Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and The Literatures Of Extraction In Contemporary Latin America

In 1849, thousands of experienced Chilean miners left the port of Valparaíso to join the California Gold Rush. They carried with them tools and skills essential to the extraction of gold, a formidable mineral essential to the accumulation of wealth and, as it would later turn out, to digital technology. From 1971 to its abrupt end in 1973, Salvador Allende’s government appointed a transnational team of scientists to develop a national computer system that would manage the country’s socialist, centrally planned economy; the unfinished project was known as Cybersyn in English and Synco in Spanish. It featured an orange, 1970s-futurism control room for president and ministers to make decisions based on real-time data from nationalized factories across industrial sectors. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, as data mining and mining proper drive each other in a feedback loop, Chilean writers, like their counterparts from elsewhere, reflect on the importance of the digital in our changing relationship to objects. Putting together these three moments invites a defamiliarization of the digital technologies that so decisively inform our daily lives. Contingent, they result from historical processes and express a certain world order. They could be different.

One cannot overstate the impact of the so-called digital revolution, and yet it is easy to dismiss its long history and its ideological underpinnings. A smartphone sitting on a table at a restaurant in Santiago has a long story to tell, from the minerals and manpower extracted around the world to assemble it, to the startling fact that so much computing power—indeed, more than would have managed a socialist utopia in the seventies—is conferred upon any one individual, the customer. There are no brands of Chilean computers, as there are none for cars or airplanes. A long history of extractivism and uneven development, of failed alternative modernities, is built into the smartphone. Yesterday, Latin America provided essential rubber for Ford’s cars and then bought the finished product at a disproportionate cost; today, it provides essential coltan, gold and other minerals, and then does the same as before. Digital surplus value is disproportionately accumulated in northern centers of capital. Meanwhile, scholars in science and technology studies have long debated such pregnant questions as that of whether artifacts have a politics; how technologies reflect societal values and, in turn, may condition them; and how transnational technological transformation affects the world.1 But how to awaken sleeping objects? In other words, how to reveal the historicity of the digital? As I argue in this chapter, contemporary Latin American literature, when read within the broader material turn that this book traces, offers an answer to this question.

Smartphones and other highly portable technology provide a useful illustration of the material turn that has been occurring in recent years. Thanks to them, many in the developed and developing worlds will readily recognize that, in their lifetime, their relationship to objects has significantly changed. However, such gadgets can also eclipse the broader shift they belong to; it is easy to take the part for the whole. To the contrary, this chapter builds on the insights about raw material and luxury goods developed in chapters 1 and 2, respectively. A bedazzled smartphone, that bundle of minerals and consumer desires, mobilizes everything we have learned about extractivism and commodity fetishism—also about the potential role of literary language in, fittingly, “throwing a wrench” into their workings. As I now turn to show, the semiperipheral condition of Latin America, a late adopter of technologies, allows the region’s writers to incisively probe ideologies of the digital. In particular, as my transcultural materialist reading will demonstrate, they estrange the notion of personal computer, confront the nasty underside of cloud computing, and ultimately upend and denaturalize a phenomenon that the cultural critics Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron called in 1995 the “Californian Ideology”—the self-serving techno-utopianism of a new digital ruling class.

Carlos Slim has been described as the Warren Buffett of Mexico. Having surpassed in wealth the American investor by “a few” billion dollars, one might as well say the opposite: Buffett is the United States’ Slim. The largest stakeholder in the New York Times and, reportedly, its savior from bankruptcy, Slim is at the time of writing the second wealthiest man alive, second only to Bill Gates. Yale Law School professor Amy Chua noted in 2004 that the mogul made $5000 every two minutes, which was more than the average Mexican earned in a year.2 Like Gates, whose fortune of $79.2 billion tops the Forbes list of wealthiest people, Slim amassed his $77.1 billion from the digital turn³—not computers, in this case, but telecommunications, especially cell phones. (The irony of Slim bankrolling print media with profits from digital media has not escaped cultural critics.) The turning point in his accumulation of capital coincides with neoliberal policies in Latin America. In fact, it is the deregulation of Mexican telecommunications in the 1990s that gave Slim the opportunity to amass his fortune. President Salinas privatized Telmex, the state telephone company, in a move that later caused a corruption scandal, leading him to exile and loss of reputation. Meanwhile, Slim saved face and profited at a historically unprecedented rate.

When does a phone stop being a phone? Clearly, today’s “smartphones” are not telephones: rather, they are portable computers, one of whose functions is to make and receive calls. We do not call a Swiss army knife a “smartknife,” and do not confuse it with a knife proper. This semantic slippage is partly due to the nature of technological change: Benjamin was fascinated with how the first electric light bulbs were shaped like gas flames or how iron was shaped to resemble wood.4 However, “smartphone” is marketeering language; the term itself is part of an apparatus that compels users to “upgrade,” creating needs and desires that previously did not exist. The cell phone was—it is about time to refer to it in the past tense—something in between. Its name came from the network technology that made communication independent of copper lines, the rudiments of that technology since Alexander Graham Bell. Not that it was independent of infrastructure, mind you. Slim’s cunning, as his detractors have observed, was to have the Mexican state pay for the new infrastructure he needed to replace the old one, and then reap the benefits of establishing a new technological standard. Clearly, there is more than one way to think of the “smarts” in the smartphone. But can literature and other cultural production, as Ortiz, Rivera, Magnus, and others have shown us in previous chapters of the present volume, allow us to estrange a language that obscures the historicity of the material turn?

