Platform sub-imperialism

Abstract

This commentary explores Brazil's role in Latin American platform capitalism, integrating Ruy Mauro Marini's theoretical framework with contemporary studies of platform capitalism. It examines the connections between Latin American platforms, overexploitation, and data accumulation, leading to the concept of platform sub-imperialism: The emergence of certain Southern countries as platform sub-imperialist powers, acting as regional centers of data and capital accumulation through the expansion of their platforms into neighboring countries. This positioning constitutes an intermediate state between hegemonic nations and “digital colonies” in the international division of platform labor, data accumulation, and technological dependency.

This article is a part of special theme on Critical Data Studies in Latin America. To see a full list of all articles in this special theme, please click here: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/bds/collections/critical_data_studies__in_latin_america

Introduction

Are all countries in Latin America “digital colonies” merely consumers of services and providers of raw data for platforms from the Global North? This commentary presents an alternative hypothesis: While some Latin American countries are not entirely free of their technological and economic dependence on the North, they have developed their own platforms, and the expansion of these platforms into neighboring countries reproduces similar power dynamics among Southern countries as those observed with the North, a phenomenon we propose to call platform sub-imperialism.

In dependent capitalism, platform sub-imperialism is the expansion of a sub-imperialist power's platforms into countries within its sphere of influence. This expansion updates the sub-imperialist capitals’ overexploitation of labor in the region through their leading role in the regional platformization of labor. Moreover, Platform sub-imperialism realizes a double accumulation from neighboring countries: Sub-imperialist platforms accumulate value and data, a new dimension of accumulation compared to industrial sub-imperialism, produced by platform workers on a regional scale. In conclusion, through the regional expansion of its platforms, platform sub-imperialism reinforces the role of sub-imperialist countries as regional centers of data and capital accumulation, an intermediate position between the hegemonic countries and the “digital colonies” in the global hierarchy of platform economy, data accumulation, and technological dependence.

This perspective is innovative, given the longstanding focus of digital colonialism scholars on the extraction of data from Global South populations by Global North platforms (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Ricaurte, 2019; Silveira et al., 2021; Van Doorn and Badger, 2020) and Western state surveillance (Mann and Daly, 2019; Mannion, 2020), the primary perspective of data imperialism studies. In these studies concerned with North–South power relations, when Big data initiatives from the South are addressed, the focus is on activist projects (Milan and Treré, 2019; Ricaurte, 2019). While acknowledging their contribution, we believe that significant gaps remain in these critical studies: The power relations between Southern nations through digital technologies and the role of platforms from the Global South, especially those based in Latin America, in this process.

To fill these gaps, our commentary focuses on the role of Brazil and its leading labor platform, iFood, in Latin America for several reasons outlined in the first section. To contextualize our study historically, we integrate Latin American thinker Ruy Mauro Marini's concept of sub-imperialism, discussed in the second section, with contemporary studies of platform capitalism. In this way, we seek to understand the connections between Latin American platforms, overexploitation, and data accumulation discussed in the last two sections of the paper.

Brazil's centrality in Latin American platform capitalism

There are 27 platforms headquartered in Latin America, valued at more than US$ 1 billion (Statista, 2022). These platforms are mostly concentrated in Brazil, one of the largest southern hubs for platforms outside of Asia (Neto et al., 2022). An example of the important role of Brazilian platforms on the continent is iFood, a labor platform focused on delivery. Although iFood began as a fast food delivery platform, it now delivers medical, grocery, pet, and department store products, including electronics.

Founded in Brazil in 2011, iFood began its international expansion in 2016, targeting the continent's other main markets, Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia (Costa and Bezerra, 2022). Presently, iFood is the largest delivery platform in Latin America (Statista, 2023), organizing 250,000 workers in 1700 cities with 43 million consumers (iFood, 2023). As a result, iFood is the eighth most downloaded delivery app in the world (Statista, 2023). Its users generate 20 billion data records per month, contributing to the development of its artificial intelligence solutions, in which the company invests US$ 1.5 billion per year (iFood, 2023).

This example challenges digital colonialism's and data imperialism studies’ view of all Global South countries as merely “a mine of low-yield data since it collects few […] and exploits them even less” (Ricaurte, 2019: 9) ¹ . However, Latin American platforms are also unable to expand into the markets of the Global North (Seto, 2023); they are regional platforms, platforms created and operated within a specific geographical region (Steinberg and Li, 2017). In Ifood's example, its focus is on dominating the Latin American market; as Ifood's CEO Bloisi (2022: 1) puts it: “It is not about the rest of the world, it is about Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. The key word is not global expansion; it is a strong ecosystem [for iFood].”

The example also reinforces the importance of discussing platform capitalism(s) in the plural, with greater attention to the specific historical contexts of regional platformization (Steinberg and Li, 2017). Since the study of regional platforms has so far focused on Asia (Steinberg and Li, 2017), this presents an opportunity for studies on Latin America.

