The collision of extractive, logistical, and financial operations, enabled by digital infrastructures, has escalated capital’s dependence on a racialized and gendered division of labor underlying the global supply chain. Consequently, we need to attend to multiple sites and social classes that come into contact, not bounded by the particularity of a given space per se but linked as nodes through which global capital and media operate. Hence, these expanding sites of extraction require a transnational perspective, which does not only look over from the North to the South but also within the Global South itself. With these concerns, this paper investigates the racialized patterns of labor, care, and waste in the Middle East by excavating the relationship between the spectacles of smart futures and contemporary urban inequalities. In contrast to the profit-driven, high-tech spectacles of Gulf capital, it looks at the war-torn and toxic cities spreading through the rest of the region, such as Beirut, while focusing on the racial politics of the exploitative kafala (sponsorship) system. In return, organized efforts of migrant workers and their allies underscore the emergent forms of solidarity and care at a transnational scale. These mobilizations build upon long, intersecting histories of labor, anti-racist, feminist, and decolonial struggles in the region and beyond. Thus, counterfuturisms arising from the Middle East contest the imperial order of capitalism that reproduces social hierarchies predicated on race, gender, citizenship, and geopolitics, thereby generating a cultural aesthetic exceeding the one of state-capital nexus.

From 2018-2019, the world market was swept by a wave of mass uprisings, from Paris to Hong Kong, Santiago, Beirut, Quito, to Tehran and Baghdad, and many other locations. It seemed the Covid 19 pandemic might damp down these incendiary movements, but the 2020 outbreak of the Black Lives Matter revolt in the USA showed the contrary. These social rebellions have been marked not only by their scale, duration and intensity of confrontations with police, but also by new uses of digital platforms to coordinate and connect wide-area mobile actions, and by fresh digital countermeasures from security forces and reactionary vigilantes. “Riot platforms” (following Clover 2016) thus open another phase of the experimentation in the digital circulation of struggles ongoing since the turn of the millennium.

This paper interrogates the political economy of labour and the modes of value extraction which are at play in refugee governmentality. It centres on “extractive humanitarianism”, which consists of humanitarian interventions which capitalise upon unpaid refugees’ labour and on the repeated extraction of data from refugees’ mobility and activities. This intervention focuses on Cash Assistance Programmes for asylum seekers and on data extraction activities in refugee camps, while exploring the labour economies at stake there. Drawing on literature on how labour and value are analysed in refugee and migration studies, I take into account works that discuss the so called “migration industry”, the states’ exploitation of migrants’ labour force, and the labour performed by humanitarian actors and volunteers. Cashless economies and data extraction processes are to be considered alongside other two labour activities which are key to the governing of refugees. First, refugees as debit card beneficiaries perform unpaid labour, as they produce data through their transactions which are key for the datafication of their mobility. Related to this, refugees are at the same time requested to perform free labour by producing data and providing feedback concerning their use of the debit cards. Second, techno-humanitarianism requires labor on the part of international organisations and humanitarian actors for populating databases, keeping them up to date and making data circulate. The paper concludes by illustrating how extractive humanitarianism generates value not only through migrant detention and border security industry but also by capitalising on refugees’ activities and mobility.