Microsoft’s drug dealer: digital disruption and a corporate conversion of informal improvisation

Abstract

Over the last three decades, technology companies have promoted the “disruptive” potentials of the information age. Brazilian favelas (shantytowns) provide one of the most popular examples used to describe how digital disruption applies to informal urban communities. Favelas have been mapped by Google and surveilled by an IBM Smart City while hundreds of well-branded digital inclusion programs present themselves as alternatives to an informal economy and an illicit drug trade. However, corporate narratives of digital disruption fail to account for what scholars describe as an “insurgency” and practices of improvisation (gato, jeitinho, or gambiarra) found in the favela. Describing a process of “converting” regulatory fines into well-branded social projects, this article provides an ethnographic account of a Microsoft-funded documentary about an ex-drug trafficker turned digital educator. Considering the role of ethnography in an urban “gray zone,” this article asks: what techniques do global technology corporations use to take symbolic ownership of local knowledge? What does the dissonance between corporate and community-based narratives reveal about alternative forms of creativity in the digital age? And, how can we characterize the formalizing potentials of digital disruption in Latin America?.