The hope and hype about African digital entrepreneurship, contrasted with the reality on the ground in local ecosystems. In recent years, Africa has seen a digital entrepreneurship boom, with hundreds of millions of dollars poured into tech cities, entrepreneurship trainings, coworking spaces,...

There are now over three billion Internet users on our planet. The connections afforded to all of those people, in theory, allow for an unprecedented amount of communication and public participation. The goal of this paper is to examine how those potentials match up to actual patterns of...

Introduction / Mark Graham and Fabian Ferrari -- Moving beyond Shanzhai? Contradictions of platformized family production in the planetary network of e-commerce labor / Lin Zhang -- How do workers survive and thrive in the platform economy? Evidence from China and Philippines / Julie Chen and...

Hopes and Potentials -- Taking Stock -- Bounded Opportunities -- Viable Strategies -- Uneven Ecosystems -- Transitioning Identities -- Silicon Tensions -- Ways Forward -- Appendix A: Methodology -- Appendix B: Case Study Notes and Market Data.

Understanding the embedded and disembedded, material and immaterial, territorialized and deterritorialized natures of digital work. Many jobs today can be done from anywhere. Digital technology and widespread internet connectivity allow almost anyone, anywhere, to connect to anyone else to...

Only ten years ago, there were more internet users in countries like France or Germany than in all of Africa put together. But much has changed in a decade. The year 2018 marks the first year in human history in which a majority of the world’s population are now connected to the internet. This...