The popular area of Hay Ettadhamon (Solidarity District) in western Tunis is notorious throughout Tunisia as a place of crowds, theft, poverty, illicit alcohol and drug dealing. It was also the first place in the capital to see protests during the 2010-2011 uprising. Yet, many residents claim that in fact the area has become middle class, pointing to high levels of “consumption” as proof of this class standing. A post-revolutionary spike in internet use serves to evidence high consumption levels. Internet use soared in popular neighborhoods of Tunis, Tunisia following the revolutionary uprising. In spite of pronounced economic constraint, by 2015, most households in low-income areas of the capital were accessing the internet through cell phones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers. This paper will compare two different neighborhoods of Hay Ettadhamon: one of these neighborhoods, located near to the city’s light rail system, first began developing in the 1960s, while the other is peripheral and has only recently taken shape in the wake of the 2010-2011 revolutionary uprising. The paper will highlight differentiation in urban form between these two neighborhoods and how these differences impact resident perceptions of the two areas, where the latter is viewed as dangerous and insecure. The paper will further show how these perceptions impinge on discourse about social class and internet use. At issue are the ways the revolutionary uprising prompted shifts in urban formation, identity and sociality that are ultimately inseparable from a sudden desire for and dependency upon the internet. Juxtaposing discourse about the internet with various forms of actual internet use in the area serves to substantiate why some residents identify as middle class while also countering projections of Hay Ettadhamon as a places of homogenous crowds. The paper draws upon 15 months of ethnographic dissertation fieldwork with children, adolescents, and adults in two dozen area internet cafes, three preparatory schools, and an NGO.

Participatory digital platforms usher historically specific arrangements and modes of communication into relation with self-understandings. New forms of laboring and data accumulation coincide with practices and platforms of value generation and image circulation. These circulations rely on measurements of labor, affect, and attention used in workplaces that link up with a complex mixture of tasks, traditions and technologies, which belie their conditions of production. In this paper, I draw on my four months of participatory observation and work in a digital advertising agency in Istanbul, Turkey in late 2014. Condensed in a particular neighborhood on the backdrop of the financial district of the city, JazzRabbit offered services characteristic of the new advertising agencies, demanding forms of labor such as (social media) account management, data interpretation, geo-locative application production, follower generation, product solicitation, and celebrity incitation. I focus on the way workers anticipate product and image circulation as they brand images and logos according to their 'ways of seeing'. This anticipation is a way through which workers rearticulate the political and (contextually) derogatory category of 'layfstayl' (lifestyle, or 'yasam tarzi'). Emptying out the concept, they use technology as a way to short circuit the meaning and history of political identification, and use it to connote 'scientific' standards of behavioral 'choice'. These practices of 'scientific' expert mechanics mediate worker intimacies and entrepreneurial subjectivities. Taking data as lumps of affect, attention and labor, and ‘behavioral advertising’ as a complex of data, algorithms, and procedures, I engage with (histories and) practices of calculation, tabulation, and interpolation of the workers. These practices in turn doubly reify data into product, and imaginary categories of an automated society of consumers and producers into working classifications. I argue that both ads and self-understandings are in part generated by careers of data, which transform the histories of objects, and reapply timeless categories of marketable identities. Behavioral advertising makes this relationship observable, calculable, and again, marketable.

This paper explores the cooperation taking place after the revolution of 2011 between the advertising industry, the state, and underground artists in Cairo. I argue that during times of transitions and political crises and when digital circulations are transforming the media industry in Egypt, the political power of art ceases to be deadlocked between defiance/resistance and compliance/selling out. Rather, political action during transitions transpires as a process of making sense of a world that appears ambiguous, cynical, and dreadful. In Cairo and since the early 2000s, emerging underground music scenes capitalizing on online platforms conjured alternative markets and youth publics adjacent to the mainstream media industry. After the 2011 revolution in Egypt, the advertising industry in Cairo started hiring underground musicians - instead of mainstream celebrities - to perform in commercials for a broad range of clients including the Egyptian government. The rise of the underground music scene after 2011 stilted on revolutionized youth subcultures and digital media, and spotlighted artists who flaunted their anti-corporatization and voiced their political engagement. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork on the alternative music scene in Cairo, I explore the making of commercials (including a government’s sponsored national campaign) featuring underground musicians. I explain the power structures underpinning an incongruent collaboration transpiring during the years after 2011 between underground artists and their alleged antipodes: the corporates and government. The transformation brought by digital media intertwining with a new generation of youth audience is reshaping the media industry and restructuring the relation between governance, capital, and artists. On the one hand, corporates and governments piggyback on underground artists’ adept mastering of the online space and its social media to reach out to politicized younger generations. On the other hand, artists who need to channel cash flow to their music scenes through advertising deals have to negotiate between expectations of youth fan base looking up to the artists as the voice of the revolution and maneuvers with a government and corporates that they distrust and despise. The making of advertisements imbricates this mistrust and symbiosis between the state, capital, and artists, where actors are experimenting during transitional times when the rulebook of political action and media programming is transmuting. For underground artists, during transitions and crises, politics become the space where they can make sense of the world and actively engage with that which they also fight against; political oppression and industrialization of art.