One of the first works to critically engage cell phones, unwittingly binding the worlds of Slim and of Gates, is the corrido “El celular.” Corridos have a long history, which goes back to colonial Mexico and originates in medieval Spanish romances. Like modern troubadours, its first practitioners in the Americas used its stanzas, typically composed of four rhyming, octosyllabic verses, to carry news from one village to the next. Myths are born in corridos; they recount the exploits of famous men and women, including caudillos and soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution. The piece at hand is a hit song from the 1992 album Con sentimiento y sabor (Tan bonita), by the popular norteño band Los Tigres del Norte. The band’s members grew up in Sinaloa and live in San Jose, at opposite sides of a digital divide and an increasingly militarized border that are, nonetheless, home to a diversely bilingual and binational people. Sinaloa is a Mexican state famous for corridos and, in the last decade, unfortunately, also for narcotrafficking. (Los Tigres went on to pioneer the subgenre of narcocorridos, which memorialize the war on drugs from below.) San Jose is a Californian city that, with Palo Alto, where the author of the present study resides, is a focal point in the string of suburbs that have come to be known as “Silicon Valley.” As a New Yorker article put it, “Los Tigres sing in Spanish—mainly about things that happen to poor people in Mexico, or to Mexicans in America.”⁵

“El celular” is a case in point. To the straightforward bouncy waltz of modern, rock-infused corrido, its eight stanzas portray a man who goes from honeymoon with his cell phone to disappointment. At first, he flaunts it. “Call me at any time and anywhere,” he says, “’cause I’ve already got my cell phone.”6 By the second stanza he is qualifying the invitation, asking his interlocutor not to call home at night, but rather (as he specifies in the third) when there are many people around to see him pick up the phone. He looks like a “man of influence,” he says.⁷ Listeners presumably warm up to this likable goof, who masquerades as a rich man, in the manner of popular comedic characters Tin-Tan, Cantinflas, and Chespirito, who have made Mexicans and Latin Americans at large laugh out loud for decades. The song indulges in this goofiness for several stanzas: our hero compares his poise to that of an ancient Roman and a top executive. He claims the gadget gives him “personality,” and confides that he carries it even when it does not have a battery, merely to “flash around.” Interestingly, the verb he uses is “apantallar,” literally “to screen”—one is reminded that, per Freud, projection is indeed a key aspect of constructing a personality and building memories. The imperial figures of the Roman and the executive are projections, we learn in the climactic sixth stanza, from a disgruntled employee, possibly a day worker:

The genre does not care much for nuance, nor does it aspire to sophistication. Still, the song’s moment of truth could not be more poignant. Tragicomically, we discover what we knew all along: that the cellular-wielding chap is no Carlos Slim. Rather, the gadget feeds delusions of grandeur while increasing “productivity,” if not outright exploitation. Some twenty-five years later, this unlikely document of technological shift captures a zeitgeist. Call it cultural critique for the undocumented masses: this is a song about alienation, the invasion of private life, and a changing rapport with means of production. It is little wonder it should be a hit—all corridos sound the same, but some, in a fitting metaphor, click. Playful variations on the throbbing bass rhythm in the seventh stanza dramatize the anticlimactic, overly farcical moment when the song almost slips away into crass comedy. When the boss has an emergency, “he drags me out of the bathroom, doesn’t let me…think [pensar].” Pensar unequivocally rhymes with cagar, to shit, the omitted term here. The bass falters only for a moment, but then the note drops on the verb to think, and the song continues to its denouement. In the interim, the coupling of thinking and shitting vindicates the reflective agency of what Marx would call Lumpenproletariat. More generally, it gives a twist to the topsy-turvy-world motif that underwrites the song. The rich and poor do not quite trade places—but don’t they equally, in the end, obey bowel movements more pressing than any work demand or phone call?

Having gone from new-gadget bliss to abjection, the song closes with a conventionally picaresque (and machista) envoi. It turns out the plebeian hero has a second boss. He can’t fool around with girls anymore, or go party with his buddies: “My wife almost caught me / she keeps tabs on me with my cell phone.”9 Years before the NSA surveillance scandal, the age-old plot of jealousy and treachery comes across as naive. The third boss is the cell phone, of course, but there is an entire apparatus of overlords that gravitate around it; a shifting social pyramid, governed by company takeovers and transnational financial operations at an unfathomable scale, still has the same localized workers at their base. In the song, disruption economy enters into family politics, possibly for the better. In compensation, a masculinist fantasy asserts itself. The digital turn is transforming society in many ways, some salutary and others less so. It is a mixed bag: access to information empowers women and men everywhere; concentrations of capital are one evident cause of concern. At the prospect of further disempowerment, cultural products take refuge in machismo. There are multiple examples. In the late aughts and onward, they range from the unfortunate to the unmemorable. There is an over-the-top urban Mexican song that plays on the double entendre of a “byte” being about data and about teeth, egregiously insinuating that the scroll button in certain Windows mice resembles a clitoris (“Byte, byte, byte / Yo quiero un byte, byte, byte / Déjame jugar con la bolita de tu mouse”). Or witness the Puerto Rican reggaeton superstar Daddy Yankee—What’s in a name?—in a suit and a crisp white shirt, a muscular businessman with oversize graduation rings, praising the bling of smartphones. In Colombia, prepago went from being the term used for off-contract cell phones to the euphemism for escorts.¹⁰

