OVERLOAD, CREEP, EXCESS: An Internet from India

This book locates India’s flourishing internet within a complex 24-year history that has seen an unprecedented re-organization of social and political life. Three essays provide independent perspectives on a common area of inquiry, an era that witnessed a fundamental mutation of the State, its mechanisms of planning and governance, the public domain and the everyday, all mediated by digital technology, all impacting its internet. Bringing the essays together is a common timeline, which begins in the late 1970s, includes such landmarks as the Information Technology Act, the much-discussed Aadhaar biometric identification programme, the chequered career of social media, and the widespread use of internet shutdowns.

Nishant Shah is a feminist, humanist, technologist. He was the cofounder of The Centre for Internet & Society, India. He is currently an endowed professor of aesthetics and cultures of technology at ArtEZ University of the Arts and Radboud University in the Netherlands, a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet & Society, Harvard University, USA, and a Knowledge Partner with the Digital Asia Hub, Hong Kong. His current preoccupations are around questions of digital technologies, narrative practices for collective action, and cultural politics of Artificial Intelligence. Ashish Rajadhyaksha worked as Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society. Although known primarily as a film scholar, he has published widely on digital governance, including the book The Last Cultural Mile: An Inquiry into Technology and Governance in India (2011), the edited compilation In the Wake of Aadhaar: The Digital Ecosystem of Governance in India (2013) and the essay 'State Power and Technological Citizenship in India: From the Postcolonial to the Digital Age' (with Itty Abraham) in East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (2015). Nafis Aziz Hasan has been researching the techno-politics of digital media, material politics of public institutions, and technological policies for governance, with a regional focus on India. One part of his project seeks to offer a historical understanding of digital technology in relation to prior technologies of rule. Another aspect of his work draws on rich ethnographic material on the assemblage of people, processes, and technologies, generated over a decade from across India. His work has appeared in academic journals such as South Asia, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and Economic and Political Weekly, and popular outlets such as thewire.in, New Indian Express and raiot.in. This is his first book.