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.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
All translations from Spanish and Portuguese are mine; also interviewees names were changed in order to protect their identities.
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.).
I thank the two anonymous reviewers for all their comments and suggestions while drafting this paper.
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).
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).
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).
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).
References
Alarcon Medina, Rafael. 2015. Peasant warriors in an electronic social-formation: from rural communities to transnational circuits of dependence in postwar El Salvador. Convergence 21 (4): 474–495. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856514544085.
Alarcon Medina, Rafael. 2018a. Informational returnees: deportation, digital media, and the making of a transnational cybertariat in the Mexican call center industry. Dialectical Anthropology 42: 293–308. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-018-9518-5.
Alarcon Medina, Rafael. 2018b. The making of a precarious cybertariat: SIM card street vendors, informational labor, and subordinated digitization in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Information, Communication & Society 23 (7): 980–997. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1543440.
Alarcon Medina, Rafael. 2020. Grand digital abyss: technology, critical theory, and subjectivity in twenty-first century cyber-capitalism. Dialectical Anthropology 44: 19–39. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-019-09577-y.
Anderson, Jill. 2015. Tagged as a criminal”: Narratives of deportation and return migration in a Mexico City call center. Latino Studies 13 (1): 8–27. https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2014.72.
Aneesh, Aneesh. 2006. Virtual Migration: The programing of globalization. EUA: Rutgers University Press.
Aneesh, Aneesh. 2015. Neutral accent: How language, labor, and life become global. Durham: Duke University Press.
Arora, Payal. 2019. The next billion users: Digital life beyond the west. USA: Harvard University Press.
Augé, Marc. 2019. Con la tecnología llevamos ya el “no lugar” encima, con nosotros (entrevista con Carlos Geli): https://elpais.com/cultura/2019/01/31/actualidad/1548961654_584973.html
Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation. Understanding New Media. USA: MIT Press.
Bratton, Benjamin. 2016. The stack: On software and sovereignty. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Brophy, Enda. 2017. Language put to work: The making of the global call centre workforce. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Brynjolfsson, Eric and Andrew McAfee. 2016. The second machine age. Work, progress, and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies. Nueva York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Burrel, Jenna. 2012. Invisible users. Youth in the internet cafés of Urban Ghana. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Calderón, Fernando y Manuel Castells. 2019. La nueva América Latina. Mexico: FCE.
Castells, Manuel, and Pekka Himanen. 2016. Reconceptualización del desarrollo en la era global de la información. Chile: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Castells, Manuel. 2006. La era de la información. Vol 1: La sociedad red. Mexico: Siglo XXI.
Cheney-Lippold, John. 2018. We are data. Algorithms and the making of our digital selves. Nueva York: New York University Press.
Chun, Wendy Hui. 2011. Programmed visions. Software and memory. USA: MIT Press.
Crehan, Kate. 2002. Gramsci, culture and anthropology. London: University of California Press.
Crehan, Kate. 2016. Gramsci’s common sense: Inequality and its narratives. Durham: Duke University Press.
D’Cruz, Premilla. 2016. Cyberbullying at work: Experiences of Indian employees. In Virtual workers and the global labour market, ed. Juliet Webster and Keith Randle, 239–259. United Kingdom: Springer.
Escobar, Martha. 2016. Captivity beyond prisons: Criminalization experiences of Latina (im)migrants. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Faleto, Enzo and Fernando Henrique Cardoso. 1996. Dialéctica de la dependencia. Mexico: Siglo XXI.
Finn, ed. 2017. What Alhorithms want. Imagination in the age of computing. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Florida, Richard. 2017. The new urban crisis: How our cities are increasing inequality, deepening segregation, and failing the middle class-and what we can do about it. New York: Basic Books.
Florida, Richard. 2019. The rise of the creative class. New York: Basic Books.
Fuchs, Christian. 2014. Digital labour and Karl Marx. London: Routledge.
Golash-Boza, Tanya. 2015. Deported: Immigrant policing, disposable labor and global capitalism. New York and London: New York University Press.
Golpelwar, Mayank Kumar. 2016. Global call center employees in India: Work and life between globalization and tradition. Germany: Springer.
Hassan, Robert. 2008. The information society. Cambridge: Polity.
Heyman, Josiah and Amado Alarcón. 2016. Border speech between two national linguistic ideologies. The Case of Bilingual el Paso Call Centres. In Borders in Service: Enactments of Nationhood in Transnational Call Centers. eds. Mirchandani, Kiran and Winifred Poster. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, Pp. 210–241
Hualde, Alfredo and Jordi Micheli. 2016. The evolution of call centres and the implications for service quality and workforce management in Mexico. In Innovation and internationalization of Latin American services. eds. Hernández, Rene, Hualde, Alfredo, Mulder, Nanno and Pierre Auvé. Mexico: United Nations ECLAC- El Colef. Pp. 177–194.
Kitchin, Rob and Martin Dodge. 2011. Code/Space. Software and Everyday Life. USA: MIT Press.
