Desire, Mobility, and Digital Precarity: Ethnographic Perspectives from Italy and Greece

Abstract (English)

Digital transformations—ranging from the expansion of “digital logistics of desire” infrastructures to the integration of AI-driven functionalities into social media—are often portrayed as epochal ruptures or as linear, deterministic trajectories that societies passively endure. Yet beneath these grand narratives lie countless subtle, unscripted disruptions: unexpected shifts, incremental adaptations, and emergent practices that continuously reconfigure everyday life and unsettle hegemonic imaginaries. The mobilization of desire—understood both as labor and as the production of labor (Lefebvre 1996)—has long underpinned capitalist reproduction and now draws upon increasingly expansive infrastructural networks that reshape territories, communities, institutions, and the global geopolitical order. This digitization engenders complex, interwoven mobilities of people, labor, goods, symbols, and imaginaries, forming exchange networks that function as dynamic cultural spaces. However, operating within a neoliberal framework, these networks often fall short of the hopes and aspirations they promise (Appadurai 2013), rendering the much-anticipated “near future” (Guyer 2007) increasingly elusive, and exacerbating precarization across economic, social, and existential dimensions (Tsing 2015; Ramsay 2019). At the same time, the hopes and disappointments generated by these flows produce a structural tension and an unpredictable dynamism that can transform collective yearning and despair into acts of transformation or subversion—especially among marginalized groups. Drawing on digital ethnographies conducted in Italy—spanning Sicily’s agricultural sector and Milan’s domestic maintenance services (TaskRabbit)—and in Greece, where imaginaries are shaped through streaming platforms (Amazon Prime, Netflix) to stimulate touristic flows, this paper investigates how mobility phenomena intersect with digital platforms’ capacities to transpose, channel, stimulate, and monetize desire. Furthermore, it examines how individuals across diverse social contexts navigate the tension between continuity and change, articulating both resistance and aspiration in response to emerging digital realities.