Are these moments vulgar displays of power or desperate cries of disempowerment? It is too soon to tell, but these poles are part of a dialectic. We live in an age of social experimentation via the digital. In one narrative, connectivity and instant gratification become the norm rather than the exception. In another, the upper hand belongs to a false sense of proximity and to insatiable desire. In this changing environment, cultural products may adopt various stances, from the celebratory to the critical to mere social commentary. Among the latter, Andrés López’s epochal stand-up act, Pelota de letras, stands out. It depicts a digital generational gap with vignettes such as a grandfather who has an uncanny ability to fold newspaper pages flat but cannot pronounce the Anglicism “DVD” (el sirirí) or use a mouse (he looks at the device, not the screen).11 If we connect the dots, we will appreciate the popular culture of an entire continent exploring the frictions of the digital turn and the specific ways in which it has been conducted: through neoliberal policy, capital accumulation, and hegemony of the English language. Over 95 percent of the World Wide Web is in that language, and yet its supremacy rests on the privatization of Latin American telecommunications—by homebred industrialists, no less. In isolation, the cultural products I have discussed up to this point make a modest contribution to the historicization and critique of the digital turn; together, they make a stronger case. However, it is in works of fiction, embedded within broader cultural formations, where I find the most complex and thoughtful reflection.¹² I now turn to consider them in more detail, going from cell phones and peripherals to what has been the main event of the domestic digital ecosystem: the personal computer.

The oeuvre of Alejandro Zambra (born in 1975) is composed of several short novels, available in English translations, including Bonsái (2006), Formas de volver a casa (2011), and the experimental work Facsímil (2014).¹³ He has also authored several collections: two of poetry, one of essays, and a book of short stories. His recurrent theme is seemingly naive love stories that comment more or less obliquely on Chilean history. Against the trend of revisiting the 1970s that one can find in many Southern Cone writers and film directors from both sides of the Andes, Zambra speaks from democracy, although looking back at childhood years marked by dictatorship. Fittingly, Patricio “Pato” Fernández, writing for the culture section of the Spanish newspaper El País, referred to his work as “the great light [leve] novel.”¹⁴ Levedad or lightness, in this context, does not imply lack of ambition. Zambra’s love stories are not so much political allegories as they are metonymies: he does not write about dictatorship; he writes about love. We slip from domesticity to History with a capital H with ease and without heroism.

One can see in the title of Zambra’s short story collection, Mis documentos (2014), a reflection on the relationship of technology and writing, a gesture toward obsolescence, and a white-glove attack on Alberto Fuguet.15 The title alludes to the discontinued name that Microsoft’s operating system, Windows, gave to its user file-folder from 1995 to 2005: My Documents. Ostensibly, the company chose this name for pedagogical as well as for brand-name-recognition purposes. It also evokes Fuguet’s idealization of Apple’s Macintosh computers as one of the traits of newness in his often-cited 1996 coinage “McOndo”—a riff on García Márquez’s fictional town, joined with condos, the computer brand, and the hamburger chain.¹⁶ Fuguet is Mac, while Zambra is PC. Except Zambra knows that these terms might not mean much in fifteen years, let alone in cultural history writ large. On the one hand, there is opportunistic avant-garde posturing; on the other, a critical reflection on obsolescence. The book’s savvy poetics of everyday life submits the present to the gaze of the future. Put in terms of a different Chilean writer, Roberto Bolaño, Zambra knows that “My Documents” will have but a fleeting normalcy from the vantage point of the distant year of 2666.

Files are “mine” as they are yours and everybody’s; the possessive pronoun seeks precisely to establish a connection between the so-called personal computer and the mass of users. In a parodic mode, Zambra’s title cultivates a similar effect, as the stories in the book are for the most part exercises in petite histoire. They include love stories that, for lack of a better word, one could indeed call superficial, in that any reader could feel identified with them. Microsoft eventually abandoned the possessive pronoun because it was no longer necessary: users did not have to be seduced or convinced to spend numerous hours a day in front of the screens. Moreover, the company Apple, with its minimalistic hyperproductivity and branding, established the doctrine that, in matters of design, what does not serve a purpose is in excess. Meanwhile, it relegated the other files in the computer, the ones that determine the relationship between the physical machine and the user, to a digital backstage from where they would never return. There files guard trade secrets, increase company revenue, and give users—for the most part unconcerned by the profit they generate—a sense of ease and lightness.

The most remarkable text in the collection is “Recuerdos de un computador personal,” a re-elaboration of a short story that appeared in the Mexican journal Letras libres in 2008 under the title “Historia de un computador.”17 Set mostly in Santiago, it is essentially the parable of a couple, Max and Claudia, who fall in and out of love, as told from the vantage point of their mutual relationship with their home computer. Summary does not do justice to a text that hinges upon its récit, and whose carefully chosen words suggest many rich subtexts. And yet, for present purposes, suffice it to say that Max and Claudia’s relationship grows in parallel to the embedding of the computer in their lives; that it reaches its plenitude as the computer reveals the full extent of its functionality; and that they both become obsolete at the same time. Other than the arrival and decay of the computer, the main diegetic elements are Claudia’s snooping into Max’s files, which leads to her discovery of his philandering, merely suggested in the first version and rendered explicit in the second; and the late revelation that Max has a child, Sebastián, in Temuco. The story ends there, as Max gives away the computer to his neglected son:

Once by himself, Sebastián set the computer up and ascertained what he already suspected: that it was considerably inferior, from all points of view, to the one he already had. They had a good laugh with his mother’s man, after lunch. Then they both made room in the basement to store away the computer, still there since many years ago, waiting, as they say, for better times.¹⁸

Zambra’s vignette of everyday life in the early 2000s comes to us complete with the thermal sensation of the CPU, which gives warmth to the protagonist, and mention of by-now-archaic games such as Minesweeper and Solitaire. Like Baudelaire to Benjamin, Zambra speaks to us from what is already a distant time.¹⁹ But while contemporary capitalism thrives in producing an ever-shorter lifespan of products, leaving behind literally mountains of waste, Zambra dwells on the object. In step with new materialism, he tells the becoming of an assemblage of human and nonhuman elements. For elucidation, consider that when the National Rifle Association defends gun ownership on grounds that “weapons do not kill; people do,” they obscure the fact that it is precisely people with weapons who kill. The “locus of agency,” to revisit Bennett’s term, lies in the assemblage.²⁰ Similarly, in Zambra’s story, it is not people who love, but people with computers who do.

