Transformation Zones: Digital Hubs, Class and (Geo)politics in Jordan

该项目旨在通过对约旦亚喀巴经济特区(ASEZ)进行人种学研究，绘制数字枢纽开发过程中的政治机构地图。亚喀巴被沙特阿拉伯和以色列包围，是约旦唯一的互联网交换点，在跨区域数字网络(海底互联网电缆、数据中心和交换点)的交叉点上日益突出，战略上使其处于全球数字发展的断层线上。从历史上看，自由港，以及最近的自由区，如阿塞兹(在世纪之交发展起来)，一直是资本主义发展中的关键“模块化技术”，通过剥削性劳动制度实现高度分割的资本积累模式。然而，当数字中心从这些技术中诞生时，它们可能会产生什么样的新形式的劳动力早熟？他们如何通过数字零工劳动力和“监控资本主义”的数据驱动盈利模式来重新配置市场地理位置？数字枢纽实体基础设施的跨地区构成，通过这些基础设施，本地化的生态系统(虚拟市场)具有矛盾的全球覆盖范围，如何改变地缘政治和阶级关系？因此，这个项目试图明确全球资本主义的机制是如何通过这些基础设施以数字方式运行的，以揭示它们在(智能)治理系统和(重新)制造人力资本方面的变革作用。

This project sets out to map the political agencies embedded in the development of digital hubs through an ethnographically-led study of the Aqaba Special Economic Zone (ASEZ) in Jordan. Hemmed in by Saudi Arabia and Israel and home to Jordan's only internet exchange point, Aqaba's increasing prominence at the intersection of transregional digital networks (subsea internet cables, data-centres and exchange points) strategically positions it on the global fault-lines of digital development. Historically, free ports, and more recently free zones like ASEZ (developed at the turn of the century) have been key 'modular technologies' in capitalist development, enabling highly segmented modes of capital accumulation through exploitative labour regimes. Yet, when digital hubs are born out of such technologies, what new forms of labour precarity might they produce? How do they reconfigure market geographies through the enabling of digital gig labour and the data-driven profit models of 'surveillance capitalism'? And how might the transregional make-up of digital hub's physical infrastructure through which localised ecosystems (virtual markets) have a paradoxically global reach, transfigure geopolitics and class relations? This project thus seeks to pin-point just how the machinery of global capitalism is digitally performed through these infrastructures in order to shed light on their transformative role in systems of (smart) governance and the (re)makingof human capital.