Reimagining digital inclusion through platform economies in Brazil

Abstract

This article considers how community-led organisations in Brazil are reformulating debates surrounding digital inclusion in the face of the consolidation of platform capitalism. It does this through exploration of how two NGOs cultivate spaces for exchange and dialogue in rural and urban areas of the country’s Southeast. The first, SILO, works with communities in rural, peripheral and protected areas to respond to local challenges using art, science and technology, while the second, AfroGames, offers esports training to disadvantaged young people across the city of Rio de Janeiro. Building on discussions with those behind each NGO in March 2024, the article examines how both organisations reproduce and break from large-scale state and civil society efforts to promote social, cultural and digital inclusion in Brazil in the early 2000s. A key contention of the article is that contemporary efforts to promote digital inclusion in Brazil cannot be divorced from territorially rooted mobilisations for social justice. At the same time, it attends to key differences between the work of the NGOs analysed and the digital inclusion efforts of the early 2000s, for example, as regards their approach to free and open culture and the potential of the video games industry. The article argues that the work of both NGOs shows how, in the hands of communities and activists, even expressions of digital culture widely associated with platform economies, capital accumulation and individualism, such as retail platforms and esports, can be turned to provocative and emancipatory ends. It concludes by considering how the work of both NGOs contributes to recent research exploring the complexities of how platforms land in Latin America through their focus on how sociocultural practices and platforms intersect, reworking the strategies of Brazil’s digital inclusion movement and probing of the limits of autonomy in an era of pervasive platform capitalism.

Introduction

In the Serrinha do Alambari, located on the tri-frontier of the states of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Minas Gerais, light streams through the window of a former casino on to a circle of sofas intended to facilitate the sharing of ideas. This repurposed building serves as the headquarters of SILO, an NGO that works with communities in rural, peripheral and protected areas to respond to local challenges using art, science and technology. Meanwhile, in the community of Vigário Geral in the North Zone of Rio de Janeiro, young people gather in the reception and classrooms of a cultural centre to play esports on borrowed smartphones. While the top floors of this building are home to dance studios and musical rehearsal rooms that provide cultural opportunities to those living in Rio’s peripheries, the bottom floor of the centre has been reformed to host AfroGames, an initiative developed by the NGO AfroReggae in 2018 that offers esports training to disadvantaged young people across the city. The organisations are active in two distinct but related types of periphery: the Serrinha do Alambari lies at the edge of Rio’s rural hinterland, precarious transport infrastructure distancing it from Brazil’s former capital. Vigário Geral was once such a space before becoming part of the city. Nonetheless, it is still regarded as peripheral as it was largely self-built by residents outside of pre-existing ‘urbanized services and infrastructure’ (Holston, 2008: 147). Although these are very different NGOs, targeting distinct populations to different ends, both address the ways that platform economies, or reliance on digital platforms to facilitate services such a commerce and access to cultural production, reproduce social inequalities. They do so by repurposing and reinventing some of the core tenets of the digital inclusion initiatives that thrived in Brazil during the early 2000s. Through exploration of how SILO and AfroGames cultivate spaces for exchange and dialogue in rural and urban areas of Southeast, this article considers how community-led organisations are reformulating debates surrounding digital inclusion in the face of the consolidation of platform capitalism. To this end, it probes how both build on and break from large-scale state and civil society efforts to promote digital inclusion in Brazil in the early 2000s. ¹

Early formulations of digital inclusion in Brazil emerged from the attempts by the Partido dos Trabalhadores [Workers’ Party] (PT) to seek redress for longstanding injustices suffered by marginalised communities. Alongside flagship policies instituted by the PT after its election to government in 2003, such as Bolsa Família [Family Grant], a poverty-reduction cash-transfer initiative, and the decision to allow Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities to self-identify for the right to seek multi-cultural land titles, the party’s early administrations sought to fulfil the citizenship rights of traditionally excluded communities through cultural policy. The democratisation of access to digital and audiovisual culture was a key axis of this strategy.

The government’s introduction of the innovative Programa de Cultura Viva [Live Culture Programme] in 2004 marked a watershed moment in efforts to broaden access to culture and cultural funding in the country. This programme sought to support geographically diverse and marginalised communities across Brazil to produce and disseminate culture. At its heart was the recognition of pre-existing NGOs, cultural centres, and collectives throughout the country as Pontos de Cultura [Cultural Points] that were eligible to receive funding for activities and multimedia equipment. As part of this, the Programa de Cultura Viva worked with civil-society initiatives such as Metareciclagem, a key proponent of the community technology and free software movements that promoted the upcycling of obsolete computer hardware, to provide digital devices adapted to the needs of communities and open to creative appropriation. Alongside this strategy, early PT administrations also sought to promote digital culture for more instrumental, employment-orientated ends through the establishment of Telecentres in low-income communities, which offered free access to computers, as well as workshops in digital skills.

