Tech Won't Save Us - “Sleep Dealer” and the Border Politics of Tech w/ Alex Rivera

Episode Date: July 15, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Alex Rivera to discuss his 2008 film Sleep Dealer and how it imagined exploitative technologies being implemented in a future Mexico of hardened borders and limited migration.Alex Rivera is a filmmaker and digital media artist whose work explores themes of globalization, migration, and technology. His feature films include Sleep Dealer and The Infiltrators. Follow Alex on Twitter as @Alex_Rivera.🚨 T-shirts are now available!Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:You can rent or buy Sleep Dealer from the official website.Paris wrote about Sleep Dealer and what it illustrates about technology for Jacobin.Border walls are still going up around the world.Smart tech is often designed to hide the human labor that makes it work.Kiwibot delivery robots are driven by Colombian workers making $2/hour.Support the show

At the same time that the internet was being built and celebrated as this kind of borderless terrain of exchange, the actual borders, particularly the U.S.-Mexico border, was being militarized. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today, July 15th, is the last day that you can order a t-shirt for this first batch. So if you want to get it as soon as possible, you have to get your order in today. Now, if you still want a t-shirt after this day, that's fine. You can still order one. It will just be shipped at a later date. So just a heads up about that. And, you know, from now on, I won't start off the episodes by letting you know about t-shirts. We'll just get right into it. So this week's guest is Alex Rivera. Alex is a filmmaker who has written and directed a number of short films, along with two feature films, the 2008 science fiction film Sleep Dealer, which is set primarily

in Tijuana, Mexico, and kind of interrogates what a future of hardened borders and restricted migration would look like with the integration of some of these new technologies that have been talked about since the early days of the internet in the 1990s. And he also made the 2019 film The Infiltrators, which is kind of a hybrid of documentary and a scripted film set in an immigration detention center. So Alex is doing really interesting and really important work. And based on that introduction, I don't think you'll be surprised to hear that most of our conversation will be revolving around Sleep Dealer and Alex's thoughts on how these technologies that are often promoted as, you know, inherently liberatory could and certainly do mean very different things for people in the global south. And that often these really positive

narratives fail to seriously consider how these technologies will actually interact with capitalism and, you know, the migration politics and other forms of inequality that exist in the world system today. I think one of the things that really stood out to me in this interview, and there are a lot of important points that Alex makes as we talk about the film and, you know, his larger ideas on these topics, but is that, you know, when he was visiting these kind of rural villages in Mexico, he was seeing that the basic infrastructure wasn't there, like running water, paved roads, just like really basic things that I think we often take for granted in the global north. Though even then, you know, that is not universal in Canada where I'm based. It's very

common for indigenous communities not to have clean water. So even that I think can be easy for us to ignore when, you know, we're based in cities and are not seriously thinking about what happens outside of them. But Alex explained that while these communities did not have this basic infrastructure, the technologies that allow capital accumulation, that allow migration to continue to the benefit of nations in the global north that use the migrant labor from Mexico and other parts of Latin America, and the technologies that allow US culture in particular to permeate these countries in the global south, were all well-advanced and rapidly advancing, even in the face of so many other aspects of society still, you know, not having developed.

And, you know, Alex says, and this is a point that many scholars have made, are even actively being underdeveloped at the same time as these technologies are rolling in. So I was really excited to talk to Alex. I really liked Sleep Dealer and his more recent film, The Infiltrators. I will include a link in the show notes if you want to rent the film before listening to the interview or after listening to the interview. You know, you can rent it on the website for $5.

You can buy the digital copy for $10. So it's not super expensive. And I highly recommend that you check it out. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like this episode make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and make sure to share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And every episode of Tech Won't Save Us is free for everybody and

that's because listeners like you choose to support the work that I put into making it every single week. And so you can join existing supporters like Jim Ritchie and Blash from Ljubljana by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Alex, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. It's great to be here. I'm really excited to chat with you about this film, about Sleep Dealer, which, you know, I know you made 13 years ago now. But I think that, you know, even though it was a while ago, it still deals with so many of these topics, so many of these themes that I think are still incredibly relevant today when we think about the impacts of technology on us, on the world around us, and in particular, on the global south, which is where I think too often we fail to consider how these technologies are going to impact those people. And especially when it comes to science

fiction, you know, we get so many narratives about how technologies will affect the global north. But so often, even in science fiction, it doesn't extend to the global south and kind of reckoning with what these technologies will mean for people there. So to get started, I was hoping that you could explain what Sleep Dealer is and how you had the initial idea to make this film. Thanks for having me on the show. And Sleep Dealer is a science fiction film. Sometimes people call it like a cyberpunk thriller. It's set mostly in Tijuana, Mexico. It tells the story of a young man. The character is named Memo, who's born in a little village in southern Mexico in the state of Oaxaca. And when his family faces kind of

