Digitizing other markets: lessons from the Bush Internet of Island Melanesia

Abstract

Digital markets are regularly equated with digital capitalism. However, markets are also central features of longstanding other economic systems, such as the bush markets of Malaita, Solomon Islands, where saltwater and bush people have traded with each other for at least seven hundred years, if not longer. This article interrogates the digitization of this bush market system based on classically-conceived long-term ethnographic fieldwork that aims to develop a better empirical understanding of possibilities for diverse economic systems and markets in the digital age. We identify continuities between Solomon Islands-centric Facebook ‘buy and sell’ groups and bush markets and demonstrate how these continuities strengthen other economic systems and values in the country. Despite their avid use of Facebook, Solomon Islanders are able to resist the industrial-capitalism embedded in platform design and to reaffirm social networks and a broader reciprocal moral economy.