Between the US and Mexico, a corridor of surveillance becomes lethal

Workers in the Global South are making a living playing the blockchain game Axie Infinity

Inventing the Shipwreck - Real Life

'Crypto colonizers' in Puerto Rico try to sell locals on the dream

Global Comprehensive Privacy Law Mapping Chart

<aside> 💡 This week’s readings reminded me of “The Californian Ideology” and how it has been extended to the Global South:

“In American folklore, the nation was built out of a wilderness by free-booting individuals - the trappers, cowboys, preachers, and settlers of the frontier. Yet this primary myth of the American republic ignores the contradiction at the heart of the American dream: that some individuals can prosper only through the suffering of others…The life of Thomas Jefferson - the man behind the ideal of `Jeffersonian democracy' - clearly demonstrates the double nature of liberal individualism. The man who wrote the inspiring call for democracy and liberty in the American declaration of independence was at the same time one of the largest slave-owners in the country.”

We can see that there’s a spectrum to the experiences of tech’s interference in the Global South: a hyper-surveillance matrix along the U.S.-Mexico border, Filipinos and Venezuelans desperate to be sponsored in Axie Infinity for a chance to make more money, crypto evangelists/colonizers descending into a hurricane-torn Puerto Rico and inflating the wealth gap. I can’t help but feel that tech’s elite only continue to prosper while forcing technology onto marginalized communities, which only furthers their dependence on technology.

“Virilio was highly skeptical of the euphoric utopianism that ushered in the internet age. As he put it to Lotringer in Pure War, ‘don’t tell me that the internet will bring about world democracy. I split my sides at that. There’s nothing more ridiculous.’”

</aside>