catastrophe, he's uprooted like so many immigrants around the world today and for many years before. And he's sort of pushed out of his town and heads north. He heads towards the border. And in this future world, he encounters a different reality. The border is impermeable. It's closed. The kind of Trumpian fantasy of the totally closed border has been realized. And so instead of migrating to the United States to work, to support his family, he ends up in a factory in Tijuana. But this is the near future. It's a different kind of factory. Instead of making a product, he connects his body to a kind of high-speed internet of the future and uses his labor to remotely control a machine, a robot that does his labor

in the United States. And so his labor transgresses the border while his body stays out. So that's kind of his working condition is being a remote laborer. And then the story revolves around his relationship with some other characters that maybe we can talk about a little later. But that's kind of the thrust of the film. And the idea came to me, per your earlier comments about how long these things take, the original idea came to me back in 1996. I remember I was reading an article in Wired magazine that was talking about how with this new thing, because in 1996, the internet was this brand new thing. It was dial-up. The actual technology was incredibly pokey, but the dreams were very big. And Wired Magazine was talking about how in the future, everyone's going to be able to work from home, and the internet might actually eradicate traffic on the highways. And whenever I see that word everyone, I always inject my family into it. And my family is part Peruvian, recent migrants. My dad was the first in his family to come, but my cousins have kept coming to this country, to the United States, and working in jobs in restaurants and landscaping and

manual labor. And so I thought, well, can they work from home? So this was back in the 90s, and I was thinking about this possibility of like, well, what if my cousins could stay in Latin America and telecommute to their jobs, and their jobs being manual labor. And it kind of had this nightmare, like it hit me in my brain, like, whoa, maybe we're heading towards a world where workers in the kind of global South would transmit their labor over this new thing called the internet. And it resonated because in the mid-1990s, the border wall was being built.

At the same time that the Internet was being built and celebrated as this kind of new global village, this borderless terrain of exchange, the actual borders, particularly the U.S.-Mexico border, was being militarized. The border wall that we know today started to be erected in 1994 under President Clinton, Operation Gatekeeper. And so this idea of like a future world where actual borders were sealed, but the internet had kind of unleashed this sort of transnational exchange of disembodied labor under a kind of nightmare future capitalism. It seemed hot. It resonated. It kind of melted into my brain. And I made a short film and then a website. And I spent ultimately a decade going from like 1996 up until basically the film premiered at Sundance in 2008. And that was

12 years from conception to premiere. And here we are 13 years later talking about it. So I'm happy the film still is alive. Absolutely. You know, what you're talking about there, about how they were talking about telecommuting labor back in the 1990s, how the border wall was starting to be built back then. You know, it just shows how so many of these ideas just remain relevant. You know, these topics just keep coming up again and again. Like, you know, the pandemic has kind of revived this kind of discourse about remote work. Before that, we also had Trump who was talking a lot about the border wall. And so these topics are still very much in the conversation. And, you know, even

though Sleep Dealer was made 13 years ago, and the idea came 12 years before that, you can still see how, you know, it remains relevant because these topics are still kind of circulating, are still important to the day-to-day lives that we're leading. Yeah, it's really wild. And I think that the dynamics that the film kind of jacks into of the destruction of distance through technology, that these technological matrices that allow more and more of our human experience to kind of be captured, put into digital form and transmitted, right? That it's an attack on distance. It's allowing kind of new forms of exchange around the planet that those under capitalism need to kind of

run in parallel to physical space being managed violently. That the kind of destruction of distance in the digital realm does not kind of destruction of distance in the digital realm does not lead to freedom of movement in the physical realm, that actually to administer this kind of transnational digital capitalist order, it's accompanied by these efforts to create kind of global bantu stands to surround the working class by border walls, fences. And you see it on the global stage, not just US-Mexico, but these past three decades of the sort of digitalization of our lives have really been accompanied by the hardening of physical borders. And it's really hard for me to think it's a

coincidence. It feels like two parts of one process, you know? And I think the film in early days, you know, kind of plugged into those dynamics that have really become more and more visible. walls coming down over the past several decades, we've actually seen more walls erected than we've had in a long time. You know, whether that's on the US border, whether it's on European borders with its neighbors, whether, you know, it's in Israel, other places like that, right? There have been more and more border walls being erected at a time when, you know, there's this narrative about the world being more connected and things moving more freely and all that, right? So I think that's a really interesting point. But you know, as you were talking about there, the links between global capitalism and how capitalism is kind of using these technologies, seizing these technologies

to transform the ways that we live, the ways that we work are incredibly relevant and are core to the film. So I wanted to talk about some of the technological ideas that are within the film and that I feel are kind of related to particular characters as well. And so the first one of that is obviously Memo, who you've discussed. And Memo obviously gets these nodes installed in his body to allow him to provide his labor across the US border, even though he is located in Tijuana, Mexico. And, you know, there's this particular line in the film that really stood out to me where he gets the nodes installed. And he basically says, like, you know, now I can connect my body to the global economy, which is like, you know, just this wild statement. But, you know,

