Approaching the Limit: Aspirational Politics Beyond Mobile Data Plans

Telecom companies advertise their services of download speeds and seamless streaming as “unlimited,” but studying the distribution backends of mobile media infrastructures reveal that telcos tend to often brush up against “limits” that involve resolving storage and bandwidth bottlenecks.

In my forthcoming book, Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution (MIT Press, Spring 2026), I not only research logistical limits encountered in moving content, data, and money to — and from — new to mobile phone users (“neomobiles”) in India, but also explore how aspirations shape such practices of distribution. Distribution technologies also aid state-corporations to set aspirational goals for citizen-consumers. I explore discourses of limits and limitlessness around telecom policies, financial technologies, phishing scams, and platform capitalism(s) to understand how they draw the terms of inclusion and exclusion in India where one negotiates uneven geographies, linguistic differences, and gender-and-caste fault lines on an everyday basis.

About the speaker

Rahul Mukherjee is associate professor of Television and New Media, and Graduate Chair of the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at University of Pennsylvania. His work focuses on logistical dimensions and environmental impact of media infrastructures and platforms. Rahul is the author of Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty (DUP, 2020) and Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution (MIT Press, forthcoming Spring 2026). He has co-edited journal special issues on super apps and megacorps, and is on the editorial advisory board of Platforms & Society and Journal of Environmental Media. Rahul's recent papers deal with platform lending and entrepreneurial aspects of cultural production in the short video platform space.