In Conversation: Payal Arora on Tech Optimism in the Global South Artwork

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In Conversation: Payal Arora on Tech Optimism in the Global South

April 29, 2025 • Global Development Institute

PhD Researcher Anuradha Ganapathy interviews Payal Arora, Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University and co-founder of two initiatives, Inclusive AI Lab for Debiasing Tech and Fem Lab. The pair discuss Payal's recent book, From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech (MIT Press), digging into the role of academia in discussing Big Tech, the positive potential in technologies such as AI, especially in the Global South, and how to bridge the gap between critique and constructive engagement.

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Speaker 1 [00:00:02] Welcome to the Global Development Institute podcast. Based at the University of Manchester, we're Europe's largest research and teaching institute addressing poverty and inequality. Each episode, we'll bring you the latest thinking, insights, and debate in development study.

Speaker 2 [00:00:31] So hello, and welcome to the Global Development Institute podcast. My name is Anuradha Ganapathy, and I am a doctoral researcher at the Center for Digital Development here. And I'm thrilled today to be speaking with Professor Payal Arora, who is a professor of inclusive AI cultures at Utrecht University and co-founder of two initiatives, Inclusive AI Lab for Debiasing Tech and Fem Lab, a feminist futures of work approach to tech. Payal is a leading digital anthropologist Award-winning books, including The Next Billion Users with Harvard Press behind her. Forbes named her the next billion champion and the right kind of person to reform tech. She's been listed in the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics 2025 and won the 2025 Women in Ai Benelux Award for her work in diversifying AI. Today, we will discuss her new book with MIT Press, From Pessimism to Promise. Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech, which has been recently long listed for the prestigious 2024 Porchlight Business Book Awards and has also won the 2025 Axiom Business Book Awards under Emerging Trends AI. So welcome, Professor Arora. Thank you so much for joining us today. I want to start by first congratulating you on writing an excellent book. Pessimism to promise. It offers a really refreshing and very timely take on reimagining the role of technology and society from and with communities of the global South. And I would love to start by hearing more about your inspiration behind this book. What were the issues? What is what are the things that you saw that prompted you to write about this book?