Despite the ambition of the digital inclusion initiatives of the early 2000s, scholars have pointed to their limitations. Both Horst (2011) and Nemer (2022) argue that the instrumental intentions of state-sponsored Telecenters had limited utility for their communities while the more informal LAN houses, internet cafes set up by entrepreneurial residents, thrived as spaces of community. Omari (2018) places digital inclusion initiatives within the context of what Caldeira terms Brazil’s ‘disjunctive democracy’ in which confrontations between state and non-state actors (such as the drug trafficking gangs that run many of Rio’s favelas) erode citizenship and destabilise the rule of law (Caldeira, 2000). Within this context, many favela residents ‘view [government] initiatives that seek to benefit their communities with suspicion’ (Omari, 2018: 286), while territorial disputes restrict their ability to do everyday things such as take photographs in the street. Cazeloto, writing in 2007, claimed that digital inclusion initiatives have no real impact on the underlying causes of social inequality. Rather, they serve to rearticulate and reinforce social hierarchies within a new phase of digital capitalism.

Cazeloto’s claims were prophetic as digital inclusion initiatives became increasingly intertwined with the systems and demands of Big Tech platforms. A dramatic rise in smartphone ownership that took place in Brazil during the mid-2000s undergirded this process, with the prevalence of ‘zero-rating’ contracts that offer users unlimited access to select services propelling the usage of messaging platforms such as WhatsApp. Likewise, during Dilma Rousseff’s administration (2011–2016), Meta (then Facebook) partnered with the government with the aim of improving access to public services while increasing reliance on its platforms (Omari, 2018). With high levels of platform penetration in Brazil, Brazilian media scholar Franco (2021) argues that the platformisation of work through on-demand platforms such as Uber and iFood has ‘hybridized’ with existing modes of ‘popular entrepreneurship’ that serve as ‘an emergency survival solution against ever-deepening precarity’ (p. 798). By coopting these strategies and the ‘territorialized sociability networks’ that they rely on, ‘Brazilian platform capitalism has succeeded in extending its control and management into areas that had hitherto remained at the margins of the exploitative practices of capital’ (p. 806). Debates around access to digital media and culture have thus shifted from analyses of the relative merits of the PT’s innovative experiments with the free software movement towards critiques of Brazilians’ incorporation into forms of platform capitalism and the impact this is having on the country’s democracy.

Drawing on visits to each NGO in March 2024 and qualitative interviews in which key figures from each responded to open questions about its aims, motives, and approach, this article asks how SILO and AfroGames are engaging with processes of platformisation. It adopts a ‘grounded’ approach to answering this question (Bryant and Charmaz, 2007), foregrounding themes and practices that stood out from notes and interview transcripts and which both organisations confirmed to be of importance in subsequent correspondence. While the article’s engagement with the work of two NGOs active in rural and urban peripheries of Brazil sheds light on how platform economies affect and are challenged within distinct Majority-World contexts, its analysis treats each NGO as a unique and historical entity. Indeed, a key contention of the article is that contemporary efforts to promote digital inclusion in Brazil cannot be divorced from territorially rooted mobilisations for social justice.

At the same time, the article attends to key differences between the work of the NGOs analysed and the digital inclusion efforts of the early 2000s, for example, as regards their approach to free and open culture and the potential of the video games industry. Taken together, the work of both organisations shows how, in the hands of communities and activists, even expressions of digital culture widely associated with platform economies, capital accumulation and individualism, such as retail platforms and esports, can be turned to provocative and emancipatory ends. We therefore conclude the article by exploring these organisations’ contribution to research, foregrounding the specificities of how platforms land in spaces and communities.

SILO: reimagining technology through cotidianidade

Of SILO’s many activities, which range from artistic and scientific residencies to feminist gatherings, this section focuses on CaipiratechLAB, a programme that supports organic agricultural producers to strengthen their local distribution circuits and secure their income streams. CaipiratechLAB also provides training that does not require participants to travel or migrate to urban areas, with a particular focus on creating opportunities for young people in rural areas to live, work and reconnect with the countryside and be agents of change in their communities. The project’s emphasis on organic agricultural production responds to a desire to valorise traditional approaches to food production and concern about the environmental impact of pesticides.

Consisting of three interlocking parts, this programme is guided by the principles of collaboration and cooperativism. First, CaipiratechLAB is producing a digital platform that maps organic agricultural producers across Brazil’s Southeast. Second, the programme facilitates a series of lessons and laboratórios [laboratories] that enable producers to learn from one another. Third, the programme consists of a WhatsApp group through which participants can share their knowledge in an ongoing and informal way. Each of these components of the project is guided by its members’ experience of growing up around the Serrinha do Alambari: SILO is led by Cinthia Mendonça, daughter of local agricultural producers, and primarily employs women and people of colour from nearby communities. The NGO’s dual concerns with technology and the valorisation of popular culture has roots in Mendonça’s participation in the country’s community technology and free software movements through initiatives such as MetaReciclagem, as well as her involvement in Brazil’s cultural scene, including 3 years working with a Ponto de Cultura in Pernambuco. This section will thus draw on conversations with Mendonça during a visit to SILO’s headquarters in March 2024 to examine how the NGO both builds on and breaks from the community technology, free software and Ponto de Cultura movements of the early 2000s.

