Cyborg Resistance on the Digital Assembly Line: Global Connectivity as a Terrain of Struggle for the Commons in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer

The Sleep Dealer’s World

Sleep Dealer presents an image of global connectivity as a battlefield in a proximate future that is simultaneously surreal yet eerily familiar. The film chronicles the story of a young campesino-hacker named Memo who lives with his family in an isolated village in rural Mexico. Memo dreams of the enchantments percolating in the connected world and tries to cope with his mounting feelings of disconnection and entrapment by obsessively tapping into it through his homemade computer console. This do-it-yourself (DIY) device enables him to devote time to eavesdropping on the conversations of migrants who have left their own towns in search of work in the cyber-factories that line Mexico’s northern border cities. To obtain these jobs, he learns, workers have special nodes implanted into their bodies. The nodes are used to connect the workers to the cyber-network, which facilitates their virtual toil in factories, farms, and homes scattered around the United States. As Memo listens in, the fizzy urban tone audible in the disembodied voices comes in sharp contrast to his sense of a foreclosed future. His family has lost much of its land and, even more perilously, a private corporation has dammed the village’s water source. As a result, everyone is compelled to purchase water from the U.S. monopoly, Water Corp., which protects its precious resource with high fences patrolled by menacing guards, backed by a fleet of drone fighter jets administered from the company’s San Diego headquarters. Such tightly controlled surroundings render Memo’s feelings of alienated entrapment visceral. Meanwhile his father, who has witnessed his ancestral land being steadily enclosed, is depressed and nostalgic. His younger brother is addicted to U.S. reality television, especially a futuristic version of Cops, which specializes in depicting live drone attacks on the amorphous, plentiful enemies of corporate power.

The film depicts a technocultural future in which many aspects of today’s world are nonetheless recognizable. The rural Mexican landscape looks familiar except that it is randomly populated with unusual characters: riot police dressed for urban warfare, heavily fortified fences topped with talking, armed surveillance cameras, and high-definition televisions incongruously perched in amidst cacti and swirling dust. This weaponized, high-tech rural landscape appears as an amplified version of the paranoid urbanism that increasingly characterizes the 21st century city (Graham, 2010; Sorkin, 2008). The way people walk, dress, and talk is familiar, but what they talk about is punctuated with strange references to technologies and ways of living that seem ominously plausible but do not (yet?) exist. Sitting at his console, Memo strikes a familiar pose. He is excited about the emancipatory possibilities of connectivity, and his DIY ethos reverberates with contemporary global hacker counterculture. But Memo’s passion for connectivity takes a disastrous turn when he stumbles upon a conversation between a Water Corp. pilot and his commander discussing a real-time drone assault. The commander detects Memo’s unauthorized presence on the network and orders a strike on the infiltrator. In the ensuing attack, Memo’s father is killed and his family’s home is destroyed. Devastated by guilt and propelled by his family’s desperation and grief, Memo flees his village to search for work and redemption.

On his journey to Tijuana, Memo recounts the drone attack that killed his father to Luz, a journalist-blogger who is searching for stories that she can write up and sell through a Web site that specializes in peddling memories of real life. To sell her stories, Luz connects to the site through nodes implanted in her forearms. Nodes, it turns out, are scarce and valuable because they enable their possessor to connect to the tightly managed virtual world economy, where all kinds of remunerated labor are performed by the bearers of such nodes. Memo quickly realizes that he will need his own set of nodes if he is going to have any chance of finding work in Tijuana’s virtual factory system—the hyperreal version of the present-day maquiladora factories where, attached to fiber-optic cables, node workers operate drones that build and clean the skyscrapers of San Diego, care for children in Washington, and toil in Midwestern slaughterhouses. All node bearers in a factory work side by side though their laboring takes place virtually in different cities. While at work, the virtual economy’s army of node workers is deaf and blind to one another; their connection to the network transports their full attention to the complex needs of a distant reality. Their eyes only see the other side, and their nerves only feel the remote location. In this sense, the nodes are a technology of passage analogous to today’s passports and work-permit documents, but the difference is that in this speculative future, the workers’ bodies are left behind while their minds and nervous systems are tapped with the use of prosthetic technologies. The nodes funnel the workers’ intellectual and productive energies into another world—across the border—where they are put to work. But their bodies stay behind in Tijuana’s cyber-factories. As long as the workers are tethered to the network, they inhabit the material world in a state of suspended animation, as if asleep. These virtual factories are the film’s titular sleep dealers.

