Modulation and cibernetic axiomatization as neoliberal individualization devices: a study on the use of WhatsApp by brazilian truck drivers
In this study, we propose to investigate the political-cultural transformations that the mass use of social platforms has brought about and how this use has established modes of control by various political and economic agents through the algorithmic and datafied instrumentalization of users' actions. Therefore, we suggest the use of WhatsApp by Brazilian truck drivers as the focus of analysis. The choice for this study clipping is justified by the importance that the platform has in the forms of political organization, in the means of work organization and in entertainment and communication among workers in the category. This deep insertion of the application use by truck drivers, together with the relevance of road transport for the national economy and the identification of these workers with the extreme right political group popularly known as “bolsonaristas”, makes this sociotechnical network that links truck drivers and WhatsApp a privileged object of investigation to observe agency and influence relationships emerging with the phenomenon of platformization. We will argue that these processes take place through a cybernetic axiomatization system that we will characterize as neoliberal individualization devices. These devices produce manipulable neoliberal subjects for marketing, political and social purposes through algorithmic, datafied and psychophysiological modulation of users. We aim to demonstrate that this system of individualization is a technology of capitalistic axiomatization, in an elaboration that unites the definitions of the concept given by Deluze & Guattari and Simondon, structuring the operations of human desire together with the algorithmic sociotechnical operations of digital technologies to harness human agency to capitalist machinic agency in its neoliberal phase. For this research, we will use a method that mixes the monitoring of WhatsApp groups of truck drivers, the study of official documents offered by WhatsApp, the analysis of the company's algorithm patents, along with semi-structured interviews with truck drivers, producing a dense description that transversalizes the technical operations, discourses on technology and actual communication practices in these spaces. With this, we intend to demonstrate the technical-social structures involved in power relations in contemporarity of social platforms.