Shiny Utopias Dreamed in California, Nightmared in the Global South
By Eduardo Altheman C. Santos
Silicon Valley is often viewed as a beacon of technological utopia, promising solutions to global challenges through innovation and entrepreneurship. However, this idealism starkly contrasts with the harsh realities faced by platform workers in the Global South, particularly in Brazil, where precarious labor conditions and exploitation are rampant. The text explores how these dreams of autonomy and progress morph into nightmares of surveillance and instability, revealing a troubling link between Northern aspirations and Southern dystopias.
In the last decade and a half, most of us have grown accustomed to seeing Silicon Valley as humanity’s shiniest utopia factory. Harboring over 40,000 startups and positioned at the intersection between tech entrepreneurialism, cyber-optimism, and libertarian fantasies—all sustained by massive streams of extremely volatile venture capital—, the Valley represents the world's last resort to solve our most pressing existential problems. From the banking system to urban transportation, labor to health care, communication to information, it seems to have the correct answers to all questions and be able to solve any problems.
Promises of a glistening new world in which technology "streamlines" the way we live as a society are embedded in a plethora of hi-tech components that make up the Californian apparatus from Amazon to WeWork—with anything from Facebook and Google to PayPal and Uber in between.
While some of these platforms are not geographically located in Silicon Valley, they are all animated by what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron called the “Californian ideology.” No wonder Die Welt went so far as to call it the “Zukunftslabor der Welt,” the world’s laboratory responsible for producing nothing less than the future itself.
Nowhere are these grandiose visions more evident than in the Valley’s projects to build manifestations of actually existing techno-capitalist-utopianism. Consider the Seasteading Institute, founded in San Francisco by Patri Friedman, a former Google software engineer and grandson of none other than Milton Friedman, and funded by PayPal mogul Peter Thiel. Aiming to bypass any existing governmental legislation, the institute desires to build “startup communities that float on the ocean” as “a revolutionary solution to some of the world’s most pressing problems.” Its mission is quite simply to “Enrich the poor. Cure the Sick. Feed the Hungry. Clean the atmosphere. Restore the oceans. Live in balance with nature. Power the world sustainably. Stop fighting”. Thomas More’s fictional account thus reverberates in fictitious capital entrepreneurship.
Or the prominent “Mars colonization program” devised by SpaceX and promoted by businessman and investor Elon Musk, notorious for the foundation, ownership, or leadership roles in Tesla, Inc., X Corp. (formerly known as Twitter), Neuralink, and OpenAI—who happens to be one of the wealthiest individuals on Earth, with an estimated net worth of over US$221 billion. In his quest to “make humanity multi-planetary” and build a future “spacefaring civilization… among the stars”, Musk aims to establish one million Earthlings on the Red Planet in roughly two decades. As the ethereal yet very terrestrial 1% of humanity marches on to consume the planet’s natural resources, SpaceX presents itself not only as the species’ last chance of survival but also as an opportunity to expand on a galactic scale what we comprehend as “home.” As one world ends, many others are thus born. Now, it is Arnold Schoenberg's second string quartet or Ursula Le Guin’s speculative fiction that echoes in financial-speculative tones.
Mars colonization program
The Valley’s strategy to energize its wonder projects often resorts to progressive ideas as sources of utopian energies. “Occupy Mars,” “disrupt everything,” “think different” (sic), “fail early, fail fast, fail often,” and “move fast and break things:” all these otherwise subversive ideas are often employed by tech corporations to advertise their main product, namely, the unique craftsmanship of bringing dreamworlds to life. The Valley even has its own Manifesto, a form popularized by left-wing organizations and artistic collectives, now unsurprisingly written by a billionaire venture capitalist labeled the “Chief Ideologist of the Silicon Valley Elite.”
Manifest of the Sillicon ValleyChief Ideologist of the Silicon Valley Elite
As the “Patron Saints” of techno-optimism, it tellingly mentions openly fascist supporters like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti alongside neoliberals such as Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek (all of whom also supported far-right authoritarian regimes, if not fascism per se), and, last but not least, tech tycoons like Jeff Bezos, founder and former CEO of Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce and cloud computing company—who coincidentally also happens to be one of the wealthiest persons alive.
While these utopian visions may glimmer and seduce, one does not need to wait for the construction of fluctuating municipalities or extraterrestrial abodes to gauge what these idealistic landscapes could resemble. In fact, one can already witness the realization of these Californian dreams elsewhere to fully grasp how, when turned upside down, they reveal what they indeed are: deceptive mirages.
