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

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.