All the Work Without the Worker; All the Slaughter Sans the Soldier:
Migrant and Remote Labor, and the future of Virtual Warfare.
Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer details the lives of three workers in the all-too-near-future and the ethical questions raised regarding treatment of migrant laborers, and imagines what virtual warfare might look like if allowed to continue. This essay aims to synthesize commonly held views about migrant labor in capitalist societies at large and the ethics this entails, and also to historically contextualize Mexican migrant workers in America in relation to Memo’s struggles and experiences as a migrant laborer in Sleep Dealer. This paper also hopes to bridge the gap between the film’s portrayal of virtual warfare and remote employment and the parallels to modern America, and to delve into the ethical issues that arise from working as a virtual combatant. This paper will conclude with speculation on how the virtualization of labor serves to eliminate common instances of everyday resistance through panoptic surveillance, and touches on the believability of the future of migrant work depicted in Sleep Dealer.
Capitalist societies and the people residing therein have a historical habit of holding many negative views on migrant laborers -that is, laborers from another country performing work in a country or place that is not considered to strictly be their homeland. Views characteristic of a society employing migrant labor may be observed not only in Western and American cultures, but even in societies found in other -typically considered to be under-developed- corners of the world, such as the migrant laborers in early Rhodesia discussed in Maurice Vambe’s essay titled ‘Aya Mahobo’: migrant labour and the cultural semiotics of Harare (Mbare) African township, 1930–1970. One can see that the Western world is not the sole perpetrator in the classification of the often mistreated and abused migrant workers as “Others”, or even as people who are thought to be stealing something away from the more permanent inhabitants -often viewing the migrants as predatory job-thieves- of the land that employs said migrant workers . In fact, it is easy for one to contend that both the mistreatment and the adversarial perception of migrant laborers is a symptom of any capitalist society, and that the examples Vambe gives of African mistreatment of migrant laborers in Rhodesia lets us in on an example of a non-Western society’s struggles on the topic of migrant labor. Although capitalism at large is arguably inherently problematic with its many, troubling symptoms and implementations, the shortcomings of capitalism in practice is better suited for another essay. Instead, the aim will be to show what life for a migrant worker in Rhodesia is like, the relation to Sleep Dealer’s portrayal of migrant work, and how these examples relate to firsthand experiences of actual Mexican migrant workers in Southern Illinois that are detailed in Warren Anderson’s Oral History and Migrant Wage Labor: Sources of Narrative Distortion.
The first hill we must climb to arrive at Anderson’s essay is that of a Rhodesian persuasion. As in Western capitalist cultures, “the tendency [in Zimbabwe] has been to consider African urban migrants as ‘residents…that…are not truly urbanized’, or not truly belonging to the urban people residing there” (Vambe 356). Despite actually living in an urban environment, these new migrants are automatically classified as different or not completely urbanized, making them an “Other” to the people who are already urbanized. They are considered to still be in rural frame of mind, and “Africans have to become totally sequestered from the rural land for them to be qualified as urbanized” (Vambe 356). This presents a strange view on migrant workers in Rhodesia, because many of them have to reside in urban centers in order to work. Residing in an urban center in many ways still is not enough to urbanize these migrant laborers, because the urban centers were not considered home. The migrant workers in fact “became urbanized to the extent that they still went to the rural areas that they called home…even when this rural space was ironically, a settler creation” (Vambe 356), and therefore could never be considered fully urbanized. This has strong parallels to the make-shift tin-house in which Memo, from the film Sleep Dealer, is forced to hang his hat and sleep. Casting the urban, working-class “Others” to the slums outside of Tijuana in the film serves to keep them from falling under the false belief that they were actual, full-fledged members of the city they worked in. The distance from house to job keeps the migrant worker ever-aware of the physical distance not only that they must travel to perform their work, but also underlines the distance between them and the actual residents of the city in a social context. “Urban African migrants…found some aspects of colonialism, such as its material culture and education, seductive, while the exploitative dimension of colonialism was deemed repulsive” (Vambe 357), just as the lure of money entices Memo in Sleep Dealer to travel to Tijuana as a migrant laborer, while the illicit way in which the necessary “nodes” he needed to have implanted in order to do any form of migrant work is most certainly shown to be repulsive to Memo and others. They proceed with the implants, however, because the money they sought was more valuable to them than their own bodily well-being in combination with desperation to earn a living for their families far away.
