In this cross-regional research project, we critically examine the tension between digital democratization and securitization in the Global South, focusing on recent cases in Latin America (Nicaragua, Colombia) and Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Thailand). Addressing the mutual entanglement between the new authoritarian turn and the emergence and subsequent repression of protest movements in the wake of the rapid digitization of state apparatuses and civil society, we seek to analyse how the socio-technological affordances of the digital realm inflect the politics and aesthetics of authoritarianism and protest in specific political conditions by way of a trans-Pacific comparison. We do so by means of visual and cultural analysis of the digital cultural productions of protesters and power holders, and digital ethnography of the micro-politics of digitally-mediated contentious political communications and controls, while remaining attentive to the slippages between the digital and non-digital, and to the political economy of digital infrastructures as an instrument of power.