The making of a precarious cybertariat: SIM card street vendors, informational labor, and subordinated digitization in Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Abstract

This paper addresses the interplay of digital media and space in the creation of a low-skilled informational workforce in urban settings. Based on ethnographic research among cell phone SIM card street vendors in Belo Horizonte city in Brazil, I argue that these workers constitute a fraction of a precarious digital workforce fundamental for the reproduction of informational/communicational markets in the peripheries of digital capitalism. The emergence of these low-skilled informational workers does not rely solely on their technological abilities or the specific spatialities in which they perform simple informational labor. Instead, I argue that their emergence as digital workers arises from the intersection of space, labor and digital media. In particular, I show how the conformation of this precarious Brazilian cybertariat enables us to grasp the role that subordinated digitization plays in contemporary capitalism.