ALGOtalk #6: Craig Ryder & Avishek Ray

Craig Ryder is a digital anthropologist whose interests span the digital mix, including the platformisation of information, emergent applications of AI, and digital research methodologies. As a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC-funded SMALL PLATFORMS project at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), he is investigating extreme speech in the UK in alternative digital spaces.

Avishek Ray is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the National Institute of Technology Silchar. His research focuses on mobility, marginality, and cultural historiography. He is the author of The Vagabond in the South Asian Imagination and co-author of Digital Expressions of the Self(ie). A 2021 Fulbright-Nehru Fellow, he is currently co-authoring Networked Mobilities in the Wake of the Pandemic, under contract with Routledge.

The TMS-funded ALGOFOLK project invites Craig and Avishek to give two talks titled:

Affordance folklore: Truth, community and visibility during Sri Lanka’s internet shutdowns

To governments worldwide, internet shutdowns are the trip-switch solution to civic unrest, and they occur with surprising regularity. In Sri Lanka, internet shutdowns have been tactically deployed to geo-specific regions and specific platforms on three occasions following moments of extraordinary violence and resistance that this article examines in detail. The concept of “algorithmic folklore” has been used to describe the speculative ideas and tactics that users of digital technology exhibit in order to make sense of their relationship with opaque computational systems. Using this conceptual approach, I consider the modes through which Sri Lankans experience internet shutdowns and offer the novel term “affordance folklore” to illustrate the discursive constructions and practical strategies that help people make sense of a complex sociotechnical event such as an internet shutdown.

Digital territorialization and the politics of platform bans: Rethinking India’s TikTok moment 

This talk explores India’s 2020 TikTok ban through the lens of “everyday techno-nationalism,” focusing on Reddit and Quora discussions. It examines how TikTok is framed as a “Chinese” platform and how this framing feeds into nationalist narratives of Indian identity. Here, I argue that TikTok’s Chineseness is constructed through us-versus-them rhetoric, enabling digital territorialization. Simultaneously, classist and casteist dismissals of TikTok as “cringe” marginalize working-class creators, erasing them from both digital culture and nationalist imaginaries. The talk raises broader questions about state control over digital life and how people negotiate identity and belonging in an increasingly polarized digital world.

These talks will be in English, and will be followed by a Q&A.