vi Editors’ Introduction Jonathan E. Abel and Joseph Jonghyun Jeon Unfolding Digital Asias What we call Digital Asias enfolds a series of reifications. Under the rubric of Digital Asias, we mean to encompass the digital cultures of Asia, the historical processes of their digitization, digital industries in Asia, the forms of labor that emerge and persist in its name, Asian social media, and the diasporic iterations of all these elements. To raise the issue of Digital Asias is to mark our moment in the history of computerization and to acknowledge its transnational flows and the dynamic processes through which these logics operate, but it also risks compliance with the most simplistic of “digital age” periodizations and essentializing Asia (currently home to 60 percent of the world’s population) as a coherent construct. Though our insistence on Digital Asias militates against Silicon Valley necropolitics in the guise of capitalist innovation and postsocialist planetarity, which dreams of the erasure of geopolitical divisions, we are wary of replacing one set of delusions with another. Such pitfalls notwithstanding, this enfolding is a juncture that provides some critical affordances. Too often that which goes under the rubric of the digital deals only with virtual surfaces, like the sleek graphical user interfaces of contemporary systems software, which hide machinic computational operations from human sight. It is no wonder that new technologies are often presented as empowering and in utopian terms, even as this discourse elides realities like unequal access and exploited labor. To insist on more capacious and grounded digital geographies is to reconcile the disparity between dream and realization and to uncover the hard kernels of social, economic, and political base programming that prop up the thin virtuality of cyberspace. Now is a good time for such insistence. The futuristic and fanciful claims of first-wave computerization from the 1960s to the 1990s have long since died. The subsequent age of Editors’ Introduction vii cyberspace has similarly fallen short of early reverie. We have come to see that digitization contributes to a widening, rather than attenuation of inequality and nurtures fascism and demagoguery as much as it does democracy. And in Asia, increasingly Asian digital production seems a fuller realization of Western global capitalist predecessors rather than a subversive alternative. From this vantage point, a broader picture emerges of the manifold nature of Digital Asias. To speak of transformations born in Digital Asias is not to speak of discrete continental regimes of capital accumulation but rather to note their imbrication and variance in a global history in which technological innovation acts as an accelerant for older capitalist strategies and exploitative formations. The digital economy emerges at a moment of global deindustrialization and declining rates of profit in what is, to be sure, a combined and uneven process, and so traditional questions about the relations of labor to production nevertheless abide. If the digital (like capital itself) alienates workers from their own labor and means of production, then paying attention to Digital Asias reveals the otherwise obscured labor along with the economic, social, and geographic unevenness that constitutes the infrastructure of global digitality today. This infrastructure is difficult to see because digital technologies amplify capitalism’s ahistorical tendencies. To unfold Digital Asias involves drawing attention to these otherwise obscured geopolitical contexts, the materiality behind virtuality’s façade, the twofold nature of labor, and the nonbenign aspects of technological “progress.” Furthermore, attentiveness to the fold is not simply about making visible that which is unseen due to its being enfolded by the allure and promise of the digital; it also indexes a methodological approach that folds in together operations and processes that have hitherto been understood as discrete.1 Even the choice of the cover image for this issue presented a telling problem. In seeking images that seemed intuitively to speak to Digital Asias, we found that most of the more obvious choices also reinscribed the kind of techno-Orientalist aesthetics (explored in greater detail later) that it is our intention to complicate. We finally settled on an image featured in Emanuel David’s contribution to this issue, The Heat/Viva La Vida (Portrait of a Female Artist at 40, Self Portrait) by Wawi Navarroza. A...
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Jan 1, 2022
Mikhail Molchanov + 1
Open Access