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Paper long abstract

Digital platforms are built to extract, store, and make legible the behavioral data of their users (Zuboff 2019). This extractive capacity is not neutral, but in commercial contexts its effects are diffuse, distributed across populations as the ordinary cost of connectivity. This paper asks what happens when infrastructures designed for commercial extraction operate across divergent political conditions, and draws on ethnographic research with communities and their diasporas to examine how platform logics produce different outcomes depending on context.

Across a range of settings, the same platform architectures that enable targeted advertising can enable other forms of targeted intervention. Content moderation systems shape what documentation remains visible and what disappears. Metadata from ordinary digital activity can be repurposed by institutional actors beyond its original intent. Communication restrictions turn digital infrastructure into a tool of selective access rather than universal connectivity. In each case, the platform does not need to be redesigned. Its existing logic is sufficient. I argue that the effects of a technology cannot be assessed through its design alone. They must be assessed through the political conditions under which it operates (Larkin 2013). Platforms are already extractive in their orientation, but different political contexts transform the consequences of that extraction in ways that demand closer ethnographic attention. Recognizing this continuum matters because it challenges accounts of technology that rely on a distinction between intended and unintended effects, a distinction that becomes difficult to sustain when extraction is the design.