Youth as digital infrastructure

The first ever recorded government-ordered internet shutdown took place during the general strike of 2007 in Guinea. In response to the massive strike, which brought the country to a standstill for nearly 50 days, the government of then president General Lansana Condé requested that the four Internet Service Providers operating in the country stop all services with immediate effect. That Guinea was afforded this special place in the global history of the digital is, however, somewhat surprising, given that it had at the time some of the lowest internet penetration rates, making virtually impossible for most Guineans to access the internet, especially during the general strike when cyber cafés, one of the only ways to access the internet at the time, were all but shut down. What, or rather who, exactly, then, was shut down that day? In answering this question, this chapter argues that we need to account for the equally crucial significance of the general strike in the contested history of youth in Guinea. For the first time, youth became widely recognized as a major – if not the major – constituent group in Guinea, and, as a response, performed as such. Strongly influenced by the aesthetics of global hip-hop and media-savvy, they performed their youth. To put it in the language of Judith Butler, as their bodies assembled in the streets and on the screens, they appeared, their youthful bodies demanding collectively, though plurally, a more livable set of lives. Drawing on a small corpus of first-hand historical accounts of the protests, including published diaries, blogs, and videos by youths, journalists, and other actors in the protests, as well as interviews with youths, telecom operators, and government officials conducted in Guinea between 2017 and 2019, this chapter shows at the heart of contests over the digital infrastructure as a tool of statecraft are concerns – moral panics – about youths, understood here as a historically contingent category, a social shifter to borrow Deborah Durham’s term. In the second part of the chapter, I examine the more recent internet shutdowns in 2019 and 2020 to trace the continued ramification of these intertwined histories of the digital and of youth. This illuminates how the irruption of youth as a central concern for citizenship evident in the general strike of 2007 but also, more widely, across the African continent in the early 2000s continues to shape the social imagination of the digital not only in Africa, but across the Global South, and as such requires to be foregrounded as a productive analytical category for media studies scholars

Digital divide · Internet access · Service provider · Shut down · The Internet · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control