Cristina Teixeira Marins

CRISTINA MARINES, Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in September 2023 to aid research and writing on “’Hyperconnected and Hoping for the Best’: Alternative Work, Digital Platforms, and Social Change in Brazil.” From street food vendors to barbers who give haircuts in the back of their unfinished houses, workers in Brazil rely on platforms (especially Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and TikTok) for essential activities such as communicating with clients, selling products, learning new skills, purchasing work supplies, and socializing with colleagues. For many of these workers, creating content to post online and trying to figure out the opaque algorithms are activities carried out with the hope of finding new opportunities, improving working conditions, overcoming financial struggles, and ultimately finding an effective avenue of upward social mobility. Evidence drawn from over ten years of ethnographic research among informal workers in Brazil suggests that intense social media use exacerbates inequalities and vulnerabilities. By documenting the consequences stemming from the encounter between socioeconomic struggles in a region where formal waged employment has never been the norm and algorithm-driven companies based in Silicon Valley, “Hyperconnected and Hoping for the Best” invites us to re-examine key assumptions about the platformization of labor.