Around the mid-2000s, a tipping point was reached within the international aid system. The relations, expectations and modes of governance that had taken shape some two or three decades earlier during the NGO-led fantastic invasion (see chapter 5) were finally retired. Rather than community-based self-reliance and direct forms of humanitarian intervention, ideas of resilience and practices of remote management were gaining ground. Spurred by austerity, policy failure, political push-back and growing risk aversion, the aid industry was ready for renewal and fast opening to private-sector funding, commercial sponsorship and the promise of information technology (Zyck & Kent 2014). Regarding this period of change, it is useful to speculate on what the rise of resilience thinking tells us about the state of capitalism. Resilience suggests that, providing system functionality can be retained, it is normal for systems to suffer perturbations and periodic shocks that propel them from one condition of temporary equilibrium to another (Holling 1973). Whatever this may tell us about ecology, it is an apt description of the last three decades of network capitalism’s periodic crises and poor economic performance (Streeck 2011). Rather than expanding, capital is now challenged to find ways of working with and through the modalities of permanent emergency – and, if it can, to capitalize on crisis conditions (Klein 2007).
Gathering speed in the 1980s, the world of work in the global South has become increasingly casualized and deregulated. In terms of its political significance, one of the main achievements of neoliberalism has been to create an ever-expanding global precariat (LeBaron & Ayers 2013). While casualization is now gaining ground in the North, by the end of the 2,000s, a clear majority of Africa’s non-agricultural workforce was engaged in the informal or shadow economy (Meagher 2016). The unstoppable growth of the precariat has authored a major policy change towards the informal sector. Rather than ignoring or fearing informality or, at best, wishing to graduate it to the conventional economy, the aim is now to incorporate its extended shadow networks directly into global business chains (2016). Not only does the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (Prahalad 2006) represent a huge potential labour and consumer market, but also of crucial importance to the attraction of the informal sector is that, perforce, it comes complete with its own shadow means of social reproduction. For a free-rider capitalism that no longer creates permanent jobs or provides social protection, the latter is a valuable source of self-reproducing or autopoietic vitality. By its nature, however, the precariat exists in a dynamic relationship between economy and disaster. Made possible by the spread of mobile telephony and data informatics, the contemporary boomerang effect inhabits and explores this relationship. Earlier chapters examined humanitarian disaster as the site for the preparatory ground work in translating knowledge into data. Looking to the future of capitalism, the global South still functions as a laboratory – this time, for the disaggregated biopolitics of permanent emergency that seeks to secure for capital the autopoietic qualities of precarious life.
Precarity denotes a condition in which the casualization, informalization or unpredictability of work coexists with economic vulnerability, environmental uncertainty and an openness to surprise and shocks. Borrowing from ecology, one could say that the precariat live on the edge of catastrophe. They are constantly engaged in a daily struggle to avoid the probability of extinction. While for decades a condition of the global South (Munck 2013), to the extent that precarity is now being embraced as a viable post-social global future, this is a new historic dispensation. As a lived experience, the idea of precarity performs a valuable refocusing role. It shifts attention, for example, from statistical measures of poverty to the action-oriented ethnography of how people survive in conditions of permanent emergency. While a shallow optimism can be derived from contingent declines in estimated levels of ‘extreme’, or $1.90-a-day, global poverty (Collins 2016; Kristof 2017), we have to ask whether the extent to which people are above or below such arbitrary lines is less important than the constant uncertainty and everyday hassle that engulfs them and thereby constantly threatens their social reproduction.
Social reproduction encompasses the need for humans to reproduce as a biological species. Historically defined, it includes birthing and caring for the young, sick and old while maintaining family, friendship and wider community linkages, identities and moralities (Fraser 2016). Without these often unremarked but vital functions, traditionally unpaid and cast as women’s work – although men have always done some – capitalism would not exist. Now unrestrained, the new economy’s conscious aim to drive down wages, extend hours of work and remove social protection has not only exacerbated the crisis of social reproduction, it has revealed afresh capitalism’s dangerous propensity to destroy and consume its own conditions of existence (Crary 2014). This crisis, however, is coterminous with the relentless penetration ‘of media technologies into life through a frenzy to record and store information’ (Halpern 2014b: 224). For many, the advent of data informatics is providential regarding current complexities and logistical challenges. Rather than tackling root problems, however, data informatics harnessed to resilience thinking attempts to maintain the status quo by avoiding or working around obstacles and ground friction. A post-humanitarianism has emerged that, while constantly having to address the consequences of precarity, nonetheless sustains it by dint of trying to make its incumbents resilient to the radical uncertainties of their existence (DFID 2011; Betts & Bloom 2014; Meier 2015).
