DREAMED IN CALIFORNIA, NIGHTMARED IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Focusing on Latin America (specifically Brazil), my project investigates the relationship between technology, labor, and the Apocalypse. I aim to understand how Northern utopian visions of a more rational and streamlined society are distorted in concrete Southern situations, often generating cataclysmic scenarios. To develop this theoretical argument, I will build on my empirical research with platform workers in São Paulo. Addressing the Apocalypse less as a future-situated turning point than a processual movement that has already begun, I will scrutinize how not-so-long-ago apocalyptic forecasts have become ubiquitous in everyday life in the last two decades: Non-stop surveillance, gendered and racialized biases, precarious labor relations, unsustainable mineral extraction, capital monopolization, data colonialism, and behavior manipulation hiding behind the façade of an allegedly neutral apparatus. I will explore two aftermath scenarios that emerge from this apocalyptic rupture. One depicts 99% of humanity shackled by daily life gamification, algorithm-managed toil, big-data-powered Artificial Intelligence, behavioral prediction, the depletion of the planet’s natural resources, and people becoming surplus population overnight. In contrast, the second outcome refers to the seeds of a new social ontology in which labor, exploitation, and spoliation are no longer the lines dividing lives between grievable and ungrievable, useful and expendable, opulent and precarious.