Upon arriving in Tijuana, Memo launches his search for a node supplier and receives a rough introduction to life in the hypercapitalist and unevenly interconnected city. He traverses Tijuana’s backstreets looking for a coyotek—Rivera’s (2008) clever neologism based on the word coyote, the slang term for the border zone’s entrepreneurs of undocumented crossing, and the techno-talk that increasingly inflects the everyday lexicon of digital capitalism. In real life, a coyote sells his skills of navigation in hostile desert conditions to deliver migrants into the United States. The coyotek of the film’s not-too-distant future is skilled at navigating the world of bio-digital production. Like the real-life coyote, it is an ambivalent figure because it represents the point of contact necessary to reach the destination in which a new life may begin while at the same time it symbolizes the ordinary migrant’s precarious condition. The technology of virtual passage in the increasingly enclosed networked world is, like today’s work-permit documents, a vital and scarce resource. Node work is coveted, and the nodes are a highly valued commodity on the labor market, especially because in this future the once-viable option of physically going to the United States to work has been decisively foreclosed. Tijuana’s cyber-factories, we learn, have been erected in response to a xenophobic upsurge in a country whose sustenance depends upon an enormous contingent of ultraflexible and super-exploited workers. Conveniently, the xenophobes can be appeased and the work that needs to be done can continue, thanks to developments in the technologies of connectivity.

Memo’s search for a node dealer is quickly thwarted when he finds himself tricked, beaten, and robbed. Meanwhile Luz, the blogger Memo met on the bus journey to Tijuana, is at home using her nodes to log Memo’s story onto the memory-selling Web site. She is repeatedly interrupted by a disembodied voice commanding her to “tell the truth.” Frustrated with the network’s censorial admonishment, but desperate for the money it offers, she complies with the network’s commands. And soon a message from the network informs her that a prospective customer is interested in Memo’s story. Unbeknown to her, the customer is Rudy Ramirez, the drone pilot who killed Memo’s father. Rudy discovered Luz’s story about Memo during a guilt-propelled investigation into the attack he committed, an inquiry he conducted by entering the same network from which he staged the assault. He contracts Luz to gather more information without explaining his reasons. Delighted that she has a customer, Luz sets out to locate Memo. She finds him on a back street in what appears to be the city’s underground node district and offers to connect him with a coyotek, which, it turns out, is her. As she prepares to plunge the nodes into his body, Luz alerts Memo to the dangers of a two-way connection with a machine: “Sometimes you are in control, sometimes it is,” she warns. Memo’s voiceover responds: “Finally, I was able to connect my nervous system with the global economy.” Next we find Memo in a cyber-factory standing amid a sea of node workers fused to the global network through ropey wires and prosthetic eye implants. “This is the American dream,” the factory manager cheerfully announces, “all the work without the workers!” And Memo quickly finds himself hunched on a skyscraper’s scaffolding. His body is in Tijuana but everything he sees and feels is in San Diego. Against this phantasmic backdrop emerges a radically paradoxical version of today’s social web, amplified to such a degree that it is almost unrecognizable, and defined by an intractable tension between emancipatory promise and exploitative violence.

Leading up to the film’s climactic episode, Rudy crosses into Mexico with secret plans to find Memo and offer his expertise toward subverting the enclosing power of the Water Corp. The voice of an outsourced border patrol worker emanating from the surveillance camera-cum-border-officer warns of the perils that await—disease, insecurity, revolution, and crime—should he cross the fortified line. The scene lays bare a core paradox at the heart of the ideology of virtual connectivity: The enclosures of the material and virtual commons intensify certain kinds of connection while also activating ever-more elaborate separations and disconnections. But Rudy crosses the border despite the warnings and, in the film’s final scene, he, Memo, and Luz sneak into the cyber-factory that employs Memo. Thanks to the standard configuration of their implanted nodes, they log Rudy onto the network so that he can remotely navigate a drone to strike at the reservoir in Memo’s village. With the Water Corp.’s jets in close pursuit, Rudy punctures the dam, releasing its valuable liquid to the parched surrounding community. Sleep Dealer thus portrays a future of not only expanded exploitation and enclosure but also resistance and reappropriation of the commons. Significantly, it is that sci-fi future’s widespread form of networked connectivity—in many ways, reminiscent of real life’s social web—that enables both types of process to take place.