Guided by Freire’s (1985) notion of cotidianidade [everydayness], or the communal practice of ‘everyday acts like cleaning, walking, cooking [and] organising [..] to establish an everyday space for exchange’ ² (Mendonça, 2022: 16) as well as his pedagogia da pergunta [question pedagogy], which calls for people to constantly ask how things could be different, SILO collaborates with producers to reimagine technologies in their service. Although arguably lesser known facets of the educator’s work, both concepts key into Freire’s persistent concern with the conscientização [conscientization] and liberation of marginalised communities. This section begins by exploring how sustained engagement with producers, infrastructural inequality and the widespread use of platforms such as WhatsApp in Brazil’s interior have led SILO to rethink key tenets of the community technology and free software movements of the turn of the millennium, namely that digital inclusion efforts should rely on open source software and that this should be made legible to end users. It then considers how the process of developing a retail platform has led it to question the value of openness in relation to data. The section concludes by probing how experimental practices emerging from Brazil’s cultural scene inflect CaipiratechLAB’s approach to technology in its laboratórios. Drawing these threads together, this section builds on Grohmann’s (2023) characterisation of Latin American platform cooperatives as combining practice and platform to argue that CaipiratechLAB’s experimental results collectively explore what paths might lead to more equitable and less commodified food distribution networks in the rural interior of Brazil’s Southeast.

An effort to map the needs of organic agricultural producers in Brazil’s rural interior underpins CaipiratechLAB’s work. Indeed, Mendonça employed the term ‘mapping’ as a shorthand to describe the process of visiting producers across the country’s Southeast to learn about their experiences. Drawing on its team’s deep knowledge of local communities and Freire’s notion of cotidianidade, those behind CaipiratechLAB accompany and partake in the work of producers over a period of time, providing space for those who prefer to express their thoughts through doing to share opinions, dreams and concerns. As a result of such dialogue, CaipiratechLAB resolved to create a digital platform mapping organic producers across Brazil’s Southeast. Responding to the repeated refrain ‘I know how to plant, not how to sell’, this platform seeks to support producers with one of the aspects of their work that they find most challenging: selling. This platform is not, though, intended as a straightforward solution to complex and structural problems faced by agricultural producers. Rather, in line with Freire’s pedagogia da pergunta, the platform asks how technology could be reimagined to meet rural producers’ needs.

Attending to these needs, the platform does not follow marketplace conventions. This decision seeks to circumvent the ‘relation of mistrust’ that sometimes develops when customers are wary of the appearance of producers’ wares and the fairness of their prices. For example, CaipiratechLAB’s platform provides illustrations rather than photographs of products in order to move away from the idea of produce as hyperreal merchandise that must correspond to items pictured in carefully composed photographs, thus preventing producers from having to explain that their products do not look like those in supermarkets because they are organic. To establish a relationship of trust, the platform also provides a work contact for each producer. This allows potential customers to make direct enquiries about the availability of produce and learn about pricing. The platform thus prevents people from adding produce to a digital shopping cart without interacting with those who have grown or raised it in an effort to move away from depersonalised and commodifying models of food consumption towards a more affective one. This approach also opens space for producers and customers to circumvent the payments systems embedded in many retail platforms (Nieborg and Poell, 2018). While many may still turn to payment platforms such as Pix, users could also choose to pay with cash or make exchanges in kind.

Beyond navigating issues of trust, Mendonça outlined how a conventional marketplace approach requiring producers to constantly update their produce availability would prove unsustainable due to the way producers are able to engage with digital media. Many of the producers CaipiratechLAB works with have precarious and infrequent internet access, with some only connecting to the internet every couple of weeks when their routines permit them to visit locales with Wi-Fi or mobile internet signal. The programmes’ platform seeks to navigate this via the affordances of technologies producers already use, such as WhatsApp. As Pereira et al. (2022) observe, ‘WhatsApp use has become an integral part of everyday life in Brazil, and the country has seen creative and extensive adoption of the platform’. Rural areas are no exception to this, with a 2021 study revealing that 91% of agricultural producers own smartphones and 76% use WhatsApp to carry out business (Redação Canal Rural, 2021). Such statistics show how platformisation is far from a strictly urban phenomenon (Wang et al., 2022). In relation to CaipiratechLAB’s platform, the fact that WhatsApp’s default settings provide feedback on whether sellers have received and read a message provides potential buyers with more information than a traditional marketplace approach and thus better accounts for intermittent internet connectivity. CaipiratechLAB’s platform thus keys into the ways users across Brazil have creatively reimagined WhatsApp as a means to do far more than just communicate with friends and family by transforming a heavily used instant messaging service into a form of sales infrastructure.