By no means limited to urbanization, precarity in the global South is associated with the rapid post-colonial growth of slums (Davis 2006). Gaining momentum with the easing of colonial residence restrictions, socialist-inspired economic catch-up and ‘drain the swamp’ rural counterinsurgency techniques, the explosion of urban precarity has largely been the result of economic liberalization (UN-Habitat 2003: 45–6). Austerity in the modern sense was first imposed on the global South at the end of the 1970s by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the form of ‘structural adjustment’. Comprising a mixture of enforced expenditure cuts, economic deregulation, downsizing of public bureaucracies, infrastructure sell-offs and cuts to subsidies in exchange for state debt refinancing, austerity was introduced aggressively in contexts that lacked the cushioning mechanisms that then existed in the North. At the time, it was criticized for its disastrous impact on public welfare (Cornia 1987; Walton & Seddon 1994). Less commented upon, however, was the fact that imposed austerity also encouraged a major expansion of what, in the global South, is variously called the informal sector, the black market or the shadow economy. Labour and entrepreneurial activity were forced out of the formal sector and the household and, having nowhere else to go, into the shadow economy (Duffield 2001).1
The notion of informality captures a raft of production, trading and service activities that, together with the employment opportunities created, operate outside state control and formal tax and regulatory requirements. Lacking legal recognition and statutory protection, workers in the informal sector operate below the radar of economic conventionality (Nordstrom 2000; Roitman 2001). The 1980s saw the expansion, for example, of extensive local–global transborder trade networks across Africa, dealing in all manner of foodstuffs, manufactured items and consumer goods. These extra-legal conveyor belts provided employment and commodity access for millions of men and women (Meagher 1998). At the time, estimates of the size of the shadow economy across much of the global South were as high as 40 to 50 per cent of official GNP (Duffield 2001: 142). Earlier views of the informal sector tended to see it as the epitome of underdevelopment, and hence a transitory phenomenon that was destined to disappear with development. The global trend for casualization and shadow networking, however, has been consistently upward (Jutting & Laiglesia 2009). At the turn of the twenty-first century, after decades of failed NGO and World Bank remedial interventions, the shock of the ‘astonishing size of informal economies’ was initially greeted with alarm (Meagher 2016: 485). UN-Habitat’s unflinching 2003 Global Report on Human Settlements, for example, provided much of the empirical evidence for Mike Davis’ aptly entitled exposé Planet of Slums, published in 2006.
With around a quarter of the world’s population affected, post-colonial urbanization has largely been an exercise in the relentless expansion of urban informality (WEF 2016). In Africa, for example, the number of slum dwellers more than doubled between 1990 and 2014, to around 201 million or over half of the continent’s total urban population (UN-Habitat 2016: 84). While slums are only a rough proxy for precarity, they constitute ‘off-grid’ milieus. Usually situated on marginal land, often low-lying, on slopes or contaminated industrial sites, slum dwellers commonly endure overcrowding, inadequate shelter and insecure tenure coupled with an absence of regular electricity, water or sanitation services, and, at most, basic medical and educational provision (UN-Habitat 2003: 10–12). Given added impetus by the 2008 financial crisis, by the end of the decade, depending on location, estimates of between 70 per cent and 90 per cent of Africa’s non-agricultural labour force, more than half of which is comprised of women, were now in casualized, low-paid vulnerable employment. Moreover, as the OECD declared, by this time most of the 1.7 billion people then defined as extremely poor ‘depend on their labour for survival as it is often their only asset’ (emphasis added, Jutting and Laiglesia 2009: 19). Based on the UN threshold of $1.90 a day, this suggests that a billion or so dispossessed and otherwise assetless people currently earn less than $700 a year. To get a feel for the ball park we are in, this amounts to around $21,000 over a lifetime of active work.
