Precarious Privilege: Globalism, Digital Biopolitics, and Tech-Workers’ Movements in India

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on Indian tech-workers’ views on labour and social movements in the context of precarity, digital globalism, and the neoliberal transformations of the culture and economy. Based on interviews of twenty information technology (IT) workers in India, conducted in 2018, I found that they inhabit the liminal spaces between precarity and privilege. I call it the precarity of liminality. This ambiguous status, combined with the assumption of white-collar prestige, prevents tech-workers from defending their labour rights. Indeed, even the trade unions formed exclusively for tech-workers are constrained by their members’ assumption of privilege. I hold that this is the case because the neoliberal market has transformed the local underpinnings of culture into a homogeneous simulacrum and codified performance, so that even the cultural diversity of these workers fails to resist their co-option into the global logic of labour and capital.