I think it does also kind of illustrate something that the internet has done and what this connection has also meant for labor. So, you know, I know that you've outlined a bit about, you know, MAMO and we've talked a bit about these remote working technologies, but can you talk about what the film shows about this kind of technology being kind of an American dream, you know, to have the work without the worker. So when I had that kind of nightmare dream of the remote laborer, you know, transmitting their labor across the border through the net, I was sharing it with a friend, Lalo

Alcaraz, who's a cartoonist, a political satirist. And he was like, oh, it's like a cyber bracero program. And I was in an early stage of my own learning, and I didn't know a lot about the bracero program. So I went back and researched it. And the bracero program, of course, was started during World War II when the United States had a labor shortage because the men were mostly involved in the war effort. And so in fields like agriculture, there was a labor shortage. And so they made a deal with Mexico to send men to work in the fields, but the men who came from Mexico would never become citizens. Their wives were left in Mexico as a kind of collateral.

They were just intended as pure labor. And the Spanish word for bracero comes from arms. It's like arm person, how you could translate bracero. And that program, which was started during the crisis of World War II, lasted for 20 years because the growers loved it, this kind of disposable labor force. And so the factory in Sleep Dealer is called the Cybracero factory. But the idea is just that this country has always had, it's just patently clear and yet always worth restating that it's always had a system to basically exclude the people who've done the most basic, most essential labor, the labor that creates life, that reproduces families, that reproduces life through production of food.

People who do the most essential work are always kind of cut out of the basic social protections. And so if you approach digital technology knowing that history, then you start to see reality. Because I could see it in the mid-90s. Again, this idea came to me very early in the internet days when most people were kind of celebrating this kind of new utopia that sold itself as digital democracy, horizontalism, and a place where everyone could kind of express themselves in a global village. But I felt like I could see that, wait, how is this going to play against that long history of labor hyper alienation that this country has always kind of driven its economy on. And so it was really about just

kind of connecting the dots that there was this long history. And if this new system is being created and not being created in a way to intentionally confront that history, not being created in a way to intentionally disturb that history, it's probably going to accelerate that history. And so all of that kind of thinking went into the creation of this film. You know, I think what you're describing there is that we see again and again and again how, And so all of that kind of thinking went into the creation and the inequities that actually exist, then, you know, those idealized benefits are not realized. And, you know, you're talking a lot there about the US Mexico relationship, which is obviously incredibly important when we're talking about this migrant labor. But I think it's also important to note that this is very much a global phenomenon, right? Like I'm in Canada,

Canada brings in workers from Central America to help with agriculture. It also brings in workers from the Philippines and other parts of the world for other types of work. Europe is obviously involved in this. And even countries like, you know, Singapore and the UAE, as they develop, they bring in workers from India and places like that for construction and whatnot. And so you can see that this is a global phenomenon, but also how through the treatment of these workers in these countries that it's very easy to see how if countries were able to keep them out but still get that labor, they would want to do so, right? And so, you know, after having the idea for this film in the 1990s after making it in the mid to late 2000s i wonder what

you make of how we've kind of seen this develop over the years you know with the outsourcing of call center work to the global south to places like india you know there's talk now of more and more engineering work at these tech companies being outsourced as well you know i know that's not the manual labor that you're talking about in the film, but we're also seeing, you know, we've been hearing for a number of years about autonomous vehicles that are coming, but increasingly that's turning into drivers

often located in the global South, whether it's, you know, in Mexico or India, kind of driving these vehicles and making it look like it's this technology that's doing it, but actually it's this human worker in a low paid job somewhere in the global South. So what do you make of those developments? Yeah, no, there's a bunch of real-world examples of this kind of remote manual labor kind of coming into existence, you know. And I like to think a little bit of the Marxist kind of frame of living

labor and dead labor and the idea of like living labor being kind of the labor in your body that you can sell on the market tomorrow by going out and working, right? And dead labor being the labor that has already been performed, kind of baked into a product or a commodity that then can be moved around the globe, right? And that we live in this political order where dead labor is free, you know, so products that cross the US-Mexico border, we have a free trade agreement and products move incredibly fluidly around the planet, dead labor, whereas living labor is kind of criminalized. In Sleep Dealer, I'm kind of speculating on what I would call kind of like an undead labor. It's a type of labor in between where the labor is alive, it's being

