Reimagining digital inclusion through platform economies in Brazil

This article considers how community-led organisations in Brazil are reformulating debates surrounding digital inclusion in the face of the consolidation of platform capitalism. It does this through exploration of how two NGOs cultivate spaces for exchange and dialogue in rural and urban areas of the country’s Southeast. The first, SILO, works with communities in rural, peripheral and protected areas to respond to local challenges using art, science and technology, while the second, AfroGames, offers esports training to disadvantaged young people across the city of Rio de Janeiro. Building on discussions with those behind each NGO in March 2024, the article examines how both organisations reproduce and break from large-scale state and civil society efforts to promote social, cultural and digital inclusion in Brazil in the early 2000s. A key contention of the article is that contemporary efforts to promote digital inclusion in Brazil cannot be divorced from territorially rooted mobilisations for social justice. At the same time, it attends to key differences between the work of the NGOs analysed and the digital inclusion efforts of the early 2000s, for example, as regards their approach to free and open culture and the potential of the video games industry. The article argues that the work of both NGOs shows how, in the hands of communities and activists, even expressions of digital culture widely associated with platform economies, capital accumulation and individualism, such as retail platforms and esports, can be turned to provocative and emancipatory ends. It concludes by considering how the work of both NGOs contributes to recent research exploring the complexities of how platforms land in Latin America through their focus on how sociocultural practices and platforms intersect, reworking the strategies of Brazil’s digital inclusion movement and probing of the limits of autonomy in an era of pervasive platform capitalism.