The Silence of Interconnected Technologies: Internet of Things and Ghost Infrastructures in Brazilian Innovation Projects

• In Event: Ghosts of Modern Futures Past – I

Abstract

In developing countries like Brazil, technology has always been identified with visions of a future in which it is possible to achieve economic advantages in the international division of labor. Considering the multilayered and heterogeneous aspects of information technology infrastructures this paper is an attempt to understand how Brazil, generally characterized by greater disparities in income distribution, internet access and patterns of consumption, with important consequences in how technology is producing difference, is implementing the “National Plan on Internet of Things”, a component of a broader program, the “Brazilian Strategy for Digital Transformation” funded by the public national fund for innovation. The focus here will be on the disjunction between the existent broken networked infrastructures, that barely cover 50% of the national territory, and IoT technologies being imported or developed in the country through public investment, a policy motivated by a collective held and desirable future of becoming developed, a future that never arrived but is always in our present. The objective is to destabilize naturalized understandings of technological innovation and their potential transformative effects in both our everyday lives and the politics of development, exposing the interactions through which IoT choices are being modulated when translated to Brazilian different and messy realities, and fostering a ghostly presence-absence. The proposed methodology is based on an infrastructure ethnography in order to trace networks and social relations associated with the many IoT layers, without omitting the social and political struggles that emerge among the many technological projects and competing imaginaries.

Author

• Cristiana de Oliveira Gonzalez, State University of Campinas