Speaker 3 [00:02:18] Thanks so much, Anuradha, and it's really nice to be here. I really enjoy the work that's coming out of your center, and I hope we can engage more. And I appreciate this platform because this tap center is what I feel like is a turning point in academia, particularly for the humanities, where we are opting out of being at the table when it comes to reforming big tech. We want to be on the outside. Containing it, controlling it, regulating it. We have positioned AI against humanity, and it's not academia alone. You see mainstream media headlines every other day talking about how AI is threatening democracy, our social well-being, our mental health. It also is an existential crisis. And it's inducing deep amounts of guilt if you use it, because oh my God, what about the water usage or guilt? Because what if you're, you know, basically feeding the data extractor machine and yet you feel the sort of impotence because you're using these tools from Google to WhatsApp because you will have families abroad and you have, you know you're trying to just basically navigate your everyday life with these tools. And so, and including the workplace, right? And so what's happening here is what I'm calling the pessimism paralysis, which is not just a despair, but a deep impotence that academics, civic sector, even policymakers are experiencing right now. And they are particularly in the West. In the meantime, there's an opposite trend going on in the rest of the world where there's an increasing, like, hope and optimism. Which is particularly towards any kind of new technologies, including that of AI. And I have, in the book, documented about two decades of experience in this area, and particularly in the last few years, when it comes to AI and other novel technologies, from my work and engagements in Brazil, India, Mexico, Nigeria, and elsewhere. And So this is where the book comes in, is trying to see what's going on. Why is the West becoming increasingly pessimistic versus the rest becoming increasingly optimistic? And I disagree with the typical explanations given for this, which is A, that obviously these people and global or context have not. Reached where we've reached, right? So this idea of developing to develop countries, just like digital divide. And if only they reach where we are, which is, you know, access to these kinds of tools and technologies, then they will also be as pessimistic as we are. And I debunk that because I actually say that not only have they in many places reached, but they've also overtaken by a decade. If you look at China and WeChat, et cetera, Elon Musk wants X to be the future WeChat, which is a decade-old app, right? At least, I mean, it's old school in China. If you want to think about the future of fintech, the Global South, particularly East Asia, is leading it by a decade easily, right, if you want a look at autonomous vehicles, EVs. Again, much is happening in the Global South. So, and even crazier, like digital public infrastructures, where you know about the whole digital sovereignty, which Europe has started in the 80s and France invested so much money in creating a European internet and failed and they really wanted some sovereignty and now they're so in deep pockets with the US firms and they're right now trying to pivot. And India went ahead and built the digital public infrastructure in a fraction of the cost, right? And now, guess what? The EU is looking closely at the India stack to emulate it. All this is to say is that the digital divide doesn't cut it as an explanation. And also, mobile internet is some of the cheapest in the world today in the Global South. It used to be a decade ago some of most expensive in the World, including that of India. So there's a lot of data disruptions. This is, by the way, not to say that we don't have work to do to address the digital divide, but we do need to acknowledge, you know, where progress has been made. And also the fact that their leaders, they've overtaken the West in different ways, which really is well worth, you know paying attention to. And the second is, oh, but they're just lack, they're naïve, they lack literacy, they just are not educated. You know, the whole deficiency model again. And that's also absolutely not true, because they're the forefront of being replaced by AI. They are the forefront of disproportionate harms, if you're women in the global South, which we've been documenting for years and we continue to do. And they are the for front, particularly with intersectional identities. So if anything, they are, they're are the ones who are optimistic, not despite the situation, but because of it, because they, guess what? They happen to live in typically much more constrained social conditions and context. Oftentimes in resource-constrained context, very conservative context, where say if you're a homosexual, which is basically illegal and criminalized in something like 67 different countries in the global South, the digital in relation to that is more liberating because it allows me to humanize myself by being in touch with others online. Or for example, if you're an Afghanistani woman, try talking to her about doesn't she care about her privacy by working and feeding the data extractor machines by using big tech, considering she's not allowed to be in public spaces. She doesn't have, without her companion, she's now allowed the basic rights to education. Basic rights to work. She has been deprived of so many, even infant, like children have better rights than women in Afghanistan right now. So in relation to that condition and context, they are actually looking at digital tools as genuinely liberating because they can again humanize themselves. They've felt forgotten and unheard, but the diaspora of Afghanistan, people who are there to support and really enable them and say, we have not forgotten you, matters for them. And I can come up with so many different examples just to say that this is not naiveté. This is basically the way in which the young people are looking at these spaces as you know, and particularly these AI tools as a way to reimagine themselves, play around and create new future work opportunities. Because as I mentioned in my book, they are also leading in the creative economy because the states and markets have failed them. 90% of young people in the world today live in the global south. That is the norm. Right? And out of which majority of them live in tier two, tier three towns. So they are not the typical, you know, well-off middle class whatnot. And most government policies and market mechanisms ignore them. They don't treat them as consumers, as any, they just ignored. So, they are expected to take on their parents' or grandparents' job to be a farmer or cleaner. They do not want to. So they are no wonder so excited because when they go on to create an economy, like during the, we investigated hundreds of, hundreds of young people all over different from Kenya to India to Bangladesh, they were selling pickles on TikTok to a diaspora and were making a living. They were monetizing their presence. They were gaming the algorithm. They saw a little more agency with these digital tools, which otherwise they do not have in their lives because they happen to be from, you know, rural Rajasthan or in a township in South Africa. So all this is to say is this book was driven by the data and, you know, I am reclaiming techno-optimism from the tech pros by a digital anthropologist and The fact that we need this message right now is because I really believe we have a cascading of books which speak about the doom and the gloom of digital. And we need to remind ourselves why people not just, and when I say people, young people, not just tolerate these tools, they love them. They are passionate about these tools despite the risks and harms. And if you can't computer You know, we will destroy inadvertently some things which are, you know, the digital which is really giving them hope and enablement, which is why I want policies to actually work, designs to actually work, which means you need to be more nuanced about what people gain value from and what they love. I don't mean tolerate, but love and are feeling passionate towards about the digital and. How to protect them, their freedoms, their safety, and it's not an either or, right? So that's really the driver of this book.

