‘South Fabricated’: Computing Stories of Global South Insecurity

‘Fabricado no Sul’: Histórias de computação sobre a insegurança da GS

Abstract

Sci-fi tales of computing technologies have been carriers of an unabashed anxiety vis-à-vis the present and the future of politics. In International Relations, these tales split in two: either technology divides developed from developing, while also forging paths to development; or it helps contain unruly bodies–human’s, nature’s, otherwise. Drawing on the case of activist app Fogo Cruzado, this article proposes to shift the narrative towards the different political pathways that can be fabricated through an engagement with existing digital infrastructures. In re-enacting the trajectory of a bullet from a gun chamber to a smartphone notification, I show how the making of situated digital artifacts can illuminate how we think about Global South politics and disrupt two assumptions structured through tales of control and domination: one, that digital infrastructures are monolithic, seamless, and consistent; and two, that tales of technological innovation need to happen in the North.

Keywords
SF; apps; Global South; digital technologies; security politics

Resumo

As histórias de ficção científica sobre tecnologias de computação têm sido portadoras de uma ansiedade descarada em relação ao presente e ao futuro da política. Nas Relações Internacionais, essas histórias se dividem em duas: ou a tecnologia divide os países desenvolvidos dos países em desenvolvimento, ao mesmo tempo em que cria caminhos para o desenvolvimento; ou ajuda a conter corpos indisciplinados - humanos, da natureza ou outros. Com base no caso do aplicativo ativista Fogo Cruzado, este artigo propõe mudar a narrativa para os diferentes caminhos políticos que podem ser criados por meio de um envolvimento com as infraestruturas digitais existentes. Ao reencenar a trajetória de uma bala da câmara de uma arma até uma notificação de smartphone, mostro como a criação de artefatos digitais situados pode iluminar a forma como pensamos sobre a política do Sul Global e romper duas suposições estruturadas por meio de histórias de controle e dominação: uma, de que as infraestruturas digitais são monolíticas, contínuas e consistentes; e duas, de que as histórias de inovação tecnológica precisam acontecer no Norte.

Palavras-chave
SF; aplicativos; Sul Global; tecnologias digitais; política de segurança

Introduction: past <- present -> future

Let us start with a story. Once upon a time, and in truth it has been not very long ago, we collectively nurtured a similar (neoliberal) hope. This hope was that digital technologies could – would – potentially and miraculously help us solve or help address several of our problems and overall improve our quality of life. This view has been shared, in varied hues, by journalists, academics, activists, politicians, and laypeople from different political spectrums, in what many today would classify as ‘techno-optimism’ (Mayer, Carpes and Knoblich 2014) or ‘cyberutopia’ (Kaufmann, Leander and Thylstrup 2020). The same view has been also quite common in popular culture, with information technologies becoming important actants in movies, TV shows, literature, Comic books, etc. The 1960’s Star Trek handful smart computers are illustrative of this (Finn 2017). Similarly, in academia, Castells’ The Rise of the Network Society and McLuhan’s idea of ‘Global Village’ are still widely employed to advance views which posed networks, digital technologies and the Internet as potentially strengthening democracy and participatory politics (McLuhan 1992; Castells 2010).

All the hope would eventually find a splash of cold water – a ‘techlash’ (Z.M.L 2022) fuelled by a profound disenchantment with how tech companies were shaping our experiences with digital technologies. These companies create appealing platforms that shape our everyday ‘onlife’ (Della Rata 2018) – that is, our online life and its experiences, affects, aesthetics, etc. – and thus our expectations of reality, without being held accountable for such power. The technology sector has been for some time criticized for its neglect of hateful speech and harmful content, discriminatory and racist algorithms, misogynistic practices, intended or unintended support of violence, connivance to far right politics, among others, that contribute to feeding the disenchantment with a technology that was expected by its early adopters to promote dialogue, community, and democracy.

To some degree, this movement from cyberutopia to disenchantment (Kaufmann, Leander and Thylstrup 2020) also took root in International Relations (IR) literature. The immense potential of digital technologies for development and citizen empowerment would find its contradictions, especially when it came to the reach of the inequalities and exclusions related to the diffusion of digital technologies, state and corporate surveillance and control and the use of these technologies against civilian populations in the context of social unrest, international and domestic conflicts. The use of digital systems for biopolitical and biological control (Ansorge 2016) – systems once expected to provide humanity with unique possibilities for progress and thriving (Asimov 1969) without the catastrophic risks posed by nuclear technologies – has led to profound anxiety. This anxiety is sometimes expressed in terms of a plea for more regulation or for the altogether banishment of some technologies.1

In this work, I discuss how Sci-Fi (SF1) tropes surrounding digital technologies help build a story that is told from the perspective of a white, male, and possibly misogynistic entrepreneur, a story which feeds and is fed by anxieties related to the actual uses of these technologies as instruments of biopolitical and bodily control. I then connect these anxieties to the unfulfilled promises of individual empowerment and democratisation that accompanied the early days of digital technologies while situating two ways in which these anxieties become part of IR. First, digital technologies both forge paths to development and divide developed from developing. Second, they play an important role in helping contain unruly bodies, working as infrastructures that modulate mobility and subjectivity.

Then, I offer a counter-narrative. If we look at this from a different angle than the viewpoint of our imaginary white entrepreneur and his dreams of oversight and control, a different story becomes possible, one which is sensible to the ambiguities, contradictions, and ambivalences of everyday digital technologies. By taking the Global South as an analytical vantage point, I suggest, we become better equipped to subvert this white entrepreneur perspective and unveil the complexity of the worldmaking that happens through these technologies. Specifically, I look at how this vantage point provides escape routes from the recurrent tropes surrounding the miracles (or nightmares) of digital technology, taking upon Stengers’s (2008) provocation which asks what these abstractions do and what they blind us against.