performed in real time, but being packaged digitally and transmitted around the planet. And so in terms of examples of that kind of like undead labor, you know, one was like, I'd met at a conference, somebody who was building surgical robots. And I had assumed that their market was primarily going to be in the battlefield where American forces are, and they need to do like some kind of highly complex spinal surgery. And they have the surgeon in Chicago, but the person is wounded in Afghanistan. And they said, no, actually, that's where we're starting. They build there, but their market is to put the machines in the US and then have the surgeons in India and to do basically low cost, highly technical surgeries that way. A much more prevalent example is I was

on a college campus in Phoenix and saw these robots running around delivering food, like burritos to the dorm rooms. And those robots, they look like little boxes. They look like some of the little Star Wars delivery bots. And they run autonomously on GPS around the campus. But when they get to an intersection and have to cross through traffic or where there's a lot of pedestrians, then that machine starts talking to a worker who's in Colombia, in South America, who will then drive the machine remotely through that kind of complex situation and then turn it back to autonomous.

Why Colombia? Well, the kid who built this system is from there, but obviously, it's the labor efficiency. And so you're starting to see this kind of like undead labor appear in different aspects of life. I'll tell you one last story. A friend of mine is a filmmaker and was making a film about technology. And she wanted to interview the CEO of this company. I think it's called Coach Care, something like that, Care Coach. The company does senior care.

And what they put is a monitor in the senior citizen's living room. And on the monitor is a little digital cat. And the senior citizen sees the digital cat and can talk to the cat. And the cat can see the senior citizen and say, oh, what are you knitting? What are you cooking for lunch? And what's really happening behind that exchange, behind the digital cat, is three workers in the Philippines who work on shifts. And so they take turns inhabiting this digital cat. So the senior citizen bonds with the cat behind the scenes are three workers in a 24-hour shift that are there.

And my friend met the CEO and the CEO said, oh, I love meeting filmmakers. She said, why? He said, well, because I was inspired by a film to make this company. And she said, what film is that? He said, Sleep Dealer. So that's an example both of this like dystopic labor system of this kind of, you know, all the work without the worker kind of digital technology unleashing this sort of hyper form of alienation. It the worker, kind of digital technology unleashing this sort of hyper form of alienation. It's an example of that. And then also an example of something else

I don't even understand, which is making critical science fiction that then becomes the inspiration for these kinds of business models. That was weird. It reminds me of like a year or two ago when Parasite won the Oscar for Best Picture. And then you had, you know, these rich people like Elon Musk being like, oh, yeah, that was such a great film.

I really liked it. And it was like, did you watch the film? Like, did you understand what it was actually saying? Pretty crazy. Beyond the comments on work and what technology could do to work, the film also comments on other potential technologies and how they would interact with our lives and the society that kind of exists around us. with digital communication technologies, when he's calling his family in these video calls. You know, it's not only expensive, but then when he tries to transfer money back, there's like a huge percentage of fees that is taken, like a third of his transfer is gone in fees, which is crazy, but also, you know, something that people who make these remittances, who send money back to their families, deal with is these high fees as well. But there's also the character of Luz, who I think kind of represents this the best.

And I kind of see Luz in a sense as kind of like the modern gig worker in a way, because Luz wants to be a writer, and as a result, sells her memories on this TrueNode platform, but obviously struggles, you know, because there are a lot of other people selling their memories on this platform. And, you know, I think it just shows that in an economy where there's an oversupply of labor, it's really easy to kind of undervalue the workers and the labor that is being done. Because obviously anyone can, you know, enter that economy, right? Anyone who is struggling can just, you know, kind of exploit themselves in that way. But I feel like what that example shows, what the character of Luz shows has only become more relevant, you know, especially since the gig economy has exploded since the 2008-2009

recession, you know, and especially, you know, the specific kind of subset of that, the creator economy as they're calling it now. And so, you know, obviously there was a slightly different kind of technological environment at the time you were coming up with the film and making the film. So where did the ideas for this kind of tech implementation come from? Well, the overall approach to like the world building, because, you know, when you write science fiction, I think probably for most science fiction writers like myself, it starts with that spark, that original idea. But then especially if you turn to the film form, you have to start to decide, well, what does the street look like? What does the room look like? What are the other characters?