Speaker 2 [00:12:27] Yeah, that's a lot to unpack there and some really great insights coming from you, which, of course, are there in the book that I've read. And I think you also follow up some of these insights, but you mentioned that yourself. There is a sort of a hierarchy, even a knowledge construction, right, which is that negativity and pessimism, generally speaking, as you write in your book, are also associated with a higher degree of intellectual aptitude. So you note in the book yourself, you say that. If you say that the world is getting better, you may risk being called naive or immature. But if you say the catastrophe is imminent, then you may even qualify for the Nobel Prize. That's what you write in the book. And I think that's a very important provocation that you're offering, which is the fact that there is, apart from the fact that obviously the Global South is what's happening in the Global south is very different from what's happened in the global north. There is also the issue of the fact The negative reflex is so central to critique in academia. And for better or worse, the Western intellectual tradition tends to push you to debunk and demystify, deconstruct, and is less equipped to help you rebuild and reconstruct, I would say. And as someone as a researcher who's investigating the more optimism and hopeful possibilities, I myself struggled with building the theoretical as well as the methodological repertoire to research the digital good, so to speak, and also to develop more generative forms of critique. How, in your view, can we bridge this gap, so-called gap between critique and constructive engagement?

Speaker 3 [00:14:14] Yeah, I think thank you for that, because I think it's such an important question in this time and age, because I get students who have so much anguish about how they cannot seem to fit the data from, say, Vietnamese creatives into the surveillance capitalism. So they are told to have a theoretical review. They are under say, critical data studies, and they are showcasing how they can be the top student and can get published. And so they have to be hyper-critical, which subscribes to data colonialism, surveillance capitalism, algorithms of oppression, the list goes on, right? Inequality, all by the fact that, you know, bias is baked into these systems. These systems have to go, We need to opt out, we need to contain these tools. And then you see the data saying something different. And they come to me saying, I don't know how to fit it. And I'm really struggling. So the onus is on them to, what I believe, is be nudged to manufacture data. And the way we manufacture data is by conveniently eliminating data. And I've done that myself, by the way, in when I was working with the think tanks where. We were told to, you know, when we were funded by certain think tanks before my academic career, and we are told, hey, this funder has told us to, you know go show empowerment and how you know children are going to use these tools for better education and literacy and how they're going to learn chemistry and math, etc. Actually these kids were just like playing games with these kiosks. And a lot of it was just a lot of play and sociality, which is what I wrote about in my previous book on the next billion users, where I owned up to the fact that we were complicit in manufacturing a sort of poverty porn narrative, a sort-of victimized narrative because it allowed us to get more money, right? And also the sort of instrumentalist usage of the internet versus you know, the rest of the world from the, but I mean, while they're being instrumental in their usage, that's how we were portraying them. The West were allowed to be much more diverse in their users, which is about playfulness. And we could, there's also a divide, right? Within academia, if you look at media studies, it's like, oh, how do the kinds of questions, how do young people or teens use blah, blah, a lot, right? In... Then you have an exploratory topic and you're able to capture their playfulness, their need for intimacy and the sociality and other kinds of sort of belongingness, fan culture. There's such richness in the kind of data. But when it comes to young people in the global south, how do they use this for mathematics, chemistry? How do women use it for health And it's, we are already, you know. Framing the questions in a way which actually pushes them in that direction, right? So we are manufacturing and feeding the same old divide between the North and the South. And so I think that's one of the dangerous things. So I would say, first things first, we need to have an honest starting point. Stop saying, in what ways do... Refugees get oppressed in this way which means that I'm going to feed into firstly my starting point is they are mainly oppressed versus how do they engage with these tools which is much more exploratory and honest also straw man arguments are