What if instead of an age of automation we are currently living through the dawn of a new era of exploitation?

I argue that by focusing on middle class technological anxieties in the global North, "The Social Dilemma" inadvertently reinforces the spatial hegemony of technological optimism and ignores the socio-spatial contingencies through which social media and its artifacts are constructed and imagined.

This book is a timely set of dialogues on a series of key coordinates to navigate the political economy of Big Data Capitalism. Chandler and Fuchs have successfully composed a well-rounded volume addressing a wide range of urgent themes that include digital governance, posthuman knowledge, digital affective labor and its gendered dimensions, new (and old) forms of slavery and their respective technologies, emerging forms of political organization, and the appropriation of fixed capital by workers – among others.

The social practice of everyday hacking, digital and mobile workarounds, information piracy, illegal copying and sharing—in a word, jugaad culture—is an increasing feature of post-liberalization India. But it has a history that must be understood as always involving repeatedly forgotten experiments in techno-perceptual assemblages.

If researchers working with the new data sources – and geographers in particular – can learn to think across contexts in a more inclusive way, it may take us further toward realising big data’s promise as a tool for social scientific research.