CaipiratechLAB uses WhatApp in an effort to produce a platform that fits into the ways producers currently use digital media but is otherwise largely invisible to them. This aspect of the project offers a rethinking of MetaReciclagem’s emphasis on promoting ‘critical use of technologies’ (Collingsp2004, 2007). It also subtly diverges from what Grohmann identifies as the desire of urban platform cooperatives such as Se~oritas Courier, a São Paulo-based cycle delivery collective of cis-women and trans-people, to promote active understanding of the functionality of a range of technologies among its members. A member of this group has, for example, noted: ‘People need to understand how algorithms and platforms work. [. . .] We need to try to understand it so that we can incorporate it into our everyday work’ (Grohmann, 2023: 279). By contrast, limited connectivity and exposure to web development systems, as well as the already considerable demands on producers’ time, have led Mendonça and her team to question the relative value of such an education. Indeed, as Escosteguy et al. (2017) have argued in relation to rural communities in the south of Brazil, uneven access to information communication technologies shape producers’ interest in and uptake of them. As such, CaipiratechLAB aims to allow producers to benefit from online visibility without generating more work for them. It has therefore designed its platform around the ways producers already use digital media, such as through the exchange of WhatsApp audio recordings. Likewise, those behind the platform create and update the entry for each producer based on the information they provide. This means producers do not have to remember a login or navigate an unfamiliar technological system. CaipiratechLAB maintains the platform for the moment, but plans to train a young person from the local community to carry out updates. In this sense, despite its pragmatism, the programme’s community links mean it upholds the free software movement’s ethos ‘that the user is able or has access to someone who can understand the program’ (Roussel and Stofli, 2020: 10).

By bringing together two very different types of technology – a US-owned and proprietary app and an open access platform – CaipiratechLAB also reimagines the free software movement’s emphasis on ensuring that the source codes of all community technologies are accessible (Roussel and Stolfi, 2020: 10). Hosted on GitHub, the platform’s code has recently been used to map restaurants supporting those displaced by devastating floods in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. In keeping with this ethos of providing a community-orientated platform on which producers can depend, the code underpinning CaipiratechLAB’s platform avoids the use of plugins to limit the possibility of the site breaking as software add-ons update and change over time. Likewise, SILO has ensured that the development of the platform has changed hands over the course of its development to prevent its underlying code from becoming idiosyncratic and difficult to navigate. At the same time, the project uses the proprietary messaging app WhatsApp. Far from this implying an acritical approach to proprietary platforms, it results from discussion with producers of their specific needs. Indeed, Mendonça (2021) has previously underscored how digital inclusion through consumption produces alienation among rural communities. In this sense, while CaipiratechLAB’s recourse to WhatsApp does not strictly correspond to MetaReciclagem’s ethos of, to use Mendonça’s words, ‘opening the black box’, its doubling of the programme’s functionality through the creation of a supplementary open source interface shaped to the needs of producers arguably keys into the appropriative principles of the movement. Platform cooperatives such as Hire Who Struggles, a virtual assistant that connects members of the Homeless Workers Movement with people in need of services, see WhatsApp as the best way to reach customers due to the platform’s widespread usage in Brazil. By contrast, CaipiratechLAB’s usage of WhatsApp is motivated by its producers’ familiarity with its functionality. As such, though its producer-orientated combination of proprietary and open source technologies may seem at odds with what Lehuedé (2024: 6) identifies as widespread efforts among Latin American civil society organisations to ‘assert their self-determination and autonomy in relation to corporate-owned dominant tools’, CaipiratechLAB remains deeply committed to this project through its dialogic exploration of paths towards autonomy in a context of engrained platformisation. Indeed, commenting on a draft of this article, Mendonça pointed out that the development of CaipiratechLAB led her to realise that simply providing an alternative to Big Tech platforms did not guarantee understanding or education, and often limited people’s ability to engage with the programme’s work. Instead, SILO’s team has elected to provide ongoing critical training on the use of services such as WhatsApp that highlights their risks and opportunities, as well as those of alternatives.

At the same time, CaipiratechLAB is navigating the complexities of platform capitalism’s data extractivism. In particular, it is debating the relative merits of openness – a key concept for the free software movement of the early 2000s – as corporate interests seek to capitalise on data the NGO has acquired. A rural bank, for example, contacted SILO to offer credit to the producers involved in CaipiratechLAB. Although training in cybersecurity already forms part of CaipiratechLAB’s programme and the project team asks participants to let them know if they receive unwanted correspondence via WhatsApp, Mendonça emphasised how this encounter exemplifies the complexities involved in producing a platform to connect producers to new customers. SILO’s team is thus constantly evaluating the balance of risk and opportunity posed by their work. For the moment, however, and in the face of a series of large-scale data breaches by state departments in Brazil which mean that the personal details of many are already exposed, the team feels that the benefits of CaipiratechLAB, a programme administered by people with backgrounds in providing cybersecurity training to members of the feminist movement that builds on how producers are already using digital media, outweigh its drawbacks.

Nor is CaipiratechLAB simply responding to the ways data are mobilised for capital accumulation. Instead, it is working with Brazil’s Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE) [National Institute for Space Research] to produce unprecedented data about regional food production systems. This data is intended to support producers to make informed decisions about their work and facilitate contestatory data practices. It thus dialogues with the ways civil society groups across Latin America have produced alternative bodies of knowledge to challenge extractive practices and ‘assetized ontologies of territory’ (Lehuedé, 2022).

