Non-Weekly Cucumber Salad #16 🥒
I've been very depressed and It's been very hard to find the right state of mind that allowed me to properly write. I've been pitching this essay to myself in my head for about about two months now. Somewhere in the middle of August I decided to discuss some of the topics related to what would later became this essay with my partner and after having this convo I decided that I was actually going to put some words into a pad and write this essay soon-ish.
What has made me want to articulate these thoughts coherently was a feeling of uneasiness about what I consider to be a perceptual injustice that is inflicted upon many of my millennial friends who live in South America. I think the idea of what happens in North America, specially in the field of technology, is always informed by being coated by a thick layer of imperialist ideology. And this ideology is replicated equally, but with distinct pervasiveness, by companies, social media influencer accounts and people who live abroad, in search of an aesthetic angle that would make their lives seem enviable.
When I was in college I remember learning with a positive perspective about initiatives related to the sharing economy like Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit, WeWork, etc. I remember there was a sense of refreshing newness to them, almost as if these companies represented a different genre of private entity, one that in some way (one which no one could really explain) promoted an increased sense of transparency. People were excited to find a company to which they could donate all their work energy to and find purpose in searching for a new version of reality, one that above all else, trusted private technology sources.
But that was a hell of a long time ago, 10 years later the shared economy has created a new layer of precarity in the working class, specially in the Global South where a larger portion of the population relies on informal jobs and is ostracised from qualified positions.
In 2023 the Silicon Valley doesn't represent what it did 10 years ago, there's no innovation, or any of the hopeful values that we were coerced into attaching to the work developed there for that matter. The Silicon Valley is an anarchocapitalist theme park in ruins. A dead mall. Watch a new documentary about a fraudulent Silicon Valley CEO on your favourite streaming platform premiere every month under the "true crime" releases!
It's been over a decade since we allowed tech bros, who didn't understand the first thing about real human social relationships, to define what the future was going to be like: that future is now! Take a look around! Does it look anything like what we were promised? My uncle is working for Uber at 64 years old, he's going to work until he dies and never harvest a single benefit from his employer. Does that look like a good version of the future?
What the shared economy has done has been, through a hyper neo-liberal perspective, "freed" the most vulnerable workers from any rights and the companies from any responsibility. People don't work iFood as a side gig to get some extra money, they depend on that job to feed their families. Even as most of us prefer to turn away from the knowledge about their struggle, in the last 10 years Brazilian society has gained a new layer of vulnerable workers and you can't ignore the amount of people hustling in front of your local McDonald's every single day, they are visible, they are present. And when we see them we have to think "These people are experiencing a new brand of exploitation: the one created by the Silicon Valley". And we need to know that Instead of creating measures to protect workers from insecurity, creating more jobs, developing schools to increase qualification, we have given those workers away to gamble with to North American and private capital. This is literally the worst outcome possible, this is the future designed by the Silicon Valley.
And if we have so deeply incorporated these platforms into our lives it doesn't mean they have succeeded in turning the future into a better place, it means we have failed to understand the importance of class consciousness and we have forgotten how to fight for the right of the working class, because if we ever really understood what was the price we were going to pay, as a society, for the implementation of these platforms we, workers, should've never have had their employment in our countries be successful, and we should have fought for better public transportation if we wanted so badly to get to places with ease.
What makes me angry is that all of the terrible consequences of the poisonous ideology of The Silicon Valley are out on the open, no one is concealing the struggle of the gig workers, their cause is an open wound, but we're still being fed the narrative that the Silicon Valley is doing anything relevant for this world that isn't making worker's lives more miserable. And people in South American still believe that the Silicon Valley is building whatever the new hell they're collectively designing to call "the future".
The future should belong to the people, and building the future should be a radical practice. We have to stop accepting being fed top to bottom visions of what the future should look like and we have to detach our imaginations from the omnipotence and omnipresence of digital machines, because the future is about understanding contexts and acting locally and building meaningful connections and understanding our connection with nature, it doesn't have anything to do with a fucking application you have on your phone that's secretly stealing behavioural data from you.
With love, ✨🐝
Ana Luisa