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ABSTRACT
This article analyzes the discursive construction of Facebook’s goal to build Internet connectivity in India through its “internet.org” project. I argue that the rhetoric of connectivity emergent in this project uses the language of empowerment and innovation to operationalize a mode of entrepreneurial philanthropy amenable to millennial development that in reality reflects notions of progress reminiscent of colonial modernization practices. I also contend that this case demonstrates the need to understand the particular technopolitics of everyday encounters with infrastructures that cannot be reduced to any single vision of connectivity or singular understanding of digital contexts.
Acknowledgements
I thank Robert Glenn Howard, Robert Mejia, Sara L. McKinnon, and Robert Asen for their comments on earlier versions of this project. I also extend thanks to Dr. Boylorn, the editorial team, and the anonymous reviewers for their incisive feedback and care in engaging this article.
Notes
1 Mark Zuckerberg, “The Internet Should Not Just Belong to the Rich or the Young, It Needs to Belong to Everyone,” (UN Sustainable Development Summit, September 25, 2015), https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10153252006166872.
2 Zuckerberg.
3 Lilly Irani, Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India, Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 1.
4 The tweet was taken down rapidly, but scores of articles were produced in reaction, including a public disavowal by Mark Zuckerberg.
Nellie Bowles, “Marc Andreessen’s ‘Colonialism’ Gaffe? A Symptom of Silicon Valley Bias,” The Guardian, February 12, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/11/marc-andreessens-colonialism-tweet-silicon-valley-facebook-india; Mike Isaac, “Marc Andreessen Apologizes After Facebook Disavows India Comments,” The New York Times, February 10, 2016, sec. Technology, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/11/technology/facebook-rejects-marc-andreessen-comments-on-india-and-he-apologizes.html; Shelly Walia, “Facebook Board Member Marc Andreessen: Indians Should’ve Embraced Free Basics—and Colonialism,” Quartz (blog), https://qz.com/613815/facebook-board-member-marc-andreessen-indians-shouldve-embraced-free-basics-and-colonialism/ (accessed March 20, 2018); “Andreessen Regrets India Tweets; Zuckerberg Laments Comments,” Bloomberg.Com, February 10, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-10/marc-andreessen-pro-colonialism-tweet-riles-up-india-tech-world; Mark Zuckerberg, “I Want to Respond to Marc Andreessen’s Comments … ,” February 10, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102645335962321.
5 Rahul Mukherjee, “Jio Sparks Disruption 2.0: Infrastructural Imaginaries and Platform Ecosystems in ‘Digital India,’” Media, Culture & Society 41, no. 2 (March 1, 2019): 175–95.
6 Mukherjee, “Jio Sparks Disruption 2.0.”
7 Ibid.
8 Pradip N. Thomas, Digital India: Understanding Information, Communication and Social Change, 1st Edition (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2012), 5.
9 Publications Division, Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas: Prime Minister Narendra Modi Speaks (2017–2018), vol. IV (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Government of India, 2019).
10 With increasing criticism that the moniker was disingenuous, Facebook decided to rebrand the project “Free Basics” at the height of the controversy. The name “internet.org” was retained for the umbrella organization that would home Free Basics.
11 “Internet.Org,” English, https://info.internet.org/en/ (accessed April 3, 2018).
12 Mohan J. Dutta, “Decolonizing Communication for Social Change: A Culture-Centered Approach,” Communication Theory 25, no. 2 (May 1, 2015): 125.
13 Thomas, Digital India, 6.
14 Jean-Christophe Plantin et al., “Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook,” New Media & Society 20, no. 1 (January 2018): 293–310.
15 These invocations are latent across state and corporate narratives. See for example: Narendra Modi, “Text of PM’s Remarks at the Launch of Digital India Week,” July 1, 2015, https://www.narendramodi.in/text-of-pm-s-remarks-at-the-launch-of-digital-india-week-175130; Narendra Modi, “Digital India Is the Enterprise for India’s Transformation, PM’s Address at the Digital India Dinner” (www.narendramodi.in, September 26, 2015), https://www.narendramodi.in/text-of-speech-by-prime-minister-shri-narendra-modi-at-the-digital-india-dinner-26-september-2015-san-jose-california-345156; Ravi Shankar Prasad, “Session with Chief Guest at 14th India Digital Summit” (New Delhi, February 6, 2020); “21st to Be an Indian Century, Says Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos,” Livemint, January 15, 2020, https://www.livemint.com/industry/retail/21st-to-be-an-indian-century-says-amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-11579094353084.html.
16 Zuckerberg, “The Internet Should Not Just.”
17 Mark Zuckerberg, “Everyone in the World Should Have Access to the Internet,” https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102641883915251 (accessed May 15, 2017).
18 C. K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Pub, 2006).
19 Ananya Roy, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (New York: Routledge, 2010).
20 Facebook, “Is Connectivity a Human Right?,” https://www.facebook.com/isconnectivityahumanright (accessed May 15, 2017).
21 “Wikipedia Zero Operating Principles – Wikimedia Foundation,” https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero_Operating_Principles (accessed November 10, 2017), In fact, a 2011 study from Oxford showed that 84 percent of the geo-tagged entries on Wikipedia are about Europe or North America, and there are more entries about Antarctica than any country in Africa or South America; Robinson Meyer, “Ninety Percent of Wikipedia’s Editors are Male—Here’s What They’re Doing About It,” The Atlantic, October 25, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/90-of-wikipedias-editors-are-male-heres-what-theyre-doing-about-it/280882/.