Empirically, I mobilize ethnographic anecdotes from my fieldwork with Fogo Cruzado app in Rio de Janeiro to disrupt two assumptions structured through these tales: one, that our digital infrastructures are monolithic, seamless, and consistent – a rigid and inflexible vision which, politically, leaves us with only two options: they will either save us or doom us; and two, that our tales of technological innovation need to happen in the North – or have Northern stories as reference. This is where Sci-Fi (SF1) and Speculative Fabulation (SF2) connect to the South Fabricated (SF3), enabling us to recount stories of digital technologies beyond the North. Fogo Cruzado is an app that uses social media to crowdsource information on gunshots and armed violence, making it available for access through an Application Programming Interface (API). Based on interviews with Fogo Cruzado’s creators and analysts and on complementary reports/documents, I (re)trace the trajectory of a stray bullet as it departs from the gun’s chamber and passes through computational infrastructures or ‘metainterfaces’ (Andersen and Pold 2018), until it becomes a computational representation and situated policy instrument. As we follow the bullet, I trace how the app entangles tentacular (neoliberal) technologies (e.g. third-party APIs and platforms mostly owned by the same companies that disenchanted us) and local security politics and discuss the potent, yet ambivalent ways in which apps help us tell stories of security, insecurity, threat, and politics in/of the Global South.

Analytically, this opens the analysis to a Global South politics that happens through activist practices and pragmatic engagements with digital technologies that refuse to ‘disconnect’ and ‘detach’, but instead rely on existing infrastructures to advance progressive political and social struggles. The case of Fogo Cruzado is illustrative of this. Looking into pragmatic engagements, I argue, while not a one-size-fit-all solution, offers interesting political possibilities to think of how the Global South has been productively engaging with ‘tentacular’ asymmetric infrastructures imbricated with power.

It starts with a garage

The past three decades have seen an intensifying interest of IR scholars in the role of technology in global politics (Nye 2004; Owen 2015; Ansorge 2016; McCarthy 2018). While acknowledging the different kinds of technologies that interest the discipline,² this growing attention coincides with the emergence of digital technologies as a topic of interest across disciplinary sub-fields. Rhyming with the two tales which opened this paper, this surging interest has been populated by mixed feelings: on the one hand, some optimism regarding their centrality in an integrated global economy; in diminishing cultural and physical distances; in facilitating greater individual and collective empowerment; and the emergence of the trope of the network to describe how all the above are entangled together. On the other hand, concerns with the forms of inequality, domination, and conflict they produce as they become increasingly critical to the world economy and to globalized societies.

This section connects this established disciplinary interest with the commercial and fictional myths and tropes associated with digital technologies. Looking at myths and tropes can be helpful in situating the prevailing disciplinary discourses and anxieties surrounding these technologies in IR. Specifically, it asks how fiction helps us understand the relationship between IR and the emergence of digital technologies. To explore this question, I discuss three tropes that give meaning to our imagination around these technologies, establishing correspondences with IR thinking. These tropes include, first, the foundational myth of the garage as a space for innovation and its role in justifying contemporary modes of immaterial production and consumption that are crucial to computing technologies; second, the ‘Star Trek computer’ trope, where technology functions as a sophisticated instrument that grants humankind the possibility of universal knowledge allowing us to achieve greater progress/security; and, third, the trope of the evil/rogue AI as proxy for a manifest anxiety and fear of losing control of technological innovation. Together, these three tropes give us a good picture of what has prevailed in the current imaginary surrounding digital technologies: a sci-fi-ish,‘high tech’ version of the story, which, as Haraway (1991) recalls, foregrounds the white, male, and entrepreneurial dream of disruption and control, universal knowledge, and capitalist western progress.

As the title of this section indicates, our starting point is a garage – a startup garage, more precisely. The founding myth of contemporary digital technologies is seen in both figures above. Figure 1 shows a common garage with a padlocked green double door, while Figure 2 shows an embossed plaque on the front of the garage, which reads ‘Birthplace of the Silicon Valley’ and details how one of the world’s most famous ‘high tech’ centres came into being. As the story goes, great corporations responsible for ground-breaking innovations were founded in modest suburban Californian garages.

Figure 1
The HP Garage

Figure 2
Plaque indicating the HP Garage as the birthplace of the Silicon Valley

The image of the engineer inventing from his home garage has become influential to imaginaries surrounding innovation and contemporary modes of production. In the Back to the Future trilogy, Doc builds the DeLorean time machine and other inventions in a garage, while in sci-fi movie Primer, two engineers also build a time machine in their garage (albeit accidentally). In real life, the origins of the Silicon Valley are connected to the stories of at least two corporations: Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Apple. As we read from the plaque in Figure 2, HP’s founders developed their first product – an audio oscillator commissioned by Walt Disney – in that garage. The garage story of HP became popular thanks to an advertising campaign called ‘INVENT’ intended to ‘help update the nearly irrelevant office-supply manufacturer and rebrand it as a tech startup giant’ (Erlanger and Govela 2018: 73) and it was benefited by Apple’s appropriation of the narrative of the garage as a space of innovation.

The story sheds light onto the individual efforts of motivated men who push humankind forward materially, by building new tools, gadgets, and technological processes, and economically, by creating new (and, supposedly, more efficient) business models that will potentially disrupt and replace existing (inefficient) ones. But there is a significant parcel of it left untold in the myth of the garage. As noted by Erlanger and Govela (2018), the garage is the architectural symbol of an ‘industrial tech complex’ connecting corporate success stories and World War II (WWII) military research funded by public money. They remind us that while HP’s story with Walt Disney’s audio oscillators may have facilitated ‘the immersive screenic experience by enabling surround sound, which became integral to Disney’s films’ (Erlanger and Govela 2018: 75), venture capital is not the sole protagonist in this space: HP’s innovation was most importantly instigated by a WWII defence contract with the US government. The end of the war – and, consequently, of the contract – meant severe cash-flow issues for the company and a need to redesign its management style and work environment (Erlanger and Govela 2018). It was by emulating this new management-work paradigm that Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (both who have previously worked for HP) created their own corporation. As with HP, they too developed their first computer in a garage.