As with the examples that Vambe provides us with African migrant workers, Anderson’s essay sheds light on the analogous treatment of Mexican migrant laborers in America. However, counter to the expectation of African migrant workers in Rhodesia to urbanize themselves, Southern Illinois is very rural as well as destitute, and Mexican migrant workers are in no way expected to “urbanize” and conform to society, because the societies located in this region and the society the migrants come from, Cherán, Mexico, “have thus been formed into a migration partnership by the regular movement of the natives of Cherán” (Anderson 3), and the interactions between these two places are “rich with familial, social, personal, economic, and gossip ties” (Anderson 3) to the point that the migrant workers, although not officially recognized as American citizens, can lead a fractured sort of double-life within either and both of these two places. However, due to the fact that these Mexican migrant workers do not necessarily have proper permissions to work in Southern Illinois, they are placed in a position prone to exploitation. Anderson talks about the difficulty in getting firsthand accounts from these migrant people, and in one example Anderson’s friend, after answering questions for an interview with a St. Louis newspaper without the assurance of anonymity that was published with his real name, the migrant-laboring friend “feared his boss’s reaction to what had been published…as none of his family had any documentation, this put him in a precarious situation” (Anderson 14). Strange that, even without proper permissions and documentation, Anderson’s friend was somehow able to find work. This is obviously illegal, but one wouldn’t be surprised to find that the friend could be deported without pay if caught, while the infringing employer may only get a slap on the wrists or some equally disproportionate reprisal. One scenario hugely displaces the vulnerable migrant, while being a minor nuisance to the perpetrating and more-powerful employer that may suffer no greater harm than being short a worker or two for the day. This no doubt results in lower wages for the migrant worker that assumes the majority of the risk involved in their employment, and one way Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer attempts to repudiate this assumption of risk is by preventing the migrant worker from ever coming into the country where their labor is needed in the first place. Instead, Memo and others like him, can plug themselves into a network and perform work remotely, so that the American corporations can keep labor costs down to the smallest possible percentage, without having to actually quarter the undesirable workers within the U.S. borders.
Sleep Dealer provides a creative prediction as to what advances in virtual-reality technology might mean for a Mexican migrant laborer in the future. With the advent of the internet and technological innovations in computers and video games, this future seems increasingly believable and may almost be considered an inevitability of human technological progression. This is seen today in the expansion of remote jobs such as working from home for a call center, in the prevalence online educators (often referred to as distance educators), and even in drone-operators of the U.S. military. Today, one may sit comfortably in their pajamas at home in Arlington, Texas while simultaneously delivering English lessons to children in Hong-Kong. This is actually advantageous in many ways both for the company hiring these English teachers and for the employee, because the employee need not uproot themselves from their homes, nor do the employers need to foot the bill for the English teachers’ transition to Hong-Kong, saving time, money, and headache for both parties. Due to the intersection of this convenience and cost-efficiency, virtual work is becoming increasingly normalized in American as well as other Western cultures. Much of the work depicted in the fictional film Sleep Dealer is done remotely, and does not require the employee’s physical presence to carry out the duties of the virtual job that may be located hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Another form of work shown to us in Sleep Dealer is from the character Rudy, who works for a privately contracted military company as a remote drone operator. This is no futuristic conception; drone operators exist in America today and are used in much the same way that Rudy uses drones: to destroy enemies of America and to act as executioner for private military contractors. How is this normalized in American culture? Allison Rowland’s essay Life-Saving Weapons: The Biolegitimacy of Drone Warfare sheds light on the way the U.S. Government makes virtual more readily-digestible to the average citizen. As with Memo’s father in Sleep Dealer being labelled as an “aqua-terrorist” in the official justification of his extrajudicial killing by Rudy and his remotely-piloted drone, so too are the people Americans execute with drone strikes labeled as terrorists to keep the operator and the average citizens’ conscience clear. Beyond labeling the “Others” as terrorists, “biolegitimacy is the rhetorical strategy through which the Obama administration attempt[ed] to gain public acquiescence for it controversial drone campaign” (Rowland 603). The U.S. governments argue that the reason for drone implementation is of a life-saving nature. The lives being saved, however, are those of American soldiers because they are no longer in direct danger of the conflicts being waged virtually, not to mention the money saved in transportation of human soldiers abroad. Everything about drone warfare is excused through weak arguments of cost efficiency, and “not only do drones cost less than ‘boots on the ground’ but also they can be deployed faster and without the logistical problems of housing and supplying servicepersons, especially in remote areas” (Rowland 605) makes one think of virtual warfare as a no-brainer. Despite the growing number of drone-strikes and civilian casualties, “…official White House rhetorics continually rehearse a discourse of saving lives” (Rowland 607) in order to remain under a positive light in the public eye. Rudy in Sleep Dealer is broadcast on live TV performing the duties of a drone operator, and is perceivably lauded by the public as heroic and even cool, much as Youtube videos today of drone strikes are promoted as cool and heroic. Not only are they capable of assassinations, but drones are promoted as devices with inherent and untapped utilitarian potential, and, even today, “drones deliver pizzas, dry cleaning and engagement rings, and one day will drop Amazon purchases on your doorstep” (Brady 119). The frequency of drones in American culture leads to the normalization of their usage, and dampens the sense that extrajudicial drone strikes are immoral due to the familiarity Americans have with the technology.
