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Paper short abstract:

This presentation examines the conditions of possibility, meanings and effects of the “tricks” and “cheats”, as illegitimate stratagems, devised and enacted by platform-based delivery workers in Bogotá (Colombia), against the platform companies they work for.

Paper long abstract:

Critical labour platform scholars have demonstrated that while platforms promise autonomy and independence, legally categorizing workers as self-employed, in practice, through algorithmic management, platform workers are increasingly controlled and subordinated. This contradiction ultimately exacerbates labour precarity producing insecure lives and livelihoods (Van Doorn, 2017; Rosenblat, 2018; Woodcock, 2020). However, l suggest that the forms of control deployed through algorithmic management are always partly failed for they cannot account for workers’ experiences and practices which exceed the digital realm. This inherent failure, coupled with conditions of heightened labour uncertainty, represents a fertile ground for the emergence of “illegitimate” practices through which workers strive to sustain and secure their livelihoods. Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork with mainly migrant, platform-based delivery workers in Bogotá, in this paper I consider the myriad of creative ways in which workers “tick” and “cheat” platforms. These stratagems span from the widespread practice of having multiple accounts based on fake identities, to the less common but more sophisticated frauds through which workers manage to “keep” the orders they are supposed to deliver, or even the money which clients pay for them. I discuss how these practices may constitute firstly, an almost necessary means allowing to navigate the precarious conditions imposed by platforms. Secondly, a way for workers to reclaim their promised, but negated, independence, and lastly, a form of covert, everyday resistance (Scott, 1986) which allows platform workers to highlight their agency and protest the perceived injustice of their working relations and conditions.

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Paper short abstract:

I study how Chinese low-income debtors who live on digital credit create informal strategies to scam predatory platforms in the fin-tech black market. It explores how the illegitimacies and informalities of the digital economy generate new financial subjectivities among precarious populations.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2014, thousands of digital lending platforms have sprung up in China. In the absence of regulation, they have come up with a business model called "cash loans" to target low-income customers and make quick profits. The "cash loan" is an unsecured microcredit product similar to payday loans. But it is enhanced with features such as data-driven instant approval, digital money transfers, predatory interest rates, and remote debt collection. The model has been characterized by the media as a "debt scam" that leads to personal over-indebtedness. There are news stories of young people committing suicide due to the intense moral pressure caused by violent debt collection calls and predatory interest rates of 300-500%. Today, even under heavy regulation, there are still similar digital lending platforms operating in the fintech black market. The lending apps that promise easy approval of microloans have also cultivated a particular group of users who rely on multiple sources of digital credit to make a living. They have become "professional debtors," borrowing from new sources of credit to cover old debts. This paper focuses not only on how digital credit platforms manipulate users, but also on how some users, understanding the informality and illegitimacy of certain credit practices, have managed to hack the fintech black market by creating "fake data points" that cheat the algorithmic models of risk assessment and other informal strategies against debt collectors. It explores how the illegitimacies and informalities of the digital economy generate new financial subjectivities among precarious populations.

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Paper short abstract:

This talk suggests that a digital investment platform called “Çiftlik (Farm) Bank” that emerged after the failed coup in Turkey in 2016 is a “capitalist gimmick” (Ngai 2020), shaping its users’ sentiments of value and labor by replacing calculability and abstraction with play and enjoyment.

Paper long abstract:

In 2016, an unconventional digital investment platform called “Çiftlik (Farm) Bank” emerged after the failed coup in Turkey in 2016. With its interface that looked like the globally known online game FarmVille, Çiftlik Bank presented itself as a “new generation farm game.” Its participants, whom I refer to as “Çiftlik Bank-ers,” purchased and grew virtual animals on the Çiftlik Bank platform. In return, Çiftlik Bank promised to actualize the Bank-ers’ investments in its virtual farms by building real farms and distributing the revenue from selling dairy products at its franchises back to the Bank-ers. Hundreds of thousands invested in Çiftlik Bank because they did not trust Turkish commercial banks to secure their money during the ongoing financial crisis after the failed coup. Some even took bank loans to invest in Çiftlik Bank. However, its 26-year-old founder’s escape from Turkey in 2018 with hundreds of millions of dollars he collected from the Bank-ers revealed that Çiftlik Bank was a Ponzi scheme.