typically given yeah well sure there are these tools are used widely however and then the rest of it is all about the critique of it, which it doesn't give fair. Value, a fair reflection of the value that people get out of that, right? And also the fact that we are human beings which have, you know, basically are driven by intrinsic contradictions because we have to constantly make decisions between sometimes better and worse. You know, like I'm a woman worker in the gig economy in India and we've done four and we have so much data to back us, which is why I am... Very aggressive in my points, much to the dislike sometimes of, you know, current academics who've even unfriended me, by the way, which is always crazy. This is how personal it gets. That's what's really crazy is some of the top academics are unfriending me because they don't like what I'm saying. And I think they see this as I'm feeding the arguments for big tech to reign supreme or something, right? And it's not the case. It's like the fact that you're taking it this personal, that you are so angry with me for saying something like that is what the problem is. Is that, look, I am on the side of I want real legitimate choice. But I also understand I do not deny that big tech has way too much power. But I'm also pragmatist because I see. The fact is that these tools, I look at them as public spaces. Because if you are like Google and you have 96% market share, you are a public space. Actually, you're no longer a private entity, which means that you can be treated as such in terms of the demand. And we underestimate user agency, because we are what makes these platforms. We can shape these platforms, right? And we- also underestimate the fact that these companies are made up of people and they are wide ranging from idiots to deep thinkers and because they're people and it's it's like a state like if you look at the number of people working in it they have i have spoken to some very deep thinkers really genuinely people who really are on board to change from within we should be working with them, these critical changemakers, because we need that change from within as much as from the outside, right? But regulation tends to think in terms of banning and controlling. They're not thinking in terms how do we make sure we don't screw the chances of these young people who are trying to get by, make a living, even really get past the conditions and contexts they were born into through digital means, you know. So, I think there's, in short, one is I think people have to stop applying and I'm talking directly to PhDs and younger people, even masters and bachelors, is yes, that there are theoretical reviews, but they are not meant to be a framework to channel the way you think and apply it to the real world. It's just a starting point. Not of how you should think, but what the field is saying, or what are the leanings of the field, which to me allows an opportunity to critique. And it's not that when you critique, you have to throw the baby with the bathwater. You can agree that there is disproportionate power, but it's all about building nuance of what aspects of design, what aspects of policy, the boringness of detail needs to go, It needs to be. Mitigated needs to be removed and which aspects and oftentimes the solutions are extraordinarily tediously boring and any practitioner, anyone who is listening to this recognizes this. But the problem is when you are an academic who's not been in practice or a student who hasn't experienced the world, you think in broad, very simple black and white terms of this fits into that, right? And so, and I think that way it could become much more generative and more importantly, bridge the divide between the ivory tower and society, which really is others, we're not going to be relevant to, you know, what's happening right now. You know, all worse, we will become part of the problem because we are creating and generating so much angst and so much despair. Some of my students are like in therapy because especially in gender studies because they feel that they're drowning in this sort of, you know, pessimism. Like they feel helpless. They feel like, because there's only this much, it's like being a church, you know, of guilt. Oh my God, I just used ChatGPD. Did I just, you know, throw away a glass of water? Oh my god, I've just contributed to the ruining of the and I'm not saying that's not true, right, but we cannot think in singular terms. And that's really, you know, it doesn't make for click bait for sure because you become much more sightable when you come up with strong black and white arguments, you become more likely to win a big grant. And I get these are major incentives in academia, but if you want to enter the real world or be relevant to the real word, then maybe you have to think differently. So it is right now we are positioned in this sort of messy trade-off, isn't it?