It is important to reach behind such abstract statistics to try to grasp the dynamic at work. Since the 1980s, the global South has been trapped in a process of ‘jobless’ growth, in the sense that the creation of formal employment has either ceased or, relative to demand, is now insignificant. What is new is the dissolving of subsistence and semi-subsistence economies without, contrary to the experience of nineteenth-century Europe, the appearance of a formal alternative. Instead, there is precarity that is, perhaps, best described oxymoronically as active unemployment. As a global phenomenon, informalization and the crisis of social reproduction are reflected in the unprecedented growth in social and economic inequality. Wealth has been transferred globally from the masses to the elites between and within both rich and poor countries (OECD 2008; Piketty 2014). According to Oxfam, the richest 1 per cent have now accumulated more wealth than the rest of the world put together (Oxfam 2016). At the same time, ‘the wealth owned by the bottom half of humanity has fallen by a trillion dollars in the past five years’ (2016: 1).
Much has been made of the statistical decline in extreme global poverty since 1990. However, as argued in chapter 11, the resilience regime has changed what counts as evidence, preferring a narrow empiricism that black-boxes wider social and political considerations. At the same time, apart from being uneven,2 the decrease tends to occlude an important growth in precarity. In 2013, some 767 million people, around 11 per cent of the world’s population, were said to be living in extreme poverty, a drop of around two-thirds compared to the 1990 estimate (World Bank 2016b: 4). This was mainly due to decreases in the populous countries of East and South Asia. Taking China as an example, however, this decline was synonymous with a shift away from cradle-to-grave welfarism in favour of a vast, flexible and precarious labour force, the welfare of which is entirely dependent upon China’s economy continuing to create and maintain industrial jobs (Friedman & Lee 2010).
Due to the effective outlawing of migration, another difference regarding the dissolution of the agrarian economy in the global North is that the actively unemployed in the South are territorially contained. There are no external shores to which this growing excess can, at least legally, be exported. Such immobility serves to highlight another singularity of the global precariat: the vulnerability of its off-grid milieus to catastrophe. Between 1973 and 2002, there was a consistent upward trend in natural disasters, as well as their growing economic and infrastructural impact. At the same time, most of the people killed and injured, more than in all other regions combined, have been from ‘low-income’ countries (UN 2004: 46–8). In 2011, the OECD warned that disasters are likely to become more common and destructive due to the increasing interconnectivity of the global economy and the speed at which people and things now travel (OECD 2011). The openness and vulnerability of the global precariat to hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, famines, health pandemics and conflicts have been repeatedly illustrated in recent decades.
The financial crisis of 2008–9, widely regarded as the worst financial and economic disaster since the 1930s, also demonstrated how the volatility of global markets now impacts directly on the actively unemployed. Capital’s easy ability to pass on to a territorially immobile precariat, abject before the uncertainties of its environment, the unmediated force of adverse economic conditions, shortages and market downturns was clear. While the global South is not fully integrated within the financial circuits involved in the 2008 crisis, associated hikes in energy and food costs produced rapid and widespread increases in hardship. Output temporarily fell into negative figures while estimated levels of global unemployment increased by nearly 30 million to reach 205 million in 2009 (OECD 2011: 1). By this time, around a billion people globally were said to be living in hunger, then the highest figure on record. Much of this insecurity, especially increased energy and food costs, has yet to be reduced. The crisis also gave a further boost to the expansion of informality and the spread of economic vulnerability (2011: 4). These estimates lend credence to the consistent upward trend in the number of people globally receiving long-term humanitarian assistance. Defined as for 8 years or more, with medium-term being 3 to 7 years, in 2015 around 88 per cent of official humanitarian assistance went to long- and medium-term recipients combined, with the bulk going to the former. Moreover, of the twenty largest recipient countries, almost all were long- or medium-term recipients (Development Initiatives 2017: 62).
