According to Srinivasan (2019),1 the way people in the global South use and experience digital technologies could help bring a different understanding to tech innovation and its applications in the real world and the ways in which they are built for and by users.

François Bar, Matthew Weber, and Francis Pisani advocate for a cul-tural model of technological appropriation drawn from Latin America. Appropriation draws attention to how users interpret, manipulate, and repurpose technology in creative and unexpected ways. Their cycle of evolution suggests cultural mechanisms of appro-priation: baroquization, creolization, and cannibalism. This new vocabulary to understand technological appropriation un-moors the notion of “hacking” from Western modernity. It encourages us to think about how users and cultures are central to a technology’s life-cycle. Beyond just signaling difference, Bar, Weber, and Pisani suggest that innovation on the periphery is a powerful process that merits consideration.