# Rahul Mukherjee, "Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution" (MIT Press, 2026)

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Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-south-asian-studies-313341/rahul-mukherjee-unlimited-aspirational-politics-and-mobile-media-distribution-mit-press-2026.md
Podcast: [New Books in South Asian Studies](https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-south-asian-studies-313341)
Published: 2026-06-02T08:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK9167074221.mp3
Audio file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK9167074221.mp3
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Duration seconds: 3662

## Resource

Around 2016, buoyed by so-called data kranti ("data revolution"), an aspirational neo-middle class of users in India accessed internet for the first time on their mobile phones. Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution (MIT Press, 2026) tells the story of digital infrastructures that are being created by state-corporations for content and money to move and reach such users. It interrogates how their design impact the forms of inclusions and exclusions enacted as well as the horizon of social behaviors and expectations in "Digital India." The book contends that to understand the possibilities and limits of India's aspirational politics, media studies scholars should attend to infrastructures of aspiration: the distributional logistics of streaming content and mobile money are the infrastructural backbone that recalibrate thresholds of aspirational goals. Digital content media distribution is also shaped by how user practices get entangled with particular affordances of platforms, and hence the need to study both participatory cultures of circulation and logistics of distribution together. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, critical discourse analysis and participant observation, the book traces the supply chains of content delivery networks enabling streaming video-on-demand services and informal ways of circulating "vernacular" music videos through memory cards. Unlimited does not restrict itself to formal media infrastructures, but also researches online phishing and lending scam assemblages to understand how such scams perform critical boundary work to reveal the cracks in and workings of financial distribution networks. This book offers a systematic examination of distribution considerations—including localization strategie…

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