Putting the selfie to work: Image making and work/time discipline in the margins of the Indian state

In India, the use of biometric images as a means of evidencing whether workers or schoolchildren are present is becoming increasingly prevalent. By exploring how the capturing of images has become a key feature of organizing the work-time discipline in Delhi, this chapter shows that narratives about the state implementing infrastructures of digital surveillance from above as part of regimes of techno-moral governance only provide a partial account. Surveillance also emerges from below as managers and outsourced workers operating in the margins of the state repurpose ubiquitous messaging services such as WhatsApp to create informal networks of visibility. Within these networks, selfies—and other images—take on a significance and purpose rather at odds with the feelings of pleasure, leisure, and self-expression more often associated with their digital circulation and begin to reveal the everyday, even banal, ways in which regimes of transparency, accountability, and work/time discipline are produced.