The individualist ethos of these stories is noteworthy. In the garage or in the room, innovation can be always credited to the labour, skill, or knowledge of one person. In (neo)liberal thought, both Adam Smith and Friedrich von Hayek had already emphasised the role of specialised labour and knowledge for innovation and action, and as fundamental for market competition (Smith 1937; Hayek 1945). Likewise, this individualism also finds resonance in SF1. In Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (2018), individualism is central to the work’s case for militarism. The book tells the story of a war between the limited democracy of Terran Federation and an alien race of bugs, who are depicted as largely mindless – in contrast to the protagonists’ heroism and sense of military duty and responsibility as citizens of the Federation. It is the figure of the heroic individual soldier – the entrepreneur of war – that makes the difference between both societies and that, in Heinlein’s narrative, places the Terran Federation in a position of moral superiority.

Also in a confined space – but this time of the room – we see the creation of one of the world’s most popular social media platforms: Facebook. In the 2010 movie The Social Network, we learn that Facebook was preceded by the misogynistic website Facemash, which used photos hacked from the college’s student database to allow visitors to rate the female students’ attractiveness. The motivation behind the creation of Facemash was Mark Zuckerberg’s inability to accept the end of a relationship with a former girlfriend, which is shown in his insulting post about her in his LiveJournal blog. Facemash’s success would attract the attention (and capital) of investors and foreground the creation of Facebook. While not a Sci-fi oeuvre, the movie, alongside the stories of Apple and HP, show that western stories of innovation are often connected to the success stories of individuals (not rarely white, wealthy, and male), and to an amount of public and private capital as well as gender, social, racial, and economic hierarchies.

The myth transforms the banal space of the garage (or the room) in a place where ground-breaking innovation is possible, and, as Erlanger and Govela (2018) note, make it symbol with multiple signifiers that, at once, embodies a new labour subjectivity (e.g. the individual entrepreneur), signals the displacement of the home towards contemporary modes of immaterial production and consumption, and makes the private and domestic attractive to venture capital.

Figure 3

Figure 3
Star Trek computer interface

As these spaces centre the production of computing technologies on the individual, the immaterial, and the venture capital, individual and humankind search for immaterial knowledge acquires a very material grounding: the computer. In the TV show Star Trek, the computer is the interface through which one gains access to a vast, organised, and consistent stock of knowledge. According to Ed Finn (2017), ‘[t]he Star Trek computer is (…) an infrastructure worthy of the quest for universal knowledge’ – a quest that ties it together with Diderot’s project of the Encyclopédie and, more contemporarily, Wikipedia and the searchable internet itself. While the overarching horizon set by the Star Trek computer (or by Diderot’s Encyclopédie) is probably unreachable, Finn emphasises the ‘good-enough’ efforts of tech corporations to create their own versions of it. For example, Google’s search engine or Apple’s voice assistant Siri, both which have changed the way we access, remember, and relate to information. ‘The implicit point (…) is not that we can find love through Google, but that we are all telling our stories through these algorithms, all the time. The algorithm is a medium for living, a pathway to experience’ (Finn 2017: 76).

In addition to organising knowledge and mediating our experiences, the ‘Star Trek computer’ is also a problem-solver. It anticipates the needs of the captain and crew by opening doors, answering queries, running life support, and overall contributing to keep the starship operational. The perspective of tech as problem solver is closely aligned to that we see in a passage of the dialogue between Stephen Byerley and Hiram Mackenzie in chapter 9 of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot story: ‘the Machine is simply a tool capable of helping humanity to progress faster, freeing it from some of the charges that arise with calculations and interpretations’ (Asimov 1969: [no pagination] translated by author).

Two issues arise when we look at this second trope, which looks at the instrumental role of technology in a broader search for progress (or new civilizations). The first has to do with predetermination, the second with disruption and regulation. In relation to the corporate versions of the Star Trek computer’s quest for knowledge, Finn recalls that ‘many of the destinations have been determined, as have the pathways between them – both through systemic bias and through customisation for individual users’ (Finn 2017: 74). In other words, we gain access to a knowledge that is as much curated and mediated as the encyclopaedias of Diderot’s time, only that mediation now takes place through proprietary algorithmic ‘metainterfaces’ (Andersen and Pold 2018) which ‘remain invisible, a set of trade secrets hidden in black boxes’ in which ‘the ways that ambiguities and conflicting truths are resolved remain hidden by default within the logic of the database’ (Finn 2017: 72).

The second issue has disruption and regulation as two sides of a coin. In Asimov’s chapter 9, another dialogue, between Byerley and robopsychologist Susan Calvin, reminds us that machines are disruptive and therefore require regulation to deliver the promised benefits. The first lines in the dialogue highlight the disruptive character of positronic robots, more explicitly when the Coordinator/Byerley emphasises that existing social theories needed to adapt to the innovations these machines present. In turn, the reaction to Dr. Calvin’s remark makes explicit that the robot economy has its own problems. Moreover, robots would require ‘the relentless force of First Law of Robotics’ in order to work for the good of mankind.

— [positronic robots] arrived just in time, and along with them came interplanetary travel. So, it was no longer important whether the world was Adam Smith or Karl Marx. In the new circumstances, neither made much sense. Both theories needed to adapt and ended up almost at the same point.

— A god-ex-machina, then, in a double sense, Dr. Calvin commented dryly.

The Coordinator smiled softly.

— I’ve never heard you make jokes before, Susan. But you’re right. Nevertheless, there was another danger. The ending of each problem merely gave rise to another problem. Our new world-robot economy can develop its own problems, and for this reason we have the Machines. Earth’s economy is stable and will remain stable because it is based on calculating machines that work for the good of mankind, controlled by the relentless force of the First Law of Robotics. (Asimov 1969: [no pagination] translated by author)

The story was first written and published in the 1950s, but the problems raised in this dialogue are very familiar. Similar dilemmas appear whenever advances in digital computing and robots are concerned. A common trope through which this dilemma is introduced in fiction is via the evil/rogue AI trope, our third trope. While many of the short stories in Asimov’s book play with the ways in which the Laws of Robotics can be put into use, interpreted, and practiced, the cinema adaptation of I, Robot places greater emphasis on the risks of a robot revolution, working with the radical scenario where a robots’ radical interpretations of such laws would pose severe limits to humankind freedoms. The movie makes explicit the problem of control presented by the Coordinator: laws are necessary for our creations to ‘work for the good of mankind’, or: to control technology so it does not control us.

