“Be yOuR OwN BosS.” Two twenty-something Palestinians are pictured leaning over an iPad and laughing: a ColourSplash™ filter makes their eyes and frayed festival wristbands glow a radioactive green. Their suits are whatever they put on that morning and their offices are wherever they turned their screens on. On a Facebook group for online freelancing work in Gaza and the West Bank, these mantras come up again and again.

The idea is that regardless of your circumstances, anyone can live the millennial dream and “work where they want when they want” thanks to the internet. In a place like Palestine, where unemployment reaches 30 percent (the highest in the world by some measures) and movement is violently restricted by a series of checkpoints, borders, and military zones, work in the “placeless” digital realm can be sold as a way of overcoming these obstacles.

The World Bank’s “m2work” project in cooperation with Nokia took precisely this approach. It was just one of a series of initiatives in the past few years led by governments or private-sector actors that have identified the Arab world as a region in which digital microwork has “vast potential” as a means of alleviating poverty. But this rhetoric of flexibility and entrepreneurship conceals some ugly realities.