One can find “Unlimited” as a qualifier in advertisements for telecom data plans, video-on-demand platforms, and even loans. From Vodafone ads in the piazzas of Turin declaring “illimitati” texts to internet bandwidth companies promoting their “aseemit” internet services in rural hinterlands of India, “unlimited” in different languages seems like a consensus term to characterize phone/data offerings across the world (See figures 1 & 2). Beyond suggesting quantitative abundance of data usage, video libraries and money, “unlimited” connotes breaking the boundaries of aspirations, dreams, and desires in the affective register.

Figure 1: Vodafone ad promising illimitati (unlimited) data/texts in Turin (picture by Author)

Around 2016, buoyed by the so­ called data kranti (“data revolution”), a significant customer base of “neomobiles,” an aspirational neo–­middle class of users/audiences in India (estimated to be more than two hundred million people and growing), acquired mobile phones and accessed the (mobile) internet for the first time in their lives. Neomobiles became the target for both the streaming media industry and fintech companies. “Neomobile” remains a contested term standing in for an idealized distribution subject of platformized governance or quasi­ agential data generator in/of on­-demand delivery cultures.

Figure 2: “Aseemit” (Unlimited) Internet promised as part of Broadband Network Ad in Karmatand, India (Picture by Author)

In my forthcoming book Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution (MIT Press, Spring 2026), “unlimited” works as both a descriptor and heuristic. Mobile media companies tout their services of download speeds and seamless streaming services as “unlimited,” but studying the distribution backends of mobile media infrastructures reveal that telcos tend to often brush up against “limits” that involve resolving storage and bandwidth bottlenecks. In this book, I not only study distribution infrastructures of mobile media to point out logistical limits and constraints encountered in moving content, data, and money to—and from— new to mobile phone users in India, but also explore how aspirations shape such practices of distribution as well as how distribution technologies aid state-corporations to set aspirational goals for citizen-consumers.

According to India’s politicians, access to smartphones or mobile internet has provided the “neo-middle classes” with the “capacity to aspire.” Especially in the 2010-2020 decade, one found novel kinds of middle-class subjectivities emerging in India that had less to do with income levels and concerned themselves with self-identification.[1] The growth of aspirational discourses has coincided with expansion of credit infrastructures in India, propelled to a large extent by digital financial media in the form of e-wallets, payment gateways, and microloan apps available through a click, swipe, and scroll on smartphones. Are these developments in mobile money leading to financial inclusion or are they encouraging reckless lending promoting dreams of upward mobility but then catching borrowers in debt traps? These research questions suggest the need to study the distribution of mobile phone content and money together, an effort that both scholarship on mobile media studies and media distribution studies rarely makes except for some notable exceptions.[2] This is despite increasing media phenomena of convergence of money, content, and data concretized in the proliferation of livestreaming e-commerce and payment/lending apps across China, India, Kenya, and other parts of the world.[3]      

“Unlimited” as a promissory note of telecom and data service companies is disingenuous not only because it occludes particular logistical constraints, but also because in certain cases state-corporations deliberately impose limitations. The tendency to continuously drum up the breaking of barriers and constraints is not exclusive to mobile phone companies but extends further to the wider discourse around technological growth and unfettered capitalism. Telecom companies and private corporations worldwide also strategically deploy “limited” in their pronouncements and offerings, whether it is about “limited edition”/ “limited time” sales to create artificial scarcity for rush orders, or “limited warranty”/ “limited guarantee” based on risk assessments for future wear-and-tear/planned obsolescence of sold goods (such as consumer electronics including smartphones), and “Pvt Limited” for limited liability companies.

In the age of tech boosterism, what is the point of studying limits and limitations? Meredith Broussard (2019) notes that in celebrating achievements of AI and machine learning, we can get too carried away forgetting that there are “fundamental limits to what we can do with technology. There are also limits to what we should do with technology” Machine learning models depend on training datasets, and a lot of “machine learning” is about mathematics, computation, correlations, and yes, “human learning.” The limits of machine learning arise because “social decisions are about more than just calculations” with “data” becoming inadequate to making “value judgments”.[4]