CaipiratechLAB’s efforts to valorise local knowledge also shape its training programme. The project’s lessons and laboratórios explore a wide range of subjects, from producing sustainable tourism initiatives to how climate change is affecting organic farming. Some sessions take place virtually, while others are carried out in person. These are supplemented by a WhatsApp group which participants can use to share queries and experiences. The most complex themes are dealt with in person to allow ample opportunity for questions, dialogue and hands-on support. Shaped by Mendonça’s experience of working with experimental activities and laboratórios as part of her involvement in Brazil’s arts scene, the NGO adopts an open-ended and collaborative approach to teaching and learning that invites producers to learn from, build with and inspire one another. As part of this, its lessons and laboratórios are predominantly led by people with experience of living and working in Brazil’s rural interior. A session on 5 July 2023, for example, gathered producers to think about the possibilities of Cadernetas Agroecológicas, a notebook or analogue technology that allows small-scale agricultural producers to map their production and income over a weekly period. During this event, Ozirene Cardoso shared how, despite initial difficulties with the notebooks, they have since helped her to think of herself as an agricultural producer and provider for her family. As such, unlike other courses targeting agricultural producers such as an Open-Agriculture, AI, and Data course convened by the US-based Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy, CaipiratechLAB’s lessons and laboratórios do not just introduce participants to digital tools. Nor do they seek to cultivate new forms of subjectivity, as per Gil’s (2024) analysis of the close alignment between repair skill training and entrepreneurship in São Paulo. Instead, they map onto the Pontos de Cultura programme’s valorisation and support for pre-existing cultural practices, as well as echo MetaReciclagem’s focus on ‘how technology can improve people’s lives and not just how people can adapt to their use’ (Collingsp2004, 2007). In this sense, CaipiratechLAB’s training allows producers to share and experiment with a range of practices and technologies.

Although the platform is still in a development and testing phase before being handed over to members of the local community in 2025, producers from the Brazilian Landless Rural Workers’ Movement and customers have already used it to coordinate the collection of purchases when the latter’s truck broke down. CaipiratechLAB’s decision to not adopt a traditional marketplace structure has, nonetheless, been a source of questions and required explanation at a demo of the platform to those behind Faz Feira, another group developing a retail platform to connect agricultural producers and potential customers. Although arguably a challenge to CaipiratechLAB’s work, Mendonça highlighted how such encounters are a central axis of its exploratory practice. In this way, whatever the future of the NGO’s platform, SILO and CaipiratechLAB’s methodologies have already succeeded in stimulating discussion around how a range of technologies – analogue, digital, open source and proprietary – can be used in the service of rural communities and the establishment of equitable relationships with the land. The programme thus develops Grohmann’s (2023) argument that groups across Brazil are expanding instrumental US-based conceptions of platform cooperativism (Scholz 2016) by engaging in experimental practices that blur distinctions between cooperative and platform. CaipiratechLAB illustrates that, beyond collectives, NGOs are also experimenting with methodologies that combine praxis and technology to seek social transformation. Furthermore, alongside the solidarity economy and community technology movements that Grohmann notes inspire cooperative platforms in Brazil, CaipiratechLAB shows how such groups also draw on methodologies from cultural collectives, repurposing them to address economic and agricultural challenges.

AfroGames: creating Black spaces in a platform economy

This section argues that some of the most innovative digital inclusion initiatives in Brazil are taking place in the context of esports, despite their close imbrication with platform economies. Rather than formulate alternatives to Big Tech platforms, esports organisations that carry out digital inclusion work among low-income communities in Brazil such as Fluxo, Zero Gravity and AfroGames, the focus of this section, embed the constraints and affordances of these platforms within pedagogical approaches that draw on epistemologies rooted in territorial struggles. Video game cultures have always occupied an ambiguous position in relation to discourses around digital inclusion in Brazil. While video games were excluded from state-led efforts (such as the Telecentros), they were often at the centre of popular grassroots (or what Horst, 2011, describes as ‘creolized’) practices such as LAN houses and the pervasive pirating of consoles that took place through the 1990s and 2000s. A similar ambiguity is evident today. On the one hand, video game development is often used as a vehicle for appropriations of digital technology through co-creation with communities. For example, Lab Coco, a social enterprise based in Olinda that describes itself as a ‘technology lab for the promotion of Black, Indigenous and peripheral identities’ runs game design courses and developed an educational game titled Contos de Ifá [Tales from Ifá] that teaches players about Afro-Brazilian heritage. On the other hand, online gaming communities are often perceived as highly discriminatory places and even seed beds for the far-right sentiment that led to Jair Bolsonaro’s rise to power. Although they acknowledge the growing diversity among gamers in Brazil, Macedo et al. (2023), for instance, argue that the ‘rhetorical strategies, hate campaigns and performance of toxic masculinities’ employed by a minority of players ‘share an (ultra) conservative ethos that connects these behaviours with the far right’ (p. 5).