Connectivity Revolutions

The promise of digital modernity is inextricable from its revolutionary claims about the possibilities of global connectivity. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg put his passion for digital connectivity into world historical terms when he told a group of advertising executives, “Once every hundred years, media changes. The last hundred years have been defined by the mass media. In the next hundred years, information won’t be just pushed out to people: It will be shared among the millions of connections people have” (cited in Hoffman, 2008, p. 6). Such a revolutionary gloss on connectivity also animated the passions of Zuckerberg’s 1.0 predecessors—the digital gurus Nicholas Negroponte and Bill Gates being among the most influential—who similarly invoked the transformative power of connectivity. Negroponte (1996) predicted that in the near virtual future “there will be no more room for nationalism than there is for small pox” (p. 236). Computer-driven connectivity would revolutionize capitalism itself, Gates, Myhrvold, and Rinearson (1995) declared in the mid-1990s, freeing it from nagging historical antagonisms and rendering it “friction free.” The complex version of this future that Sleep Dealer depicts, by contrast, is overflowing with contradictions, tensions, and cracks. In this fraught, imaginable future, the social and technical infrastructure of digital capitalism disconnects workers not only from the products of their labor but from their own physical bodies as well. Yet, this same infrastructure of separation brings people together in new ways and on new, heretofore-unimagined, terrain. In this way, the film evokes a future version of the virtual present, where the digital infrastructure facilitates the global expansion of exploitation and enclosure while serving as a platform for new forms of resistance, social cooperation, and political communication from below. And here we find Sleep Dealer’s vital theoretical contribution to a critical analysis of the politics of global connectivity. In this section, I elaborate further on this contribution through a discussion of recent scholarly debates around the dialectics of global connectivity. In the section that follows, I return to an analysis of Sleep Dealer’s portrayal of connectivity as a terrain of struggle for the reappropriation of the communicative and material commons.

This discourse of connectivity hinges on the notion that power in the digital age is participatory, decentralized, and diffuse (Cammaerts, 2008). Although this rendering of communication technology as a kind of stand-in for democratic change runs through the narrative of modernity (Mattelart, 2001), the scale of digital technological change and the kind of connections that they engender have wrapped digital capitalism—along with its entrepreneurs, theorists, and practitioners—in an aura of revolutionary significance. This is a revolution propelled by injunctions to participate, network, and connect. Yet, its revolutionary stature is idiosyncratically bereft of anything approaching a systemic critique of the actually existing social distribution of power, wealth, freedom, and justice. Rather, the trope of connectivity is consensual, frictionless even. It has, according to this narrative, value in itself and can thus be viewed as the ideological core of an always-unfinished communication revolution.

The techno-politics of connectivity increasingly appears as an official ideology of neoliberal governments confronted with a new generation of anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist social uprisings around the world. The U.S. government has been at the forefront of this liberation by a connectivity (Christensen, 2011; Morozov, 2011) approach to domestic and foreign policy alike. Since its electoral victory in 2008 and in the wake of the uprisings in the Middle East (both events having been narrated in the mainstream media as social media revolutions), the Obama Administration has declared connectivity a vital lubricant to democracy. In his 2011 White House budget address, “Winning the Future,” Obama promised that the federal government would pour resources into high-speed wireless technology, providing every American the opportunity to connect: “This isn’t just about a faster Internet or finding a friend on Facebook,” Obama announced, “it’s about connecting every corner of America to the digital age” (Stolberg, 2011, p. A17). Speaking in 2010 at the Internet Freedom Conference, Hillary Clinton extolled the centrality of “connectivity” to the goals of the U.S. government on the international stage, declaring, “the freedom to connect is like the freedom of assembly, only in cyberspace. It allows people to get online, come together and, hopefully cooperate” (U.S. Department of State, 2010). In keeping with the prevailing cultural mood, Clinton’s invocation of frictionless connectivity was, like Obama’s and Zuckerberg’s, delivered without providing any reference to the meaning she attributes to such connections, nor does she elaborate on the content of the cooperation such connections are thought to ignite.