Speaker 2 [00:23:50] Yeah, and I think you're making an important point about the fact that we get very easily drawn into some of these binaries, and increasingly, at least in the digital space, I think holding on to those contradictions and tensions and the dualities is going to become more and more important, because the reality is that the digital is probably not going anywhere anytime soon, atleast. Hopefully it might take a different shape and form, which is what we all want to. Work towards, but given that it's there and it's existing and it sort of all pervasive, I do think we need to sort of live with that and then think through more the dualities and that probably is not just challenging, but it can come down to maybe perhaps those very boring details like you mentioned. So thank you for that. And I think I'll just move now into some of the recommendations and some of very articulate ideas that you've made in the book about how you can actually start re-imagining alternate futures. And you speak a lot about design and you see it as a potentially a transformative approach also to rethink some of these futures. And you talk about pleasure-based design, green design, and you're not talking about design in a very narrow sense of UI, UX interface or like combinations or configurations of technology, right? You're talking about embracing design as a. Broader way of thinking, of creating the right socio-technical environment. So could you perhaps talk about these expanded notions of design and what should we talk be talking about when we talk about design and where should we be taking inspiration from?

Speaker 3 [00:25:33] Yeah, no, thanks for that. And so basically, you brought up two frameworks I suggest in the book, which is pleasure-based design and green design. So let me use those as illustrative points. So for example, right now, I'm working on a Google-based project for this year on building a gender AI safety protocol. Basically what that means... Is that I'm working with teams within Google to basically process deep fake porn and all the kinds of non-consensual content which is AI-generated, which disproportionately impacts women and girls and other marginalized groups and vulnerable groups like homosexuals, et cetera, especially in the global South. And we are taking a cross-cultural approach to this because typically, what they call in industry speak, the golden use cases are found and are used from the North, particularly America, the US. So it's usually Californian use cases or something. So the idea being is that Google across the world. And while we are trying to reform these tools, get better at it, there are teams working from policy to design to privacy, security within Google that are doing this work. And they are asking for our help, right? And they're saying, OK, because they're not academically trained necessarily. Or some of them are, by the way. They have PhDs. Do you have? Wealth of knowledge. They've been trained by academia. So they have the toolkits. So they are seeking for engagement. And this is part where I feel like we have an alignment of interest because we want to also secure these victims. And Google is basically asking What are the systems in place that we should be responding to? From the intuitive nature of reporting a content to be removed immediately. If I'm a victim-survivor, usually I will go through an intermediary that is an NGO or something in Mexico, like a woman's group, because oftentimes I am firstly mentally traumatized. My family has been dishonored. It could also result in very deadly consequences. It is an embodied harm, you know, a physical harm it could result in. You know, very often it doesn't even get reported, but when it does, we need to make sure that they are supported and they go through intermediaries. And those intermediaries have a really hard time going through these systems and paperwork online and the way in which it is framed. And this is where I'm talking about the boringness of detail. It's like, you know, you go through all the texts. Have you done this? Have you? And this This is what we're trying to work on, right? And then what makes sense in these different contexts. So we want to come up with standards that are cross-cultural but also could be have enough agility to work in different cultural contexts. So that's the sweet spot we need for it to work. And then we want know who are the stakeholders, like cyber police, the municipal party. And you can see already how boring that can get, right? But so very essential for this to work. Work for the victim survivors, okay? Even the fact is that they don't want to be called victim survivors. They just want to become women, that itself. How do you frame them even in the text? Because then it feels alienating. I'm not a victim and I may just stop reporting it. You know, so there's a deep like anthropology, a sociology of why people engage or report or discontinue, which often is a case where you stop midway in reporting because you're afraid. So all this requires a humanities, social studies understanding. But also, I'm trying to communicate that the reason why this is so challenging is because it's a significant amount of content which is consensual. Because guess what? You have Bangladeshi couples who are split and they just got married. And the men are off to Dubai or Abu Dhabi or whatnot, working, and they meet them once or twice a year. So in the meantime, the way in which they have intimacy with their wives is online. Because they're just newly married. They're a couple, and getting to know each other, not just mentally and