Digital unsettling: Decoloniality and dispossession in the age of social media By Sahana Udupa and Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan. New York: New York University Press, 2023. 264 pp.

This book uses the term unsettling to examine the vast and interconnected sites of struggle, contestation, and knowledge production that debates and conversations about “the digital” open up and mediate. The book's chapters draw from campus politics, interactional contexts of extreme speech, systematic capture of data and its exploitation, as well as the collapse and blurring of spaces and affects demarcated as “home” and “field.” In working through this material, Udupa and Dattatreyan unsettle how discussions of “the digital” are commonly framed in the media, political discourse, and social policy research. The authors, moreover, locate and dissect their own practices as researchers, questioning and pushing the boundaries of their own subdiscipline of media anthropology, its concepts and methodologies, through their varied intellectual and creative projects. The book, therefore, evokes the very movement and aliveness, both the “rooting and routing” (p. 15), summoned by the concept and process of unsettling. What stands out is their commitment to decoloniality as a lens and a praxis that does not elide the political, discursive, and material demands of abolitionist and other decolonial/anti-colonial movements, but that “acknowledges … that these (persistent colonial) formations cannot be undone so easily” (p. 3). The first chapter analyzes how university campuses function as nexuses for interconnected, digitally mediated anti-colonial and decolonial movements, amplifying and building on work in geographically diverse locations that strategically focuses on immediate local issues. The authors observe that “what marks this moment as unique is how the digital makes the university campus permeable, visible, and virtual—a key node in a ‘network of outrage and hope’ that potentiates the dialogue across specific sociohistorical contexts and comes to symbolize the entanglements between here and there, then and now” (p. 32). Dattatreyan illustrates this by recounting how #MyRacistCampus, a hashtag that emerged from student protests at Goldsmiths, University of London, started to “commingle with #RhodesMustFall” (p. 35), which originated at the University of Cape Town; this led student organizers from Goldsmiths and Baltimore to organize Zoom meetings to share strategies and educate each other (p. 45), thus enabling the “sharing of anti-colonial space/time” (p. 35). The second chapter draws on Udupa's vast experience of researching the far right as well as hate speech, trolling, and the discourses about them. Ethnographic vignettes from the UK, India, Germany, and Denmark illustrate how extreme speech online is not a threat to the liberal order; it is, rather, the means through which the “moral order of the nation-state” (p. 88), and thus the “exclusionary ideology” that undergirds modern racial and ethnic categories, is reinstated. Through astute analysis of networked extreme speech, the chapter illuminates how middle-class and educated leaders and ideologues with a “long tail of underlings” (p. 79) co-construct an assemblage of fascist and right-wing nationalist political formations. In doing so, they manage to appear both respectable and rational even though they are supported by the vitriol and affective economy of hate generated and spread by their lesser-known or anonymous followers. Building on the first chapter's point about the digital affordances that enable interconnected processes and struggles, this chapter reminds the reader that online discourses reproduce “colonialism as a global process,” one that “cannot fit neatly into a single national racial formation project” (p. 94). The third chapter, “Capture,” succinctly and clearly outlines the growing discussion around digital labor, exploitation, capitalism, and surveillance from a range of disciplines. Moreover, foregrounding what the authors refer to as the “rural-urban-data trap” (p. 99), the chapter argues that although digital technologies are quite pervasive and far reaching, they still produce us as demarcated subjects under persistent conditions of racial capitalism. Such differentiation, the chapter points out, exists because there is an uneven distribution not just of access to technology but also of safeguards against emotional, political, economic, and environmental harms. Chapter 4 assesses the digital's potential to allow both scholars and those engaged in intellectual and political work outside the academy to push back against “formal disciplinary conventions regarding form, subject, method, and theory” (p. 127). Drawing on theorizations of citation and digitality, this chapter suggests that citational practice is powerful thanks to “its capacity to re-animate, to breathe life … to congeal and legitimise ideas as they are entangled with and in opposition to formal domains of knowledge production” (p. 130). What is exciting, however, is that the authors extend the discussion from the previous chapter on the “subjectifying tendencies of the digital” to the production of “affinity networks” for “scholars, artists, and activists who seek affinities in shared differences” (p. 134). The last chapter features the two authors in a dialogue about the potential of networked technologies to blur and unsettle the paradigms of home/field established and normalized under conditions of colonial presence and (often forcible) knowledge production. Udupa, through conversations in the interdisciplinary project AI4Dignity, extends the conception of what a decolonial sensibility, contextual knowledge, and reflexivity can do to “unsettle naturalized categories” that are used to train big data analysis, machine learning, and AI models, and to showcase opportunities for community engagement within such modeling processes. Dattatreyan's experience in using multimodal and collaborative strategies in his ethnographic work focalizes some alternative ways that power and ownership can be negotiated in projects of networked knowledge production. Most crucially, the last chapter's reflexive and dialogic form invites readers—scholars, students, activists, artists, policy workers—to join in a collective struggle against the normalization of disciplinary methods, to find ways to unsettle them, and to do so unafraid of “circumventing the messiness of the social” (p. 191). Chapters 1 and 2 draw on the authors’ previous work and experiences in different research spaces, arguing against the foreclosure that analysis about the digital often achieves, creating the conditions of coloniality and dispossession that in turn allow experiences of the digital to persist unchallenged. After unsettling the common ideologies that inform scholarship about the digital, the authors extend the scope of their analysis to encompass networks and transnational processes that assemble knowledge about the digital as well as what it means to study it and indeed what is at stake. By considering the digital within the longue durée of colonial modernity, the authors trace how critical and left-leaning positions on the digital often fail to register that the processes of digital capture have their genesis in the well-trodden tracks of colonial knowledge production, which persist today even as political projects to destabilize them use the same technologies to congeal, spread, and resist. The last chapter (along with the coda) invites readers to use the book's heuristic tools to challenge hegemonic narratives that allow digital media—and the institutions and actors that directly or indirectly exploit it—to extend oppressive social relations. Overall, the book's conceptual framing, that of digital unsettling, is ambitious and important, but its most interesting and valuable contribution is its method of comparison; the authors posit this method as “a ubiquitous feature of the digital condition that fosters a collective articulation and debate linked to multiple points of felt relation and connection” (p. 15). In bringing together events, emotions, reactions, texts, and dialogues, as well as histories and knowledges, and in placing them in “radical juxtaposition” (p. 16), the book interrupts the smooth affective flows that prop up, invisibilize, and normalize the hegemonic ideologies that Dean (2009) calls “communicative capitalism.” And it goes even further: it showcases how those who turn to technology to dissent from “neoliberal fantasies” (Dean, 2009), as well as illiberal nationalist fantasies, need to embed in their critical movements an understanding of how these networks of knowledge production and circulation are supported by enduring histories of violence, expropriation, and colonialism.