A final consideration helps to broaden this picture. Besides the sedimentation of long-term refugee camps into urban slums, in terms of the growing off-grid world, the urbicidal wars (Coward 2007) being fought in the Middle East and beyond are relevant. Amplifying precedents set in the Balkans at the end of the 1990s, there has been a massive destruction of urban infrastructure in places like Syria, Iraq and Libya. Given the level of infrastructural destruction and dissolution of human capital, one could argue we are witnessing the effective de-development of once technologically capable industrial societies. With 11 per cent of its former population holding an advanced degree, Syria was once relatively more educated than the USA (UNHCR 2017b). Having over half of its former population displaced and nearly 6 million refugees beyond its borders, most of its hospitals closed or destroyed, its professional classes scattered and catastrophic levels of privation among the remaining populace, like Gaza, Syria is emblematic of the anticipatory condition of a precariat forced to live amid ruined landscapes. With reconstruction estimates in Syria running into tens of billions of dollars, if the recent past is a guide, we will not see a Marshal Plan-style rescue anytime soon. With the effect of conflict and privation being particularly acute in the Middle East and Africa, according to UNHCR the world is witnessing the highest levels of displacement on record. Of an unprecedented 66 million people forced from their homes, over 22 million are refugees (UNHCR 2017b). There are also 10 million stateless people who, denied nationality and therefore basic rights, have no access to services or, even if they could find it, formal employment.
While informalization began first and has spread deepest in the global South (Munck 2013), over the past one or two decades it has also become visible and identified in the North. Indeed, in a reversal of modernist developmental norms, within the third-wave era of electronic globalization, it is the North that is now playing catch-up with the South – catch-up, that is, in terms of the global future of work, at least for the majority, being a precarious and resilience-demanding existence under conditions of permanent economic emergency (Streeck 2011). While there are historical differences, the same post-social logic is reaching and connecting across the mobility barriers that spatially separate the global North and South. In the global North, the casualization of work is associated with the growth of personal debt, at the same time as trade union memberships has shrunk, wages have stagnated, and social mobility declined (Clark & Heath 2015). Some countries, including the USA and UK, are purported to have levels of inequality not seen since the nineteenth century (Roser 2015). It is now on the record that young people have few of the economic life-chances – including predictable employment, housing and pensions – that earlier generations took for granted (Corlett 2017).
That the logic of precarity is now blurring historic global North–South distinctions rests upon a couple of considerations. First, in removing the social protection associated with welfare-Fordism, the new economy brought the North more in line with the more open realities of the global South. Second, the nature of automation in the North is now replicating the ‘jobless’ growth that has also long been a feature of the South.
Periodic waves of automation are the historic hallmark of capitalist development. While often contested and violent, automation in the past invariably displaced workers into new and dynamic sectors of the economy. Surplus agricultural workers entered the expanding factory system in the nineteenth century. As steam gave way to the combustion engine, and gas to electricity, during much of the twentieth century the diversifying lines of Fordist mass production recycled redundant labour while absorbing increasing numbers of women entering the formal economy for the first time. While the latter had a liberating effect, the necessity of the two-wage, or even multi-wage, family soon became the hallmark of modern precarity. Moreover, as suggested in phrases like ‘jobless recovery’ or ‘jobless growth’, concerns have grown in the global North that automation is hollowing out erstwhile professional and middle-class jobs – especially those that depend on logical or algebraic modes of thought. While computers find these jobs easy to replicate, they struggle with low-level sensorimotor skills that rely on mobility and perception (Joshi 2017). Basically, if you want to beat a chess grandmaster, use a computer; to have the pieces cleaned and polished afterwards, find a human. This metaphor gives a clue to the growth of a global precariat.
Automation will not destroy the world of work. It is, however, radically transforming it. The ‘good’ jobs that require logical and algebraic reasoning – jobs that in the past were associated with stability, career structures, pensions and holiday pay – are declining, being restructured, and concentrating at the top. Most of those made redundant by machine learning, or facing the need to have several jobs to survive, have nowhere to go but an expanding mass of occupations and labour processes that, ‘whatever the disparity in wages and skill level among them, have as their common trait that they are technologically stagnant ... they exhibit, unlike capital-intensive manufacturing and agriculture, consistently anaemic productivity growth’ (original emphasis, Smith 2017). Loosely described as the ‘service sector’, and having a marked division between business/professional and consumer/personal activities, precarity is subject to varying degrees of casualization and low pay, and is dispersed throughout the retail, leisure and – not least – auxiliary sectors of global manufacturing and agriculture.
