The digital has become an inescapable reality in our lives, with emerging technologies increasingly expanding into all aspects of our daily worlds. Their influence extends far beyond convenience and connectivity, shaping social, political, and economic relations in profound ways. Across Asia, as elsewhere, people’s lives are becoming ever more entangled in new digital economies – whether by choice or necessity – creating new forms of digital dependency and deepening digital divides. These disparities are evident, for instance, in the unequal power dynamics between big tech companies and outsourced exploitative digital labour in Asian low-income countries. They are also reflected in the operations of bot and click farms, in the proliferation of information overloads and fake news, as well as in broader issues of cyber-security. This theme hence explores digital technologies as mechanisms of appropriation, that facilitate the displacement of work and environmental loads onto the Global South, for example through the usage of artificial intelligence in extractive industries. By examining these processes, we seek to understand the socio-economic relations and forms of human organization that digital technologies reinforce, disrupt, or transform. 

Building on approaches in media and digital anthropology, we investigate digital technologies as a field of practice, focussing on what people do with emerging technologies, including how they adapt to and incorporate digital worlds in their lives. This includes examining how Indonesian Muslims engage with social media in religious practice or how people interact with AI that exhibit human-like traits. We ask how digital technologies shape human interactions, the formation of online communities and the ways people express themselves in digitals spaces. While emphasising the realm of everyday practice and the power structures in which they are embedded, this theme also engages with broader philosophical questions. Ultimately, we seek to interested in how emerging digital technologies shape who we are and how we connect with others, and whether they might change what it means to “be human”.