or resources, just as much as it is a question of methodology.
2 At its heart, the book mainly looks at the character and strategy of the U.S.-based Big Tech platforms, and the often-neglected active role of local and regional players in the expansion of these Western giants, in a relationship that is at once competitive, collaborative, and dependent. This can only be understood through the political economy of Big Tech, an economy of extraction. The physical infrastructure of the digital, data centres, cables, devices, consumes vast amounts of energy and water, while the raw materials that sustain it are drawn from violently exploited labour and land. The Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, holds nearly a third of the world's critical minerals yet captures only a small fraction of the revenue¹. We are forced to ask what it means that the very technologies promising liberation are built upon our dispossession.

3 The digital thus extends the old colonial geography: extraction from the South, and accumulation in the North. But what is striking, and this book shows it well, is that most users of these global platforms now live in the Global South. There are more YouTube users in India than in the United States, more Facebook users in Brazil than in Europe. Yet ownership, capital, and control remain external. This contradiction, massive Southern usage, Northern capture, mirrors the structure of global capitalism itself.

4 The so-called “bridging of the digital divide” reproduces the colonial project in a new language. Undersea cables like Equiano or 2Africa follow the same maritime routes once used for the slave trade². They claim to connect us, but what they really connect is capital to extraction. The infrastructures of inclusion hide the architecture of dependency. Even the phrase “the cloud” erases the material violence of the ground, the water, land, and labour that sustain it.

5 The book's insistence on *context* is critical. To understand platforms, we must look at the places in which they live, their political, cultural, and economic ecologies. Kenya's experience with M-PESA shows how local needs and histories shape technology. It reminds us that innovation in the South is often a response to absence, to lack of access, to infrastructural neglect, yet even these responses are folded into global systems of control³. Platformization must therefore be defined not only technically but socially and historically.

6 This is also a methodological question. The ethnographic attention to how technology is lived and practiced in particular contexts challenges the universal frameworks that dominate much of global tech scholarship. It allows us to ask whose knowledge counts and who gets to define what a platform is. The book refuses to universalize; instead, it provincializes Silicon Valley.

7 The question of the state also runs through this discussion. In Kenya, new cyber laws, among the raft of controversial bills recently passed, grant sweeping powers to police online content. Section 26A gives courts and the executive the authority to shut down websites or platforms under the pretext of illegality. This is significant given the state's entanglement with global platforms. In practice, the state's debt dependency and private partnerships extend the logic of capture. Tasks once performed by public bodies, regulation, communication, even education, have been privatized, creating a hybrid regime where public authority is exercised through corporate infrastructure.

8 This blurring of state and corporate power is at the core of digital colonialism. The privatization of public life happens not only through ownership but through the re-
shaping of the social itself. Technology turns what was once social into economic, monetizing attention, care, love, and solidarity. Platforms reach into the most intimate corners of life and reconfigure them as data and profit.

9

Crowdfunding platforms in Latin America, for instance, allow small businesses to access capital but simultaneously expose them to financialization. Insurance, credit scoring, and algorithmic profiling turn community risk-sharing into private data economies. Informal and social economies, once collective safety nets are captured, de-socialized, and rebranded as “innovation.” This is the neoliberal logic at work: the transfer of public and communal functions into market hands, under the banner of inclusion.

10

The same dynamic plays out in the realm of intimacy. Match-making and dating applications expand the terrain of encounter but also commodify desire. They convert affect into transaction, and freedom into alienation. Social relations once formed through shared histories and embodied spaces are now mediated through algorithmic selection. The self becomes a product, optimized, displayed, and traded.

11

The discussion on Netflix and global streaming platforms extends this argument into culture. Netflix's move from distribution to production in the Global South, commissioning African series, hiring local crews, appears progressive. But control over rights, viewership data, and distribution remains in California. The globalization of "local" culture conceals its subjugation. African cultural labour becomes the subsidy of global capital. As the book asks, how much less does a Nigerian producer have to earn for an American worker to keep their wage? The unevenness of this exchange is not accidental; it is structural.

12

The consequences are visible. In Brazil, as subscription services expand, traditional media, newspapers, cinemas, theatres decline. Independent producers are squeezed out. Audiences are centralized on platforms whose algorithms shape what can be seen and said. This process deepens the homogenization of imagination while claiming diversity.

13

And yet, even here, creativity resists containment. Yoruba filmmakers and Igbo musicians use YouTube to reach their communities, creating archives of expression that exist alongside and sometimes against, the mainstream. There is agency in this participation, even when it is embedded within exploitation. The South is not silent; it speaks in tongues the algorithm cannot fully translate.

14

The book also draws attention to how art itself has been transformed. The familiar argument that “piracy kills creativity” obscures something deeper: that art consumption has been re-defined from a social to an individualized act. Once, music was shared in communal settings, through dance, ceremony, or public performance. Now, art is privatized, experienced through headphones, subscriptions, and paywalls. Piracy, then, may not be theft but a symptom of the commodification of culture, a refusal to let art be locked behind capital.