Another version of the dilemma, also explored in Asimov’s stories, involves unwanted (human/corporate) interference with the robots’ program. The movie Alien also plays with this trope. In it, we find out that commercial space tug Nostromo’s Science Officer Ash is in fact an android secretly programmed by the company to return the alien at the expense of the lives of the crew. In letting the crew be killed one by one by the Alien and then trying to kill Ripley with his own hands, Nostromo’s android embodies the risks of unregulated machines as he goes against Asimov’s first two laws of robotics: (1) a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; and, (2) a robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

These three tropes – the garage, connecting contemporary modes of production of innovation to individual ingenuity and venture capital; the ‘Star Trek computer’, solving problems at the service of progress and Enlightenment; and the evil/rogue AI disruption requiring control – can help clarify some of the underlying imaginaries surrounding digital technology in IR thinking.

… And it spillovers into global politics

The general optimism towards the democratic and emancipatory potential of the early internet and computing technologies finds resonance in the myth of the garage, especially as the latter contributed to build an image of tech corporations as benign, innovative, and decentralising, and of innovation as a matter of an individual-capital market alliance. Moreover, the libertarian ideology still firmly rooted in the tech sector portrays the disruptive power of their business models and creations under a positive light, focusing on their potential to make governance systems more efficient while giving people voice and balancing or even reducing the powers of the state.

In IR, the potential of empowering individuals, on the one hand, and increasing efficiency, on the other hand, was received with both enthusiasm and caution. Facilitated by the plurality of online forums, social media channels, and other forms of decentralised organisation favoured by the internet, transnational activism offered a counter hegemonic force against material resources and state power (Deibert 2000; Sell 2013). Digital technologies would empower individuals and ad hoc groups ‘to do what was once available only to institutions run by the state and to private organisations built on a similar top-down, bureaucratic model’ (Owen 2015: 3) which would, in turn, challenge core functions of the international system previously controlled by states and international institutions. Many saw these technologies as creating new possibilities for political change by providing ‘the entry points for young activists to explore democratic alternatives’, as well as ‘mechanisms that support synchronised social movements through marches, protests, and other forms of collective action’ (Hussain and Howard 2013: 51). As Sell (2013) notes, David could now win battles against the Goliath.

This also made digital technologies disruptive. Empowered individuals and groups could now ‘threaten existing institutions in all areas of international affairs, including development, war, diplomacy, finance, international reporting, and activism’ (Owen 2015: 4). The decentring character of these technologies meant that the state was no longer the hegemonic mechanism for collective action (Owen 2015), and also that the access and distribution of knowledge could no longer be controlled the same way as before: digital innovation made it possible for millions of people to download, stream, remix, share and store content without paying for it (Sell 2013). The early days of Napster, YouTube, MySpace, the possibility of peer-to-peer file transfers, the existence of libraries such as Libgen, Z-library, and Sci-Hub, and the proliferation of online blogs and journals have substantially altered the dynamics of who can access content (protected or not), how and from where, while also expanding the universe of content to be accessed.

Democratisation and empowerment go beyond social mobilisation and consumption. In international public policy circles, technology was also perceived as a bridge to development, a sparkle of hope for developing economies to bet their coins on (Wade 2002). A United Nations (UN) Global Pulse report from 2012 frames the relevance of big data for development in the following terms:

What exactly is the potential applicability of ‘Big Data for Development?’ At the most general level, properly analysed, these new data can provide snapshots of the well-being of populations at high frequency, high degrees of granularity, and from a wide range of angles, narrowing both time and knowledge gaps. Practically, analysing this data may help discover what Global Pulse has called ‘digital smoke signals’—anomalous changes in how communities access services, that may serve as proxy indicators of changes in underlying well-being. Real-time awareness of the status of a population and real-time feedback on the effectiveness of policy actions should in turn lead to a more agile and adaptive approach to international development, and ultimately, to greater resilience and better outcomes. (Letouzé 2012: 6)

Another UN report from that same year focuses on mobile technologies and assesses how these can contribute to help people out of poverty and propel democratic governance. In both cases, technology is perceived to solve problems, working as aninstrument to achieve development, democracy, and more security, even if incrementally.

[M]obile devices can significantly impact development goals in terms of poverty reduction, democratic governance and crisis response (...). Strategically deployed, mobile technologies can open new, interactive communication channels that help governments engage people in policy and decision-making processes, expand stakeholder participation, offer greater access to public information, and foster targeted service delivery to the poor and marginalized. nevertheless, the question is how to make this happen in real, material terms in ways that will really enhance human development. (UNDP 2012: 14)

More recently, development agencies have begun to weigh more carefully the problem-solving value of these technologies with the problems they create. This position stems from the realisation that digital technologies not only are not producing the expected changes in governing outcomes (Wade 2002; Peixoto and Sifry 2017), but also that they either reinforce or create unique forms of inequality (Noble 2018; Madianou 2019; Firmino, Cardoso and Evangelista 2019), in addition to enabling/amplifying the surveillance and control of marginalised groups (Cheney-Lipold 2011; Duffield 2016). A United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report published in 2022 classifies (digital) technology as ‘more double-edged sword than silver bullet’ (UNDP 2022: 5) when referring to the negative outcomes associated with it. The report cites as examples: disruption/displacement of labour, concentration of economic power, mass data extraction, environmental pollution, among others.

If we recall the two perceptions from Asimov’s characters dialogues – that the machine is a tool capable of helping humanity to progress faster and that it requires regulation to serve the greater good – we then have a policy ‘middle-ground’, where technology is perceived as neither inherently good nor evil, but as requiring regulation to ensure the progress of mankind. This perspective sets the tone of UNDP’s 2022 report that approximates technology to a double-edged sword. Like Asimov’s characters, the report emphasises the need for existing economies and social systems to adjust to the changes and disruptions caused by technology: ‘[n]ew technologies are upending our economies and societies, and many aspects of our social systems will need to adjust before the vast potential of technological innovation can advance human development’ (UNDP 2022: 160).