You have to build a world. So as I went through the world building of this film, my number one rule was everything for sale. Any interaction I could imagine amongst people, I would say, well, how could this be commodified? How could this be kind of the way the labor of memo is wrapped in a digital packet and transmitted and sold on mentioned, sells her memories. And what does that mean? It means that the characters in the film have these little holes in their body, little ports, like USB ports almost, in their arms, in their necks. And that's how they connect their bodies to this kind of future matrix. And for Memo, he works. But for Luz, when she connects her body at home, she has a cup of tea. What she does is she tells stories.

She's essentially me in the film, right? She's a storyteller, a filmmaker of sorts. But she doesn't make films with a camera. She makes them by connecting her body to the net and downloading her memory, essentially. So I was trying to think like, well, okay, so what shape would that take in this dystopian future? And I was like, okay, well, maybe it shape would that take in this dystopian future? And I was like, okay, well, maybe it would look something kind of like YouTube, where people around the world are connecting their bodies and uploading their memories. But certain people maybe could sell

them and what would give them special value? What would give certain memories special value? And it would be for those people who are willing to sort of succumb to a lie detector test, like a veracity. Because if you're getting all this data from around the world, all these images, all these stories, which are the privileged ones, it would be the ones that are sort of truer or something like that. So in the film, you'll see the character has this relationship with her machine where the machine can tell if she's telling the truth or not. And it's a little bit goofy. I think it's fun. It's interesting. But in any case, it is like you're saying, like an early vision of the kind of gig economy of uploading bits of ourselves, seeing if there's a buyer out there. And when she finds a mysterious buyer, that's what drives the story

forward because she uploads a memory of main character memo and someone out there buys it and says, could you sell me some more memories of that kid? And so that propels the story forward. Yeah, you know, I think it's just so relevant because in the past number of years, there's been this greater push for authenticity online, right? You know, it used to be much more common for people to just like have a screen name and have anonymity online. But as these globe-spanning platforms have grown and made it kind of a

business to be like a creator or a personality online, there's been this push to be more authentic, to show who you are, to have a photo, whatever. So I think that is really kind of illustrated with Liz's experience with the TrueNode platform. Because she's trying to upload her memories and the platform is constantly pushing back like, tell the truth, tell the truth. Yeah, it's a strange world we live in, man. That's all I can say. I completely agree. That's why I do this podcast, right?

But, you know, you were talking about that mysterious buyer, right? And it's been 13 years since the film came out. So I think that we can give spoilers at this point. But obviously, you know, that character is the person who set Mamo on his journey in the first place, you know, who is in the United States and who works for one of these drone companies that protects U.S. infrastructure on the other side of the border. And, you know, you were talking about that kind of military surgery robot. But I feel like we can see in so many cases that these kind of exploitative technologies, these surveillance systems get trialed, get tested in war zones, in frontier locations, and then they end up coming home, I guess, and affecting far more people. And I'm sure you must have been kind of observing this tendency while you were making the film.

So where did that kind of idea come from? it's thermal imaging, whether it's different forms of biometrics, and of course, drones. All of these technologies are first deployed in the borderlands. And then after a certain number of years of testing and refining and working them out, then they come into the airport, into the law enforcement and the domestic sphere. So I think of backscatter x-ray technology, like when you go to an airport and they have the machines that kind of go around your body. Those technologies were on the US-Mexico border 2001, 2002, but they don't make it into the airports until 2008, 2010. And so I've always said the border is kind of a time machine, where if you want to see the future of technology, in particular,

the surveillance, go to the US-Mexico border and see what's happening there, because that's what will be rolled out in the future. And I mentioned drones. And of course, that's the third character in Sleep Dealer is Rudy Ramirez, the drone pilot. Per my earlier philosophy of everything for sale, he doesn't work for the US military. He works for a kind of security corporation, like a Blackwater type of operation that works for clients. And so his job is using drone technology. He's based in the U.S. to protect American assets in the global South, corporate assets in the global South.

So his journey is basically, it's his first mission, is basically conducting this raid on Memo's village that uproots Memo and sends him on his journey north. But he has mixed feelings. And this is one of the complexities of the real life drone story, because kind of like the first generation critique of drone culture was like, oh, it's like a video game. How nightmarish that these soldiers are sort of playing a video game that's actually killing people, and it's so sterile. But when reporters started to really engage with drone pilots, that's not what they found. What they actually found was drone pilots with a lot of PTSD, you know, drone pilots that are turning

to the chaplains to try to reckon with the moral horror that they've witnessed through these high def cameras, you know, and ultimately a new type of war experience that has never existed before. Like historically, the infantry is on the ground, and my father was in the infantry and seeing killing up close. And then you had the Air Force kind of flying in at night, dropping bombs, flying home, and being very distant from the killing and not having much PTSD. But the drone pilot is, again, it's almost like the undead labor concept. It's like a third terrain where through these high def cameras, through the fact that these drones linger for days and weeks watching the so-called enemy down below, but also inevitably