In contrast to the connectivity determinists, theorists working in a critical political-economic vein highlight the persistent efforts by states and corporations to militarize, commodify, and control cyberspace (i.e., Andrejevic, 2007; Der Derian, 2009; Morozov, 2011). These authors suggest that the political economy of communicative capitalism is increasingly taking the shape of a technological counterrevolution. These systemic critiques of digital connectivity eschew a singular emphasis on user practices in favor of more rounded studies devoted to the contexts in which these practices are embedded. For example, the critical approach to the digital turn in both capitalism and sociality, which understands technological developments as always totally political, questions the seductive techno-fetishism that portrays digital connectivity as a conduit to democratic revolution (e.g: Andrejevic, 2007; Cesareo, 2011; Papacharissi, 2002). As Papacharissi (2002) simply puts it, the Internet, after all, “is still a medium constructed in a capitalist era” (p. 18) and is therefore subject to the same set of conditions that produce the uneven and undemocratic offline world. Cohen (2008) in turn shows how familiar and banal the trope of revolution has become in dominant narratives of technological progress. “It follows a discourse,” she argues, “that has historically, and uncritically described technological developments in terms of novelty and human progress” (p. 60).

Among the connectivity skeptics, political theorist Dean (2005, 2009, 2010) has elaborated one of the most incisive systemic critiques of frictionless revolution. Her theory of “communicative capitalism” seeks to capture the strategic role of digital technologies in the increasingly uneven setting of fast, flexible, and globalized neoliberalism. Contra the utopian claims of the frictionless revolutionaries, Dean points to communicative capitalism’s manifestly dystopian tendency to magnify socioeconomic inequality and fuel authoritarian political cultures. This situation, she argues, calls for critical reflection on the troubling setting of the contemporary communication revolution. Dean’s theory of communicative capitalism is especially useful for scrutinizing the politics of connectivity because of the way the concept joins the objective setting in which digital connectivity is embedded to its immediate and long-term subjective implications. Communicative capitalism, for Dean, is characterized by the merging of democracy and neoliberalism in networked communication technologies. Out of this fusion, she argues, democracy emerges as merely participation, contribution, and access. Dean takes issue with the “techno-enthusiasts” who persistently confuse technological developments with emancipatory possibility. Such confusion, she believes, makes it impossible to recognize the entwined relationship between enhanced network communication and a worldwide intensification and acceleration of a new phase of capitalist enclosure of the commons—a process Harvey (2004) characterizes as “accumulation by dispossession”—under neoliberalism. Harvey (2005) contends that digital technologies are the privileged technologies of neoliberalism, but Dean (2009) develops this point further by arguing that communicative capitalism’s ideology of participation is being harnessed in the service of the neoliberal regime of accumulation by dispossession. “Rhetorics of access, participation, and democracy,” she argues, “work ideologically to secure the technological infrastructure of neoliberalism, an invidious and predatory politico-economic project that concentrates wealth in the hands of the very, very rich, devastating the planet and destroying the lives of billions of people” (p. 23). For Dean, analyzing these developments in their own technological and ideologically prescribed terms mystifies the relationship between neoliberalization and networked communication. Instead, she argues, this relationship must be understood in the context of a political economic and symbolic regime where growing inequality is produced, accelerated, and rationalized. According to Dean, any project geared to subverting the destructive yet seductive infrastructure of communicative capitalism needs to seriously reflect on the manner in which politics, including oppositional politics, has become infused with techno-fetishist inducements to participate in the proliferating circuits of communicative capitalism. Her critique resonates with Andrejevic’s (2007) concept of the “interactive enclosures.” For Andrejevic, as digital connectivity becomes an increasingly strategic site for capital accumulation and social control, the structure of the social web itself becomes a facilitator of active user participation in his or her self-subjugation.

Working along this vein, Dean (2005, 2009, 2010) draws on Slavoj Zizek’s insights to argue that the ideology of frictionless revolution should be understood as one that functions through what we do, rather than through what we do not know or what we erroneously think we know. For Dean, the problem is not collective ignorance about the troubling questions raised by our participation in the social web with regard to public surveillance, the commodification of our sociality, and the cultivation of our anxieties. Most of us know, for instance, that our clicks are being commoditized and surveilled, but we participate in the culture of online connectivity anyway. Similarly, we may well know that social inequality has soared alongside the number of Facebook friends the company has accumulated, but the kind of connectivity offered by the social web, Dean suggests, enables us to act on the idea that we can change this bleak situation as we sit behind our screens, signing petitions, posting informed arguments. In her view, we have increasingly come to terms with our awareness that these connections are typically little other than an endless circulation of content. Because connection always engenders the possibility of ever more connectivity, its mere activation now seems unproblematically to suffice. Hence, the unceasing pursuit of connections, activated by the social web’s metamorphosis from a technological innovation into an enveloping culture, allows us to believe we are “doing something” about deepening social divisions by simply engaging in certain online activities. Dean’s point is that it is our participation, rather than our knowledge (or lack thereof), that provides the essential ingredient to reproducing the ideology itself. More generally, it follows that this kind of participation leaves intact the ideological setting in which the view of connectivity as a catalyst of frictionless social change is embedded.