The urge to mitigate the disruptive effects of technology via regulation also betrays the profound anxiety that accompanies the idea of progress. If, on the one hand, progress becomes the horizon which humanity must pursue (or the force we cannot stop), on the other hand, it is necessary to contain its nefarious effects, in the same vein that Polanyi (2001) emphasises the role of regulation against the social disaggregation and disruption provoked by the Industrial Revolution in 19th century England, if not to contain the disruptive tendencies of the market economy, at least to slow-down its pace so that society can accommodate to it.

One of the areas where this anxiety rings the loudest is security. As Mueller, Schmidt and Kuerbis (2013) note, the forms of governance enabled by digital technologies are at odds with states’ security concerns: de facto control over internet’s technical components and resources, as well as ownership of widely used platforms, remains with the private sector. The predominance of companies rather than states in the provision of technology-related services is notably present in the narratives of Asimov’s I, Robot tales, Alien’s movie plot, and the mythology of the garage. Furthermore, the fact that actors empowered by digital technologies can challenge state narratives, hack through systems, access confidential information, use botnets to take down or disrupt online services and websites, and make use of autonomous weapons makes digital technologies both a threat and an opportunity for state actors (Owen 2015; Jensen, Whyte and Cuomo, 2020).

The problem of control is central both to the Cybernetic Theory informing the birth of Computer Science (and therefore to the development of digital technologies) and to IR. Historically, Cybernetics has been concerned with the problem of controlling and predicting future events and actions (Galison 1994) in order to make the world effectively calculable – that is, to repeat in machines the behavioural traits of self-reflective biological systems, thereby unifying the biological and computational understandings of the world (Wiener 1948; Galison 1994; Finn 2017; Hui 2019). The ambition to control and predict were closely connected to the WWII and the attempt by Norbert Wiener to develop an ‘Antiaircraft Predictor’ that could anticipate an enemy’s flight position (Galison 1994). Converging with Cybernetic thinking is the centrality of the science of statistical knowledge, probabilistic modelling, data systems, and behaviour analysis to IR thinking in the mid-20th century which would also become crucial to ‘the development of algorithmic ways of calculating’ (Amoore and Raley 2017: 4).

This anxiety with anticipation and calculation is complemented by the idea of an ‘evil Artificial Intelligence (AI).’ In both the cases of Science Officer Ash and the I, Robot cinema adaptation, trouble arose when highly sophisticated computer systems refused to obey human orders and began to actively threaten human freedom and life. In these contexts, computational and biological unification gave the impression that the machine acted on free will, even in the first case when it was actively programmed to disobey and kill.

The fear that these sophisticated, autonomous machines (that is, machines not directly operated by a human) might turn against us is nowhere better expressed than in Sci-Fi short film Slaughter Bots (Sugg 2017). The film was presented before the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons and tells the story of how AI-powered lethal drones become privately available and lead to global chaos as governments, nonstate groups, and private individuals use them to anonymously kill opponents and critics. The narrator is Professor Stuart Russel from the University of California, Berkeley who, at the end of the film, directs his words to an imagined policy-maker audience, warning that the technology to create such weapons already exists, and that action must be taken to ensure such a future never to take place.3

Fear that automated machines may kill people outside of human agency and supervision, coupled with the need to keep control, has led to the creation of campaigns such as Stop Killer Robots. The campaign can be placed in a continuum of concerns related to the role of digital technologies in security politics (Amoore 2009; Chandler 2015; Leander 2017; Wilcox 2017; Aradau and Blanke 2018). The active involvement of the tech sector with intelligence and military agencies (BigTechSellsWar 2021; Wakabayashi and Conger 2021) and the use of the infrastructures they create to survey, target, marginalise, and even kill individuals seem to jeopardise the early promises of political emancipation and empowerment that accompanied the emergence and diffusion of digital technologies. In the words of Morozov, ‘[t]he global village has never materialised – instead, we ended up in a feudal domain, plainly shared between tech companies and intelligence agencies’ (Morozov 2018: 15).

Fabulating speculatively with tech

It is almost without notice that sci-fi-ish andhigh-tech depictions of technology have shaped IR’s vision of it. Also without notice, they populate disciplinary accounts of technology with tales of oversight and control, where technology also becomes a harbinger of efficiency and simplicity: a problem-solver, instrumental to achieve development and an ally in the quest for increased security. However, while the tropes discussed above may help us understand IR’s expectations and anxieties around digital technologies, they offer little help when it comes to getting around the pit of disenchantment.

In fact, these tropes operate under the same dialectics of utopia/disenchantment presented in the introduction and oftentimes obscure what Kaufmann, Leander and Thylstrup. (2020: [no pagination]) call pragmatic engagements of everyday digital politics: strategies that ‘neither radically withdraw from nor reject digital infrastructures, but instead stay with them and work from within them.’ How then can we conceive our relationship with technology differently, from another angle than the viewpoint of our imaginary white entrepreneur and his dreams of universality, oversight, and control, but one that is not utilitarian either? What other tales can pragmatic engagements fabricate through technology?

To explore these questions, my analytical vantage point will be a peripheral story from the Global South. My intention, following others who have mobilised the category of the Global South to rewire our tales surrounding digital technologies (Medina, Marques and Holmes 2014; Milán and Treré 2019; Amrute and Murillo 2020), is to disturb the abstractions offered by the three tropes above and to speculate for another tale and another present for our entanglements with digital technology, one that goes beyond the recurrent tropes surrounding the miracles and nightmares of digital technologies. I argue for the relevance of computation through and with the Global South, in addition to what has been already argued about computing from and in these places (Milan and Treré 2019; Amrute and Murillo 2020). By looking at the ‘through’ and ‘with’, the idea is to open critique to the inherent ambivalences, contradictions, complicity, and complications produced in the encounters of situated practices of computing with hegemonic, tentacular, and equally situated computational infrastructures owned by big tech companies.