15

Even the notion of familiarity that the book discusses, platforms like Anghami in Beirut or Mdundo in Nairobi, shows how local cultural identification becomes both resistance and aspiration. These platforms reflect historical struggles over access and the desire for belonging, but they too are drawn into the capitalist marketplace. The tax regimes that favour large transnational producers reveal how national economies remain peripheral, while profits flow outward.
16 Labour is the invisible thread tying these phenomena together. The book shows how mobile phones, through internet access and payment systems, have become part of the cultural economy, tools of both creativity and control. Companies like Orange in Mali or Safaricom in Kenya embody this double role: extending connectivity while reproducing hegemony. The same networks that distribute music also facilitate surveillance, working in partnership with the police.

17 Within this architecture, digital labour becomes the new frontier of colonial extraction. The invisible work of annotating data, moderating violent content, and cleaning AI systems sustains the entire digital economy. It is repetitive, underpaid, and psychologically draining. Behind every “smart” algorithm lies the emotional labour of thousands of workers, many of them women, performing the unseen task of maintaining digital order. The myth of automation depends on their invisibility.

18 This labour regime is also gendered. Women disproportionately occupy the lowest-paid and most precarious positions. They perform the effective work, managing users, handling complaints, moderating abuse, without recognition or protection. The trauma of constant exposure to violence online, combined with job insecurity and lack of mental-health support, forms a continuum with older forms of feminized labour. What was once domestic and invisible is now digital and invisible. The platform becomes the new household of exploitation.

19 This is why we must insist that the question of technology is also the question of care. What would it mean to build digital systems that centre healing rather than harm? That prioritize the wellbeing of those who sustain them? Such an ethic would challenge the foundations of platform capitalism itself, which depends on overwork, anxiety, and precarity as conditions of profit.

20 The discussion of technology-facilitated gender-based violence illustrates this clearly. Online abuse, harassment, doxing, and sexual exploitation reproduce the patriarchal structures of offline life. The anonymity and scale of platforms amplify harm while shielding perpetrators. Violence migrates into the digital, normalized by algorithms that reward outrage and spectacle. For women and marginalized communities, the internet can be both sanctuary and battlefield.

21 Kenya's Gen Z uprisings make this contradiction visible. Social media became the space of mobilization, hashtags, digital satire, TikTok dances. But the same digital traces that enabled solidarity were used for surveillance and repression. The state and the platform converge again: data becomes weaponized. Tanzania offers similar lessons, online resistance constrained by infrastructural control. We are reminded that digital liberation cannot rely on tools built for profit and policing.

22 Technology, then, is not neutral; it is the terrain of struggle. The question is how to resist within it, and how to reimagine it. The idea of “ethical technology” rooted in community values offers one direction; technologies built around African notions of reciprocity, care, and collective wellbeing. Instead of racing to “catch up,” we might ask what kind of world we want to build, and whether speed and scale are virtues at all.

23 At the structural level, public-private partnerships have hollowed out the state, transferring education, communication, and knowledge into corporate hands. The “digital public sphere” is owned. Unless we reclaim collective ownership, through cooperatives, unions, or publicly-run platforms, we will continue to live within a
privatized commons. The alternative must begin with solidarity, not competition; with justice, not efficiency.

24 This leads us to the Audre Lorde pontification: *can we use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house?* Can we truly decolonize technologies that were conceived within imperial logics? What does digital sovereignty look like for us? Perhaps the task is not to reform but to reimagine, to draw from African spiritual architectures, from the metaphors of community, rhythm, and reciprocity that underlie our philosophies of life.

25 The question of the Sahel offers an important metaphor here. Across the region, we have witnessed efforts to re-capture control over the political economy of mining, to reclaim resources long exploited by external powers. The challenge before us is whether a similar re-capture can take place in the digital sphere. Can we reclaim the data, labour, and infrastructures that underpin global technological power? Can the South reassert digital sovereignty as it struggles to reassert control over the land and its minerals? This is the frontier of twenty-first century decolonization.

26 What would a technology designed through our cosmologies look like? What would a platform feel like if it honoured balance, dignity, and mutual nourishment rather than speed and extraction? These are not rhetorical questions. They are methodological, political, and spiritual. The digital has material consequences on bodies and lands; it also shapes our inner worlds, our time, our attention, and our capacity to care. As we reflect on this book, the challenge is to think of how these worlds might be healed.

27 The digital is not immaterial. It is built on bodies and on the earth. The Global South is not simply a marketplace or data source; it is the very ground upon which the global information order rests. Within the same systems of exploitation, creativity and resistance persist. Yoruba filmmakers, Nairobi poets, Cairo coders, São Paulo designers, all negotiate, subvert, and repurpose the tools of domination to tell their own stories. They remind us that power is never total.

28 The question that remains for us as scholars, as activists, as citizens, is how to transform these small spaces of creativity into collective autonomy. How to move from participation in the empire to the making of freedom? Technology will not liberate us, but our struggles within and against it might.

## NOTES

1. https://roape.net/2022/01/05/global-capitalism-and-the-scramble-for-cobalt/

2. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13637/11600

3. The inspiration from M-PESA came from the commons. Sending airtime vouchers to each other that were cashed in at the Safaricom Shop was an innovative way that people began to send money instead of using bank services or local transport. This was then commercialized into the monolith that Safaricom currently is, with no credit, or resources extended to the original innovators.
AUTHOR

NOOSIM NAIMASIAH

Ukombozi Library