Sleep Dealer: Connectivity as a Terrain of Struggle for the Commons

My discussion so far has provided an overview of two major approaches to thinking about the politics of connectivity—one associated with a decontextualized faith in connectivity as a vehicle of frictionless revolution and the other characterized by an engagement with systemic critique and expressing a deep skepticism toward the first view. As I have noted, the connectivity skeptics challenge the ideology of frictionless revolution by taking systemic critique, rather than technological innovation, as their analytic starting point. The skeptics put antagonism—or the friction at the very heart of capitalist political economy—at the center of their critique. Yet despite such an emphasis, there remains in this critical perspective a persistent elision of the role that antagonism plays in generating systemic limits to the processes of capitalist enclosure. In this way, the connectivity skeptics’ critique fails to highlight how the antagonism that undergirds their argument also opens up possibilities for emancipatory politics. In this section, I use a sociopolitical interpretation of Sleep Dealer to show how the film poses an alternative interpretation of connectivity whereby the limits of capital are exposed through various forms of resistance, which in turn lay bare unexpected weaknesses in the infrastructure of global corporate power. As the film proceeds, these exposed faults are increasingly brought into contact with each other and help to spread into other parts of the system.

Here, I propose a reading of the film that offers a third approach to the techopolitics of connectivity. In this alternate approach, the aim is not only to provide a systemic critique of the new communication and earthly enclosures that undergird globalized and hyperconnective digital capitalism, but also to call attention to the significance of the antagonisms to which enclosures inevitably give rise. As I suggested earlier, the film unfurls through a story of ambivalent, tumultuous connection between its three protagonists and the hard corporate-military core of the global network society, culminating with the trio’s efforts to undo the damage caused by Water Corp. on Memo’s community. I hope to show how this alternative interpretation of connectivity helps us to rethink two major themes that have animated the theorization of global network culture: the politics of security, enclosure, and control, and the materialization of a communication commons. Here we can take into account the enclosures that the optimists ignore while recognizing the need to pay attention to how those enclosures produce new antagonisms, opening possibilities for the reappropriation of the commons.

Connectivity, Resistance, and Political Possibility

In my reading of the film, Sleep Dealer poses a vital contribution to the theorization of contemporary communicative capitalism by navigating the paradoxical maze of technocultural ambivalence. It uses the all-too-topical drone metaphor to trouble the paradox of global communication as a domain in which fantasies of freedom and nightmares of dispossession collide. In this way, the film subverts the still-prevailing technological definition of digital connectivity with a labor-driven narrative of plebeian global connectivity emanating “from below.” In this way, Rivera’s (2008) depiction of digital laboring replaces the information industry’s lopsided image of clean, creative, well-compensated work with an image of a harshly ranked world that is by turns hyperexploitative, violent, unpredictable, and deeply contested. The film asks how, in a hyperconnected world, people come to be pitted against one another in ever-more elaborate and corrosive ways. At the same time, it considers some unanticipated political alliances born in the fissures of the global network.

In this reading, the film proposes a narrative of digital politics that complicates the established lines of thought surrounding the agency/structure debate in relation to technological politics. In so doing, it dispatches celebratory technological fetishism and totalizing technological pessimism alike by evoking the political possibilities offered by emergent transnational networks of social cooperation amid an increasingly clenched and contested infrastructure of digital connectivity. In this amplified depiction of the present, we experience a head-on confrontation with its violent ambiguities. It is a politicized perspective on technological connectivity that echoes the terms of thought and action proposed by critical digital media scholarship, particularly its insistence that in order to understand the emergence and political significance of new media, we must think beyond the technologies and the political hazards and promises that they purportedly hold within themselves. In this sense, Sleep Dealer offers an alternative to gadget-driven narratives of human emancipation by deploying a conceptualization of the networked present in which communication infrastructures are rife with ambivalence but also with political possibility. As such, Sleep Dealer projects the world of connectivity not as a participatory terrain of democratic contribution and frictionless accumulation, but as a site of exploitation, antagonism, and reappropriation of the communicative and material commons.