In the last five years, I have conducted in-depth interviews with platform workers and digital ethnography in Facebook and WhatsApp groups congregating thousands of platform workers in São Paulo, a metropolis with over twenty million inhabitants. Since 2019, platforms have become Brazil’s largest job providers. Research from May 2021, conducted under the paired lethal effect of the Covid-19 pandemic and the administration of Jair Bolsonaro, showed that over 32 million Brazilians, 20% of the national adult population, used some platform as an income source, whether selling products and services on Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp, driving around for Uber and 99 (a transportation platform founded in 2012 in Brazil and subsequently bought by the Chinese giant Didi Chuxing, thus becoming the country’s first unicorn), or delivering food, groceries, and medicine on iFood (a Brazilian-founded delivery platform that, since its launch in 2011, has become a sector leader in Latin America with over 300.000 active couriers and over 55 million clients). Brazil, therefore, offers a glimpse into the apocalyptic present and future of a platform-run society.
“People don’t join apps because they want to; sometimes, it’s the only way to pay their household bills. If I had not joined, I would probably starve.”
Carlos, courier in São Paulo
The scenario is devastating: extremely low and uncertain remunerations, unlimited working hours, instant and unjustified terminations, “partners” (who are not even correctly labeled as “workers” in a platforms’ strategy to circumvent taxation and labor legislation) being obligated to buy their very work equipment, dead-end jobs with zero promises of upward mobility, no communication or transparency between the C-level and the workers, the intensification of performance by gamification protocols, injured platform workers receiving messages from platforms asking why they were not logged in to their accounts, and even the infiltration of undercover agents sent by platforms to undermine collective action aiming to organize platform workers—these are the elements that comprise the aftermath site of a dream turned nightmare and show who carries the load of an alleged weightless economy.
“We need to press the apps so they see us differently, not just as a bunch of couriers. Whether it’s me or so-and-so doesn’t matter to them. We are the ones who make the deliveries; we are the platform and the face of the platform; iFood is just a name.”
João, courier in São Paulo
Even amidst these ruins, platforms still try to advertise themselves as utopian experiments where individuals may exercise their yearnings for autonomy and freedom. In this milieu, workers are transubstantiated into “independent contractors” and “partners” in a horizontal web of mutual dependency, free to establish their working hours and even be their own bosses. Nevertheless, the routine of platform workers points to an inverted portrayal in which non-stop surveillance, überprecarious labor relations, unsustainable mineral extraction, capital monopolization, data colonialism, and behavior manipulation hide behind the façade of an allegedly neutral apparatus. These not-so-long-ago apocalyptic forecasts have meanwhile become ubiquitous for millions worldwide. The apocalypse, thus, becomes less a future-situated turning point than a process that has already begun and urges us to rethink our present and how our lives are affected by the ongoing technological catastrophe.
“I began to see that the app’s strategy is bulletproof against any movement that borders on unionism. Because if you go on strike, first, they have your data. If you’re not smart and leave your cell phone at home, they have your data and will make decisions. The guy who manages to get all the delivery couriers together and say, “Let’s go on strike.” What will be the app’s decision? Will it meet the demands or approve a bunch of people on the waiting list? Approve! There are a lot of unemployed people waiting!”
Pedro, courier in São Paulo
This is not the first time dreams conceived in the global North have become cataclysms in the South. From 15th-century visions of a brave new world that brought about colonialism and slavery to free-market delusions that revealed themselves as neoliberal shock treatments from the 1970s onwards, a complex link between utopia and dystopia seems constitutive of the economic, social, and political relationship between North and South. Silicon Valley’s technocratic utopia, which finds its dystopic version assembled in the South, represents the latest update of this enduring scenario.
However, while our time is one in which catastrophe has already taken place, another wave of technological “disruption” is set to shake our existence soon: self-driving vehicles, delivery drones, fully-automated plants and logistics warehouses, seller-less stores, Internet of Things, Generative Artificial Intelligence, machine-learning scripts—the apocalypse within the apocalypse—promise to undermine even further a modern ontology based on human labor and interaction. If platforms such as Amazon, DiDi, and Uber had already amalgamated a precarious global workforce, what happens when even these "bullshit jobs" are turned obsolete by technology—and, with them, humans who perform such tasks?
While at CAPAS, I will build on my empirical data to develop theoretical research on the apocalyptic present and future of platform and technology-mediated labor and what that means for a modern ontology based on labor and value extraction as its fundamental forms of sociability.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eduardo Altheman C. Santos is a fellow at CAPAS and a postdoctoral researcher in Sociology at the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil, where he also received his PhD in 2018. His research interests include the Frankfurt School, critical theory, platform capitalism, Marxism, critical neoliberalism studies, ideology critique, and the work of Michel Foucault and Herbert Marcuse.
