Our first exploration of The Vaporstate takes us to India, home of Aadhaar: a mammoth digitisation project that charts a path from technosolution for public service delivery, to a mandated centralised system of surveillance and corporate capture.

More like this: Is Digitisation Killing Democracy? w/ Marietje Schaake

Joining Alix for part one of The Vaporstate is Mila Samdub, Astha Kapoor, and Usha Ramanathan. Together they discuss the conception of Aadhaar, India’s key piece of digital public infrastructure, and how it morphed from a simple digital ID to something that unifies payments, phone plans, and biometrics.

Further reading & resources:

More about Usha Ramanathan — legendary lawyer and activist who has been pushing back on the Aadhaar programme for over a decade
More about Astha Kapoor — co-founder of the Aapti Institute
More about Mila Samdub — researcher, writer, and current Open Future fellow
Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology — by Abeba Birhane et al, Nature Journal
Aadhaar 2.0 workshop
Walmart Takes Ownership of PhonePe from Flipkart — The Times of India, 2022
Walmart invests $200 million in Indian mobile payments giant PhonePe — TechCrunch, 2023
Google launches India mobile payments app Tez — BBC, 2017

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