22 Of course, there is a difference: Wikipedia continues to be based on an apparently collaborative model, and Facebook is based on aggregating its data.
23 Facebook, “Is Connectivity a Human Right?”
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Yves L. Doz, José Santos, and Peter J. Williamson, From Global to Metanational: How Companies Win in the Knowledge Economy (Harvard Business Press, 2001); Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18, no. 2 (June 1, 2000): 33–58.
28 Zuckerberg, “Everyone in the World Should Have Access to the Internet.”
29 Alex Fattal, “Facebook: Corporate Hackers, a Billion Users, and the Geo-Politics of the ‘Social Graph,’” Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 3 (2012): 927–55.
30 Fattal, “Facebook,” 952.
31 Mark Zuckerberg, “Free Basics Protects Net Neutrality,” Times of India Blog, December 28, 2015, http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-edit-page/free-basics-protects-net-neutrality/.
32 “Free Basics: Myths and Facts,” English, November 19, 2015, https://info.internet.org/en/blog/2015/11/19/internet-org-myths-and-facts/.
33 Zuckerberg, “Free Basics Protects Net Neutrality.”
34 “Free Basics.”
35 Ibid.
36 Fattal, “Facebook.”
37 Zuckerberg, “Free Basics Protects Net Neutrality.”
38 Zuckerberg.
39 Revati Prasad, “Ascendant India, Digital India: How Net Neutrality Advocates Defeated Facebook’s Free Basics,” Media, Culture & Society 40, no. 3 (April 2018): 415–31.
40 “Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg Regarding Internet.Org, Net Neutrality, Privacy, and Security,” https://www.facebook.com/notes/991065514744482/ (accessed May 15, 2017).
41 “Open Letter.”
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Prasad, “Ascendant India, Digital India.”
48 Telecom Regulatory Authority of India and Sudhir Gupta, “Prohibition of Discriminatory Tarrifs for Data Services Regulations, 2016” (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, Government of India, February 8, 2016).
49 Zuckerberg, “Free Basics Protects Net Neutrality.”
50 Zuckerberg.
51 Zuckerberg.
52 Zuckerberg, “Free Basics Protects Net Neutrality.”
53 Srinivas Raj Melkote, “Theories of Development Communication,” in International and Development Communication: A 21st-Century Perspective, ed. Bella Mody (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003), 129–46; Srinivas Raj Melkote and H. Leslie Steeves, “Critique of Devcom in the Dominant Paradigm,” in Communication for Development: Theory and Practice for Empowerment and Social Justice (Sage Publications India, 2015), 240–302.
54 “Free Basics.”
55 Mark Zuckerberg, “Facebook Post, ‘Over the Past Week in India, There Has Been a Lot Written about Internet.Org and Net Neutrality … ,’” April 17, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102033678947881.
56 Rebecca Dingo and J. Blake Scott, The Megarhetorics of Global Development (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 6.
57 Zuckerberg, “Free Basics Protects Net Neutrality.”
58 Robert Glenn Howard, “The Vernacular Web of Participatory Media,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25, no. 5 (December 1, 2008): 490–513.
59 Zuckerberg, “Free Basics Protects Net Neutrality.”
60 David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Duke University Press, 1993).
61 Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 36.
62 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (October 1985): 243–61.
63 Ergin Bulut, Robert Mejia, and Cameron McCarthy, “Governance through Philitainment: Playing the Benevolent Subject,” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 11, no. 4 (December 2014): 342–61. doi:10.1080/14791420.2014.951948.
64 Zuckerberg, “Free Basics Protects Net Neutrality.”
65 Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
66 Stuart Hall, as cited in Dingo and Scott, The Megarhetorics of Global Development.
67 Irani, Chasing Innovation.
68 Zuckerberg, “Free Basics Protects Net Neutrality.”
69 José van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 12.
70 Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity.
71 Ibid.
72 Tarleton Gillespie, “The Politics of ‘Platforms,’” New Media & Society 12, no. 3 (May 1, 2010): 347–64.
73 Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” in The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, 1st ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
74 Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, 1st ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 6.
75 Starr, The Creation of the Media, 6.
76 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, 1st ed. (Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Dingo and Scott, The Megarhetorics of Global Development, 4.
77 Melkote, “Theories of Development Communication,” 130–31.
78 Melkote, “Theories of Development Communication.”
79 Roy, Poverty Capital.
80 Ibid., 10.
81 Irani, Chasing Innovation; Roy, Poverty Capital.
82 Marcel Mauss and E.E. Evans-Pritchard, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2011), 35.
83 Shani Orgad and Kaarina Nikunen, “The Humanitarian Makeover,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 3 (July 3, 2015): 229–51. doi:10.1080/14791420.2015.1044255.
84 Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
85 Dutta, “Decolonizing Communication for Social Change,” 127.
86 Robert Waterman McChesney, Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media (New York: New Press, 2007).
87 Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”
88 Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 23.
89 Robert Mejia, “A Pressure Chamber of Innovation: Google Fiber and Flexible Capital,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 3 (July 3, 2015): 300. doi:10.1080/14791420.2015.1027240.
90 Roy, Poverty Capital.
91 Irani, Chasing Innovation; Roy, Poverty Capital.
92 Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, eds., The Promise of Infrastructure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).