What’s it like to be playing a video game? Imagine living in one. You’re jumping from quest to quest to quest, trying your darndest to collect all the money and health possible — so you can arrive at a new level, closer to something like paradise, like luck. On the way you come across obstacles; you defeat adversaries either through fisticuffs or mental games; you stop and rest (but not for too long).

You can stop if you wish, but your character goes into stasis. It lies dormant until you pick up where you left off. Nothing happens then: no level ups, no money,  no extra health. It may as well be non-existent.

Roll back. If you find the cheat code — amongst a slew of cheat codes, each varying in benefits — you get access to a platter of riches that enables you to get ahead. Ring-a-ding-ding! A whole menu opens up for you to choose from at leisure: level seventy; twenty million coins; unlimited full mana. Cheating is shameful. It was all hard work. I put in a hundred hours to get here.

But I looked it up and found that the answer was impenetrable; there were no codes to be found. So back I go; jumping from quest to quest to quest, trying my darndest to collect all the money and health possible. Ring-a-ding-ding! I arrive at the destination point and check in. Something is whirring behind me, but I can’t see it. I check in again. The game pulls me in.

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In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon presents a warning: ‘They finally come to understand that the changeover will not be a reform, nor a bettering of things. They come to understand, with a sort of bewilderment that will from henceforth never quite leave them, that political action in the towns will always be powerless to modify or overthrow the colonial regime.’³ ‘Decentralisation!’ they said. ‘We have a vision!’ they said. ‘Revolutionise!’ they said. What is being decentralised and how? Whose vision(s) are we foregrounding? And what kinds of revolutions are we seeing? It depends on whom you ask.

Discover new worlds. In Turkey, a delivery start-up named Getir is rapidly displacing the age-old, local ecosystem of bakkals (grocers).⁴ Look to Sri Lanka, and the ride-hailing company PickMe sees a driver on its roster: a sixty-one-year-old single mother with three school-age children working from 6.30am to 9pm each day, paying about twenty-five per cent in commissions to the company.⁵ Hop on over to Uganda, and what we see is eerily similar: called ‘SafeBoda’,⁶ this is a motorcycle-hailing company that offers on-demand food, pharmacy, and other essential services, and which is currently booming with many drivers reporting high bonuses. But these are still early days (incentives help with hiring after all); it was recently discovered that the company had also been selling user data to a US company.⁷

Of course, many techno-optimists have argued that the platform economy empowers women, who are traditionally locked out of the workforce in the Global South. But because these same women still take on disproportionate roles when it comes to caregiving and child-rearing, they are ‘unable to meet the demands of the algorithm’.⁸ Further away, in the eye of the tiger, feminism seems to have won: in Chicago, a woman decides to drive herself, via her Lyft vehicle, to the hospital after experiencing contractions,⁹ and many female rideshare drivers report instances of sexual harassment or assault while on the job.¹⁰ All around us a slew¹¹ of human rights violations¹² continue to occur;¹³ the wealth divide continues to widen — between cities and towns, between suburbs and metropolitan areas.¹⁴

We know the hegemony trickles down. In a recent exposé on the conditions for Gojek¹⁵ riders in Indonesia, journalists report that riders ‘say their life in Gojek is like a drug addiction’,¹⁶ with others stating that labour standards remain poor.¹⁷ Zoom out into the Colony™ — despite workers winning a landmark case that now see Uber¹⁸ (and shortly after, Deliveroo¹⁹) workers rightly entitled to paid leave and employee benefits, other companies have not followed suit. Closer to ‘home’, in so-called Australia, Amazon builds its sixth warehouse in Western Sydney, a sprawling 200,000 square metre complex — double the size of Bondi Beach — promising to deliver jobs to the community, as is their modus operandi.²⁰ We won’t see the effects of these expansions until years later. Meanwhile, Chinese ventures swoop into various African countries, vultures for untapped opportunity: we see the expansion of ride-hailing company Didi Chuxing²¹ and the encouragement of ‘digital sovereignty’ funded for nefarious means,²² as well as the transformation of Zambia into a (tax-free) start-up hub.²³ Who wins? Zoom out again, and we see freelancers in various low-income countries toiling²⁴ for peanuts²⁵ — while major companies’ share prices soar²⁶ — in a kind of Mechanical Turkinisation²⁷ of piecemeal work: need a sixty-minute transcript for USD$5 in twenty minutes? Consider it a done deal. On YouTube, ‘business influencers’ give tips on how to make more money on Fiverr. How to hack Uber surge pricing? This man tells you how. In Birmingham, four Uber drivers are accused — by the algorithm — of fraud.²⁸ Elsewhere, someone comes up with a Chrome extension that can be installed on your phone should you want to see if Uber has ripped you off.²⁹ Six months later, Uber succeeds in getting it pulled from Google.³⁰

Globalisation, but make it hot. So hot that the surface of the earth is melting. Borders blur yet tighten. In the meantime, data centres whirr on, hidden away and unseen. Out of sight, out of mine: bitcoin mines³¹ thrive,³² abetted by the exchange of money and power. In The Wretched of the Screen, Hito Steyerl writes that ‘In our dystopia of negative freedom in our atomized nightmares nobody belongs to anybody (except banks). We don’t even belong to ourselves.’³³ I reach into my memory and unlock recollections of Kiva:³⁴ a slick rebrand of the payday loan popularised during the early 2010s, its services purporting to help those without access to conventional banking. Like eBay, but for microcredit! We are only seeing its effects now.³⁵ As our margins of refusal continue to shrink, everyone hits play. One day you may win. Game on. Game over. Game on. Game over. Game on.