Larkin, Brian. 2008. Signal and noise. Media, infrastructure, and urban culture in Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2007. Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Louridas, Panos. 2020. Algorithms. Cambridge: MIT Press.
MacCormick, John. 2012. 9 Algorithms that changed the future. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Macías-Rojas, Patricia. 2016. From deportation to prison: The politics of immigration enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America. New York: New York University Press.
Manovich, Lev. 2001. The language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Marino, Mark. 2020. Critical Code Studies. Cambridge: MIT Press.
McPhail, Thomas. 2009. Development communication. Reframing the role of the media. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Meoño Artiga, Luis. 2016. Transnational ‘Homies’ and the urban middle class: enactments of class, nation, and modernity in Guatemalan call centers. In Borders in Service: Enactments of Nationhood in Transnational Call Centers. eds. Mirchandani, Kiran and Winifred Poster. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. Pp. 152–180.
Mintz, Sidney. 1985. Sweetness and power. New York: Penguin.
Mirchandani, Kiran. 2012. Phone clones: Authenticity work in the transnational service economy. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Mirchandani, Kiran, and Winifred Poster, eds. 2016a. Borders in service: Enactments of nationhood in transnational call centers. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
Mirchandani, Kiran and Winifred Poster. 2016a. Nations at work in transnational call centres. In Borders in Service: Enactments of Nationhood in Transnational Call Centers. eds. Mirchandani, Kiran and Winifred Poster. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. Pp. 245–273.
Nadeem, Shehzad. 2011. Dead Ringers: How outsourcing is changing the way Indians understand themselves. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Neuwirth, Robert. 2011. Stealth of nations. New York: Anchor Books.
Norris, Pippa. 2001. The digital divide. Civic engagement, information poverty, and the internet world wide web. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Poster, Mark. 2007. Information please: Culture and politics in the age of digital machines. Durham: Duke University Press.
Poster, Winifred. 2013. Hidden sides of the credit economy: Emotions, outsourcing, and Indian call centers. International Journal of Comparative Sociology. 54 (3): 205–227. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020715213501823.
Qiu, Jack. 2009. Working-class network society. Communication technology and the information have-less in Urban China. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Rios, Victor. 2011. Punished: Policing the lives of Black and Latino boys. New York and London: New York University Press.
Rivas, Cecilia. 2014. Salvadoran imaginaries: Mediated identities and cultures of consumption. USA: Rutgers University Press.
Rivas, Cecilia. 2016. ‘El Salvador works’: the creation and negotiation of a national brand and the transnational imaginary. In Borders in Service: Enactments of Nationhood in Transnational Call Centers. eds. Mirchandani, Kiran and Winifred Poster. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. Pp. 35–57.
Rodkey, Evin. 2016. Disposable labor, repurposed: Outsourcing deportees in the call center Industry. Anthropology of Work Review 37 (1): 34–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/awr.12083.
Ross, Alec. 2017. The industries of the future. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Rowe, Aime Carrillo, Malhotra, Sheena and Kimberlee Pérez. 2016. Answer the call. Virtual migration in Indian call centers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sallaz, Jeffrey. 2019. Lives on the line: How the Philippines became the world’s call center capital. New York: Oxford University Press.
Scholz, Trebor. 2012. Digital labor. The internet as playground and factory. London: Routledge.
Silvio, Almeida. 2019. Racismo estrutural. Sao Paolo: Polen.
Smith, Gavin. 2011. Selective hegemony and beyond-populations with ‘no productive function’: A framework for enquiry. Identities 18 (1): 39–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2011.593413.
Stiglitz, Joseph, and Bruce Greenwald. 2015. La creación de una sociedad del aprendizaje: Un nuevo enfoque hacia el crecimiento, el desarrollo y el progreso social. Spain: Planeta.
Treré, Emiliano. 2019. Hybrid media activism: Ecologies, imaginaries, algorithms. New York: Routledge.
Treré, Emiliano. 2021. Intensification, discovery and abandonment: unearthing global ecologies of dis/connection in pandemic times. Convergence the International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 27 (6): 1663–1677. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565211036804.
Trottier, Daniel, and Christian Fuchs. 2015. Social media, politics and the state. New York: Routledge.
Tsing, Anna. 2005. Friction. An ethnography of global connection. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Wacquant, Löic. 2009. Punishing the poor: The neoliberal government of social insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press.
Webster, Juliet, and Keith Randle. 2016. Positioning virtual workers within space, time, and social dynamics. In Virtual Workers and the Global Labour Market, ed. Juliet Webster and Keith Randle, 3–34. United Kingdom: Springer.
Weizenbaum, Joseph. 1976. Computer power and human reason. USA: Freeman.
Wilson III, Ernest. 2006. The information revolution and developing countries. Cambridge: MIT Press
Wolff, Simone. 2016. Local development policies, the labour market and the dynamics of virtual value chains: The case of the IT sector in the municipality of Londrina, Brazil. In Space, place and global digital work, ed. Jörg. Flecker, 127–149. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wolfson, Todd. 2014. Digital rebellion. The birth of the cyber left. USA: University of Illinois Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
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
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-023-09691-y