seeing the so-called enemy's wife, their children, seeing them play soccer, watching life unfold, and then getting the order, now drop the bomb. And that the bombs are never complete. You know, you have Jane Mayer and the New Yorker describing what they call squirters, the name for people who, when they drop a bomb, someone comes out of the building half alive. And what do you do then in facing a decision there? And so the drone pilot experienced a kind of a sort of digital high resolution remote PTSD. And so that's kind of the condition of my character is that we don't know it, the audience doesn't know it, but that's why he's buying the memories is to learn more about what he's done and to who he did it. And that sort of propels the film towards the third act when these three characters, the remote worker, the memory seller, and the drone pilot ultimately

collude in a kind of act of solidarity at the end. I definitely want to come back to that act of solidarity. But I'm also interested in how that idea evolved. You know, because you talked about how the piece about remote work was kind of the core, right? And then the idea for the film kind of grew from there. But I'm wondering how you got to the point where you decided to kind of bring in these ideas about military technologies and about drones. Because, you know, this was a film that was made in 2008. So I have to imagine that, you know, the experiences of the Afghanistan war, of the Iraq war, influenced that process. Can you talk a little bit about that? The creative process, again, started with that first idea of the remote worker. That's going to be my protagonist. Then the first order of business creatively to build a story was, well, who's the antagonist? I thought about the mirror image of the remote worker in the global south sending their labor north. What's the mirror image of that?

Well, it would be somebody in the north sending some version of their labor south digitally. And so I thought about the different ways that people in this global north transmit ourselves into the global south, right? And so I thought about a corporate executive maybe having a factory in Mexico. I thought about tourists, you know, tourism. But it was ultimately the military projection of power, especially the US and Latin America, that just seemed so rich. And so I started to think, well, what would the military projection of digital power look like? And this was, again, in the late 1990s, I'm starting to write this script. So it's really before dronification. It's before the word drone was really popularized.

But I was thinking remote worker, travel north, remote soldier, travel south. And then an intermediary, a character who would connect them as a kind of journalist storyteller. And so I started to get this nice little triangular structure that was like, oh, I can kind of see a story coming out of this. So that was the creative process of going from that first idea to ultimately like an actual story structure. That's fascinating. But obviously, you know, the film's location, the film's setting in Mexico, instead of, say, the United States or some global North City like Los Angeles, also gives us kind

of a perspective on geopolitics, right? You know, we're not just seeing the effects of, say, climate change or nuclear apocalypse on some global North City. We are seeing the effects of the implementations of these kind of technologies around work, around communication, around military, around writing or journalism in the global South, which obviously has a very different relationship to power than, say, the United States or some global North City. And so how did you come up with this vision for the future of the global South, how it's affected by these technologies? And do you think that differs from how science fiction that is rooted in the global north would usually kind of represent these kind

of futures and these issues? A couple things. Number one is the great majority of humanity lives in the global south, right? The actual experience of planet Earth, if you want to understand it, look at it from the perspective of the global south. Because the folks in the global north have power and power over the media. The sort of image production of the human experience is deceptive. We think that the concerns and the life experiences of the global North are kind of like the concerns, when if you looked at it objectively, it's actually the global South and those experiences by which we should understand how we're doing as humanity, you know, and also how we're doing politically

and economically. It's looking there is where the actual majority experience is. And so in terms of science fiction film, it was fascinating to me when I started this project that I could really find actually zero examples of films about the future from the perspective of the global South. And it's not that there's no films from perspectives of the global South. There's actually tons of films. There's huge, deep, rich film cultures in India and Mexico and Brazil and various nations in Africa. There's tons of comedies and romances and adventures. But the future, that terrain was really untouched by film in the global south. And that was interesting to me and problematic and also an opportunity.

It said, okay, well, this is something to push. Let's push into that. So in any case, I also make documentaries. And so I'd spent time in southern Mexico filming, being in a little village and getting to see life and seeing technology. And what I saw in these little villages was technologies that would accelerate the export of labor, technologies that could kind of suture together and allow transnational families, which live in constant pain, families that are separated, fathers from children, husbands from wives, etc. This is a

painful situation, migration. And technologies that would kind of suture that together were accelerating, were 21st century. Technologies that would allow the import of American culture, technologies of transmission, all of those in these little villages in the countryside of Mexico, those technologies were futuristic. The first time I used like a calling card, a phone card with a little chip embedded in it, like many of our credit cards today, was there in these little villages in southern Mexico in the early 2000s. I'd never seen it before, but it was there. But there was no running water. You still had to go to get water from a bucket in a well, and the streets were not paved, and there was no

ambulance in the town. So the development was highly asymmetrical, where technologies for basically, again, the extraction of human labor into these transnational circuits, those technologies were shooting into the 21st century, whereas the other aspects of infrastructure for sustaining life and health were kind of reverse developing. Per the word of subdesarrollage, which Cuban intellectuals developed after the revolution, which is to underdevelop, to actively underdevelop, was what was happening to the rest of the infrastructure. So the world was kind of bifurcated. And that was the vision for Sleep Dealer in terms of the world.

