Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina described China as an imitator nation in her interview with Time in 2015:

I have been doing business in China for decades, and I will tell you that yeah, the Chinese can take a test, but what they can’t do is innovate.  They are not terribly imaginative. They’re not entrepreneurial, they don’t innovate, that is why they are stealing our intellectual property.

Fast forward to 2023, where little, yet everything, has changed. While the US Financial Times covers Chinese corporate espionage, China Daily touts its nation’s global innovation. The Financial Times reached out to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to learn how much of a nemesis China has become to the United States by stealing trade secrets, pirating software, and counterfeiting to the tune of $225–600 billion a year. China Daily counters this framing by arguing that China is a hub of global innovation. The Chinese media reminds the world that in 2018, China entered the global innovation index rankings of the top twenty most innovative countries in the world.

China’s list of achievements is impressive. It pioneered the world’s first quantum-enabled satellite, the world’s fastest supercomputer, the world’s largest and fastest radio telescope, the world’s first solar-powered expressway, the world’s largest floating solar-power plant, and the world’s thinnest keyboard. China Daily concludes confidently, “No matter how much the country’s creativity may differ from the West, China will lead the world as a global leader in science and technology by 2030.”

We are witnessing a creativity turn in the Global South as Indigenous innovators are looking at their people as creative assets, legitimate markets, and content partners to help build their data products and services. Yet the imitator label remains a sticky factor that translates to few creative industries in the West tapping into these global shifts.

Creative caste

Silicon Valley remains slow to recognize the geopolitical shifts in the creator economy. Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen explains how the West suffers from a “cultural captivity” syndrome, where a theory is born from the “accidental correlation between cultural prejudice and social observation.”⁹ Sen talks about the stickiness of how we imagine entire groups even when correlations die.

I call it the creative caste system, in which certain groups are believed to have an intrinsic ability to create original thought and content while others do not. Groups are marked by the nation and the context they happened to be born into. People’s gender, caste, race, and economic status play a part in how they are perceived on the creative spectrum, and the poverty stigma, in particular, runs deep. It is still a challenge for Big Tech to view low-income users as consumers, let alone as creators.

In 2022 I gave a keynote on the next billion creatives to UX researchers from the usual suspects like Meta, Google, Amazon, Spotify, and other North American tech firms. After my talk several e-commerce strategists approached me to explore the potential of live streaming for the Global South. This Western awakening is happening among consultancy firms such as McKinsey Digital, too. It released an article in 2021 titled “It’s Showtime! How Live Commerce Is Transforming the Shopping Experience.“ The gist of the article is to convince Western businesses to blend entertainment with purchasing by using live streaming for e-commerce. While Western tech is waking up to this supposedly novel opportunity, in China, this is old news. China’s creator economy is now a mature ecosystem with a market size of $20 billion in 2021. China is already home to the world’s biggest live-commerce player, Taobao, with a market share of 35 percent. By 2020, almost 30 percent of Chinese internet users shopped via live streaming. Chinese apps realized years ago that content creators need to be able to monetize their talents and fanbases, or they would look elsewhere to set up home. US tech still grapples with interoperability and content monetization.

While Silicon Valley is still harping on blockchain and the nebulous Web 3.0, India has gone ahead and set up the Unified Payment Interface (UPI). UPI is the Indian government’s digital public infrastructure allowing instant payments in peer-to-peer and customer-merchant networks. While crypto lords in the West battle each other over who will reign supreme, India has set up an easy-to-use, low-cost marketplace to help boost the creator economy and get the market working again. UPI has been so effective that Google has nudged the United States Department of the Treasury to consider it as a best practice while they design standards for open payment systems. Tech business analysts Vivek Wadhwa, Ismail Amla, and Alex Salkever argue that we should not be swept away by the “cool” factor of new tech like blockchain. Instead, the real revolution of tech tools lies in the “less flashy efforts” of open standards and interoperability, where India is way ahead of the game.

More examples abound. Latin America is a driving force in e-sports and mobile game apps. African entrepreneurs are pioneering “data-lite” mobile apps to cater to their cost-conscious and mobile-first clientele. As the world’s eyes are fixed on Spotify to do right by musicians, Abu Dhabi has become a global hub for music-streaming apps, disrupting the global music industry. Anghami, a legal music-streaming app, has become the first Arab tech startup to go public on New York’s Nasdaq stock exchange. These Global South entrepreneurs have much in common. They are chronically underestimated, they must hit the ground running and deliver profits, and their price-conscious users demand added value for them to part with their money. Their only option is to think outside the box.

Out-pirate the pirates

Tech entrepreneurs in the Global South must innovate in environments where piracy is the norm, users come with constrained budgets, and streaming is a challenge with unreliable connectivity. By 2028, 70 percent of global subscriber growth for music-streaming services is estimated to take place in the Middle East, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and Africa. Anghami’s Lebanese cofounder, Elie Habib, explains, “Our start was to out-pirate the pirates.”