physically also. And this is consensual. And guess what? That is majority of the data. Actually, whether we like it or not, we are sexual beings, and that's okay. It's not perverse. It's like there's a lot of consensual sex. Homosexuality is normal, and they use these platforms because it's safer relative to their context. Like I mentioned, 67 countries, right? And that's just like about criminalizing it. There's a wider set of countries that stigmatizes it, right? So. So all I'm saying is, and then teenagers, in majority of the countries, they have arranged marriages. You know, even in India, as you know well, is that many of them don't even have the opportunity to date. It's kind of not a thing, right? It's not a social acceptable idea and forget having sex before marriage. But, you know, you want to feel experienced. You want to like the experience of love, intimacy, sex, and that's... Perfectly healthy and normal, if done in a right and consensual way. So we should be recognizing that this is our real challenge and stop pretending it's not, that it's all perversity. Oh my God, when we talk about sex and sexuality, it's about danger, danger, and basically what kind of literacy campaigns are built is towards the girls and women in the Global South saying, stay away from this dangerous space. But that's akin to saying, hey, you know what, the public space is really dangerous, so you should stay at home. I mean, hence the lock profile. Oh, are you unsafe online? Just lock your profile, which means, of course, the girls and women can't capitalize and optimize on the attention economy or be creators up to a point. There's basically a gendered ceiling online, right? Because you in order to address harassment, if I'm monetizing my profile and building my online business is, well, it was your fault then. You went out. You unlocked your profile, didn't you? So I am just trying to say, look, these tools are enabling because we get other kinds of stories. Women are feeling, during COVID, I was really heartened by how many positive stories he heard from women in India and Bangladesh despite the fact that they are oftentimes more vulnerable to harassment. And they were telling me, well, like in Bangladesh, they were forced to go online to sell their saris. And, you know, many of them have to do care work, right? And culture is not shifting anytime very soon, are they? Like, it's like, patriarchy is doubling down sometimes. And you know in laws expect there, you know, these women to still uh do all the work at home and earn but the point is that this this is the reality starting point but when they are at home, and they're selling their saris on the live fee a Facebook live, which by the way really saved Bangladesh's uh you know ability to shift online because they didn't have Amazon that time during COVID. So you know again the sort of black and white oh anti- I, if you're on Facebook, you know, you really should think through because it's a sort of righteousness, right? You put yourself on a pedestal that I was such a great person because I got out of Facebook. Yeah, because your choices, but in Bangladesh, they really liked it because Facebook life enabled them to continue the business. And then they got all these compliments oh wow you're so smart, I love the way you describe this, oh you're looking so pretty in the sari and all these women were giving tips about hey can you give me this, what kind of jewelry are you wearing and then apparently it built a lot more confidence in these women and they also were able to exercise their confidence at home and it shifted the personal dynamic. It's a Resellers are 40 percent women and they target the women and their families but they realize the power shifts do take place. But it takes time and the digital is key. It's a key way for the women to build confidence and all that. I have so many examples but the bottom line is, you know, the pleasure-based principles. We've got for pleasure-base that people do not just like Alright, but fine pleasure. Through intimacy, through validation, through confidence to play, through the sociality of getting compliments from strangers and feeling good about yourself. And you're like, you know what? I am doing something good. Oh, great. I'm going to work on this. So the self-actualization, growth, and the green design is more about how we are asking questions about how AI will replace our creativity, and then we are having this existential crisis of then what makes us human? And this is really a Western-centric part of creativity as an end product, as a patented, as individualistic and indigenous forms of design, which is green design, shows that. If you look at the way in which say Ubuntu approaches or other kinds of indigenous approaches, which emphasizes that I am because we are, and we have this idea that, which comes from a long standing practice that humanity is situated within nature, within society, and nature contributes to the way in which we flourish. And so there's a different way in which we recalibrate ownership. And also, we don't put that much value into ownership as key criteria for understanding the fair prominence and redistribution and fair rights. In fact, forests have rights. What mountains have rights? So all I'm saying is that if we get off the high horse, that all the answers will come from the West and think fresh. About how have collective ways of governance enable for flourishing, for example, or redistribution. We may find answers from the Global South. And I think that would be humbling and important. Because I mean, after all, that is a majority world.

