Temporary Digital Enclaves: Temporary Linguistic Online Gambling Workers and a Collaborative Digital Community in the Philippines

ABSTRACT Urban enclave scholarship has focused on ethnic enclaves as territorial formations produced by long‐term settlements and low‐wage migrant workers. This article critiques these presumptions by examining how Taiwanese temporary migrant workers in the online gambling industry in Metro Manila, the Philippines, produce a digital enclave organized through digital platforms and institutional control. Drawing on fieldwork, in‐depth interviews, and social media analysis, this study offers three contributions. The first is the concept of a temporary digital enclave, which describes an enclave form whose boundaries are maintained by the intersection of industrial control, legal precarity, linguistic isolation, and digital platform dependency. Second, I propose the concept of a collaborative digital community, depicting a bottom‐up, participant‐driven community in which workers' shared online narratives produce a sense of belonging and reinforce spatial control, as fear‐laden gossip, warnings, and industry rumors circulate through platforms to construct a shared imaginary. Finally, this case shows a multi‐scalar process across the industrial, urban, and daily scales, revealing the online gambling industry's institutionalized Mandarin proficiency as an organizational boundary that drives workers toward Mandarin‐language digital platforms, produces a collaborative digital community that reinforces the spatial enclave, and deepens workers' dependence on the industry, digital platforms, and the digital community.