The jobs and occupations associated with precarity will not be automated anytime soon. As Jason Smith argues, to believe that this will happen is to assume that the productivity gains recorded in manufacturing due to automation will be easily repeated in the service sector – in other words, ‘that a sector resistant to technological innovation and perennially registering minimal growth in labour productivity, will be transformed into dynamic, technologically progressive lines of production’ (Smith 2017). To put this another way, it’s like thinking that AI and robots will of themselves suddenly transform caring for the growing ranks of the elderly in the global North, chronically unwell, demented and impoverished, into an activity from which capital can extract.
This does not mean, however, that through AI, the precariat cannot be streamlined – that is, as in the ‘gig’ economy, logistically optimized to be in the right place at the right time 24/7. The global precariat has the appearance of a 21st-century variant of the nineteenth-century servant class (Huws 2015; Boltanski & Esquerre 2016; Smith 2017). While we cannot return to the past, the price of security has been high. Expectations regarding employment protection and what constitutes an acceptable job have been downgraded.
Debates about the changing world of work in the global North commonly focus, often in a celebratory manner, on the growing ‘flexibility’ of labour markets. For the South, on the other hand, emphasis is on the ‘informal’ sector, where, as we shall see, a similarly positive revaluation is underway. While flexibility and informality are spatially and historically different, they are treated here as part of a third-wave electronic globalization that is blurring North–South distinctions. Irrespective of its disastrous effects on social reproduction, there is a coming together around the increasing casualization or liquefaction of labour – that is, the creation of bare labour power for which capital has disavowed the social, reproductive and moral responsibilities it had earlier conceded to the external forces of social democracy (Balibar 2016). Helped by advanced business logistics and Big Data, labour’s new role is to resemble its early nineteenth-century self on a global stage – to be available and responsive 24/7, easily adaptable and interchangeable, while also being disposable and replaceable without recourse (Reid 2006): as liquid as mobile capital turning a tap on or off at any fixed point on the planet. And, since it is in the global South where the largest and most developed informal labour markets and shadow economies are found (LeBaron & Ayers 2013; Meagher 2016), it is here that the future can be discerned.
Unchecked – if not encouraged – by the NGO-led fantastic invasion of the 1980s, the process of peasant dispossession and impoverishment revealed by structural anthropology during the 1970s (see chapter 4) has continued unabated. By the end of the 2000s, active dispossession and informalization had reached a point that would have been inconceivable three or four decades earlier. Namely, the emergence of a global precariat having little more than its bare, territorially entangled physical and cognitive labour to sell on an uncertain global market. Having given up on social protection decades ago, political and economic elites have obliged the precariat to live on the edge of disaster. In fact, since it is regarded as conducive for resilience, they even recommend it (DFID 2011). Of necessity – and at a terrible human cost, however – the precariat has shown what could be called its actually existing resilience. It has forged and been willing to defend extensive local–global networks and adaptive institutions necessary to support its own social reproduction (Duffield 2001). Despite several decades of ‘jobless growth’, and with youth unemployment averaging around 40 per cent to 50 per cent, Africa’s shadow economies still manage to add some 8 million souls a year to the actively unemployed (Meagher 2016: 485). It is this adaptable, autonomous vitality that a libertarian business sector, wanting to keep overheads down and options high, now seeks to feed on.
Rather than assuming, as in the past, that shadow economies will disappear with development, the sheer size and urban density of the global precariat have forced a rethink. The way that informality is understood, or the ‘truth’ of informality, has changed. Around the mid 2,000s, views on shadow networking were refracted through the rapidly emerging resilience paradigm (Evans & Reid 2014). By this time, as a means of mitigating disaster risk, the UN was advocating the importance for people in the global South to understand that they are now responsible for their own survival and should ‘not simply wait for governments to find and provide solutions’ (UN 2004: 189). The precariat, however, had already been doing this for decades. Helped by the resilience perspective, past concerns over informality have been replaced by a new and positive developmental imaginary. Not only are shadow economies inevitable, the fact of surviving and expanding against the odds suggests that the precariat has qualities of innovation and autopoietic self-reproduction that a crowdsourcing, platform capitalism can now, quite literally, capitalize on.