Ethical concerns in regards to virtual work as well as the virtual warfare conducted by the United States’ unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones) today are numerous. In order to maintain the mental health of remote drone operators carrying out drone strikes, many preventative steps are taken by the military-industrial complex. “The drone operator’s target is called an Object, and given a code name, a carceral procedure which replaces the person’s individuality with an institutional identity” (Brady 125) is a way in which operator is distanced from target, both physically and ideally, and aims to help combat feelings of guilt that may arise from the murder of one’s own kind. Unlike Sleep Dealer, where Rudy sees the face of his target, Memo’s father, while operating his drone, specific measures are taken by the military to prevent this from happening with hopes to preserve the mental health of the operator. “Increasingly, drone operators are said to be suffering from PTSD” (Brady 129), a trend arising probably from the finality of the strike in which the targeted person is completely destroyed at ease and without potential consequence for the drone operator, whereas a soldier may aim high, intentionally missing enemies of the state to protect their own conscience.
Meeting the virtualization of labor in-stride is the inevitability of the panoptic surveillance of the virtual laborer, obliterating many opportunities for everyday resistance one might observe in present-day laborers. One possible form of everyday resistance given in Sleep Dealer is exhibited by Memo’s father throwing a rock at the dam that dammed his ability to earn a living and provide for his family, a small action with no consequence, unlike most forms of everyday resistance where there is an intended consequence at the expense of the employer. A plausible form of everyday resistance in Sleep Dealer may be seen when Memo falls asleep at work, and the remote robot he is controlling plummets to its own implied destruction. However, this is not because Memo desires to waste company capital, but rather due to his lack of sleep from working long hours. But one might draw the conclusion that, if never fired for sleeping on the job, a remote worker might exhibit everyday resistance in the destruction of company property by perhaps pretending to fall asleep and plummeting the work robots to the ground in order to destroy them. The panoptic surveillance that comes with virtual labor and remote drone strikes removes a likelihood of everyday resistance, and even Rudy, a remote drone operator in Sleep Dealer, is unable to partake in true everyday resistance. Rudy uses his drone to destroy the dam that inhibits the growth of Memo’s family, but in doing so cannot return home to America nor continue his life as a drone operator, making this form of resistance not that of the everyday variety present in, say, a factory employee purposefully (and hopefully discreetly) sabotaging the machine they operate, because the factory employee may still be allowed to return to work the following day whereas Rudy is forced to start his life anew in the small village outside Tijuana.
Given the views of migrant workers commonplace to capitalist societies in America and abroad, the increasing usage of virtual labor as a means of sustenance, and taking into account the White House’s campaign to normalize its increased use of drone warfare in lieu of actual combatants, Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer does not appear to be too far off from the state of things currently going on in America. Apart from the implementation of nodes to connect one’s mind to a network where they may be used as virtual laborers, Sleep Dealer seems entirely ordinary by today’s standards and appears to be a spot-on, albeit sometimes exaggerated, critique on modern America as it is experienced today. The future portrayed in the film seems all-too-likely in the age of virtual labor and remote warfare that we live in at present.
Works Cited
Anderson, Warren D. “Oral History and Migrant Wage Labor: Sources of Narrative Distortion.” Oral History Review: Journal of the Oral History Association, vol. 28, no. 2, 2001, pp. 1–20. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2002160757&site=ehost-live.
Brady, Andrea. “Drone Poetics.” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, vol. 89-90, 2017, pp. 116–136. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2017394203&site=ehost-live.
Rivera, Alex, Director. Sleep Dealer, Film. Likely Story and This is That Productions, 2008.
Rowland, Allison L. “Life-Saving Weapons: The Biolegitimacy of Drone Warfare.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs, vol. 19, no. 4, 2016, pp. 601–627. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2017871163&site=ehost-live.
Vambe, Maurice Taonezvi. “‘Aya Mahobo’: Migrant Labour and the Cultural Semiotics of Harare (Mbare) African Township, 1930–1970.” African Identities, vol. 5, no. 3, 2007, pp. 355–369. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2008395210&site=ehost-live.