The Spotify business model does not work for Arab users because most Arabic music is independent and not backed by a label. Anghami pays more to artists and less to labels. The company launched as mobile-first for scaling across emerging markets and invested locally. They started by building relationships with labels and musicians in the Middle East before going global. Educating users on streaming rather than finger-wagging on piracy helped build a loyal base. The startup needed to make revenue from the get-go, given the unappetizing deals from venture capital funding.

Diversity and culture are strengths, not barriers. World music is not some niche, but the norm. Habib believes that designers should cater to user aspirations and argues that music is intrinsically social. He remarks on how Spotify executives assume their users consume music alone when, in practice, users are deeply social and seek connection with others through music. Anghami found that most users shared music with others on WhatsApp and followed the playlists of those that matched their tastes to discover new music. His startup saw the potential in using machine learning to connect users with each other to build on this sharing culture. While Spotify strategists remain unconvinced about the value of designing for mobile users in the Global South, Anghami leaders have built their business model around it, targeting the resource-constrained and those with precarious incomes. The startup takes this demographic into account by offering daily, weekly, and monthly subscriptions, multiple pricing tiers, and access on low-end mobile devices and 2G networks. Given the high demand for audiovisual entertainment from the next billion users’ demographic and rising mobile uptake, Anghami allows music videos on par with audio. Habib explains the key difference between emerging and Western markets: “It’s not just about launching a service but providing the ability for people to try it, taste it and then eventually commit to it.” Western creative industries can flourish if they break out of their caste molds. But public- and private-sector industries must first confront their traditional notions of who and what count as creative and how to treat them right.

The ABCD principle

In the last few years several apps and platforms have emerged in the Global South with a business model that places the next billion user market at the center. The classic case is Reliance Jio, India’s major telecommunication platform, which made its data the cheapest in the world by catering to India’s vast low-income populace. The NBU market was not an afterthought, but the core customer base. Reliance Jio designed its marketing plan by looking at the data usage of this user group. Marketeers closely examined the kinds of content this segment consumed and produced and developed a marketing plan based on the patterns identified. It is called the ABCD principle—an acronym for astrology, Bollywood, cricket, and devotion—the four main areas young users pivot most of their data toward.

The economy of scale is fed by Global South users’ aspiration and enthusiasm for change. Entrepreneurs have had to offer deep and added value to their customers in a highly competitive space with few rules to protect them, little infrastructure to support them, and limited numbers of users with disposable incomes. For decades Global South economies have been predominantly informal and precarious, and in many of these countries, formal employment is a rarity. Eight out of ten workers in Africa are informally employed, the highest share among all regions. Moreover, with less than 7 percent of the world enjoying liberal democracy according to the Democratic Index 2021, users are forced to become more creative when online. They constantly pioneer creative tactics to circumvent AI-driven state machinery and online censorship regimes. These everyday hacks contribute to the ripening of the creator economy, contrary to some mythical nationalistic quality of innate innovators.

While the creator economy in the West is targeted at the urban elite, the rest of the world is opening up to the marginalized majority. While Silicon Valley views the global poor as high risk, Global South entrepreneurs are increasingly seeing them as opportunities long neglected within the monopolistic tech ecosystem. By building for and with the world’s majority, you can scale up from the bottom.

Next billion creatives

India is just one case among many Global South creator economies where we see creativity play out online every day. While on average 20 percent of internet users worldwide follow an influencer, in Brazil, the figure is double that. A consumer survey by Statista, a data company, shows that two-fifths of Brazilians say they bought a product because of an influencer, the highest share among the fifty-six countries surveyed. Nielsen, a market-research firm, estimates that Brazil has five hundred thousand potential influencers on social media, more than anywhere else in the world.

In fact, these companies have discovered that the next billion creatives drive the creator economy. Creators from resource-constrained contexts are taking the lead, being self-driven and self-taught, given their limited options. The digital has created a niche that can help these creators scale. Southern creators pioneer clever shortcuts to enable their creative processes and learn on the fly due to limited leisure time. They are unapologetic about their economic status, and in fact take pride in producing more with less.

Their expressions find a virtual home and resonate with a global creative community, despite the dominance of the Western aesthetic on social apps. While their privacy matters, their visibility matters more. They are acutely aware of the fierceness of the attention economy and often use their data as currency. They are hungry for followers, likes, and comments, and keenly study their metrics to remix and reshare their posts to get it right. However, many refuse to call themselves “influencers” as they reserve this title for those able to monetize their content and earn a livelihood from it. A few detest the traditional view of an “influencer” who tries to peddle brands and get people to “buy stuff.” Most did not expect to be an influencer in the conventional sense of being able to attract hundreds of thousands of followers. Creators want to get rich and famous from content monetization but are realistic about their prospects. Their aspirations are to nurture a community beyond what they are born into, have fun, gain status, and, most importantly, make a mark “out there” through their digital expression. These creative climbers are aspirational influencers. They live by a code of digital creative practice and want to be recognized and respected by an online public. They believe that when you are true to yourself while creating content, you become relatable to others. They want to be seen and heard. It’s their entry point to a better future.

Excerpted from From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech, by Payal Arora. Published by The MIT Press. Copyright © 2024 MIT. All rights reserved.