The Cryptopolitics of Digital Mutuality: WhatsApp Savings Groups in Africa

What is it about?

This chapter explores the hidden politics of informal savings groups and contribution networks in Africa as mediated through encrypted digital messaging platforms. Such platforms have become widespread in Africa for mobilizing online savings groups and fundraising initiatives. Based on cases from South Africa and Kenya, the chapter argues that the emerging digital publics are constituted through multiple materialities and communicative forms, including the offline spaces of self-help groups with their social and historical embeddedness, and digital platforms with BigTech connectivities. When discussing the potential of encrypted chat apps to enable new types of collectivities built on peer solidarity, the paper draws parallels with other types of hidden publics that emerge with cryptographic technologies and currencies.

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Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Mediated by encrypted messaging apps, the poor and marginal exercise their agency through self-help groups and networks, carving out new civic spaces. While building on vernacular organizational templates and facilitating alternatives to more formalized versions of financial inclusion, such initiatives may also create exploitative invisibilities and foster data capture, scams and ‘Ponzi schemes.’ The paper argues that such spaces always involve important and interconnected offline and online, material and human modalities. It offers new perspectives to the formation of the digital public sphere through attention to cryptopolitics, and advances new approaches for analyzing it.

Perspectives