It was like, okay, if it's going to be about extracting labor, we'll make that stuff glow, make it blue, make it look like Avatar, futuristic, but everything else is kind of falling apart. So that was kind of how we navigated a lot of the world building from the point of view of the global South. I think that's really sad, but I also think it's really illustrative, right? Because, you know, as I'm sure I said before, we get these grand visions of like what technology is going to do to society and how it's going to improve all of these things. And not only do those visions not come true, but they fail to kind of think about what that is actually going to mean for the global south, how that implementation is going to happen. But, you know, as you say, if you go to the global south, you can see that, okay,

things are going to get improved if they serve capital in some kind of way. But if it's this infrastructure, this basic infrastructure that you just need to get by, to improve basic living conditions, then that won't be provided because there's no clear way that some company can make a profit from it, right? It reminds me of this scene in the film when Mamo and his father are at this small lot that his father has where he can grow crops, corn, beans, and it's become much more difficult because the water has been privatized and the price of the water has significantly increased. And Mamo kind of asks, should we still be doing this? Does this still make sense? And his father responds to him and asks, is our future a thing of the past? You know, should we not be hopeful for the future anymore?

Should we not be thinking about the future anymore? And that really struck me because I've been reading a fair bit lately about how, you know, in the 20th century, there was this general kind of view that there was hope in the future, like the future was going to get better. It was going to bring greater wealth and how there came a point when when that switched. And you know, I think we can see that in modern discourses today, where like millennials generally feel that, you know, there's not much hope in the future, because they're not doing as well as like their parents generation, things are incredibly difficult. And so, you know, I think that's really relevant. And so I'm wondering what you think about that question of the future and who can have a future if these trends continue in the direction that we're seeing. I think it's a battleground. And obviously, nobody wants to have no future. And I really believe that the hope in this transnational order is and will be generated by the imagination of transborder people.

One of the films I did when I was in that little village in Mexico, it was actually about a phenomena called the Hometown Association, which is basically when a group of immigrants comes to the U.S. and they all end up living in the same town in the U.S. And so they, in this case of the film, my film is called The Sixth Section, and it tells the story of a group of migrants in New York who are all from one village in Mexico. And in New York, they elect a president, a secretary, and a treasurer for the town in Mexico. They basically form a second government in exile and raise money in New York in dollars and send it back to do public works in their town in Mexico. And they end up competing with the actual kind of like legitimate government, meaning the government that's been there historically,

which has never done anything for the people. Now the diaspora in New York comes home remotely in the form of money and starts to rebuild the town. And so I think there's like so many different interesting phenomenas on the global stage where transnational people are sort of flipping the script and trying to figure out how to use some of these dynamics that have been historically used by a profit motive, if driven under the cloak of democratic language, but really they're just corporations operating in this accelerated way, that needs to be criticized and attacked constantly. But we also need to not fall into total depression and think there's only defeat on the horizon, because that's not how life works. Every attack will produce a counterattack. Every dystopic imagination produces a reaction. And so I think, you know, I actually find this to be a

really exciting moment because transnational people around the world, I think, are organizing in very, very interesting ways. And that's a theme I've explored in other work. And in a sense, it's also like Sleep Dealer tries to talk about that other side of the equation a little bit as well, which is that these transnational systems that let us see the other side of these supply chains. So we know that the products we touch come from around the world. If we didn't have systems of visual transmission, we couldn't see the other side of the world. We need to be able to see the Apple factory in Guangdong province. We need to see the suicide nets. We need to understand that. It's worse if we can't see that. And so these systems of transnational transmission allow us to perceive our reality and also to communicate with people around and build

other types of solidarity. So that's where Sleep Dealer ultimately ends, is with these characters that have experienced all these forms of alienation we've discussed. It ends up with them kind of colluding and talking and finding each other through the transnational matrix and fighting back, you know, and I think that that's real. Yeah, you know, I think it's a really hopeful moment at the end, right? Because you have Mamo, who has been, you know, working in this factory to try to provide for his family. You have Luz, who has been kind of like deceiving him by selling his memories. But at the same time, you know, the selling of those memories also helps to bring in Rudy, who has become kind of, you know, disillusioned with how things are working with the drone work that he's doing. And so these three kind of come together in this act of solidarity to blow up the dam that has been affecting Mamo's community and holding his community back. So, you know, I think that this act of solidarity is really hopeful. But I