The esports industry is also an unlikely venue for digital inclusion initiatives because of the degree of its imbrication with the dynamics of platform capitalism. Nieborg and Poell (2018) argue that video games are exemplary of what they describe as the ‘platformization of cultural production’ since they are (and have always been) ‘platform dependent’ (p. 4277) at the levels of production (through game engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine), consumption (either through the platforms of major developers such as Riot Games or distribution services such as Steam) and spectatorship (through sites such as Twitch, YouTube and Mixer). Falcão et al. (2020a) argue that these platforms ‘colonise the gaming experience’ and ‘foreclose spaces of flight and resistance, transforming them into spaces geared towards business policies’ (p. 66). Due to this pervasive platform infrastructure, ‘gamer subjectivity [. . .] is domesticated by the agency of neoliberalism’ (Falcão et al., 2020b: 408). Furthermore, the professionalisation of gaming in the esports industry connects the dynamics of racial capitalism (the role of racial hierarchies in the production of an expendable workforce) with the specific demands of the platform economy. Developing the term ‘racial platform capitalism’ and building on the work of Van Doorn (2017) and others, Gebrial (2024) argues that ‘platformisation is deeply invested in the social constitution of surplus populations as disposable, dangerous and less-than-human – and therefore in the racialisation processes that govern these dynamics’ (p. 1172).

Although she draws these conclusions from an analysis of work-on-demand apps (and specifically London Uber drivers in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis) Gebrial’s point is equally applicable to the esports industry in marginalised spaces in Brazil. Macedo and Kurtz (2021), for instance, have argued that ‘the Brazilian esports scene depends on a network of informality, precarity and labour exploitation that encompasses successful personalities, media and advertising discourses, and spectacle fed by neoliberal discourses that glamourise labour that is precarious, unremunerated and driven by hope’. Video games are fertile ground for what they call ‘hope labour’ (borrowing the term from Kuehn and Corrigan, 2013) since they create the illusion of being separate from social conditions and therefore purely meritocratic.

AfroGames, which describes itself as ‘the world’s first esports Training Centre in a favela’ echoes these ambiguities. Founded in 2018, AfroGames is a project run by AfroReggae, an organisation that was set up in 1993 to ‘reduce the use of drugs, disease, and crime in the favelas through artistic education’, such as percussion and dance lessons. The NGO received funding through the Programa de Cultura Viva [Live Culture Programme] in the early 2000s (Turino, 2010: 19). AfroGames provides esports training to disadvantaged young people across Rio and has already achieved considerable success with one of its teams coming fourth in the 2024 LPG (Liga Pro Gaming) Final. The project continues AfroReggae’s ethos and approach that are rooted in the specific struggles of the Vigário Geral comunidade. Durão and Coelho (2012) describe AfroReggae as evidencing ‘a certain hybridity’ (p. 906) between the strategies of an NGO and a business as well between ‘extreme localism’ and an embrace of ‘the global culture and social action markets’ (p. 907).

Although AfroReggae have received various sources of state funding over the years, it is also partly run as a business. While its main goals are to, in Junior’s words, ‘raise the self-esteem and the aspirations of favela residents and change the attitude of wider society to favela communities’ (Neate and Platt, 2010: 143), its strategies for achieving these goals are to harness sociocultural developments and adapt to changes in the market. AfroReggae’s navigation of market dynamics and popular culture is echoed in its engagement with esports. Miguel, a member of AfroReggae’s marketing team, points out that the NGO has engaged with esports precisely because they are ‘one of the most desirable activities for young people in Brazil’. One of the project’s central aims is to produce professional esports athletes who can compete at the highest levels. Achieving this goal entails full incorporation into the industry’s platform infrastructure, including the platforms of Riot Games and Garena employed for practice and competition, as well as the range of sites used for engaging with audiences, from specialised streaming services such as Twitch to non-specialised social media sites such as Instagram and TikTok. AfroGames’ main strategies are dictated by the market. Their focus on the battle royale game Free Fire (2017) is due to its pervasive popularity among teens in Brazil, the result of being free to play on mobile phones rather than requiring a PC.

However, the commitment to Free Fire is also evidence of AfroGames’ dedication to AfroReggae’s activist aims. The project harnessed the game’s existing popularity to take advantage of significant changes already underway in the gaming industry in Brazil. In a survey of the ‘geographies of esports’, which was researched before the release of Free Fire, Macedo and Fragoso (2019) point out that the spatial dynamics of exclusion within the esports industry are shaped to a large extent by regional variance in the quality of internet access. And these ‘disparities in connection quality’ reflect ‘the economic asymmetries between regions across Brazil’ (Macedo and Fragoso: 111). The establishment of esports training centres in favelas is part of a wider disruption of this geography of digital exclusion. One of the founders of AfroGames, Ricardo Chantilly, is also the creator of DiversiGames, a social enterprise that describes its mission as promoting ‘access to gamer culture, technology and digital innovation for minoritised groups’. AfroGames is a continuation of his commitment to expand the publicly perceived profile of a gamer. The initiative does this by providing training opportunities and offering its professional athletes a basic salary that provides stability as they enter a precarious industry. Alongside esports, AfroGames carries out activities more straightforwardly related to what Chantilly describes as ‘inclusão digital’ [digital inclusion], including a game jam held in collaboration with the NGO World of Us in which groups of young people developed games centred on Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous myths.

