Messy Empowerment: Mapping Digital Encounters in the Margins

The global digital paradigm has ushered in a distinctly new technomateriality. Extractive data regimes have given rise to new economic structures and social realities (Morozov, “Silicon Valley Was Going to Disrupt Capitalism”). Even the so-called unconnected are scaffolded in by either the surveillance state or surveillance capital. What emerges today, in lieu of older understandings of the digital divide, is a “networked margin” (Shah, “Networked Margins,” 9) where people and communities exist not wholly outside of a digital paradigm but rather relegated to the edges of the network society. As data architectures bear more decisively on their social and economic