The group started through the efforts of Guilherme Cavalcante Silva and Juan Ortiz Freuler. Guilherme arrived at dependency theory thanks to his work on technological development and policy in Latin America. Juan came on board due to the parallels between the theory and the Non-Aligned Tech Movement, an initiative for the technological self-determination of non-aligned countries (about which he has previously written here). We meet online once a month to discuss texts proposed by the participants. I remember that during our first meeting, we discussed the scope of “dependency.”

Popularized in the 1960s and marginalized after the late 1970s, dependency theory argues that the economies of certain countries are conditioned by the growth and expansion of another economy to which they are subordinate. This is the definition given by Brazilian economist Theotonio Dos Santos in Imperialismo y Dependencia (Imperialism and Dependency) (1978), a massive work of almost 600 pages that we reviewed in one session. Organized in a center-periphery scheme, the countries at the center define the conditions for growth, while the countries on the periphery grow only “as a reflection” of that expansion. The result for the latter is underdevelopment. Therefore, development and underdevelopment are two sides of the same coin. 

Dependency relations can be observed in the unequal exchange between the center and the periphery, in the concentration of technology in the centers, and in the international division of labor, that is, in the role that each country plays in production processes. What was once a division between manufacturing countries and countries producing raw materials and agricultural products is now a division between countries that produce digital technologies and those that manufacture them or, in the worst-case scenario, constitute merely dependent users. This is the most recent phase of dependency described by Dos Santos: the technological monopoly of multinational corporations from dominant nations that perpetuates relations of domination and subordination.
 
“Dependency is a movie, not a photograph.” This is how Raúl Zambrano, an ICT policy advisor for almost 20 years at the UNDP and a living encyclopedia on dependency literature, explained it at a meeting. He was referring to the fact that centers are constantly shifting and peripheries readjust themselves according to those movements, a process that sometimes involves growth, but always in a subordinate manner.

In the group, we discussed several cases that illustrate this dynamic. At first glance, Taiwan, a peripheral country that has become a successful global hardware manufacturing center, seems to defy the cycle of dependency. However, when we review the indicators, we see that the dominant economies continue to grow at a much faster rate in the same sector. In other words, the periphery is moving, but the center has already overtaken it. The case of Mercado Libre, which we analyzed at Juan's suggestion, points in the same direction: although it is a leading platform in the region and develops advanced technological capabilities, it relies on Amazon Cloud to carry out these operations, unable to develop its own infrastructure. 
 
This phenomenon is also reflected in labor arrangements of the new phase of dependency. In Laboratories of Digital Economies: Latin America as a Site of Struggles and Experimentation, an article we read thanks to Guilherme's recommendation, Rafael Grohmann argues that centers use the periphery as a laboratory to test new forms of labor exploitation. According to Rafael, who accompanied us in that session, informal and precarious work, the norm in countries such as Brazil, has been exploited and reinforced by dominant digital platforms as the ideal labor arrangement to maximize capital accumulation. Rebranded as gig work, the model leaves the laboratory. 

Data labeling for artificial intelligence is a good example of this process: an activity that connects periphery workers with the centers and incorporates them into the global value chain, but under working conditions that reproduce dependency. Ruy Mauro Marini, a thinker in the Marxist tradition of dependency whom we read on another occasion, already had a name for it: super-exploitation, understood as the remuneration of the workforce below its value, the intensification of work, or the extension of the working day. This is a central feature of labor in dependent countries. Super-exploitation reduces the domestic market by restricting consumption and discouraging the transfer of technologies that could increase productivity. Yet another way of achieving accumulation.
 
Where to go then? For Dos Santos, dependent countries have two paths: maneuver within the alternatives allowed by their own situation of dependence, or change the situation qualitatively to open up new possibilities for action. In the group, we have explored both routes. In our most recent session, for example, Miriam Millán from the Center for Digital Culture in Mexico introduced anti-colonial and anti-imperialist criticism of technology as a strategy of resistance. Referencing Frantz Fanon, we talked about the Algerian revolutionaries who appropriated the tools of the master, in this case radio, to put them at the service of their struggle. Something similar seems to be attempted by Latam-GPT, a Latin American language model built on Meta's Llama 3, but designed to understand our context and respond to the needs of the region. Will that be enough?