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The Covid-19 pandemic has led to the rise of digitally enabled remote work with consequences for the global division of labour. Remote work could connect labour markets, but it might also increase spatial polarisation. However, our understanding of the geographies of remote work is limited. Specifically, in how far could remote work connect employers and workers in different countries? Does it bring jobs to rural areas because of lower living costs, or does it concentrate in large cities? And how do skill requirements affect competition for employment and wages? We use data from a fully remote labour market—an online labour platform—to show that remote platform work is polarised along three dimensions. First, countries are globally divided: North American, European, and South Asian remote platform workers attract most jobs, while many Global South countries participate only marginally. Secondly, remote jobs are pulled to large cities; rural areas fall behind. Thirdly, remote work is polarised along the skill axis: workers with in-demand skills attract profitable jobs, while others face intense competition and obtain low wages. The findings suggest that agglomerative forces linked to the unequal spatial distribution of skills, human capital, and opportunities shape the global geography of remote work. These forces pull remote work to places with institutions that foster specialisation and complex economic activities, i. e. metropolitan areas focused on information and communication technologies. Locations without access to these enabling institutions—in many cases, rural areas—fall behind. To make remote work an effective tool for economic and rural development, it would need to be complemented by local skill-building, infrastructure investment, and labour market programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital labour platforms do not attempt to build trust between worker, client, and platform on the basis of strong and durable ties. Instead, platforms utilize a double articulation of algorithmic power to govern spatially dispersed workforces in both material and discursive ways. However, algorithms do not have hegemonic outcomes, and they do not entirely strip away agency from platform workers. Through manipulation, subversion, and disruption, workers bring fissures in algorithmic power into being. Fissures in algorithmic power are moments in which algorithms do not govern as intended. While these moments do not simply result in positive outcomes for workers, they show that algorithmic power is inherently only ever partial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital labour platforms do not attempt to build trust between worker, client, and platform on the basis of strong and durable ties. Instead, platforms utilise a double articulation of algorithmic power to govern spatially dispersed workforces in both material and discursive ways. However, algorithms do not have hegemonic outcomes, and they do not entirely strip away agency from platform workers. Through manipulation, subversion, and disruption, workers bring fissures in algorithmic power into being. Fissures in algorithmic power are moments in which algorithms do not govern as intended. While these moments do not simply result in positive outcomes for workers, they show that algorithmic power is inherently only ever partial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Henri Lefebvre talked of the 'right to the city' alongside a right to information. As the urban environment becomes increasingly layered by abstract digital representation, Lefebvre's broader theory warrants application to the digital age. Through considering what is entailed by the urbanization of information, this paper examines the problems and implications of any 'informational right to the city'. In directing Tony Benn's five questions of power towards Google, arguably the world's most powerful mediator of information, this paper exposes processes that occur when geographic information is mediated by powerful digital monopolies. We argue that Google currently occupies a dominant share of any informational right to the city. In the spirit of Benn's final question-'How do we get rid of you?'-the paper seeks to apply post-political theory in exploring a path to the possibility of more just information geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing digital connectivity has sparked many hopes for the democratization of information and knowledge production in sub-Saharan Africa. To investigate the patterns of knowledge creation in the region compared to other world regions, we examine three key metrics: spatial distributions of academic articles (traditional knowledge production), collaborative software development, and Internet domain registrations (digitally mediated knowledge production). We find that, contrary to the expectation that digital content is more evenly geographically distributed than academic articles, the global and regional patterns of collaborative coding and domain registrations are more uneven than those of academic articles. Despite hopes for democratization afforded by the information revolution, sub-Saharan Africa produces a smaller share of digital content than academic articles. Our results suggest the factors often framed as catalysts in the transformation into a knowledge economy do not relate to the three metrics uniformly. While connectivity is an important enabler of digital content creation, it seems to be only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition; wealth, innovation capacity, and public spending on education are also important factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global production networks (GPNs) have become a key framework in conceptualizing linkages, power and structure in globalized production. However, this framework has been less successful in integrating the influence of digital information and ICTs in production, and this problematic in a world where relationships and power are increasingly mediated by digital information flows and resources. We thus look to adapt the GPN framework to allow more substantive analysis of 'the digital'. Primarily, this is done through a theoretical analysis of the three core categories of the GPN framework - embeddedness, value and networks - to highlight