Proposals for what Mike Davis (2006: 79–80, 179) has called ‘boot strap capitalism’, in which informality has figured as the Third World’s potential deus ex machina, have been around since the 1970s. With the rise of the resilience regime, however, and the spread of mobile telephony, the idea of a populist capitalism from below has been technologically reinvigorated. Published in 2006, an influential statement reflecting this rejuvenation is C. K. Prahalad’s (2006) The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits. Prahalad’s basic proposition is that we should stop thinking of the poor as a burden, or as victims. Instead, if we ‘start recognizing them as resilient and creative entrepreneurs and value-conscious consumers, a whole new world of opportunity will open up’ (2006: 1). Bottom of the Pyramid or BOP economics, together with its related ideas of ‘inclusive capitalism’ or ‘inclusive development’, highlight the potential value of harnessing this singular low-cost reproductive infrastructure (Meagher 2016).
Orangi Town slum in Karachi, Pakistan, for example, has an estimated population of 2.4 million. Tired of waiting for the authorities to install a proper sanitation system, the residents organized themselves and, by hand, buried sewerage pipes along most of the slum’s 8,000 streets. Dharavi in Mumbai, India, houses around a million slum dwellers and, through its tens of thousands of small businesses, provides many services to the city. Its shadow economy has an estimated $1 billion annual turnover. Sited on prime real estate, its residents have up until now resisted official attempts to develop the area (WEF 2016). Rather than fearing informality, shadow milieus can self-organize and reproduce, while providing productive services and low-end mass consumer markets, all within challenging environments. This adaptive vitality now qualifies the informal sector as both a potential development partner and a business opportunity. As Kate Meagher tells us: ‘A growing literature on youth unemployment in Africa now argues that what is needed is greater integration of Africa’s expanding informal labour markets into local and global value chains in order to increase demand and income opportunities for the vast stores of under-employed labour building up in African economies’ (2016: 485).
The aim is no longer to graduate the informal sector to membership of the conventional tax-paying economy. Such formalization would cancel out the shadow economy’s post-social resilience when this is the autopoietic quality that is attractive to capital because, for the first time, below-the-radar activities can be revealed and managed through data informatics and remote sensing. In relation to cash transfer, for example, inclusive development envisages using intermediaries like NGOs, social enterprises or labour brokers to go the organizational ‘last mile’ in integrating informal production, welfare and consumption networks within formal business circuits (Lavinas 2013). In this way, new and hybrid business infrastructures are emerging out of the autopoietic shadow communities created by the precariat to secure their own reproduction. At the same time, this positive orientation towards informality signals a change in the spatial organization of international capitalism. Basically, third-wave globalization is moving out of the enclave and special economic zones into the general milieu of global precarity.
Instead of seeing the emergence of a global precariat as an unacceptable affront and evidence of the bankruptcy of capitalism, ideas like ‘inclusive development’ or BOP economics use a different political compass. The implication is that precarity arose independently, unconnected or – at most – from neglect or lack of attention. It has sprung from the ground as a new object of concern. Now that the shadow economy has been rehabilitated through the lens of resilience, however, rather than the negative talk of ‘poverty’ or ‘victims’, the new emphasis is to celebrate the life-affirming vibrancy purportedly revealed – especially a vitality, inventiveness or resilience that is drawn out and enhanced by new technology. We have called this the techno-pastoral aesthetic.
This aesthetic is a contemporary developmental inflection of the ‘progressive neoliberalism’ (Fraser 2017) outlined in chapter 2. Namely, the fusion of demands for market freedom, rights, choice and authenticity with a Hayekian neoliberalism that, rather than around Homo economicus, is fashioned towards the distracted and cognitively challenged Homo inscius (Spencer 2016a). Chapter 5 broadened the idea of progressive neoliberalism in relation to the NGO-led fantastic invasion of the 1980s. Developmentalism resides in the various relations of care, inclusion and giving voice that interconnect progressives with the Homo inscius of contemporary development. Regarding the fantastic invasion, through the project form, progressive neoliberalism was instrumental in the valorization of community mutuality and the relations of social reproduction for the marketplace, so to speak. Today, it is playing a similar anticipatory role, this time regarding the incorporation of precarity. As argued in the next chapter, connectivity has enabled a moving beyond the project form towards the incorporation of precarious life generally within the circuits of global capitalism.