Speaker 2 [00:37:19] Yeah, and I think on that, I wanted to follow up to ask you if you have any suggestions or you have any thoughts on what sort of methodologies can aid research in these spaces because I think in your book, you also talk about the power of the anecdote and you explain how as an anthropologist who studies digital cultures, you have to also fend off a lot of that traditional critique about anecdotes, you really can't make decisions based on an anecdote, right? But equally, we know that there are speculative approaches, fiction, storytelling, foresight methodologies. A lot of these are in play, and they are being used when we're talking about envisioning alternate futures or envisioning hopeful possibilities. And I wanted to understand if you had any thoughts on some of these innovations, if you've actually practiced some or? If you have any disciplines you think we should be looking into for methodological innovations.

Speaker 3 [00:38:21] Yeah, no, I mean, you've already brought up so many different methods, which, you know, I guess is not the podcast to go into methods. That's more like a course. And but no, but these are very important to be open minded about the variety of methods that are at our disposal. We don't we don't need to reinvent the wheel. It's there. We just need to be opened to getting to know these different methods. But look, I indeed it's like when it comes to I can speak particularly to qualitative work, right? Because we tend to almost especially tend to, when it comes to big data analytics, we tend see quantitative as king and qualitative as an add on. But what the quantitative does is it signals what the trends are, but it doesn't even represent the reality. The trends of certain kind of platforms. So for example, I can do data scraping of X, you know, basically Twitter, and I can get patterns of communication, but that represents mainly white male and the West of a certain class. And it doesn't represent the rest of the world. And for the longest point, it's actually deeply data flawed. So in fact, one would argue that it could be dangerous because you have a ton of bad data, which can create actually dangerous sort of validation and legitimacy of certain kinds of starting points. So, which is why we always need a sort of triangulation of methods. What we could say about that data is that is the culture of space. These are the people who are, it makes sense as an analytical tool that Yes, it is still an important space, but for the subset of people, and to understand how the subset people have disproportionate power over, say, policy or design. That would be an honest research, isn't it? Not saying that this is what society thinks. And forget the Global South being represented, or Wikipedia, where the majority of it tends to be still, particularly in terms of the editors, are from men, and now increasingly from Indian men of a particular caste also. So that needs to be recognized as sort of the geographies of power online, right? The demographics of power online. So and that tells us about why potentially certain kinds of framings and certain kind of button issues are designed in a particular way. So it enables us to have, let's say, a more measured approach. And qualitative address, so that addresses the what. Qualitative addresses the why, and the why goes to the core of human drive. So you don't need that much data. You can go really deep into why do people do what they do because one of the most beautiful things is to understand that regardless of how far away you are, the human drive for intimacy, love, Um for having social connect, not feeling lonely, to really want better for their children, or young people to really wanna self-actualize and build something for themselves. And all this is, and play, play with tools. All this is cuts cultures, cuts context. And I think there's something beautiful about that. And to understand what is it that they are concerned about. So you can do deep, rich anthropology work and addressing the why. And like in my previous book on the next billion users, I was already advocating for a case when I was doing anthropological work in the early 2000s about leisure-based approaches to the Global South. And at that time, I didn't have the data, actually. That was also very interesting. And I was able to, but then I You know, I wrote the book when I got the data in, where GEO, which was, you know, basically transformed the data economy in India and made data the cheapest in the world, the company basically analyzed just the data. They didn't have any altruistic angle as such. They were just like looking at a market option that majority of India is ignored. Everyone's focusing on the middle class to upper class in these cities. And they're like, hang on, the majority of the population live in tier two, tier three in rural areas. So what if we were to not do them as an add-on? What if they were the business model? And let's look at them. And they looked at the data generator, and they said, oh, hang one, majority of what they use the data for is along four criteria, ABCD, astronomy, and astrology, sorry, Bollywood, cricket, and devotion. Or, and then let's build our campaigns, our outreach, our designs, and our... So they just looked at the data and that was validating what I had already come up with a decade ago. So, and not because I'm exceptionally smart or something it's because when you're in the field and you're understanding what the human drivers are and you understand people are not exotic species that have nothing to do with other groups in the world. And I'm not saying that they aren't cultural differences but in the sense of things. Then you can be much more confident. And in the end of the day, there should be a humility in any method, whether it's quantitative or qualitative, because it reveals a slice of the pie, which means you have to have deep engagement with other empirical words, which is, by the way, again, an advice for students and particularly who are listening to this, is that I often feel that people put a lot of energy into the theories of things. So if you build on the theories of it, and far little on empirical evidence, and if you read the top most influential works in the last years, they're so theoretical driven based on fear, but far less on actually real empirical evidence. And so I think if you do empirical-based work and you look into that, I think you may find very different stories, because they're emanating from. You know, very different sources. And there's always much more nuance, but they tend to not be given equal weight because we love theory, we love a good idea. And, you know empirical work just makes things messier. And we need to, you now swim in that mess, you.

Speaker 2 [00:45:21] Idea that lived experience is empirical or has a form of empiricism is something that we still grapple with I think. Thank you, thank you for that and I think I want to sort of take this podcast to a close but I have a very important question which I want to end it with. You probably have answered it in some sense when you talked about how you keep straddling academia and the practitioner space and how you've made enough enemies. On probably on both sides. I don't know. But what is interesting is that, like I mentioned in the introduction, that your book, the current book that we're talking about, which is pessimism to promise actually won like a business book award. And that's quite unusual, I would say. And it also, it also says a lot about how the practice community probably is seeing your work. And, and Given that you've also worked extensively, you know, in the sort of non-academic space with multilateral institutions, agencies, even think tanks, I think what would be your advice for researchers who want to straddle these worlds or at least at the very least want their work to speak to the practice community of say innovators or policy experts?

