Rahul Mukherjee, Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution

In recent years, India's rising telecommunications industry, start-up culture, and official state narratives have cultivated a distinct national brand of an innovative and digitally savvy state machinery that mobilizes digital infrastructure for seamless governance, service delivery, and communication with citizens (Athique, 2019; Kaur, 2020).Particularly post-2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government's nationalist agenda promotes state-corporate partnerships for establishing largescale digital and financial infrastructure through projects such as Digital India, Aadhaar, and Atmanirbhar (self-reliant) India.Rahul Mukherjee's Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution intervenes at this critical juncture, offering a timely and vital analysis of how the emerging infrastructures of platformized governance are intertwined with people's mundane, everyday practices and desires attached to mobile media and money distribution across the country's varied regional geographies.Mukherjee conceptualizes aspirational politics within the slippages and frictions between top-down discourses of neoliberal financialization and digitization and bottom-up realities of the users and intermediaries constituting media distribution assemblages.Echoing Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's (2012) theory of nonscalability, Mukherjee's work provides compelling evidence for the inherent incompleteness of technological scalability across India's complex and diverse geographies.Unlimited illustrates how statecorporate promises of seamless digital and financial inclusion for previously unconnected and unbanked users brush up against contingent, everyday relationships, user and intermediary desires, and logistical and social limitations.Through rich ethnographic accounts, the book's theorization of aspirational politics alerts us to the "awkward, fuzzy translations and disjunctures" (Tsing, 2012, p. 522) of digital distribution supply chains.These disjunctures illuminate how the specific media distribution assemblages-the network of people, devices, platforms, and desires making the flow of content and money possible-confront the complexity of uneven geographies, failed infrastructures, and gendered and casteist hierarchies.