The composition in Figure 4 is the static version of a 20-second video produced by the author. Its silence encapsulates sense, time, and sight. The first figure depicts, visually, the sounds of gunshots. Through the ups and downs of its lines, it registered 15 seconds of an intense shootout that paralysed Rio de Janeiro’s largest avenue, Avenida Brasil, on an early morning in June 2020. The second and third figures in the composition follow from the first. The black figure registers the time interval it takes for the first event to be registered by the Fogo Cruzado app, launched during Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic games to map the incidence of shootouts in the city. The sequence then leads the viewer to the third image, a Google Maps’ screenshot, which pins the approximate location where the gunshots were reported. The pinned map closes the cycle of reporting in the platform. The cycle starts with a gunshot being fired; then, it goes through human bodies being affected by them, through hearing or flesh; the gunshot then gets computed (someone reports it directly to the platform or in social media), verified, and, finally, it is registered in the platform’s database.

Figure 4
Computational trajectory of a bullet

The discussion advanced in this work derives from my research on Fogo Cruzado, which took place between 2019 and 2021. It has been a ‘quasi’ ethnographic (Johns 2013) work which involved interviewing creators and analysts, in addition to users and a programmer. Because at that time the team worked from their homes, onsite participant observation was not possible. In order to complement data from interviews and online media reports, I have downloaded and ‘used’ the app to understand how it worked, as well as followed public X/Twitter interactions between Fogo Cruzado’s profile and users reporting armed-violence related events.⁴ During this time, Fogo Cruzado changed significantly to the point that today it has become an Institute, and the app now integrates a broader activist work in public security (Instituto Fogo Cruzado, no date).

Fogo Cruzado works through crowdsourcing – a similar process is used by tentacular architectures such as Amazon’s mechanical Turk and others. Typically, crowdsourcing implies using the knowledge and (voluntary) work of Internet users to produce content. This is the case of collaborative maps, where users individually provide tiny pieces of information to compose the whole ‘picture’ (Givoni 2016). Crowdwork has been employed widely, to monitor traffic flows as well as humanitarian catastrophes, as well as in AI systems, where (underpaid) human workers label digital objects such as videos, images, text, books, etc. to help these systems find better (and more profitable) recommendations to users (Crawford 2021).

But different visions may thrive from similar infrastructures (Faria 2021). Fogo Cruzado’s crowdsourcing differs from Amazon’s significantly. Amazon is a global corporation that successfully expanded its business through a combination of logistics mastery and (human) labour exploitation (Crawford 2021). In a sense, its business thrives thanks to its underpaid and over-explored workers. Fogo Cruzado, in contrast, was part of Amnesty International’s campaign ‘Violence is not part of the game’ which sought to raise awareness to armed violence during the Olympics (Oliveira 2016) and has been since then funded through different sorts of grants from non-for-profit foundations and donations.

The app is idealized by a black journalist specialising in public security, Cecilia Olliveira. It was originally conceived as a ‘Waze of bullets’ (Programmer, interview by author, 18 July 2019) that would map the occurrence of armed violence events with the help of users. Its creation was motivated by the absence of data on shootouts and victimisation by stray bullets. ‘[T]his data simply did not exist’ (Olliveira, interview by author, 20 March 2019). The issue was not simply the absence of data, but to whom this absence did most harm: ‘People must know that violence in Rio happens in a selective fashion. Those who suffer are dwellers of favelas and peripheries, generally it is young, black men, who become victims of the war on drugs’ (Olliveira, cited in Confins 2016).

Most reports come from social media: Twitter, WhatsApp, and Facebook. The process is not automatic, however dependent on little automations it may be. Crowdwork is performed by data analysts, who use keywords to filter through public posts (tweets, Facebook posts, commentaries, etc.) that mention the occurrence of shootouts, police operations, etc. The existence and location of reports is verified with the authors of the posts and with local dwellers and community organisations on WhatsApp groups, or through a comparison of how many reports on the same event exist. Only after verification the report goes to the map and becomes a smartphone notification.

There is extra care with user data. In addition to asking for only minimal personal data when signing up to the platform (email and nickname), this data is stored to avoid leaking and thus threatening the lives of Fogo Cruzado’s informants. Second, data collection and communication of occurrences also includes a careful curation of language to avoid further stigmatising the local communities. For example, words that may characterise either the perpetrator or victim negatively, such as ‘criminal’, or suggest users not to go to a particular place or region, are avoided. Conversely, to help establish patterns of victimisation, analysts inform when the victim is child, elderly, man, woman, or police officer.

Fogo Cruzado’s use of social media data provides a pragmatic engagement with these capitalist, misogynist, and intended-to-be-universal infrastructures to advance a political statement against the selectivity of armed violence that targets marginalised populations. The app relies on social media dynamics where users are expected to produce content, without being irrevocably contaminated by this mode of production. In a sense, it can be said to be intimately connected to such tentacular platforms of value and data extraction and their narratives of individual empowerment.⁵ At the same time, however, it does not resemble these infrastructures at all.

The concept of ‘metainterface’ emphasises how contemporary commercial interfaces of data capture, once embodied into ‘ever-present media devices and apps, and displaced networks of clouds and data streams’ disappear ‘into the environment of everyday cultural practices’ (Andersen and Pold 2018: 10), thereby fabricating clouded perceptions of the world that occlude the way in which commercial interfaces shape our cultural, economic and symbolic systems, while concealing their own modes of production. Under such paradigm, the cultural, material, economic and social labour of universally dispersed and omnipresent exchanges of data and signals update the promises of a networked, participatory, and open digital future through a series of platforms connecting the ordinary use of a smartphone app to large-scale, globally networked infrastructures.

From Figure 4, we see Fogo Cruzado connected to the larger scale infrastructure of Google. Its map draws from Google Maps’ API, its data stored in the Google Sheets spreadsheet. And, as previously noted, most of the reports depend on the affordances of social media platforms, as well on having people actively reporting incidents through commenting, tweeting, posting on Facebook or in WhatsApp’s private and public groups. These connections oftentimes create issues for the app.

