Hardware and data in the platform era: Chinese smartphones in Africa

Abstract

The increased access to smartphones in Africa and elsewhere in the global south has opened new markets and new areas for surveillance/platform capitalism/data colonialism to operate. This article attends to the socio-technical practices of Transsion, the Chinese maker of Africa’s top selling smartphones, and through these showcases how essential hardware are to the global data economy. Working from a mix of data, including translocal fieldwork in Shenzhen, Accra, Addis Ababa, and a close reading of Transsion products and artifacts alongside business practices, the article shows how the company’s prioritizing of Black African consumer needs sustains its competitive position and how its constellation of hardware and apps are integral to its success in routine experimentation of artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and other emerging areas of computation. Ultimately, the argument is that consumer hardware such as low-cost smartphones are critical to the datafication of the everyday in the global south via the bundling of surveillant and extractive software and should be considered sites of power within discourses on the platform era.

Africa-China Knowledge Networks: State of the Field

“…However, there are few academic studies on the political and social implications of these new trends in surveillance. One exception is the scholarship of Seyram Avle (2022), who has focused on how China's low-cost hardware provision to African consumers serves to induct these consumers into a surveillance-capitalist economy from which they had previously been excluded. Bulelani Jili (2020) has also highlighted the agency of African governments in seeking out Chinese surveillance technology, as well as what he views as China's mask of neutrality in providing it.…”