Speaker 3 [00:46:40] Yeah, I mean, you know, when I wrote my previous book, Next Villain Users, I was really already entrenched in the development space. That's where I met Richard and all of these, you know, folks who are already doing amazing work and You know, I basically was critiquing development agencies because I was very much entrenched in that, right? So I could, I was in the front lines. I was, like I mentioned, I as a complicit, so I could speak with a real point of honesty, also owning my own positionality, right, in it. And I was really surprised that actually almost every major tech company, as well as other industries reached out to me after that book. And that's because we are in a data-driven economy and they were looking at, okay, they were already recognizing the Global South is transforming in ways that are no longer what it was even a decade ago. And these are legitimate markets. Like I said, majority of people live in the Global south but they don't know how to approach them. Oftentimes they're not from Global South. They think that, well, don't we still, that's why they come up with this whole AI for good, right? Like, oh, okay, great, the global South the market, but let's just build the tools and give it to them. And then we change the language, right. Isn't that what we should do? And so I was, I was already trying to tell them to think differently about them not being utility driven, but leader driven and a lot of like from Liberty, Latin America, telecom companies to every major company was telling me, hey, we got really excited because the, we. This is exactly what's happening. Majority of the data that's generated, we notice, is for leisure-oriented stuff. But it's one of the few works that actually says that. And so they related to it. And it was something that they've been witnessing. And they recognized it in the mirror. And they're like, OK, but how do we go about it? Versus I find that academia still Like. Decades ago, we're still holding on to media studies versus development studies. Academia is one of those institutions which are like even harder to change because of the, you know, everyone's doubling down on their discipline. It's sort of very like, like fictum-like, right? And because they're not really impacted by the market mechanisms and they're really accountable to you know actual like they can be in the ivory tower to a high degree, right, even though there's push that they should engage with society. They still demarcate anything which is optimistic oriented or change making to development studies. If it comes to global south, right? Oh, that's a development studies thing, right. And development studies, people feel like they need to be more instrumental. And then media study is all about, well, the young people. And how they're using it, and it happens to be in the US, but of course, it'll apply to the rest of the world. But if it's in Nigeria, you have to say the young people in Nigeria and that doesn't apply to US, right? And so it's so old school in academia. And in fact, I would say the market is more progressive in that respect, because at least they legitimizing the Global South is worth looking at in non-patronizing terms. So it's funny because I basically the new book that I've written is particularly also countering this sort of pessimism because it's again generated and led by academics, you know? I mean, they're feeding the mainstream media with non-stop book after book with you know, usually five pages in the end saying, yes, we need to be optimistic and there is hope. How? What is their hope? And they're like, look, I'm optimistic. And they hate the fact that you say, oh, you're pessimistic. No, that's my role to critique. But yes, you critique by killing hope. And you offer five pages saying that, well, your hope is to resist it. Resist these tools, stay out of these tools. Opt out of it. You know, your tactics to circumvent it. No, these tools are also, if you use it right, can really empower you. Like they can be your friend. They can be enablers. And not as a side note, it is the core part of what can really shift and recalibrate power. And recognize that these have agency enabling capabilities. I think this is where, again, I got re-channeled into putting my energy. So what I would say is, look, if you are a PhD or a master's student or anything, wanting to really make a difference, you've got to get momentum, build the courage to go against the normative literature, criticize it. Own up to that. And guess what? Your data can speak it, because people can't counter data. And when you have the data at your hand, then your job can be to come up with new frameworks. And there's already work, including yourself, who are coming up with much more nuanced understandings. And I think we need much more of that. We need to become a counterculture within academia to push against this, because this is already happening in innovation studies. Social entrepreneurship, you know, in other disciplines, not in the humanity. That's my problem. And the social science is to some degree, but humanity is particularly weak on that. And what's bizarre is some of the biggest questions we're facing today demands humanities to take the lead. What is trust? What is creativity? What does, you, know, fair, what is, you you know and all this and if we are not taking the leadership in this Then what are we doing?

Speaker 2 [00:52:44] Thank you, thank you so much for that. I think there's a lot that you've left as provocations for students, for academics, and for the larger digital community, I guess. But this was really a great conversation now, Professor Arora, you've spoken a lot about the importance of reframing the Global South as a legitimate site and perhaps even a leader of imagination and innovation. And you also spoken about how we can constructively engage with the digital sphere beyond the binaries of pessimism, optimism, or you know good and bad and even beyond disciplinary boundaries. For our listeners I would highly recommend reading the book From Pessimism to Promise and it's a really powerful invitation and I'm sure many of you would have got a sense of what the book is about through this discussion. So with that, I just want to thank you very much once again for the privilege of allowing us to host you on this podcast.

Speaker 3 [00:53:53] Thank you so much, and I really am looking forward to the work that comes out of your lab, so thank you.