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Accepted Paper:
Personal Workers: The New Entrepreneurs and Neoliberal Logic in Brazil
Wagner Guilherme Alves da Silva
(University College Dublin)
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper delves into the digital economy's effect on workers, moulding them into "digital entrepreneurs." It argues this fosters political radicalization through eroding professional ties, inducing individualization, and triggering subject atomization, aligning workers with extremist ideologies.
Paper Abstract:
The interaction between ordinary individuals with fascist discourses and the production of enemies is radically different in this moment of capitalist development. How disillusionment transforms into political aspiration (Pinheiro-Machado & SCALCO, 2021) takes on new contours in the era of social media. This paper aims to reflect on the digital journey of workers aspiring to social mobility through digital platforms. It wimm explores how creating a hyper-individualized mindset of becoming an entrepreneur allows for the conversion of disappointments and personal frustrations stemming from the digital world into the creation of enemies and the sustenance of extreme speech (UDUPA, 2020). However, there is still a set of positive values capitalized upon by extremist movements.
Recent decades have witnessed a shift and transformations in the understanding of entrepreneurship (Amorim & Grohman, 2021). The expansion of market logic into the realm of labour in this entrepreneurial phase entails semantic shifts capable of maximizing individual surveillance mechanisms of the subject in their entrepreneurial process. Consequently, the notion of the political subject is modified. Within this context, social media emerges as a fertile space for the development of this process, whether through the management of labour supply or strategies for account reach and the management and publicity. Mobilized by populist leaders, this set of neoliberal aspirations, for upward mobility based on individualism and competition (STEWART & SHANAHAN & SMITH, 2020) through hard work begins to transform into political aspirations (PINHEIRO-MACHADO & SCALCO, 2021/2) under the ideology of entrepreneurship. Here lies a crucial point of understanding, as we face a new grammar of the far-right, advancing its agenda through a positive set of values capillary to millions around the world.