“Trajectories of Platform Power in the AI Age: Infrastructure, Labour, and India’s Place in the Global Digital Economy"

Today, in Bengaluru, we are bringing together an interesting group of researchers, practitioners and policy folks to think through some big questions. Updates to come.

How Vietnam and the US Differ in Using State Power to Regulate TikTok Vietnam and the US are taking sharply different approaches to regulating TikTok, exposing tradeoffs between state power, user privacy, and national security.

"Both countries had threatened to ban TikTok over user safety. But while the US forced the company to divest its American operations over Chinese political influence, Vietnam [...] is using law enforcement and interagency pressure to push the platform to censor content it deems toxic."

Subscription’s entanglements Scholars cite subscription paywalls and recurring fees as evidence of a wider political-economic shift from commodification to assetization by digital enclosure, but the mechanics of the subscripti...

Now available in Latest Articles
@bricolageyumyum.bsky.social interrogates 'subscription', a taken-for-granted economic bedrock of digital capitalism
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

"Many of the issues raised by the Commission in the document are not about principles of data sharing, but rather generally poor compliance practices". The beacon of free speech everyone... soon we will have the X files

Mandated TikTok Transparency is Needed to Protect US Users TikTok should disclose its licensing terms and let independent researchers verify what is happening on the platform, say Mark MacCarthy and Carl Schonander.

The recently closed TikTok deal has some safeguards built in, but Chinese influence could persist. The fix: disclose licensing terms and let independent researchers verify what is happening on the platform, say Mark MacCarthy and Carl Schonander.

Ed tech is profitable. It is also mostly useless Independent research identifies few learning gains

Blistering piece on ed tech in @economist.com.

‘Although ed-tech companies tout huge learning gains, independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it.’
economist.com/united-state...

New housing and planning resource for Ireland – a publications hub. >1,800 academic, policy and sector publications relating to housing, property and planning in Ireland. Access at www.zotero.org/groups/55867... if there are pubs missing you want us to add, please send them to us and we will do so

🪧 'Work and Employment in the Great Reshuffle: Navigating the Polycrisis' (WES 2026)

We are organising the 2026 Work, Employment and Society Annual Conference! Call for abstracts now open. Deadline for submission is 20 March 2026. Full call for submissions here: www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-b...

Its the era of cryptopolitics - where money flows from online exchanges without borders to influence decisions within borders.

Some are jubilant about this, as if all is well with its democracy, yet we should not forget how illiberal discourses of rights have already gained prominence, (in)ordinately shaped by the class power and interests of elites.

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Super excited to announce a new piece out in the world: States and platform capitalisms: A conversation. This is a collaboration with some amazing thinkers and friends- led by @sayshatim.bsky.social Joe Khalil @linzhang.bsky.social & @rahmuk.bsky.social

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

India doing a rapid hairpin bend on its road to digital in-security and state surveillance. #digital #surveillance

ECRs apply!

Also an alum of the 2022 Montreal EGRG even. 10/10 would recommend. Early Careers please Apply.

To be fair, Coates wrote this piece because very few others who could do it, did. I see this as basic truth telling with journalist skills that others refused to employ.

Note: the above article piece is not completely about our research but includes some aspects and link to it. There are things here that do not completely reflect our position -

Link to our original paper here - doi.org/10.1177/1024...

Why Unions Find It Hard To Forge Worker Solidarity In Platform Companies In the platform economy, time is scarce, worker interactions are discouraged, and protests met with punishment. The idea of both union and unity are threatened

🚨 Our research on unions and organising in India's platform society covered in the media, for which both me and my co-author @islandexpress.bsky.social were also interviewed:

"Why unions find it hard to forge worker solidarity in the platform economy".

behanbox.com/2025/09/05/w...

sounds good! will look forward.

Thanks Lin! Excited to see the special issue(s) coming out.
I really wanted to attend the GCEG but had to pull out.The sessions looked great. Will love to do more work on innovation/tech development and leapfrogging in/from the global South. Be in touch :)

#leapfrogging #digitalAsia #politicaleconomy #services-led-development, #growthmodels #Asiandevelopmentmodels

Poundland sold for less than £1 [FREE TO READ] US private equity group Gordon Brothers acquires struggling discount retailer ahead of restructuring plan

You wait years for a headline like this on.ft.com/3Tmw16o

Please check out @adiray.bsky.social's very timely piece proposing a post colonial critical political economy approach to studying platforms and digital technologies, contesting the Asian developmental model of leapfrogging. Another wonderful article from our social media+society special issue.

I will be expanding on this work in the future from a more empirical national historical perspective of India's (digital) tech development. Promise I have it wirtten already 😂

Published in the special issue Platform Economies in Digital Asia thanks to @elainejyuan.bsky.social & @linzhang.bsky.social, who persisted.

Interrogating Technological Leapfrogging in Asian Development and Growth Models: Toward a Critical Postcolonial Political Economy Approach - Aditya Ray, 2025 This article examines the discourse of technological leapfrogging within dominant Asian development models—namely, the earlier manufacturing-led development (ML...

📌 "Conjunctural thinking" Shifts emerge from crisis, contingency, and agency

Rather than another grand model, CPPE is a decolonizing analytical praxis.

Give it a read:
🔗 doi.org/10.1177/2056...
#CPPE #DigitalAsia #CriticalGeography #PostcolonialStudies #TechPolitics #DevTheory

CPPE pivots on three core concepts:

📌 "Social blocs" - Tech development is shaped by shifting coalitions of state- society actors
📌 "Plural temporalities" Instead of linear stages, CPPE sees overlapping historical-political rhythms

&...

To challenge these assumptions, I propose Critical Postcolonial Political Economy (CPPE) approach.
A pluralist confluence of known frames in:

- Critical political economy
- Postcolonial / heterdox economic geographies
- Conjunctural analysis

Enter postcolonial critique: e.g. Raghuram et al. 2013 Chakravartty (2004), Jazeel (2019) etc. who show development outcomes are ongoing shaped by uneven social and spatial power relations, but also resistance (agency), contingency, crisis and coalitions or social blocs.

Growth models presume linear, teleological, technocratic progress, undermining asymmetric regional integration,histories & socio-political contestations that continously shape tech transformations. Developmental models essentialize state (&society) ignoring contested alliances/ subaltern agency.

The piece challenges mainstream models framing Asia’s rise through familiar lens: tech-led growth, rational institutions, state-managed 🌏 integration ("Asian Miracle”, “Asian Century”). Instead it foregrounds conflict contradictions, context in how tech leapfrogging is imagined, governed, resisted.