Pivots

Abstract This essay for the “Technologies of War” special section of CSSAAME reflects on the relationship between tech worlds and Dalit activism. The author deploys the idea of the “pivot” and the “swerve” to undertake a two-part analysis. First, the essay describes the use of the tech pivot to describe a movement to produce value that has been a particular, and particularly lauded, feature of data-centric entrepreneurial cultures, namely, the ability to move from one project to the next and to experiment with different modalities of data. These tech pivots allow tech companies to experiment on populations even while they also allow them to evade responsibility for the violence done by means of these experiments. Second, the essay discusses through lavani, a dance form practiced by Dalit women in Maharashtra and discussed in the work of Shailaja Paik, another kind of pivot. This pivot allows Dalit activists to dance toward and away from tech companies in an attempt to change tech company policy. The author argues that while the pivot and the swerve are deployed by theorists such as Gilles Deleuze to open up different modes of understanding history, the pivot also responds to a much longer set of Dalit activist tactics.