For example, when it comes to understanding different spatialities, Google’s ‘Star Trek computer’ (Finn 2017) encountered some difficulty mapping places where its car could not go, or where the use of space varied from the standard Californian practice. From having favelas as blank spaces to labelling a given area ‘favela’, the company spent considerable time blindly searching for a method to map and represent marginalised communities.⁶ The strategy that seemed to work best was to partner with local NGOs to have residents participate in the mapping (Opray 2016); even so, ‘blank spaces’ remain. It is not rare for a particular street or region to have a different name for Google, local governments and dwellers, nor is it unheard of for Google to be unable to find the correct street or neighbourhood with the name or address provided (Data analyst, interview by author, 2 March 2021).

Google Maps georeferencing requires pinning down the desired location on the map, but since many of the addresses where gunshots and shootouts are typically reported are in peripheral neighbourhoods and slums, their cartographies may be uncertain even to local authorities and inhabitants, let alone to Google Maps. In Recife, where Fogo Cruzado also operates, people routinely refer to certain localities following their historical reference as Engenhos (mills). This does not match the official names and boundaries established by local authorities and used by Google, thereby creating obstacles to geolocation. And since Engenhos are often not geolocated, Fogo Cruzado’s team has built a ‘manual’ database, where data comes from finding out the reported place by asking their acquaintances in the local communities for information.

The app’s mapping practices complement and enrich Google’s by tightening further the connections with locals. We are thus caught in what seems to be a relation of complicity. On the one hand, the app borrows the affordances of these ‘data eating’ (Lupton 2016) platforms not only to fill a gap in official data, but also to empower its users and to push for better, citizen-oriented, public security policies through the publication of weekly, monthly, and yearly reports, and through activism. It also provides data to help other civil society organizations in formulating bills, lawsuits, and public awareness campaigns. On the other hand, however, it participates in the tentacular infrastructures’ big tech. Not only it produces data through these infrastructures, but it also feeds them with data and metadata.

Faria (2021), in his writings on Oyxabaten cryptocurrency, notes a similar ambivalence with regards to blockchain. The difference, however, is that Oyxabaten represents a completely different cosmovision when compared to bitcoin, while Fogo Cruzado does not introduce us to such an alternative cosmovision; rather, it disputes how security policy is produced by the state, the failures of gun control policies and how local authorities prefer to prioritise violent incursions in favelas as their public security strategy, without leaving the ‘modern terrain’.

The project of Fogo Cruzado dialogues with the idea of companionship, which acknowledges that humans cannot be separated from the culture, nature and techniques that surround them (Haraway 2016; Lupton 2016). More pointedly, humans are constituted through these encounters, as we go about our daily lives interacting with nonhumans. In Lupton’s (2016: 2) words, ‘[h]umans are companion species with the nonhumans alongside which they live and engage, each species learning from and influencing the other, co-evolving.’ We are companions with the devices we carry with us. We carry them, fiddle with them, look at them, are invested in them, and send our data to them throughout the day. We are inevitably attached to them. As they are to us.

To return to Fogo Cruzado, the app offers a public utility service to the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro, especially in its most gun-violence afflicted neighbourhoods. Yet, the service would not thrive without having its users interacting with a social media ecosystem, informing about ongoing shootouts, gunshots, police operations, and similar activities.

The trope of companionship has also been discussed by IR scholars when it comes to producing critique. As Austin, Bellanova and Kauffman (2019) argue, to embrace this trope in critique also involves accepting that knowledge is produced externally to academia, with and alongside the people, material things, networks, and practices that mediate ideas across time and space. Importantly, companionship may also mean complicity and co-optation. It is also to stay with the trouble (Haraway 2016).

The complicity of pragmatic engagements is thus not outrightly negative. It infuses the materials of our words with possibilities, oftentimes combining troubled infrastructures with alternative practices and meanings. It creates Frankenstein-ish and Chtulhu-tesque figures, risky co-makings (Haraway 2013). Fogo Cruzado needs Google to deliver its service, but Google does not need Fogo Cruzado to deliver theirs. Like a tiny squid, the app navigates through the ever moving and expanding tentacles of the kraken, while taking part in its meta-interface. Still, the kraken provides a space through which the squid and many other creatures can thrive, almost parasitically.

The sense of parasite I mobilize is closely aligned to Aradau, Blanke and Greenway (2019). Borrowing from Michel Serres, they understand acts of digital parasitism as ‘interferences that work alongside rather than work against’ (Aradau, Blanke and Greenway 2019: 2548). Digital relations are parasitic in the sense that they imply ‘asymmetric reciprocity rather than equal exchange’ and ‘noise rather than just communication’ (2019: 2555). Distancing the parasitic from the negative connotations associated with microbes and infections, Aradau, Blanke and Greenway take the ‘parasitic’ to be a third that modifies existing relations without opposing them. Fogo Cruzado is parasitic in the sense that, first, it establishes an asymmetrical relationship of reciprocity with Google, borrowing from the latter’s infrastructure via its API requests, while Google ‘eats’ the data produced locally to perfect its knowledge of the territory. Hence, Fogo Cruzado does not work against Google (or other tech companies from which it may borrow a feature or two), but with it. Second, this relation is always being modified, adapted based on the needs of both app creators and its user base. Whenever the expectation of smooth geolocation is not met, and Fogo Cruzado’s users and analysts cannot geolocate or geotag a place with contrasting naming practices, analysts must figure out the closer coordinates to the specifics provided in each report and only after this they will pin the location on the map.

This parasitic engagement produces important frictions to the tales of successful capitalist entrepreneurs, universal knowledge machines, and rogue technologies. First, it disturbs established ideas of who and what counts as ‘innovator’, taking innovation away from the garage and distributing it alongside a chain of digital infrastructures and practices that range from satellite-enabled geolocation to activist efforts to count gunshots. Second, it situates computation within a range of practices that look less like (pre-)determined universals and much more like partial knowledge. To become real, the dream of the ‘Google Star Trek’ computer requires the continuous engagement of local practices, knowledge, and peoples. Acknowledging that the universality of computation is partial highlights its dependence of ‘low-tech’ innovations with aberrant modes of production, small gambiarras (Messias and Mussa 2020) characterized by their precariousness, improvisation and, in some cases, divergent functions. Our digital infrastructures are not monolithic, seamless, or consistent, nor are they rigid or inflexible. They are, in fact, highly adaptable, embedded with contradictions and full of fissures that reflect on their modes of production.