AfroGames reinforces the disruption of spatial exclusions within the esports industry in Brazil by grounding its processes in the territorial struggles that have shaped AfroReggae since its foundation. As Neate and Platt (2010) have documented, AfroReggae has its roots in two key acts of state oppression and violence that served to reinforce the exclusion of the comunidade from national space: the banning of funk dances by Rio authorities in 1992; and the Vigário Geral massacre in 1993 in which 30 police officers killed 21 unarmed inhabitants. AfroReggae sprang from a reggae party organised by Junior to circumvent the restrictions on funk. In response to the massacre, it established a Community Cultural Centre in Vigário Geral in June 1994 with the aim of, in Neate and Platt’s words, ‘offer[ing] young people workshops in recycling, percussion and dance with the clear objective of providing an alternative to drug trafficking and subemprego [underemployment]’ (2010: 20).

Chantilly places AfroGames firmly within this historical trajectory. He describes the organisation as ‘a digital inclusion and social impact project’ with the primary objective of creating ‘a space of opportunities for young people who live in a situation of social vulnerability’ (Fleck, 2023). This aim is reflected in both the physical presence of the organisation in Vigário Geral and the pedagogical strategies that connect it to the rest of the comunidade. AfroGames is housed in the Centro Cultural Waly Salomão [Waly Salomão Cultural Centre], named after a poet associated with the Tropicália protest movement. The building’s reception housed on the ground floor provides a space for local residents to meet and connect to the internet, creating a space in which everyday digital cultural activity intermingles with the more formal training offered by AfroGames. As Miguel observed: ‘you can see many people from the community come here [. . .] to get access to WiFi- sometimes they don’t have it at home- and they end up playing here in reception, in this space, playing because they don’t have access to the internet at home, or sometimes they don’t have access to a mobile phone. These phones here above, [in the interview room] mobile phones belonging to AfroGames, we make some of them available for people to play’. Miguel regarded this space as a means for people from the community to carry out personal admin online and engage in leisure activities. Beyond that, he also described it as a gateway for people to find out about and involve themselves in the multitudinous activities taking place in the centre, both in AfroGames’ rooms on the first floor and in the dance studios and musical rehearsal rooms above. In this sense, the núcleo’s reception acts as an heir to the LAN houses that Nemer (2022) has argued are sites for the appropriation of what he calls ‘mundane technologies’. That is, where community members find ways to seek advantage and enjoyment from everyday technologies, such as smartphones, email and word-processing programmes, that in other contexts may serve as sources of oppression.

This is echoed by the organisation’s wider educational strategy, which draws primarily on local knowhow and blurs the boundary between instructor, student and athlete. As Miguel put it: ‘our students often become teachers. There’s an example of this for Fortnite, we have a Fortnite teacher who was previously a student. We also have a student, an ex-student of Valorant who is an English teacher and so on. It keeps growing, just as we have students who become athletes’. Although the choice is driven by necessity (who would be in a position to teach individuals like the 13-year-old participant of AfroGames who is ranked in the top 50 Fortnite players worldwide?), it provides young participants with teachers and role models from within their communities.

This valorisation of the knowledge and interests of young people is also patent in the structuring of its programmes. AfroGames’ Free Fire team, a group of four men between the ages of 16 and 22, explained that their training regime consists of three key branches: ‘individual training, collective training and tactical training [which consists of] developing the team’s knowledge within the game’. This approach is reflected in AfroGames’ courses. During the ‘collective training’, students are also put into groups and encouraged to train together. In conversation in March, Miguel gestured to the classroom where he was seated and stated: ‘it fits ten students who make three or four teams and play amongst themselves. They help one another, some know more, some know less. It’s a collective endeavour’. AfroGames allows members of its community to share their knowledge and, in so doing, affirms the value of their expertise.

Alongside the expertise of its participants, AfroGames is also invested in the valorisation of specific spaces. The project has, for example, recently opened the first esports arena in a favela in Cantagalo. Miguel outlined how AfroGames organises events at the arena for participants of its courses to ‘allow them to gain experience of this competitive scenario within the courses themselves’. He mentioned, for instance, how, ‘at the end of the course, we put on a small competition for the students’ to which local influencers, among others, are invited. In this sense, AfroGames’ arena is an important space to prepare participants to perform amid the spectacle of in-person competitions. At the same time, AfroGames also uses the spectacle of these in-person events, as well as photographic and video recordings of them, to broaden conceptions of favelas. The slick films and images of talented esports athletes competing in front of cheering crowds in an imposing arena that AfroGames posts to social media challenge simplistic perceptions of favelas as spaces of poverty and crime and show them to be spaces of skill, innovation and style.

The project’s roots in specific communities inflect its work in further ways. While AfroGames operates courses in núcleos in Maré and Nova Holanda, its professional teams are solely based in Vigário Geral. As such, the project’s athletes, who come from neighbourhoods including Madureira, Belford Roxo and Irajá, all commute to the Centro de Cultura Digital Waly Salomão 5 days a week for training. Each team has a dedicated room in which to train and compete online, allowing them to plan tactics, train together and hone their communication (including through English lessons) in a consistent setting. Miguel explained that this leads to situations in which students regularly ask athletes for advice, which positions them as role models and integrates the Free Fire team into the community. As such, and in ways that recall SILO’s approach to cotidianidade [everydayness], AfroGames promotes a cohabitation between students, athletes and moradores that facilitates the asking of questions and learning together.