As I see it, the unity of action of the story, Achilles’s rage, is the computer’s agency. At the onset, Max buys the machine in installments, “as if on impulse and not through rational decision-making.”21 Once the machine becomes a staple of his household, he writes “short lines he called free verses.”²² The insinuation is that the “medium” conditions Max’s, and possibly Zambra’s, writing. At the pivotal moment when the couple connects the computer to the internet, they both become “addicted” to email, and in Max’s case, to pornography; we first learn that he has a son because Claudia asks that a user profile be created for him; when an unfortunate repair wipes the hard drive, this is compared to an amputation. In these examples of computer agency, connectivity spawns verbosity and sexual consumerism; software architecture elicits diegesis and characterization; hardware becomes an extension of human body. It is to Zambra’s credit as a storyteller that there is hardly any animism in a story that, closely read, shows what computers do.

Provocatively, the computer comes to occupy its place in the assemblage of objects that is the household by affecting its composition and circadian rhythms, not unlike Claudia. She settles in by bringing a towel and a mirror, and by being the first, of the few women who have visited the apartment, who stays to sleep and have breakfast. Meanwhile, the machine makes room for itself by displacing the ashtrays and coffee cups on the table, like the new stimulant it is. Its hum is a “slight roar” (leve rugido), that becomes part of “a familiar soundscape” (un sonido hogareño) along with the “muffled buzz” (ronquera) of the refrigerator and the noises that come from the street.²³ When the couple—or trio—move to a bigger apartment, it gets its own room: “They allocated it a single bedroom.”²⁴ The computer registers multifariously as Max’s first companion, pet, or other son. Claudia, then, either usurps the machine’s place or “adopts” it, as one would a child or a purring cat. For all the overdeterminacy of this human-nonhuman collective, it is clear that the computer has the power of turning the household on its head: from the sleepless nights it enables to the peculiar desk it gets in the bigger apartment, a salvaged door atop easels.

The computer in the story congregates involuntary memory and conditions voluntary memory. Claudia spends days organizing pictures from the couple’s vacations, giving them clever titles and storing them in several folders, “as if from different trips.”25 Note that her assimilation of experiences, prefigured by the clunky engineers of yore, is now the province of “user experience designers” in Silicon Valley. See Apple’s iPhoto, which organizes images around what it calls “Events”—a usage that must make Alain Badiou cringe. Contrast this with the above-cited bygone era when “My Documents,” with the possessive, was necessary to instruct users on what to do with computational power. As happens with other features of ideology, the very idea of a “personal computer” is by now second nature, although there is no fundamental reason to allot a society’s computational resources along the lines of consumerist individualism. Although it is an imperfect analogy, one could think of the difference between developing infrastructure with cars or with trains in mind as the principal means of transportation. Computation has hitherto developed in a way more akin to cars, but it could still take a different form; it could become a public good rather than private property.

In You Are Not a Gadget (2010), Jaron Lanier appears skeptical of such paradigm shifts. Drawing examples form several digital platforms, which are embedded into all hitherto software even when technically superior options are available, he speaks of a “lock-in” effect in new technologies.²⁶ Engineers build on shaky ground, but more importantly, although this is not a term that the politically moderate Lanier would use, on what one could call an ideologically-conditioned medium. Software turns into thoughts turns into facts. Lanier does use the term “digital reification” to refer, for instance, to how a young musician’s creativity and musical formation is unavoidably filtered by MIDI, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface that, in simple terms, allows instruments and computers to connect.²⁷ More germane to Zambra’s story, the computer scientist and cultural critic also tells us that “files” were not there from the beginning, as early programmers considered other options, like a single, all-encompassing file. The file is now quintessential “locked-in idea.” It might be easier to get rid of the concept of photons: “Our conception of files may be more persistent than our ideas about nature.”²⁸ Moreover, Lanier tells us a few sentences later that a file reifies “the notion that human expression comes in severable chunks that can be organized as leaves on an abstract tree.”²⁹ With this in mind, “Historia de un computador” becomes an artistic document of the (perhaps futile) resistance to lock-in. Claudia’s attempt to organize memories into files and folders mirrors Zambra’s act of writing. The love story’s fundamental narrative tension is between unbound feeling and what Lanier might call a “severable chunk.”

There is an added component, which is the position of the story on the global stage. Lanier’s cultural critique is the work of an insider who can exert an actual influence on the debates that inform the next generation of software and, as a consequence, the shape of some portion of our lives. Zambra’s assessment does not stand a chance, and not because he is a fiction writer, but because he is Chilean. This brings to the fore the broader problem of belatedness and dependency, which have been central concerns of Latin Americanist criticism for as long as the field has existed. But what of this so-called digital revolution, which seems to arrive in all corners of the world roughly at the same time? The frontier of innovation, from which entrepreneurs profit, seems always closer but yet remains unattainable. We seem to live in a time of trickle-down economics in fast motion. No matter how fast the flow, the structure remains fundamentally uneven.