wonder how you see that kind of translating into the real world. Because obviously, in the film, you know, we're following a few individual characters, which, you know, I think works best for film where, you know, we want to kind of relate with with a particular person. But I wonder what you see in the real world with people kind of opposing the trends that the film is kind of illustrating and discussing. For me, there's like certain kind of landmarks in the history of digital culture that have been important to me, you know. who put messages with carriers that traveled them on horseback down from their communities to the cities, who then put those messages on the web and used the internet and its capacity to transmit and kind of get around censorship networks to build a global web of solidarity around their action. That was, I think, an important data point for me entering into this.

I aspire to believe Sleep Dealer is a kind of Zapatista science fiction. Obviously, the Snowden revelations many, many years later really helped, I think, the world see that the deal with the devil of a lot of these systems is this extraordinary amount of surveillance. Right now, I mean, I think we're in this moment of kind of awakening to what Shoshana Zuboff calls, right, surveillance capitalism, that these systems that have grown to become kind of hegemonic in the digital realm are running with these very dark incentives to create interfaces that seem free, that seem like they are tools that we can use freely, but that behind the scenes are actually just apparatuses to capture data about us and package it and sell it. So all the darkness of that. And so in any case, I mean, in terms of like, how does this battle play out right now? We know that the forces of surveillance capitalism have created the largest corporations the world has ever known, the largest pools of capital the

world has ever known. It's an extraordinarily dark moment in terms of that. And I don't think anybody really knows how to challenge that power. But I also do think in this country, for example, the movement for Black Lives has really rocked a lot of seminal ways of thinking about our society, you know, from history to the way law enforcement is administered, this kind of like networked power movement has created a deep, deep disturbance. And that reminds us that, you know, these philosophies that seem super powerful, that seem supernatural almost, can be shaken. And that around the cracks of this like corporate surveillance, digital culture, other things

are possible. So I think that that's kind of the message of Sleep Dealer, is that these systems are designed not to benefit us, but they leak around the edge. And I think all these different modes of attack on the working class have always leaked around the side. They've always been an attack, but it's always produced in those social transformations, other accidental possibilities. And so that's what the film depicts. And I think that's what's going on. I love that. And, you know, I wanted to end with a final question. Obviously, the film came out 13 years ago. But as we've been discussing in this interview, and you know, as I feel personally, I think the film and its themes are still

incredibly important to the things that we're dealing with today. So I wonder, you know, how you have observed these trends evolving in 13 years, but also how it feels that people are still talking about it because, you know, what it's saying is still addressing the issues that we're dealing with in the present. Well, my hero is Mary Shelley, you know, who wrote Frankenstein when she was 17, 18 years old, you know, and observing emergent industrial capitalism in England and trying to reckon with how it was changing life and put that into a form. You know, what she saw was that you needed to talk about the monster and monstrosity in order to describe reality. And I have a feeling probably when she attended her first reading of the book, someone was like, well, what are you working on next? But I just think

Frankenstein is still so relevant today. So I'm trying to work on like a 200 year time horizon. And just, you know, this, this film has been like a real, it was a pleasure to, to build it and take that time to, to make it. I wish it had been seen by more people when it was made. It really struggled to get out into the market as a product back then, but I'm so happy. I'm disturbed. I mean, I wish it could be seen as like, oh, now we're living in some kind of utopia. And this is a depiction of an old set of problems. Instead, it's like you've said, it's still kind of resonating in today's culture. But that's also cool. It's cool that it's still alive. And I'm dreaming about remakes and maybe a TV series or other ways of exploring the story world because I feel like, you know, the dynamics that it plugs into and tries to illuminate are still haunting us, you know, very, very deeply.

I'll just say, you know, a remake or a TV series would be really cool. Well, Alex, I really appreciate you taking the time to chat about the film because, you know, as I've said a number of times now, I think that it's still incredibly relevant to the issues that we're dealing with today and plays an important role in kind of looking at how these trends in technologies can affect the global south and places outside, you know, the city and the nose of power that we're so often used to seeing represented in the visions and films and culture that we interact with. So Alex, I really appreciate you taking the time. Thanks so much. Right on. Thanks,

Paris. Alex Rivera is the writer and director of Sleep Dealer and the Infiltrators. You can follow him on Twitter at at Alex underscore Rivera. You can follow me at at Paris Marks and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to support the work that I put into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.