In my book Unlimited, I explore discourses of limits and limitlessness around telecom policies, financial technologies, and platform capitalism(s) to understand how they draw the terms of inclusion and exclusion in a subcontinent of a country like India where one negotiates uneven geographies, linguistic diversities, and gender-and-caste fault lines on an everyday basis. A structuring concept for the book is “mobilities (un)limited” to investigate not only the technological possibilities and limitations of storage and distribution afforded by mobile media systems, but also the ways in which sociocultural aspirations about freedom and mobility, and shared understandings of gender-religion-and-caste dynamics and public-private boundaries are touched and recalibrated by mobile phones. In contributing to the narrative of aspirational India, mobile media are not just helping Indians imagine an optimistic future, but are also furthering anxieties about new vulnerabilities. While “unlimited” does become a way to explore the imaginaries of abundance and mobility that are promised by the con­temporary mobile phone (and capitalism), I also differentiate “unlimited” from academic and economic discourse of “abundance” in suggesting that what is specific to “unlimited”/”limits” is the acknowledgement or anticipation of approaching or having crossed a limit line or threshold level ­toward feelings of information overabundance or attaining aspiration goals. It is about reaching the edge of one’s desperation where one is overcome by aspirational fatigue realizing that the “good life” or the “American Dream” is not for one self (for comparison with “abundance”[5]). Approaching the limit involves dwelling in the affective state of anticipation—­ “an excited forward looking subjective condition” marked by anx­ieties and yearnings as the individual adjusts to speculative scenarios, hedged bets, and moving aspirational targets.[6] My research interviews with content creators for Indian short video platforms such as Josh and Moj revealed that such mobile phone videos could at once make people aspire to the lifestyles of motorbikes and cars depicted in the videos as well as throw them in a state of depression gauging the widening gaps between their present lifestyles and those depicted in the videos.

The book argues that while conceptualizing “aspirational politics,” it is not enough to study (in isolation) how individuals/content creators aspire to be more successful and gain more followers and influence. Aspirations are also actively fashioned and nurtured by the platform’s talent agents, content directors and studio heads. The Indian government along with corporations also creates aspirational discourses. The theoretical efficacy of aspirational politics lies in attending to the slippages and ruptures across individual desires and state-corporate-platform discourses of aspiration. During my fieldwork and site visits, some of my interlocutors questioned the aspirational framing. For them, the dominance of aspirational discourses at a specific moment in the history of India needs to be connected with the rise of neoliberalism in the country. This is when many thinkers and policymakers, according to them, felt an urge to focus on class mobility without taking into account caste inequalities. Not considering caste meant working with a clean slate where historical inequalities (and their presence in the contemporary) were elided. Some opined that in the early 2010s, the aspirational framing became a way for upper­-caste mainstream journalists to write about class and the Indian youth while avoiding caste considerations. Another connected criticism was that studying aspirational discourses ran the risk of reifying state-corporate discourse. Interweaving these wide range of perspectives about aspiration/”aakanksha,” the theorization of “aspirational politics” remains open to vari­ous interpretations, motivations, and experiences. Since the pandemic, some aspirations have turned into desperations, or people being overall somewhat less confident about scaling a higher socio-economic position.[7] Recently, mythologists like Devidutt Patnaik (2025) have criticized Indians for being under the influence of Western capitalism in their endless hunger for aspirational wealth and power comparing such a hunger to that of the demon Bakasura in the epic Mahabharata. According to Patnaik, such a hunger that entails incessantly chasing modern aspirations and ambitions will only result in “shark tank” mentality that encourages cut-throat competition and the hungry aspirer will never feel “contentment.”[8]   

Whether it is ­music videos or cashless digital money, they arrive on mobile media devices through vari­ous digital intermediaries and an assemblage of platforms and infrastructures. A significant part of the book concerns itself with going beyond mobile phone screens and interfaces to study distribution backends. I trace the different nodes in the distribution supply chain of streaming content interviewing people working at each node, whether it is at the stage of curating and encoding or content delivery and decoding. I found informal practices in the formal streaming media industry, especially in the way former cable TV operators at the neighborhood level who provided the last mile delivery shifted from cable to digital internet bandwidth providers. Across India’s uneven regional geographies, I also studied informal circulation of music videos through memory cards that could be inserted into mobile phones for listening/watching. Beyond the distribution infrastructure of content reaching mobile phones, it is the mobile money distribution infrastructure based on Aadhaar (Unique Identification Project) and India Stack that has been labelled as revolutionary in India.

The India Stack’s Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) allow it to monitor the phone data transactions of the as yet unbanked millions and then calculate their creditworthiness in the absence of other kinds of formal financial data (such as credit scores or land deeds) that do not exist for a lot of people in India. Understanding this storage and distribution technology, which is so closely connected to the mobile devices of India’s population, is crucial ­because this kind of biometric data capitalism is not essentially being run by Big Tech companies extracting data trails based on internet browsing history. ­Here, the (Indian) state actively provides digital Aadhaar ID details to fintech companies in the name of financial inclusion: people’s digital bank (Jan Dhan) accounts are connected to the Aadhaar ID, which is connected to their phone numbers.[9] In return for ­services, Indian welfare recipients thereby relinquish their identification details to the state, which are then shared with fintech companies for data analytics. Studying distribution backends of mobile money involves studying machine learning algorithms that predict creditworthiness through alternative data, it entails learning about APIs which open and close payment gateways, and knowing about software development kits (SDKs) prepared by fintech companies for loan apps so that loan disbursal and onboarding can happen seamlessly across modular functions of software code. Studying such technical details is simply not sufficient without questioning some of the behavioral economics assumptions on which the creditworthiness of erstwhile unbanked/recently banked neomobile users are being estimated/determined.[10]