Added value and native technology (imagine once more a Chilean brand of computers) seems as unlikely today as in the heyday of dependency theory. The same extractive economic model that informed the rubber boom and Rivera’s La Vorágine, analyzed in chapter 1, looms on the horizon. What “Historia de un computador” makes us painfully aware of is that what is being extracted from users is the quality of their lives. This neo-Luddite line of thinking, to be sure, has been articulated in northern locales, notably by Nicholas Carr in The Shallows (2011), a psychology-divulgation manifesto on how new technologies deprive us of deep thoughts.³⁰ But by formulating his critique from Chile, Zambra offers a glimpse into what the situation is like for the rest of the world, namely, for those who cannot afford the latest or the second-latest model, but only the one that is already several steps closer to the dumpster. Paradoxically, Zambra tells us of a time when computers did last, particularly in the peripheries of digital capitalism. His nostalgia for Windows deserves a place in world literature, as it allows us to reflect on a fundamentally asymmetrical relationship between locales that is part of everyday technologies.

The political unconscious of the text is work’s takeover of the household, reinvigorated over the last decade at a global level. “It is a common characteristic of all capitalist production,” quotes Benjamin from Marx, “that the worker does not make use of the working conditions. The working conditions make use of the worker; but it takes machinery to give this reversal a technologically concrete form.”31 There is a quantitative difference between Marx’s or Benjamin’s time and our own, for machines have proliferated, but also a qualitative one, because alienation does not just affect the factory worker but spreads across the social spectrum and is intrinsic to our technology. It also colonizes spaces of private life that were once left relatively unaffected, such as sleep, which Jonathan Crary defines as “an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism.”³² Sleep is an obstacle to 24/7 productivity. With the constant stimulation of the soft light it casts upon us, and with its alluring organization of electrons into zeros and ones—subatomic particles like Aira’s in chapter 2—the personal computer leads the charge against it.

It is a sleepless Claudia who discovers Max’s secret, in the dead of night, trying out passwords while her partner sleeps. She goes through charles, baudelaire, tindersticks, los prisioneros, laetitia casta, mónica belluci [sic], and marihuana. This evocative series includes some of the referents discussed above, which speaks to the flattening effect of postmodern cultural consumption, contributes to character development, and may be in part a bona fide statement of the author’s influences. Ironically, claudia is the password that gives her access to the relationship’s undoing. Her own name is the purloined letter; the computer that earlier solidified the couple’s love is the conduit for its dissolution. A night-shift worker of sorts, Claudia is unwittingly contributing to the obsolescence of her love relationship (although Max was seemingly well ahead of her in that regard). Given the imbrication of love and technology present throughout the story, this turning point signals the submission of love itself into the waning moments of a production cycle.

As Chellis Glendinning observes in her “Notes Toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto,” all technology is political.³³ True to form, the machine in “Historia de un computador” is both about story and about history. On the one hand, there is the common narrative of a transnational middle class and its gadgets; on the other, there is the specifically Chilean problematic of patriarchy, masculinity, and the generational gap. As Ana Peluffo pointed out to me, the gap that interests Zambra is, foremost, the one that exists between his generation and those that follow, not so much the one between his generation and the ones that were more directly touched by the coup itself. This forward-looking gaze, however, does not entail negating the past, but rethinking it in light of its unanticipated ramifications, including synchronization with techno-centric capitalism.³⁴ Between “Historia de un computador” and its lower-key, more psychological and individualistic rewrite as “Recuerdos de un computador personal” comes a somewhat disappointing, but ultimately accurate assessment of the normalization of a technology that at one point could have had a critical edge.

The text is so keenly aware of the ideological, historical contingencies of computation that its second version carries one step forward the deauratization of love initiated in the first. Initially there is a series of evocative scenes that goes from the couple’s love-making in front of the computer, “un polvo largo y lento” (a long, slow fuck) with the screensaver reflecting on Claudia’s back—call it ménage à trois avec ordinateur—to a private ritual in which, after learning Max’s secret, Claudia strips herself naked and wipes the computer screen with her underwear and her tears.35 Numbed by years of pornography, the narrator in the second version describes Max as obsessed with anal sex and “facials,” and recounts their breakup scene as involving rough sex, possibly rape, and a kick in the nuts.³⁶ In the unpublished fragment “Baudelaire,” of 1921–22, Benjamin imagines that time is a photographer that portrays the essence of things, and that Baudelaire, although he does not know how to reveal the plaques, can interpret them “with infinite mental efforts.”³⁷ The daguerreotypes of Claudia’s reflection on the computer or her silhouette portrait against its backlight, followed by her abuse in the rewrite, tell the story of an objectified woman who appears distant in her proximity becoming one whose proximity is unbearable and who, in an alienated, digitally conditioned macho logic, must be destroyed.

Zambra’s love stories bring to mind Zygmunt Bauman’s proposal of “liquid love” as a rising phenomenon in contemporary relationships. Per the sociologist, this is an extension of consumerism into the private realm. Not too loose and not too serious either, but rigorously “casual,” it replaces commitment to one person with a laborious courting of a network of potential partners, each node activated when the time comes. Liquid love is a lot of work, but “worth it,” as it redefines the feeling in terms of a return on investment. Bauman speculates that today sex is the epitome of a self-sufficient, “pure relationship.”³⁸ I would venture to say that a significant part of Zambra’s oeuvre to date revolves around such moments of coagulation, so to speak, of liquid love. This is certainly the case of the relationship in the short story and in others throughout the collection. We zero in on a couple, see them fall apart, and move on to others. These are not just failed love stories, but variations on a mode of production, as seen through private life.