Brazil's sub-imperialism

To comprehend the historical conditions shaping platform capitalism in Latin America, particularly Brazil's role, we delved into Marini's theory (1965, 1977, 1992). Marini stands out as a pioneer in elucidating how certain developing countries expand their capital influence into neighboring markets while technologically modernizing their economies without breaking their subordination to the central economies.

According to Marini (1965), the economies of Latin American countries are organized to ensure the reproduction of capital from the central capitalist nations, with a permanent transfer of value from the periphery to the center through trade deficits, debt, repatriated profits, and royalties. Marini (1965) refers to this as dependent capitalism, where the mechanism that compensates for the transfer of value to the North and guarantees local capital accumulation is the overexploitation of labor. Overexploitation operates by reducing wages below the value of labor, primarily through the extension and intensification of unpaid work time. This phenomenon is evidenced by high permanent structural unemployment, lower wages compared to central countries, and prevalent precarious working conditions (Marini, 1965).

The appeal of higher surplus values from overexploitation attracted capital from the North, which, combined with local capital, made the industrialization of some Latin American countries possible in the post-war years. However, overexploitation limits the purchasing power of workers, restricts domestic markets, and forces the region's most industrialized economies to seek opportunities in foreign markets (Marini, 1965). Unable to compete in the industrial markets of developed countries, these economies turn to neighboring markets for growth (Marini, 1977).

Sub-imperialism is the expansion of capital from these industrialized Latin American economies into more underdeveloped and peripheral neighboring economies, reorganized according to their interests. These neighboring countries become primary markets for sub-imperialist industrial exports and territories where sub-imperialist companies will expand to organize relations of overexploitation in order to transfer value to the sub-imperialist power (Marini, 1977).

Sub-imperialist powers are not rising imperialisms competing with the main imperialist powers for the global market but rather subordinate forms of local imperialism complementing the interests of the North in their region (Marini, 1977). This dynamic persists as long as international capitals tolerate competition with sub-imperialist capitals in the regional market and central capitalist states recognize the political relevance of the sub-imperialist powers within their spheres of influence.

Brazil emerged as the main sub-imperialist industrial power in Latin America in the 20th century, reshaping the South American economy in favor of its capital accumulation (Marini, 1977). After an interlude, Brazil resumed its sub-imperialist role in the 2000s, expanding investments and increasing economic returns from neighboring markets (Temístocles, 2016). Now, let's understand how this has influenced Brazil's technological development.

Sub-imperialism and technological development

Western investment offers greater concessions to sub-imperialist countries than other dependent nations, including partial technology transfer (Marini, 1977). Brazil has used regulation to require foreign companies to invest in local digital infrastructure and computer capacity as a condition of access to its market (Goetz, 1986; Seto, 2021). Brazil also has with other BRICS ² countries more domestic capital formation and receives more foreign investment than all other developing countries combined (Grohmann and Qiu, 2020), which Marini (1977) attributes to its sub-imperialist role, as discussed in the last section.

As a result, Brazil is the only country in the Global South among the ten countries with the highest supercomputing capacity (Seto, 2023). In Latin America, it is the only country with large cloud service servers (TeleGeography, 2021) and has the most important Internet Exchange Point (IXP) in the region. This infrastructure is combined with public research centers of technological excellence (Marini, 1977), where most of Brazil's tech workers are trained, comprising about two million data scientists and software engineers (Abes, 2023).

By leveraging its digital infrastructure, regulatory framework, and skilled workforce, Brazil can lead investments in big data in the region, with 36% of total Latin American investments in this area (Abes, 2023), and drive the development of platforms in Latin America. IFood is an example of a synthesis of all these factors: The platform results from national capital combined with foreign capital, a joint investment by the Brazilian controlling fund Moville with the Japanese fund SoftBank (Seto, 2023). Moreover, it is a platform that combines the precarious work of its delivery workers with the contribution of its 3000 data scientists (iFood, 2023). This investment in data science is necessary to connect the exploitation of precarious workers to the production and analysis of data, which is at the heart of platform sub-imperialism, as discussed in the next section.

Platform sub-imperialism: Overexploitation and data production

While Marini's analysis primarily addressed industrial sub-imperialism in the twentieth century, we contend that a comparable phenomenon, platform sub-imperialism, is unfolding as labor platformization expands across Latin America under the leadership of Brazilian platforms. Since sub-imperialism is based on expanding the overexploitation of labor in its region of influence for the benefit of the sub-imperialist power, Brazilian labor platforms like iFood reproduce sub-imperialism as they update the overexploitation of labor in Latin America through their platformization. Moreover, platform sub-imperialism entails a dual accumulation from neighboring countries: in addition to the value produced by platform workers, it also accumulates the data produced by them and consumers, as described in the following sections.

Platform labor and overexploitation

The platformization of labor implies the elimination of fixed working hours and wages and the imposition of costs on workers for their activity (Grohmann and Qiu, 2020; Seto, 2023). This elimination of barriers to exploiting workers is precisely the mechanism for expanding the rate of surplus value that, according to Marini (1965), lies at the heart of overexploitation. Another element in maximizing overexploitation is algorithmic labor management, which involves automated punishments and incentives to enforce the continuous intensification and prolonging work rhythms. (Seto, 2023).

