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Digital dialectics: culture, labor, and power in informational capitalism

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Abstract

Based on extant literature on call centers and my own research in digitization in Mexico and Brazil, in this paper I address the relations between culture, labor, and digital technology in informational capitalism. Drawing on media theory and the anthropological work of Ana Tsing and Sidney Mintz, among others, I propose a conceptual framework on labor’s digital dialectics, within which the contradictions between algorithmic logic and the cultural layer occur. I argue that current technological subordination is based on a set of frictions and tensions that intensificate the contradiction between technology and culture as subordinated digitization while at the same time extensificate capitalistic informatization as digital subordination.

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Notes

  1. All translations from Spanish and Portuguese are mine; also interviewees names were changed in order to protect their identities.

  2. Within this paper, I use both terms: informatization or digitization interchangeably in order to refer to the process by means of which digital communications and information technologies are incorporated into diverse social structures, institutions, processes, and everyday practices (labor, economics, politics, consumption, education, etc.).

  3. I thank the two anonymous reviewers for all their comments and suggestions while drafting this paper.

  4. Although a thorough discussion on dialectics is out of the limits of this paper, it is important to say that here dialectics stresses the capitalistic contradictions between living and dead labor, between reality and concept, between the abstract and the concrete. Digital dialectics points to digitization’s contradictions as negative forms, without any possible social synthesis within the code as master concept. Digital dialectics is a negative dialectics without Aufhebung (see Alarcón Medina 2020; Adorno 1981).

  5. When it comes to terminology, everyday speech is not always precise. Software is commonly used to name specific programs or applications (Word, Excel, etc.); although this is correct, software is a concept in which discussion involves a more complex discussion on what I call here algorithmic logic. However, an in-depth discussion on the topic exceeds the limits of this piece (see Marino 2020; Bratton 2016; Chun 2011).

  6. One even may wonder if such structural approaches to signification and meaning (e.g., Claude Levy-Strauss and Noam Chomsky) are traversed by algorithmic logic (cybernetics).

  7. Current perspectives on code studies debate whether it produces meaning or not. However, I think this issue does not contradict my argument on algorithmic logic. The question, in any case, would be how algorithmic logic impinges on emergent forms of meaning production, digging deeper into the neurological structures by which humans produce signification and culture (see Marino 2022; Chun 2011).

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  1. Cultural Studies Department, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Carretera Escénica Tijuana-Ensenada Km. 18.5 S/N. San Antonio del Mar, Tijuana, Baja California, CP. 22560, México

    Rafael Alarcón-Medina

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Alarcón-Medina, R. Digital dialectics: culture, labor, and power in informational capitalism. Dialect Anthropol 47, 275–293 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-023-09691-y

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