Readers of Bonsái will recall a memorable conversation between Julia and Emilio, the novel’s main couple. It is worth citing both in the original and in Carolina De Robertis’s courageous, if awkward, translation: “Éste es un problema de los chilenos jóvenes, somos demasiado jóvenes para hacer el amor, y en Chile si no haces el amor sólo puedes culear o culiar, pero a mí no me agradaría culiar o culear contigo, preferiría que folláramos, como en España.”39 (This is a problem for Chilean youth, we’re too young to make love, and in Chile if you don’t make love you can only fuck, but it would be disagreeable to fuck you, I’d prefer it if we shagged, si follaramos [sic], as they do in Spain.)⁴⁰ For all its wit, the passage expresses Zambra’s maladjustment with his time and provenance. As Agamben puts it, “The contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness.”⁴¹ Zambra’s estrangement of a verb so basic should give us pause.⁴² His character yearns for an earlier cultural construction of love in Chile, and for just the right kind of raunchiness—one that, as it happens, can only be found on the other side of the Atlantic. Is this, perhaps because Spanish society is more egalitarian than Chilean, which means that popular language is not jarring to intellectual types? Be that as it may, note how Zambra is playing the part of Agamben’s contemporary with his many experiments in love, including its more digital variants. He does not, however, renounce yearning. In liquid love proper, if we adopt Bauman’s vague but inspiring category, love becomes an automatic response, a nonsubject.⁴³ That Zambra, precisely, writes about love signals his discomfort with this form of productivity.

A devil’s advocate might say that the scope of Zambra’s critique of the contemporary is limited because it stems from Santiago and not from a major metropolis. And yet, as Naomi Klein has reminded us, neoliberalism, a mode of production that capitalizes on shock, was born in Chile.⁴⁴ What attracted Benjamin to Haussmannized Paris was a sense of historical pregnancy: the city was a beacon for things to come and offered a connection to a disavowed past. Something similar could be said of Santiago, with its own experience of shock and with its physical layout. These are prescient of the turn that other Latin American capitals are undergoing and, if we follow Klein, are phenomena of world-historical importance. Peppered with shopping malls and hypermarkets and crisscrossed by highways, Santiago maintains many a Hispanic square and not a few direct architectonic quotes from the French belle époque—see its old market, with its iron and glass ceiling, or its art museum, a scale copy of the Grand Palais. Zambra might be the contemporary narrator to capture this space and its historical conjuncture. Indoor love stories and resignified everyday objects are merely two aspects of that broader topic.

As a subject in history, Zambra proceeds from that major experience of shock that was the coup of 1973. But he is born a couple of years later and spends his adolescence, after 1989, under the democracy of the watchful Senador Vitalicio—Pinochet, the self-appointed senator for life. His adult years coincide with the death of that figure and with the gradual and still unfinished awakening of Chilean society. Meanwhile, his country and cultural milieu went from trauma to melancholy, followed by denial and mourning, in a process that Idelber Avelar, Nelly Richard, and Alberto Moreiras have aptly analyzed.45 Nostalgia becomes an aesthetic possibility just now, and Zambra comes to its encounter. It is a mode full of risks. It is easily coopted, serving as a backdoor for reactionary domesticity. But it also has great political potential; it mobilizes. Zambra’s writing affects with subtle estrangements—of objects and love, as this chapter shows, but not only they. Its proposal of interrupting nostalgia with digital obsolescence allows us to regard time as time and not as monument or consumer good.

To recapitulate, the importance of Zambra’s tale rests on its untimely contemporaneity and on its portrayal of a new form of alienation, that of technological heteronomy and sentimental entropy. It is not a blanket diagnosis: the future can be found in Temuco, even the promise of a different domesticity, where the remnants of the past are also stored. Zambra does not commit to an anticapitalist or neo-Luddite critique, but he does explore those positions, which are global in nature, from the vantage point of Chilean society. Some readers will miss a more forceful recourse to indignation or straightforward position-taking on the pressing contemporary question of the effects of new technologies on literature. Zambra merely sets the stage for such a reflection. The story shows that, surrounded by technological gadgets of foreseeable obsolescence, we live among ruins.

As previously discussed, Marx devoted an entire section of volume 1 of Capital to what he called “primitive accumulation.” True to the book’s intended purpose of critiquing political economy in the double sense of analyzing and interrogating it, he examines a foundational myth of modern economics. “Previous accumulation,” as Adam Smith dubbed it, is the idea that there was a concentration of capital prior to capitalism that resulted from men’s natural talents. In this fabled origin story, the lazy started off on the wrong foot and the diligent flourished. Private property does not stem from violent acts of land-seizing but from merit and chance alone. Marx compares primitive accumulation to original sin: the idea that falling from paradise at the dawn of time accounts for all hitherto misfortune. In reality, however, “so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as ‘primitive’ because it forms the prehistory of capital, and of the mode of production corresponding to capital.”47 Could we not entertain the possibility that we now live at a time of digital primitive accumulation? As yesterday’s lords fenced off public land and farmed it, today’s digital moguls privatize data and, well, also farm it. The abysmal differentials in wealth that already ensue feature entrepreneurship as their original virtue.

A valuable counterargument would be that cloud computing has allowed the entry of scores of smaller players into the internet economy. This is true. There are so-called public clouds and private clouds. The former, such as Amazon’s EC2, are available for hire and provide computational services at a scale that was previously impossible. I consulted a technical report from the electrical engineering and computer sciences department at the University of California, Berkeley on the subject; it notes that it costs the same to use a thousand servers for one hour as one server for a thousand hours. But the aspiring entrepreneur—the next Candy Crush Saga billionaire, say—does not have to own a server or a thousand, but merely rent them. So, going back to Marx, wouldn’t the cloud bring the producer closer to the means of production, instead of divorcing her from them? In order to elucidate this, it is worth citing the report at length:

Cloud Computing is likely to have the same impact on software that foundries have had on the hardware industry. At one time, leading hardware companies required a captive semiconductor fabrication facility, and companies had to be large enough to afford to build and operate it economically…. Only a handful of major “merchant” companies with very high chip volumes, such as Intel and Samsung, can still justify owning and operating their own fabrication lines. This motivated the rise of semiconductor foundries that build chips for others…. Similarly, the advantages of the economy of scale and statistical multiplexing may ultimately lead to a handful of Cloud Computing providers who can amortize the cost of their large datacenters over the products of many “datacenter-less” companies.⁴⁸

Does everyone profit? Yes. This is not a separation of the haves and the have-nots, as Marx’s more dialectical model would have it. This is stratification. There are those who profit exponentially from owning the very few state-of-the art fabrication lines or data center infrastructures. For the rest, it’s trickle-down economics. And so, in a sense, digital primitive accumulation does separate the producer from the means of production. Add to this that, on the internet, general users are producers too: every click generates profit, and we are nowhere near to profiting from it. Still we retweet; we “like.” If the allure and entrapments of bourgeois culture configured the ideological scaffolding for early modern workers to give away their labor power, it is the hype of entrepreneur culture that does the same for our age. And so Steve Jobs and now Tim Cook, with playful seriousness, launch each new Apple product as a revelation or a papal decree.

This does not solve the problem of what to do with the cloud in art or criticism. Representing it is something that cloud ideologues already do; the “cloud” itself is a clever catachresis for the tons upon tons of whirring equipment it evaporates into thin air. I find that another Chilean author, Jorge Baradit, offers a prescient critique of the cloud, written at a time when computer-server farms had not yet taken over. Clearly, a mere interpretation that sought to understand the author’s intentions or appreciate his contributions to a literary genre would fail to see this. However, before I use Baradit to present the final part of this chapter’s argument, allow me to engage in a brief excursus, for it is in the plastic arts that we can find some of the earliest and finest insights on the matter of undoing clouds.

Consider the work of John Gerrard, an Irish artist born in 1974. He gained international notoriety for his installation Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada) at the Lincoln Center in New York in 2014. Its depiction of an industrial facility devoted to harnessing the energy of the sun was something to be seen. With support from the Public Arts Fund, the artist set a massive LED wall, several stories high, on the esplanade (figure 5.1). It harmonized with the surrounding buildings by usurping the architectural function of the central fountain, which it hid from frontal view. At a distance, this new centerpiece to the theater and opera complex appeared to be a screen of epic proportions, projecting a video. Upon closer examination, the screen was recognized as more of a cube, the video turned out to be a computer simulation, and its scale was seen to be rather modest for the ungraspable enormity of the power plant. A tower, surrounded by ten thousand mirrors that reflect sunlight, may look like the stem of a flower to an unsuspecting passerby; come closer, and the pedestrian turned art spectator would find herself immersed in the simulation, which offered bird’s-eye views impossible to the human eye and choreographic rotations of the sun-seeking mirrors (figure 5.2).

There are many possible readings for a piece like this. There is celebration of human ingenuity, reverential fear of technology, collapse of desert and metropolis, coordination of city rhythms to astronomic-industrial homeostasis, erasure of the borders between the virtual and the real. Crucially for present purposes, there is a commentary on accumulation. Gerrard invites us to ponder what it means to store (“reserve”) solar energy. Who benefits from such a sensational, if still-evolving, technology? Framing it as public art cuts to the chase: the sun belongs to all and to no one; solar reserve is of the commons. Contrast this to a different piece that Gerrard exhibited at the Thomas Dane Gallery in London, next to a room-size rendering of his Nevada-inspired masterpiece. In Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma) (2015), photographs are stitched together to create an effect of animation or cinematic movement, producing an effect at once familiar and uncanny (figure 5.3). The pictures show, in this arresting way, cooling towers, pumps, and blank walls from a Google data center, or server farm, in Oklahoma. Spectators may feel like giants prying about when, upon further reflection, the company is the prying giant. While the solar power plant was about public accumulation, this one is strikingly private, try as Google may to cast itself as a shared resource: call it a “mock commons.”

As it happens, Gerrard approached the company about documenting its facilities for artistic purposes. Google declined, which led the artist to rent a helicopter, fly around the facility, and shoot pictures. Reportedly, when he consulted with state police about whether the company had any right to stop him, they said: “All we can say is, the air is free.” And so a unique “farm” came to be, one that, as the artist remarks, “eats us as we eat it.” Make no mistake: with its simulations and deftly computerized imagery, this is high-tech art about the highest tech around. It is, as a Guardian review accurately puts it, an attempt to “out-Google Google.” The company that snatches personal information by the exabyte and trades in such catchy euphemisms as “street view” or “big data” may have met its artistic match. “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission” deserves a spot as the company’s motto, next to “Don’t be evil.” First take pictures of thousands of people on the street, then blur out their faces at the company’s sole discretion. First sweep in and “data mine” all there is to know about people, then deal with potential liability. And so on. For once, Gerrard turns the tables.

This is where the position of contemporary Latin American writers becomes most interesting. One step removed from the centers of the art world that Gerrard and Steele participate in, they are nonetheless as significantly impacted by the cloud as everyone else. The situation is reminiscent of earlier stages in capitalism when, for instance, the United Fruit Company brought to Latin America the worst of extractivism without the benefit of the vast cultural market that existed in the company’s country of origin. In other words, it brought the stick of exploitation without the carrot of freedom of speech (and the institutions that make it possible). By the time writers and other artists formulated their critiques, it was in a sense already too late. This needs not happen again with digital primitive accumulation. We can take what the likes of Gerrard and Steele teach us and bring it to bear upon our hermeneutic practices as literary scholars. In turn, given the many communicating vessels between Latin Americanist scholars and writers, one may expect this will have an impact on creative projects now in the making.