Departing from the instrumentalising approach of state-led digital inclusion initiatives, AfroGames marries grassroots digital appropriation with the demands of the video games industry. Its mix of social activism with an embrace of the platform economy leaves it open to the criticism, articulated by Cazeloto, that digital inclusion initiatives incorporate marginalised sectors of society into the digital economy while preserving or even reinforcing existing socio-economic hierarchies. It could be argued that AfroGames ‘includes’ participants in the structure of ‘hope labour’ that requires the reproduction of a precarious and expendable workforce. And yet, what emerges through interviews with organisers and participants of the project is how AfroGames operates through a hybrid approach that intervenes into the transnational esports industry while shielding its athletes from the sharp edge of the market and which blends the ethos of this industry with local practices and systems of knowledge. In this sense, as a space of Black innovation, AfroGames bears the hallmarks of what Nascimento (2019) described as quilombismo. Henson (2023: 3) has explored how the hip-hop movement in Bahia ‘nourishes, maintains, and retools the quilombo (maroon Community) blueprint to [. . .] create Black political and cultural spaces of refuge and communal creation.’ Whereas the artists and communities discussed by Henson create these spaces within the diasporic Black cultural practices of hip-hop, AfroGames carves out Black spaces within the predominantly white world of esports and articulates quilombismo with the demands of the platform economy. Indeed, AfroGame’s mission as a whole can be analysed as a collective appropriation of technology to serve the interests of young people in Rio peripheries while harnessing leisure activities and joy for socially progressive ends.

Conclusion

An analysis of the strategies employed by CaipiratechLAB and AfroGames problematises monolithic accounts of ‘data colonialism’ (Couldry and Mejias, 2019) and ‘platform imperialism’ (Jin, 2015) by demonstrating how history, territory and local practices shape the adoption of platforms in Brazil’s peripheries. In this, our study builds on a growing body of scholarship from Latin America that is nuancing Couldry and Mejiás’ account of data colonialism through an attention to ‘cultural, historical and material differences’ (Siles et al., 2023: 58). As such, it contributes a new perspective to the ongoing debate within Media, Culture & Society about the agency of Global South actors in this complex ‘new phase of digital globalization’ (Lin and Kloet, 2023: 1527) characterised by tensions between the ongoing power of silicon valley, the rise of ‘platformisation from China’ (p. 1526) and increasing calls for ‘platform nationalism’ (p. 1526) and ‘platform regionalism’ (p. 1528). Our analysis resonates particularly strongly with Bhatia et al.’s (2025) account of the ‘digital vernacularities’ emerging from attempts by Indian social media influencers to ‘negotiate the authority of platform affordances in creating content representative of their cultural realities and personal aspirations’ (Bhatia et al., 2025: 132). In the case of SILO and AfroGames, their ‘negotiations’ are anchored in and responsive to territorially rooted social struggles.

Despite the commonalities between them, SILO and AfroGames occupy subtly different points in the nexus between resistance and complicity of what Siles et al. (2023) characterise as the ‘in-betweenness’ (p. 61) of popular Latin American algorithmic cultures. Although SILO relies on proprietary platforms (particularly WhatsApp), it embeds their use in an ethos strongly indebted to its director’s background in the digital inclusion and free software movements that valorises local embodied knowledges and demonstrates belief in the transformative potential of creative technological appropriation. At first glance, AfroGames sits much closer to the ‘complicity’ end of the scale through its production of top-class athletes for a sport that is deeply and multifariously reliant on digital platforms. Yet, a closer examination of its Freire-inspired pedagogical strategies and embeddedness within local networks of knowledge and sociality reveal the influence of its parent organisation AfroReggae as well as co-founder Chantilly’s commitment to a critical digital inclusion strategy.

Despite their differences, the two organisations share three main characteristics. The first is a pragmatic focus on how sociocultural practices intersect with platforms. SILO and AfroGames develop assemblages of existing platforms, embodied experience and local knowledge which change and adapt to different social challenges. The second characteristic that unites SILO and AfroGames is the articulation of the logics and demands of digital platforms with territorial struggles to materialise more equitable digitally mediated spaces. SILO draws on the embodied knowledges of producers in the Serrinha do Alambari area to create new digital mappings that suit their needs, existing technological know-how and outlooks. AfroGames creates a space for Black knowledge, expertise and joy in the predominantly White transnational space of esports. And it does so by embedding its training structures within the comunidade of Vigário Geral and its existing social and epistemological practices.

Finally, SILO and AfroGames are united by approaches that reimagine the legacies of the digital inclusion movements of the early 2000s in Brazil within a sociotechnical context dominated by transnational corporate digital platforms. This facet of the organisations’ work differs from other projects that Roussel and Stolfi (2020) argue have roots in the Pontos de Cultura programme. Baobáxia, part of Casa de Cultura Tainã’s Mocambos network, for example, aims to construct an alternative digital infrastructure to connect a network of rural and urban Black and Indigenous communities. Although still reliant on infrastructural technologies such as satellite systems, projects such as Baobáxia remain committed the ethos of the open source software movement and avoid Big Tech platforms in pursuit of digital and data autonomy. By contrast, through strategic and territorially-grounded uses of existing platforms, the projects analysed in this article probe the limits of autonomy in an era of pervasive platform capitalism.