Sandeep Mertia

Thank you to the Hype Studies group for bringing together such an eclectic group of scholars, practitioners, & artists at this conference! 🙌🏽
The critical experimental & non-hierarchical approach reminded me of Sarai :)

The state of global digital capitalism(s) - Sandeep Mertia, 2025

Link: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Thank you to Ugo Rossi and the editors of Dialogues in Urban Research for inviting me to contribute to their unconventional book forum section, in which they ask scholars to relate the book to their own research contexts (somewhat similar to the anthropology journal HAU’s book symposia).

A short essay on the state of global digital capitalism(s) and futures in/from India and China, based on @linzhang.bsky.social 'The Labor of Reinvention' (2023)

Amidst everything (& its attendant self-censorship), I am so deeply grateful to my students this semester for keeping me sane through their curiosity, engagement, & comradery! 💙

Looking forward to (remotely) speaking at the 50 years of Media Studies Conference at Westminster today! #UoWMEDIA50

It's so fulfilling to see my STS students think through a critical sociotechnical problem like AI use in higher-ed more self-reflexively and relationally than most of the expert public commentators on the topic! 🥲

#grading gem, definitely not written by any LLM: "Nobody warned C. P. Snow that his tidy mid‑century parable about “The Two Cultures”would be rebooted as a late night TikTok doom scroll, yet here we are with our thumbs twitching..." 🥲

@aakashs.bsky.social and I have written an opinion piece in today’s The Indian Express. Our original title was “Startups as Reasons of the State: Why India Fails to Imagine New Techno-Futures.” Please do read and share your thoughts. Thank you!

indianexpress.com/article/opin...

Happening tomorrow: A Quick History of Algorithms (for post-algorithmic teens) 🧓🏽🔥✨
hobokenlibrary.libnet.info/hoboken-publ...

This is less canonical, and more of an attempt to answer why study STS in the here and now?https://www.academia.edu/127235339/HST120_Introduction_to_STS_Spring25_Mertia?source=swp_share

Drafting my coping strategy for the Spring’25 semester 😬✨

Critical Data Remain Elusive, As 2024 Comes To A Close 16 critical datasets are delayed, nine ministries are yet to release their annual reports and the Census is now three years overdue, affecting policy-making and weakening transparency

The “datafied” postcolonial state: no census, critical edu or health datasets but look IndiaStack, UPI, DigiYatra. Post-industrial theories of data colonialism or surveillance capitalism can hardly explain the innovations the Indian state does in the name of data ✨
www.indiaspend.com/data-gaps/cr...

Smruti Sarangi on LinkedIn: Rise of the "dumb" well-published academic | 53 comments We are increasingly seeing the phenomenon of the "dumb" well-published academic -- someone who has published loads of papers yet does not know the basics of… | 53 comments on LinkedIn

www.linkedin.com/posts/smruti...
“We are increasingly seeing the phenomenon of the "dumb" well-published academic […] The roots can be traced to the decline of values in the American academic system, which is sadly getting mimicked in the Indian academic system.”

In my college days (back in Gandhinagar), we only had occasional unscheduled visits from stray dogs & monkeys 😌

Final presentations, Computers and Society, Fall’24: I’ve made it to my students meme-scapes! 🥲

I want this app to work, but so far it’s no match for the dumpster fire ethic of the old one 😌 #LuigiMangione

Last lecture, Fall’24 ✨

The dustbin of techno-futurities scaling up 🚀

“..despite the surge in the late 2010s, India’s growth rate for mobile internet subscribers has slowed in the past few years. And as of October 2024, almost half, or 46%, of the population is still not connected to mobile internet.”

t.co/0XISvmLvWl

Great read! :) I love my students reaction when I tell them about the history of the great socialist tech venture capital organization called the US DoD haha, along with examples from Soviet Union, Chile, India, etc.

YouTube video by OxfordUnion Philosopher Slavoj Žižek on 'soft' fascism, AI & the effects of shamelessness in public life

Zizek’s (beginning?) to talk about China’s and India’s soft fascisms to think about anti-teleological histories. Cute.
youtu.be/OSYjmH_WPQQ?...

I saw dozens of such examples in my fieldwork with start-ups in Jaipur. As I work on the book, I keep wondering what could a non-parochial, non-provincial, non-suffering slot-ifying theory of tech, capital, & power in most of the world do to counter-speculate against such hype-cycled predicaments 😌

Bribe-that Mata.

Bluesky feels like I took a Time Machine back to 2009 when I was still like “Hey this social media thing is going to make the world a better place.”

Markedly less Palestinian & Lebanese content here, though that might be an effect of immediate networks and algorithms, though I hear Bluesky has been suspending accounts as well. The difference from X is nonetheless eerie & alarming in the midst of genocide & war.

Christopher Kelty: The Internet We Could Have Had Ten years ago I began writing a book. It was going to be called Power/Sharing and would pick up on my previous book Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. It was a turbulent time: the o

I'm just starting to use this app, & wondering if the discourse here (among US-based academic networks) is likely reproducing the monotechnological thinking that we've seen elsewhere 😌
networkcultures.org/blog/2022/09...

Should a Country Speak a Single Language? In India, one of the world’s most polyglot countries, the government wants more than a billion people to embrace Hindi. One scholar thinks that would be a loss.

In this week's New Yorker: My profile of Ganesh Devy, who assembled the first Indian survey of languages in a century, and who now lives in Dharwad as a protest against forces who will kill writers and impose religions and languages [1]

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

India-based twitter folks (including ofc the sanghis) aren’t here 😌

thanks for creating this, please add me

Hello! So, what’s the best way to find friends from Twitter & elsewhere here? 😌