In this spirit, Jorge Baradit’s science fiction novel Synco becomes quite elucidating.49 Its artistic merit has attracted little critical enthusiasm; its contributions to the novel as form, sci-fi or otherwise, are meager. And yet many things happen in Synco, almost despite itself, which are worthy of note. Baradit imagines an alternate universe where Pinochet stops the coup in Chile in 1973 and Allende brings the eponymous cybernetic project to completion. The novel features many amusing counterfactuals, such as a Poet Pablo Neruda Airport, a Cyberbolivarianist movement, and transistors the size of buildings (for microcomputing had not been invented). Other counterfactuals are more alarming, such as the assassination of now-president Bachelet as a young woman or the refashioning of notorious torturer and CIA operator Michael Townley as a mostly bored and horny IBM employee. The novel’s politics are, in a word, confused. Its plot peters into an esoteric conspiracy, as the purported socialist utopia reveals itself as left-wing totalitarianism, then outright fascism. Tidbits of mapuche religion and iconography punctuate the delirious political system much as orientalist myths and imagery informed Nazi hermeticism. For all its gimmicks, the novel’s premise remains unparalleled: what if Cybersyn had succeeded? For present purposes, What if something such as the cloud had coalesced under state socialism, not neoliberalism? What if locales like Santiago de Chile were the capitals, and not the backlands, of technological modernity?

Stafford Beer, the real-life British developer behind Synco, believed that information is a national resource—not in the way that the snooping NSA might understand the phrase, but in the sense of its service to a common cause. His Chilean collaborator Fernando Flores becomes a character in Baradit’s novel. The character explains the goals of their project as “a harmonic dance of consumption patterns and popular needs” and a “system that self-regulates mathematically, not politically.”50 The actual Synco, which computer historian Edén Medina and others have recently examined in great detail, did in fact aspire to homeostasis and self-regulation, although it was neither so naive nor cunning to proclaim itself as apolitical, and it did not aspire to be the harbinger of the end of history. Crucially, it revolved around worker participation, which Baradit fictionalizes as totalitarian control (perhaps because, as Beer complained, the project bureaucratized over time). A 2014 New Yorker article made the case for revisiting Beer and Flores’s progressive system for contemporary technological pursuits; it called it “a dispatch from the future,” prescient of such developments as Nest thermostats and the “Internet of Things,” except one driven by citizen needs and not corporate profit.⁵¹

Baradit offers memorable images. It is one thing to know that the Internet, like so many other technologies, is an offshoot of the Cold War, as is space exploration. Indeed, the idea of a networked communication system that, unlike phone lines, did not depend on central hubs, was originally a cautionary measure against the potential nuclear destruction of conventional infrastructure, buttressed in vulnerable major cities.⁵² But it is another thing to visualize a military parade that revolves around a microcomputer, as such spectacles centered, at the peak of Soviet power, on nuclear warheads. Past a squad of the fearful, AK-47-wielding super-goons of the regime, and following the red flag of the totalitarian regime-cum-mainframe, enter the microcomputer:

Behind them a squadron of flaming Fiat 600 carried the personal microcomputer developed by Institute Miguel Enríquez for Synco’s field operators, a marvel of miniaturization that had caused amazement at the last world technological fair in Paris. The last Fiat 600 towed a small lorry with the “Atacama X-12” model, a modern, fully wireless computer that weighed a mere 80 kilos.⁵³

The public demonstration that ensues consists of the computer’s technician wirelessly beaming an image of himself past the podium of the Compañero Presidente. The reader chuckles, as intended: Why make such a fuss about the transmission of images, given today’s Skype or FaceTime? A “mere” eighty kilograms, as in a hundred and sixty pounds? For some, the parade will restitute an element of amazement to that now commonplace sight; for others, it will merely add to the disparate collection of novelties that the novel has become by that point. Regardless, what is fascinating is the protagonism given to the “macro” microcomputer, dramatically set against a Fiat parade of Italian fascist connotation, in all its massive glory. After giving us circuitry the size of entire neighborhoods, the progress is patent; after exposing us to the lugubrious workings of Synco, this new concentrated system promises to be evil condensed. This is overly dramatic, but effective: the microcomputer is indeed the endpoint of an arms race, and Baradit disabuses us from thinking otherwise. Computational power is power too. Hence, the messiah-like character of Capitán Proxy “protects the fatherland from its own history,” and, provocatively, an offline country is a dead country: “La señal muerta es el síntoma de un país en coma.”54

But what would it mean for that country to live? For a fleeting moment, before succumbing to the apocalyptic imperative of genre fiction, the novel imagines the technology of a different, more just social order. Baradit imagines socialist computing, if all too hastily he has it degrade into totalitarianism. And yet, before its monstrous collapse of Stalinism and Nazism, Synco fancies Santiago as a world capital for the Third Way. The novel wants Allende alive, then kills him again. It is even more ambivalent about Pinochet. However, through its unabashed staging of contradiction against the monologue of present-day technologism, Synco allows us to estrange and renegotiate our digital present and its accompanying world order.⁵⁵

Today, California is undergoing another gold rush of sorts, luring away the world’s most talented programmers and calling forth mining operations of all kinds. Not only is the utopian vision that sustains it in many respects at odds with Allende’s, it is also understated to the point of being invisible (like the cloud), if ever present (like the cloud again). As I have shown, cultural products can counter the corporate-driven fantasy of behind-the-curtain, benign technocracy. I am no neo-Luddite, nor do I ignore the many beneficial aspects of recent technological developments. What I have sought to challenge, however, is the ideological self-deceit at work when users create profit in the name of gratuity or express themselves “freely” in highly restrictive protocols.