how these categories can better integrate a more dynamic and contested conceptualization of the digital. Illustrations from research on the digitalization of tea sector GPNs in East Africa highlight how these theoretical advances provide new insights on the digital and its expanding role in economic production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After observing the growth of the Indian and Filipino Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sectors, Kenyan policy-makers and managers made substantial investments in international internet infrastructure and BPO marketing campaigns. While observers continue to discuss the sector in terms of its international work opportunities, in recent years the sector has increasingly focused on contracts sourced from Kenyan and other East African clients. The government has also refocused efforts on attracting international BPO companies. This domestic turn signals both the difficulties of gaining access to overseas work due to the power of incumbents and the increasing use of the internet and ICT-enabled automation within Kenyan organisations. In effect, better connectivity has enabled a two-way globalisation of services: Kenyan BPO companies can access international work opportunities but connectivity has also contributed to the inflow of international business practices into Kenya. The conclusion examines what these shifts might entail for the sector and its workers in future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

E ast A frica has traditionally been characterized by stark b arriers to nonproximate communication and flows of information. It was the world's last major region without fibre-optic b roadband Internet access, and until the summer of 2009 had been forced to rely on slow and costly satellite connectivity. This all changed when the first of four fibreoptic cables was connected in Kenya: bringing with it the promise of fast and affordable Internet access for the masses, and the ability of the country to move towards a knowledgebased economy. Within the context of this moment of change, this paper explores the ways that managers of outsourcing firms envisage 'connectivity.' Over the course of forty-one interviews, contradictory spatial imaginaries were discovered. When describing their perceptions of the country's new technomediated positionalities, many interviewees repeated visions that allowed geographic frictions to evaporate. But when managers were asked about their actual mediated positionalities, they presented a very different world: one of barriers, frictions, and the very real role that distance continues to play in the world's economic peripheries. The goal of this paper is to interrogate why we see such stark disconnects between perceptions and practices of connectivity. The contradictions could be seen as an exposition of a scalar schism between internationally operating regimes of tru th (ie, powerful discourses that have their origin nonlocally) and local experiences and practices in Kenya. Alternatively, we can think about the contradictory accounts of connectivity as emergent from strategic spatial essentialisms that are practised to achieve particular goals. By focusing on the contradictions embedded into the ways in which people speak about connectivity in the Kenyan outsourcing sector, we can learn much about how arguments about the entanglement of connectivity, growth, and development are operationalized. 'Connectivity' is offered as a necessary, and sometimes even sufficient, condition from which growth and economic development can be brought into being: a set of spatial imaginaries th a t conveniently support a national development strategy of remaking Kenya in the contemporary knowledge economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, practices of food production, consumption, and distribution have the potential to go through immensely transformative shifts as information and communication technologies (ICTs) become increasingly embedded in every domain of contemporary life. This paper addresses key challenges and opportunities at the intersection of food and ICTs. The paper argues for the need for interdisciplinary research to examine the key roles that network technologies play in re-shaping social and economic networks of food, focusing on three main research areas: food data, transparency and changing practices; new forms of sociality around food supported by technologies, and; re-routings of mobility and distribution networks made possible by ICTs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is frequently argued that the ‘digital divide’ is one of the most significant development issues facing impoverished regions of the world. Yet, even though the term is inherently spatial, there have been no sustained efforts to examine the geographic assumptions underlying discourses of the ‘digital divide.’ This article traces the history of the term, reviewing some of its tangible effects and placing a focus on the temporal and spatial assumptions underpinning ‘digital divide’ discourses. Alternative formulations of the ‘digital divide’ are offered which take into account the hybrid, scattered, ordered and individualized nature of cyberspaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Places have always been palimpsests. The contemporary is constantly being constructed upon the foundations of the old. Yet only recently has place begun to take on an entirely new dimension. Millions of places are being represented in cyberspace by a labour force of hundreds of thousands of writers, cartographers and artists. This paper traces the history and geography of virtual places. The virtual Earth is not a simple mirror of its physical counterpart, but is instead characterised by both black holes of information and hubs of rich description and detail. The tens of millions of places represented virtually are part of a worldwide engineering project that is unprecedented in scale or scope and made possible by contemporary Web 2.0 technologies. The virtual Earth that has been constructed is more than just a collection of digital maps, images and articles that have been uploaded into Web 2.0 cyberspaces; it is instead a fluid and malleable alternate dimension that both influences and is influenced by the physical world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]