One has to be alert to the discrepancies between the way phone users/audiences and use­ case scenarios are ­ imagined by distributors of content (streaming videos) and money (payments/loans) and the actual uses and meanings mobile devices acquire in situated contexts and layered environments. Lending platform tech enthusiasts I met in Bangalore and Mumbai waxed eloquent about the power of AI and alternative data points, where in cases of thin credit history files in India, loans ­were underwritten based on social media behavioral activity tracked on phones. This kind of purported financial inclusion through digital inclusion forgets about shared owner­ship of phones, where the SIM card might be in the wife’s name but most of the day the phone is being used by the husband. The phone calls and contact list data may not be representative of the ­ woman’s activity, and hence of her social and financial behaviors. What I want to underscore is that along with an attention to media distribution backends, one also needs to appreciate the wide and deep background of users (their historical upbringing, their informal socialities) when they appear at the user–­screen interface. These point to limitations of alternative credit assessment algorithms and discourses of aspirational mobilities marked by gender gaps. Nadia Jeffrie et al. note that while in India as of 2022, there is 11% difference in phone ownership between men and women, there is 40% difference in mobile internet use.[11] Also, 19% of female internet users are accessing it on somebody else's phone compared to 8% of men. This suggests women may be using more of basic phones vis-a-vis smartphones. 

Throughout this book, I ask the question: what kinds of digital infrastructures are emerging for content and money to move through and reach mobile phone users in con­temporary India, and how does their design impact the forms of inclusions and exclusions enacted as well as the horizon of social be­hav­iors and expectations in Digital India? It goes without saying that it is not just fintech and social media companies that have found the smartphone as key to solving their distribution problem. Even scamsters, who have historically carried out their operations in crowded markets in the past, are now transitioning to digital platforms that allow broadcasting and promotion capabilities as well as discretion, pretense, concealment, and anonymity so as to monetize the targeted victim’s vulnerability and launder (read: redistribute) money. With the proliferation of digitization and financialization amid neoliberal globalization, scams are constitutive of capitalism. In manipulating (or pirating) the operative logics of the telecommunication and digital finance infrastructures, scamsters have challenged regulatory protocols that govern platform distribution and in doing so offered alternative circulatory routes for content, data, and money to flow.

The book accounts for the many lives of mobile data in India and their distributions. This is not a feel­ good story about mobile distributions but a critical account of the opportunities and challenges, the fault lines and failures. It is about how vari­ous stakeholders such as media distributors and audiences, and digital lenders and borrowers make sense of the incongruities of mobile media distribution and more generally of life amid technocapitalism, and strug­gle, anticipate, speculate, live, and even thrive, through them.

Note: Portions of this article are adapted from Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution by Rahul Mukherjee, MIT Press. Copyright 2026.

Footnotes

[1] Kapur, Devesh, Milan Vaishnav, and Nilanjan Sircar (2018), “The Importance of Being Middle Class in India,” in The New Middle Class in India and Brazil: Green Perspectives?, eds David Damilo Bartlet and Axel Harneit-Sievers, Academic Foundation and Heinrich Boll Foundation, pp.39-58. Return to text.

[2] Steinberg, Marc (2019) The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed Commercial Internet Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Return to text.

[3] Momin, Shayan (2023), “Lumpen Utopia: Money, Livestreaming, and ­ Labor in Emerging Media Worlds,” Journal of Cultural Economy, 16(2): 221–241. Return to text.

[4] Broussard, Meredith (2019). Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Return to text.

[5] Boczkowski, Pablo (2021), Abundance: On the Experience of Living in a World of Information Plenty, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Return to text.

[6] Adams, Vincanne, Michelle Murphy, and Adele E. Clarke (2009). “Anticipation: Technoscience, Life, Affect, Temporality,” Subjectivity 28 (1): 246–265. Return to text.

[7] Damodaran, Harish (2024), “The Unaspiring Millions,” The Indian Express, October 26, 2024. https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/harish-damodaran-writes-why-aspiration-is-dead-in-india-9639120/. Return to text.

[8] Patnaik, Devidutt (2025), Escape the Bakasura Trap: Let Contentment Fuel Your Growth, New Delhi: Juggernaut. Return to text.

[9] Hicks, Jacqueline (2020) “Digital ID Capitalism: How Emerging Economies Are Reinventing Digital Capitalism,” Con­temporary Politics 26(3): 330–350. Return to text.

[10] Langevin, Marie (2019) “Big Data for (Not So) Small Loans: Technological Infrastructures and the Massification of Fringe Finance,” Review of International ­Political Economy 26 (5):790–814. Return to text.

[11] Jeffrie et al., Nadia (2023). “The Mobile Gender Gap Report 2023,” Global System for Mobile Communications Association, https://www.gsma.com/r/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/The-Mobile-Gender-Gap-Report-2023.pdf. Return to text.