While platforms extend these mechanisms worldwide, they do not affect all territories and populations in the same way. Marini (1992) acknowledged the neoliberal growth of precarious work in central capitalist countries. However, he argued that there is still a structural asymmetry between the average labor value and working conditions in central and peripheral countries. Indeed, Grohmann and Qiu (2020) note that there is a geopolitics of platform labor where working conditions are worse in the global South than in the global North.

In Latin America, Grohmann and Qiu (2020) discussed how the expansion of labor platforms is linked to and intensifies the historical precariousness of labor on the continent. In this regard, Marini's historical perspective (1965) helps us understand that what these scholars describe as precariousness is the expression of overexploitation in Latin America. Most Latin American platforms offer the worst platform labor conditions in the world, and almost none guarantee a minimum wage, including iFood (Fairwork, 2022). Considering that overexploitation means payment below what is necessary for the reproduction of the worker (Marini, 1965), i.e., the minimum wage, the extreme precariousness of the working conditions of Latin American platforms shows how they are dependent on overexploitation. Especially in the delivery of food and goods, the sector with the highest market value and number of users for Latin American platforms (Statista, 2022).

The success of sub-imperialist platforms in organizing overexploitation allows them to compete effectively in these sectors with platforms from the North. For example, the dominance of iFood led to Uber Eats’ exit from the Brazilian market, which Bloisi (2022) justifies by claiming that iFood workers deliver in half the time and at a cost three times lower than those of North American platforms.

As a result, iFood dominates 39.2% of the Latin American delivery market (Statista, 2023), with 250,000 workers across the continent, concentrating the enormous amount of value produced by them as profits repatriated to its headquarters in Brazil (Seto, 2023), a prominent example of platform sub-imperialism. Nevertheless, territories are disputed by sub-imperialist platforms not only as markets for their services and the supply of precarious labor but also for data collection, our next topic.

Platform labor and data accumulation

The expansion of platforms such as iFood into neighboring countries results in the appropriation of local consumer data, in what Seto (2020) calls data dispossession: Data that results from consumer interaction with platforms, such as the preferences of users who request delivery, becomes the property of the platform through the imposition of its terms of use.

Data production is also a fundamental dimension of the platformization of labor, as work becomes datafied (Seto, 2020): Each worker's interaction with the platform generates data for its algorithmic system. Therefore, Van Doorn and Badger (2020) argue that the work of platform workers results in a “dual value production”: The value of the primary service provided, the delivery of goods in the case of delivery apps, is augmented by the value of the data they produce. This data contributes to the accumulation of value in several ways: As metrics for algorithmic labor management, intensifying its overexploitation; as inputs for optimizing the platform's business model; and as commodities, with the data and the knowledge derived from its offered by the platform to third parties.

Since data production is neither optional nor paid for platform workers (Van Doorn and Badger, 2020), the datafication of labor also contributes to overexploitation by expanding workers’ unpaid labor, including time during the workday devoted to feeding algorithmic systems. This expansion of unpaid labor time is a form of absolute surplus value extraction, the fundamental mechanism of overexploitation (Marini, 1977), demonstrating the connection between data production and overexploitation.

In the case of iFood, its position as Latin America's most important delivery platform means that its consumers and employees generate 20 billion monthly data records (iFood, 2023), concentrated and analyzed in its data science centers in São Paulo. With other Brazilian platforms, iFood contributes to the concentration of Latin America's regional cross-border data flows in this Brazilian metropolis, the only hub in South America among the top 25 global hubs for data flows (McKinsey, 2019).

In conclusion, expanding platforms from sub-imperialist countries into neighboring countries means expanding regional data accumulation directed by them. They extend the data production of precarious labor throughout their region of influence while concentrating data analysis and the resulting knowledge in their headquarters. This process depends on and reinforces their regional concentration of big data infrastructure, research investment, and tech workers capable of transforming immense amounts of data into useful information, reproducing the structural bases of their platform sub-imperialism.

Conclusion

Through platform sub-imperialism, we sought to understand the specificities of the platformization of Latin American dependent capitalism, focusing on a region where Brazil historically acts as a sub-imperialist power. Compared to historical sub-imperialism, innovation lies in expanding an accumulation strategy based on industrialization to a platform economy. The production of value and data on a continental scale, driven by Brazil's dominance in the regional labor platform market (Neto et al., 2022), exemplified by iFood, solidifies Brazil's position as a hub for data and capital accumulation, thus establishing it as a platform sub-imperialist power.

Within the size constraints of this brief commentary, our analysis focuses on Brazil and iFood, the continent's main delivery platforms. Other regional powers may have platform sub-imperialism relationships that we will investigate in future work. Finally, our findings highlight the complexity of the Latin American political debate on the platform economy, where without a classist and plurinational approach, nationalist policies can justify Latin American states to finance national platforms based on overexploitation and strengthen platform sub-imperialism.