How did Çiftlik Bank gain the confidence of its users? How did it hide its exploitation of the Bank-ers’ emotional and affective labor, trust and distrust, and knowledge and ignorance? In this talk, I will pursue these questions by contextualizing them into the socially, politically, and economically volatile aftermath of the coup attempt. I will argue that Çiftlik Bank is a “capitalist gimmick” (Ngai 2020), reframing the Bank-ers’ sentiments of value and labor by replacing its calculability and abstraction of risk with play and enjoyment.

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Paper short abstract:

The creation of ‘expert knowledge’ about investing is a process that retail investors re-negotiate to legitimise their digitised economic activities and reflect on their positionality. These emerging power relations sanction multi-layered financial literacies that regulators can see as illegitimate.

Paper long abstract:

The curation of fields of knowledge is fraught with political decisions about power, in the case of economic expertise with far-reaching consequences for wealth distribution. The tighter that economic activities are regulated, the more potential there is for investing practices to become labelled as ‘illegitimate’ when carried out by ‘non-experts’. Often investing via banks is sanctioned for retail investors but is considered subversive when carried out through apps. The question of what financial expertise and thus legitimate economic activity looks like in a time when everyone can google information, does not just trouble regulators. Retail investors, whose existence disrupts fault-lines of who is deemed 'expert' enough to wield financial power, search for answers to this too.

To explore how expertise in digitised financial labour is constructed and re-negotiated by retail investors, I will draw on ethnographic material collected in 2023. Retail investors often use social media to expand their knowledge, getting entangled with legitimate and illegitimate ‘experts’ and ‘educators’ through their TikTok and Instagram algorithms. A closer look at these personae and their (parasocial) relations to retail investors reveal that the issue at hand is not just about economic expertise but about what power relations become relevant, what they inscribe, and who they are applied to. In retail investor communities, fiat and crypto alike, this is central to making meaning of the financial activities performed. Exploring how varied digitised financial literacies are constructed, and what expertise emerges is instructive to both understand digitised financial labour and academic knowledge construction better.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the cryptocurrency community challenges the legitimacy of existing modes of economic governance. I argue that these communities represent the vanguard of popular opposition to U.S. economic policy, though anthropologists and other scholars do not acknowledge them as such.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores interactions between the cryptocurrency community and financial regulators to investigate how crypto people challenge the legitimacy of existing modes of economic and democratic governance.

In the years since the financial crisis and the emergence of Occupy Wall Street, challenges to American economic governance have increasingly taken place on the internet rather than in the streets. Indeed, cryptocurrency communities such as Bitcoin and Ethereum represent the vanguard of popular opposition to U.S. monetary policy and financial regulation, though anthropologists and other scholars have not acknowledged them as such.

Drawing on two years of fieldwork, this paper sheds light on crypto people’s contention that crypto assets amount to a technology of financial inclusion. It details their attempts to use the discourse of financial inclusion to criticize both the state and traditional financial institutions and their vision of crypto assets as a technology which disciplines these actors. This paper also considers U.S. regulators’ efforts to question the authenticity of the the aims of the crypto community and to generate suspicion of its members. It concludes that the state and other crypto-critics treat crypto assets as “unsanctioned wealth” (Roitman 2005).

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Paper short abstract:

This paper provides an ethnographic account of Burmese jade traders in Mandalay between tradition and digital intermediation in the context of informal, ethnic network-based cross-border trade between Myanmar and China.

Paper long abstract:

95% of the world’s highest quality jadeite, or jade, comes from Myanmar, and most of it is exported to China. This commerce has been long-dominated by ethnic networks and by informality of different types, from smuggling to tax avoidance to downright illicit trade and workers’ exploitation. This has created a system of “stateless commerce,” in Barak Richman’s characterisation of the diamond industry, that is trade based on ethnic networks that thrive without lawyers, court systems and state coercion (Richman, 2017). Burmese traders have historically been marginalized in this commerce, which is dominated by Chinese, in particular Yunnanese, traders. They still play an important role in the market in Mandalay, especially in setting the gems' prices, an extensive process of haggling and brokering that involve multiple middlemen, a concept known in Burmese as kyait (like) yaung (sell) kyait (like) wel (buy). The introduction of WeChat and social media live stream sale has brought in new dimensions to the brokering process that brings jade from the Burmese sellers based in Mandalay, Myanmar to consumers or traders based in China. Based on a six-month long ethnography of small-scale Burmese jade sellers and agents in the Mandalay jade market, this paper explores their formal and informal practices and argues that the technology-mediated cross-border trade brings in efficiencies and a wider market reach, but also opens up new spaces of exploitation and further marginalization of Burmese traders in a field that remains heavily organised around ethnic networks.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper presents preliminary findings and an emerging research agenda that interrogates the socio-economic, security and governance implications of established, proliferating and largely unregulated 'mobile money' innovations in the Somali Horn of Africa.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents preliminary findings and an emerging research agenda that interrogates the socio-economic, security and governance implications of established and proliferating 'mobile money' innovations in the Somali Horn of Africa. The region has long been a global hub for the development of mobile money infrastructures that operate across and within its contested and conflicted borders. Somali telecommunications companies have emerged as some of the most powerful economic actors in a setting where decades of 'limited statehood' render boundaries between formal/informal and legitimate/illegitimate activity in the digital economy both highly ambiguous and analytically problematic. Synthesizing various research strands of the authors, the paper argues that commercial digital infrastructure needs to be conceptualized within ethnographic and political economy analyses of contested statehood in conflict-affected contexts. Legally ambiguous (or 'shadow') innovations with mobile money in the Somali Horn of Africa underpin established cross border trading networks that have been identified as being crucial to state-making in the region. Interrogation of how a largely unregulated digital economy is affecting relations between (multiple) state-like authorities and citizens in the Horn of Africa can help broaden notions of 'virtual sovereignty' and varieties of 'platform capitalism' outside of contexts that are traditionally viewed as global centres of technology production.

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Paper short abstract:

This article investigates the financial practices of Venezuelans in Brazil, focusing on their strategies to support themselves financially outside of humanitarian aid. It focuses on Venezuelans' spatial and socio-cultural practices of digital money to rebuild their lives and spaces as they settle.

Paper long abstract:

Fintech, the introduction of technology for finance and banking, has been embraced by governments, humanitarian actors and the private sector as a key enabler of financial inclusion and a means for generating income and livelihoods in refugee communities. Overall, the discourse around the role of fintech for financial inclusion for refugees tends to overlook the fact that refugees are already ‘connected’ and have been finding ways of doing finance with mobile technologies ever since their inception. Previous research has explored how refugees use mobile phones and social media to access financial resources and information, while also creating informal workarounds to overcome exclusion from digital financial systems, like borrowing IDs for SIM cards, mobile money accounts and digital work platforms. This article investigates the financial practices of Venezuelans in Brazil, focusing on their strategies to support themselves financially outside of humanitarian aid. By examining the spatial and relational aspects of finance, this article explores how Venezuelans' use of digital money shapes their lives and spaces as they settle. Using multi-sited ethnography, this study observes the financial interactions of Venezuelans in various physical locations (commercial streets and shops), and their engagement on WhatsApp and Telegram networks. In-depth interviews further complement the research. Preliminary results of the study uncover three themes that aid in comprehending the spatial and socio-cultural aspects of refugees' digital money practices and their meaning for belonging: income, remittances, and payments. These practices prompt us to question the limits to financial regulation and the creation of financial subjectivities in displacement.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the causes and characteristics of an informal and "illegitimate" digital economy among forcibly displaced people, who must often adopt unsafe and informal workarounds to access digital financial services, digital work, and other digital tools and services.

Paper long abstract:

A lack of economic rights and restricted access to formal employment frequently relegate refugees and asylum seekers to the margins of economies, leading to informal and insecure forms of finance, work, and livelihood generation. A seemingly less bureaucratic and discriminatory world of digital services potentially offers a more inclusive alternative: mobile money and digital financial services could help refugees bypass exclusive banking, while online freelance work offers a source of income in the absence of local employment. But digital economies and digital finance are often not as accessible to refugees as they may seem, because digital inclusion is increasingly tied to formal requirements forcibly displaced people often cannot meet, such as the need for identity verification. These and other formal requirements effectively push many refugees towards insecure and informal workarounds. Their exclusion from digital and financial services, and from digital labour markets more generally, has fuelled the spread of an informal digital economy – often involving informal intermediaries and brokers – that puts refugees at increased risk of exploitation and cybercrime, while exposing them to many other potential harms. Building on research on the role of digital finance and work among refugees across a variety of national and transnational contexts, we aim to delineate the causes and characteristics of this digital refugee “shadow economy” and its implications for the rights and safety of forcibly displaced people in need of protection.