ABSTRACT
This chapter situates Asia’s achievement of critical mass in the digital domain in the context of national, regional and global efforts to institute a transactional economy centred upon internet infrastructure. It begins by outlining the sequential development of communication, distribution and transaction layers in the internet stack and then proceeds to provide a critical interrogation of the raft of platforms, infrastructures and regulatory norms under development in the Asian region. More fundamentally, the chapter begins to conceptualise the dynamics of a transactional economy, understood here as an attempt to institute simultaneous extractions across different forms and rituals of economic exchange. These novel ambitions are then exemplified by discussing a raft of social, economic and political transactions unfolding across Asia. I argue that the remediation of everyday life through the orchestration of social, economic and informational processes brings to light new ways of conceptualising the Asian region and the political economy of our times.