Progressive neoliberalism has aesthetically appropriated the shadow networks of precarity in the global South in the form of a romanticized poverty bucolic. While this aesthetic is examined further in the next chapter, here it is sufficient to note how the informal sector is idealized as a living embodiment of indigenous knowledge, local management practices and active community mutuality, including making space for and valuing women (Becker 2004). Moreover, the very act of avoiding conventional rules and regulations qualifies shadow networking as a surrogate resistance to ‘neoliberalism’ itself (Jackson 2016). The techno-pastoral aesthetic invests precarity with vibrancy, authenticity and hope. Through this progressive reinscription, informality reappears as an eager and eligible development and business partner. Consider, for example, UNDP’s homely appraisal of NGO-assisted informality as a low-cost welfare infrastructure for an inclusive capitalism:
A community is more than the sum of its parts. Where poverty prevails, formal laws and regulations are often less effective than the informal rules that communities set and enforce. Such informal rules can make inclusive business models viable. And a community can help its members to help each other – for example, by sharing resources, by co-operating to provide common goods (such as wells, mills or schools) and by supplying an infrastructure for savings, credit or insurance mechanisms. Businesses can count on these communal processes to fill gaps in the markets of the poor. (UNDP 2008: 9)
Apart from an undercurrent of paternalism, there is a peculiar bipolarity that haunts such bucolic depictions of poverty. Given that precarity is now a global phenomenon, any celebration of informality in the global South should, by implication, also resonate with casualization in the North. The techno-pastoral aesthetic, however, doesn’t translate. At the time of writing it is difficult to imagine that UNDP could publicly lobby international business regarding, for example, the free-rider attractiveness of the UK’s expanding gig economy, pointing out, perhaps, its flexibility, lack of unionization, acceptance of zero-hour contracts and, importantly, that community-run food banks can be counted on to ‘fill gaps’ when remuneration or the benefit system fail. This ‘lost in translation’ quality is symptomatic of an enduring spatial psychosis that appears to be intrinsic to developmentalism. A lordly bipolarity presides over a situation where what’s inappropriate or difficult in the global North, like the anticipatory structural adjustment of the 1980s, is necessary or doable in the South.
Linnet Taylor, in describing the 2013 Internet Governance Forum, gives an example of this psychosis in action among its participants. Taking place in the wake of the Snowden leaks, concerns about data protection and internet privacy in Europe and the USA were important talking points and high on the conference agenda. However, whereas, ‘90% of the discussion at the forum referred to big data as a tool for surveillance … the thread of debate that focused on developing countries alone, treated it as a way to “observe” the poor in order to remedy poverty’ (emphasis added, Taylor 2013; also see Pirlot 2014).
Developmentalism combines a paternalistic, techno-pastoral aesthetic with the relative licence that the global South affords. This should not be confused with ‘Eurocentrism’ (Sabaratnam 2013). The progressive neoliberalism underlying the techno-pastoral is adamantly cosmopolitan: this is its strength. As during the colonial period, the post-colony remains a site of the boomerang effect. Its lack of regulations, pervasive state and business corruption and, importantly, its weak data and privacy laws (Hosein & Nyst 2013), besides being the conditions of informality itself, mean that the global South remains a site of commercial and humanitarian anticipation and experimentation (Jacobsen 2015). There are several factors, however, that are specific to the moment. The rapid penetration of mobile telephony and its associated data informatics promises to do what conventional economic regulatory tools and policing methods never could – that is, to expose and bring the flows, exchanges and networks of a now-surveilled precariat into the light of day. Moreover, this uncovering and exposure is not to curb informality, or graduate it to the formal sector. These aims have now disappeared. The current intention is to capture precarity, and to encourage and exploit its disruptive beyond-the-law potential.
The next chapter examines how smart technology levels downwards into the social fabric, enabling capitalism to move out of the special economic zone to embrace and incorporate precarity as a whole.