Pléyade

Pléyade 32. Algorithmic societies and their resistance from Latin America and the Caribbean

Accepted until: March 31, 2023.

"Algorithmic societies and their resistance from Latin America and the Caribbean"

 The combination of massive databases and computational processes (or algorithms) has been incorporated into almost all social institutions today. The information stored in these databases is made up of data extracted from our daily activities, recording variations in our health, eating habits, preferred merchandises, favorite cultural products, and almost any other human and non-human life activity. This information is collected through a multitude of devices ranging from cell phones and watches to “smart textiles”, as well as through software used in social networks and mobile applications.  

This vast amount of information is seen as a valuable commodity by corporate actors, which generate profits through the forecast of future consumer goods from said data. For example, companies like Google or Amazon have gone beyond their initial operations (internet browser and e-commerce platform, respectively) to diversify into fields where huge amounts of data are produced daily, such as education (Google Classroom, Amazon Web Service Educate, Amazon Education's LMS integrated store) and health (Amazon Web Service Healthcare Accelerator, Google Cloud Healthcare).

These transformations have generated optimism in governments and corporations. Digital infrastructure projects, such as the construction of submarine cables to achieve digital connection, are heralded as historic events that will produce economic and social development. However, this universalist vision, while extremely optimistic, must be contrasted with the existing inequality, as well as with the inequities that these same projects generate.

In Latin America, the datafication of education is expressed in different ways. First, there is a trend to digitize and virtualize educational spaces and processes, a phenomenon that has worsened during the pandemic, also extending the scope of digital surveillance to the classroom. In this regard, proposals in the region are still focused on connectivity needs, while critical analysis regarding connectivity mechanisms and its implications is still pending. Second, the construction of regional digital infrastructures for academic research is evident and increasingly integrated into European infrastructures, as is the case of RedCLARA, an intergovernmental and inter-institutional organization that promotes the use of federated collaboration platforms through networks. Also, it manages a submarine cable that connects research centers in Europe and Latin America.

Health also produces daily information through various sources such as biomedical sensors, genomic information, general health information (electronic medical records, health insurance, etcétera), and information from social networks to contact the patient, as well as a growing market for devices and software that enable real-time health monitoring. This constant monitoring of personal health leads us to reconsider the extent of surveillance involved, even its very meaning. Indeed, with the constant monitoring of our health without the direct intervention of a medical professional, we tend to increase “self-surveillance”, that is, the active collection of information about ourselves in order to achieve a better self-awareness and self-optimization.

In the context of financial capitalism and expansion in the use of big data, we see that the generation of such enormous amounts of data is sustained in part by mechanisms of massive and continuous surveillance. In addition to raising questions about privacy and democracy, there is an increasing concern on the expansion of the persecution and criminalization apparatus, which deepen violence against historically oppressed groups under colonial, capitalist, racist, nationalist, patriarchal, and ableist (discrimination against people with disabilities) logics.

In turn, the political economy of digitized societies maximizes the possibilities of using technology to modify forms of work and non-work through the very redefinition of “work” and “worker”. The so-called “gig economy” –which consists of the remote provision of a wide variety of services mediated by digital platforms– not only modifies extraction, exploitation, and expropriation mechanisms, but also reproduces and amplifies preexisting logics of control and management for capitalist accumulation.

Similarly, the implementation of mathematical optimization techniques in areas such as health, education, criminal justice, and finance has intensified the domain of actuarial logics (that is, of statistical methods of risk calculation) and the automation of decision-making processes. Thus, we are witnessing the automation of decisions in areas as varied as bank loans and credits, access to state rights, health benefits, and even applying for jobs or prison rights such as access to probation, just to mention a few. Although many of these technologies have been recently installed or are in the process of being installed, it is already possible to observe some of the consequences that they have brought with them in terms of the expansion of existing inequities at the individual, group, and global levels. 

The consequences of this drift for the Humanities and Social Sciences have recently been studied in greater depth. Many of the aforementioned processes have been approached from critical perspectives under concepts such as platform capitalism, data capitalism, surveillance capitalism, information capitalism, data colonialism or digital colonialism, among others. These approaches refer to new dynamics of social organization based on the extraction and commercialization of data, among other types of digital extractivisms and new forms of accumulation. From this perspective, for example, the use of big data and algorithms can be conceived as a tool to consolidate the above mentioned mechanisms of oppression.

At the same time, it is necessary to point to a linguistic (text and code) and technological (software, hardware, network) imperialism, which imply the reconceptualization of the central notion of “text” for humanistic disciplines. This brings a series of drastic rearrangements in the way we think about the relationships between the entities that are generated in the communicative exchange, which are the expression of different forces in tension in the context of linguistic imperialism, digital extractivisms, and local resistance and technology reappropriations.

These approaches invite us to observe these phenomena and their resistances historically and geopolitically, tracing long-standing continuities to understand contemporary phenomena. These technological resistances and reappropriations are sheltered under a diversity of emerging struggles such as hacker activism and resistance, anarchist indigenous feminisms, Afrofuturist literature, organizations of workers in the digital economy, and open-source software movements, to name but a few.

 This call for papers seeks to contribute to these debates through a collection of articles that critically analyze, from Latin America and the Caribbean, the different processes that are part of these “algorithmic societies”. We call for submission of articles that address any of the following topics, or related ones: 

Languages: English, Portuguese and Spanish

Publication date: January 2024

Guest editors

Mario S. Portugal Ramirez, Department of Conflict Resolution and Human Security, University of Massachusetts (Boston, United States).

Roberto Pareja, CY Cergy Paris University, MEDET-LAT Project.

Francisca Gómez Baeza, Department of Sociology, University of Washington (Seattle, United States). 

Manuscripts will be evaluated by a double-blind peer-review process.