ABSTRACT
Grounding myself in postcolonial and decolonial thinking on Western modernity, I perform an ethnographic reading of digital infrastructures against a transnational and historical context of colonialism. Framing digital infrastructures as sociotechnical constructs, I trace the public, corporate, and state discourse around digital infrastructure development in India. I focus on infrastructural development propped by foreign investment; examining, in particular, Facebook’s Free Basics initiative. In its two-year Indian campaign for Free Basics, to purportedly bring Internet access to a billion new users, Facebook touted the economic and social benefits of Internet access to underserved people. I argue that Free Basics evokes paradigms of national development, modernization, and progressivism that are rooted in technoutopian narratives. At this nexus of corporate and state interest in digital infrastructure lies a technoutopian belief that social, political, and economic problems in the Global South can be resolved by technological advancement, and nationwide issues of inequality and disparity will be ameliorated if poor citizens have access to the Internet.
