This article examines how class, consumerism, and employment influence beliefs of an idealized digital world in marginalized communities. I recount 24 months of ethnographic and institutional observation in a non-governmental organization that promoted the concept of “ utopia digital” (digital utopia in Portuguese) in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (shantytowns). This corporate-funded non-governmental organization employed members of Brazil’s traditional middle class and promoted the liberating potentials of digital inclusion to members of a “New Middle Class” made up of 35 million “previously poor” Brazilians. Interviews with middle-class employees reveal how ideas of digital utopia act as a code for corporate efforts to encourage consumerism among the New Middle Class and bolster employment opportunities for members of Brazil’s traditional middle class. Reflecting on informal conversations, I also highlight a middle-class “crime talk” that frames the favela as an inherently violent place and, in contrast to their inclusionary work related to digital utopia, encourages non-governmental organization workers to physically avoid favela space. I use Zygmunt Bauman’s discussion of an “active” or “hunter” utopia as an ethnographic lens to discuss the practical and everyday experiences of technological inclusion in classed settings. By describing digital utopias as actively shaped by everyday understandings of urban exclusion and privilege, this article provides an ethnographic framework for decoding the socially reproductive nature of class-inflected consumer interventions in marginalized communities.
Over the last three decades, technology companies have promoted the "disruptive" potentials of the information age. Brazilian favelas (shantytowns) provide one of the most popular examples used to describe how digital disruption applies to informal urban communities. Favelas have been mapped by Google and surveilled by an IBM Smart City while hundreds of well-branded digital inclusion programs present themselves as alternatives to an informal economy and an illicit drug trade. However, corporate narratives of digital disruption fail to account for what scholars describe as an "insurgency" and practices of improvisation (gato, jeitinho, or gambiarra) found in the favela. Describing a process of "converting" regulatory fines into well-branded social projects, this article provides an ethnographic account of a Microsoft-funded documentary about an ex-drug trafficker turned digital educator. Considering the role of ethnography in an urban "gray zone," this article asks: what techniques do global technology corporations use to take symbolic ownership of local knowledge? What does the dissonance between corporate and community-based narratives reveal about alternative forms of creativity in the digital age? And, how can we characterize the formalizing potentials of digital disruption in Latin America?
PALAVRAS-CHAVEInclusão digital; favela; guerra às drogas PALABRAS CLAVE Inclusión digital; favela; la guerra contra las drogas
A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly half of the United States prison population, or five times the rate found in the general population, had been infected. Limited social distancing and difficult to implement preventative measures helped to spread COVID-19 in prisons, while many incarcerated individuals felt that government policy prevented their ability to self-care. These feelings of alienation reflect a history of policy that links disease to deviance and social death. Based on the written self-reflections of anthropology students in Wisconsin prisons, this article outlines an ethnographic and pedagogical model for analyzing pandemic policy. Students learned to relate anthropological terminology to their critiques of policy and revealed how prisoners adapted to feelings of invisibility and hopelessness during a pandemic.
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