Third, it displaces tales of technological innovation from their high-tech versions centred on the Global North (Medina, Marques and Holmes 2014). Our imaginaries surrounding digital technologies are strongly shaped by tropes such as those discussed previously. These tropes risk reinforcing a binary of doom/salvation by technology. Pragmatic engagements such as Fogo Cruzado – which work alongside capitalist infrastructures such as Google instead of opting out – produce fissures in this imaginary. They are not purely speculative but South-fabricated modes of remaking the world that also affect our perceptions of technology by combining and recombining existing infrastructures with practices that are sometimes improvised, sometimes counterintuitive, and other times simply precarious. In a sense, they work similarly to Haraway’s (2013 [no pagination]) cyborgs, ‘always simultaneously relentlessly real and inescapably fabulated.’

Conclusion

This work has played with the ambiguity of the acronym ‘SF’. SF, for Haraway, means several things other than ‘Science Fiction.’ In this work it stands for ‘Speculative Fabulation’, or the act of fabricating stories of security technologies beyond the North, and ‘South Fabricated’, attesting the situatedness of app-mediated narratives. Through SF1 and SF2, I have sought to show how popular sci-fi tropes fabricate imaginaries around digital technologies as technologies of individual empowerment and societal control. Through SF3, I have argued that an attention to South Fabricated technologies developed for and through situated Global South contexts, and pragmatic engagements may help us escape the binary and utilitarian representations of digital technologies and expand the critical ‘carrier bag’ (Le Guin 2019) of IR thinking on technology by acknowledging the ambivalences and contradictions inherent to the act of engaging: Tentacular infrastructures afford and coexist with practices that borrow from them, dispute them, or that are parasitic to them. Not always will these practices signify alternative cosmologies; but they do require different epistemologies.

In this sense, developing an app becomes as much an act of speculation as it becomes an act of fabrication. To ‘fabricate’ means both to invent or create (although not always in the positive sense) and to manufacture or construct. One may fabricate evidence, or stories like Alien, I, Robot or Star Trek. One may also fabricate apps that take a bullet from a gun chamber and turn it into a meaningful computational representation for public policy purposes. Fogo Cruzado’s loosely connected stories of peripheral engagement with big tech infrastructures depart from a ‘view from above’, diving into a politics of dwelling in the ‘mud’.

Digital technologies will not save us, nor will they doom us. They are also not simply tools at the service of humanity, but have a politics of their own, which can be asymmetric and unequal, misogynistic, and bellicose, extractive, and exploitative, as much as it can be empowering, democratising, and enhancing our possibilities for accessing information. They are deeply ambivalent, guided by assumptions and ideologies about what counts as innovation and politics, and these assumptions and ideologies get inscribed into digital infrastructures, as well as our stories about them.

Through a ‘South’ fabricated story, I showed how one can engage with capitalist, misogynist, and intended-to-be-universal digital infrastructures without being irrevocably contaminated but instead contaminating them. This is not to say that these stories cannot be ‘complicit’. However, to parasitically work alongside rather than against is probably a more efficient condition for worlding in such a manner that affects and moves us, opening the analysis to the ‘unexpected elements of one’s own embodiments in lively and re-sensitizing worlds’ (Haraway 2013 [no pagination]), with South fabrications providing the much-needed ambiguity and ambivalence our tales of computation currently might need.

Notes

• 1
  For examples of the plea for more regulation and/or the banishment of certain technologies, see the campaigns ‘Ban Facial Recognition’ (https://www.banfacialrecognition.com/) and ‘Stop Killer Robots’ (https://www.stopkillerrobots.org).
• 2
  The disciplinary interest in the debate surrounding technology can be traced back to concerns with the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe in the Cold War era. The impending doom that nuclear technologies could bring – foreshadowed U.S atomic bomb attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – fed pessimism with the impacts of technology in politics. It was believed that the possibility of escalation towards a nuclear war meant the loss of human rationality, to the extent that this would threaten the very existence of humankind. This fear is constitutive of arguments by Morgenthau (1946) and Herz (1957).
• 3
  In 2021, a sequel to the film was released. Slaughterbots – if human: kill () brings new scenarios where civilians are attacked by the cloud of lethal drones and makes a call for the UN to ban autonomous weapons. The movie is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rDo1QxI260 [Accessed on 8 December 2023].
• 4
  My use of the app did not involve reporting armed violence events. It was a passive use where I would activate notifications about these events based on my location. Likewise, my use of social media involved searching for interactions in Fogo Cruzado’s profile but did not involve reporting events.
• 5
  The idea of user empowerment through digital technologies was present in early iterations of Fogo Cruzado: the app was initially intended to allow users to better decide how to move around the city. The idea gained strength in the years preceding the World Cup and the Olympic games in Brazil, when the app was created, animated by a belief in the power of mobile technologies to help change social inequalities through better connectivity and access to services.
• 6
  For a discussion on the challenges of mapping favelas, see: https://rioonwatch.org/?p=32519, as well as the 2014 movie “Todo Mapa tem seu Discurso” directed by Francine Albernaz and Thaís Inácio, on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/93081871 [Accessed on 7 January 2023].

Acknowledgements

For their invaluable comments and suggestions on various versions of this article, the author would like to thank Laura Sjoberg, Naeem Inayatullah, Asees Puri, and the participants of the 2022 ISA Research Workshop Futurism(s) and ‘Speculations in World Politics: Re-thinking IR imaginaries & methodologies’, as well as the journal’s editors and anonymous reviewers. I also sincerely thank my interviewees for kindly contributing with their time to this research. Research underlying this article was made possible by funding from the following Brazilian agencies: Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior 001; and Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro 200.766/2019.

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  16 Dec 2024
• Date of issue
  Sep/Dec 2024

History

• Received
  29 June 2022
• Accepted
  8 May 2024