The Digital IRL: Twitter, Sri Lanka and the Place of Ethnography

In this short essay, I wrestle with an ethnographic encounter that links the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who had recently acquired the social media platform, Twitter, to the Sri Lanka politician and authoritative strongman Mahinda Rajapaksa. The encounter is underwritten by several seemingly flippant analogies made by various interested parties comparing vaguely related things: the island nation of Sri Lanka and the platform Twitter, Buddhism and ideology of Silicon Valley, Facebook and U.S. government. By treating these analogies seriously and unpacking the role of analogy in the field of anthropology, I propose to think differently about the notion of place in ethnography through the prism of The Digital IRL.