Re: <nettime> Brazil: staring into the abyss

On Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 9:47 AM Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com> wrote:

I just spent ten days in the city and region of Sao Paulo, talking
mainly to artists, academics, activist associated with right-to-the-city
and indigenous movements. This is the limited impression I got from
this. Please correct, add, deepen it with more substantial information
and knowledge.

The mood is, little surprise, very dark. Everyone expects heavy waves of
repression coming down, leading to the destruction of entire sectors of
the society and the environment. The signs are everywhere, not just
Bolsonaro's rhetoric during the election campaign, but all levels of
society are already shifting. On the legal front, major social movement,
such as the Landless Movement (MST) and indigenous movements have
already been, or are on the cusp of being, declared terrorist
organizations, removing what ever protection under the law existed and
whatever restraints the security apparatus might have had before.

The ministry of the environment will be integrated into the ministry of
agriculture, the ministry of labor is supposed to be closed down. It's a
Polyanian "disembedding" of labor and land.

Street level violence is also picking up. Even in a relatively peaceful,
well-to-do university town outside Sao Paulo, which still voted 70%
Bolsonaro, a prominent gay performer was murdered in his home, within
one week of the election. To the people I talked to, this was not a
co-incidence.

What makes the mood particularly dark is that most people still have
memory of the previous dictatorship in Brazil, which lasted particularly
long, 21 years, from 1964 to 1985. Memories of people suddenly
disappearing, of repression and of stiffing cultural climate, are still
fresh, at least for those who still have a sense of history, which is
the minority.

The coalition that brought Bolsonaro to power is mix of the old
oligarchy, corporate interests set on privatization (which will likely
happen at an extreme scale), middle classes who saw the Lula and Dilma
presidency as a threat to their status by creating social mobility for
workers and peasants, but not improving services for them.

Also, there is a feeling of deep institutional rot, mainly in form of
largest-scale corruption, which not only tarred the Workers Party, but
all but wiped out the established right-wing parties. In addition, very
real concerns with security and violent crime. And, I think very
important, were the evangelical churches that promote an extremely
conservative social agenda. They mobilized the masses and Bolsonaro's
first TV interview after the election was on one of their channels

About 30% of the electorate chose not to vote, even though it's
mandatory, and this is interpreted as being mainly those who were
against Bolsonaro but couldn't bring themselves to supporting a
candidate from the Workers Party.

A major aspect of the election campaign was that it was almost
exclusively done over social media, Whatsapp in particular. There was a
total absence of what one might call classic public discourse in which
the different sides would have encountered each other directly.

Bolsonaro is not an impressive figure, if you see him on TV, and he is
prone to gaffs, so he refused any televised debates and the stabbing in
early September played so much into his hand that quite a few are
convinced that it was fake.

The medium of choice was Whatsapp, mainly because it's pre-installed on
most smart phone and can be accessed without a data plan. So, for many
people, the Internet is Whatsapp and the "full internet" is for rich
people. This reminds me of the "basic internet" that Facebook wanted to
bring to India, that is free access to nothing but Facebook. While they
didn't succeed in India, they succeeded in Brazil, by being much less
upfront but working with the existing providers, basically subsidizing
them for free access (if I understand this correctly).

The Bolosonaro Campaign reportedly spent US 12 million on an extensive
fake news campaign, claiming, among others, that his opponent, Haddad,
has raped a child (he was a former minister of education). These
messages, which were highly targeted, Cambridge Analytica style, to
specific groups where spread in part by the social networks of the
churches. It is also believed that the campaign obtained profiles and
contact information from a Facebook hack, which was Facebook announced
in mid September.

But given the nature of Whatsapp, all of this is really hard to account
for, only Facebook itself can trace the flow of messages through its
network.

But is another reminder what anti-democratic politics look like. Key to
its success is the destruction of even the last vestiges of the public
sphere. So, as corny as the televised presidential debates are, not
having them makes things even worse. And I wouldn't be surprised if
Trump refused them in the next election cycle as well. The ground work
against the fake media has already been laid.

There are tensions within the coalition that carried Bolsonaro. It's
mainly around free trade. While Bolsonaro wants to tear down Mercosur,
certain sectors of the industry want to keep it. It's not too dissimilar
to Trumps stance on Nafta. And the solution might be the same. Make some
cosmetic changes, give it a new name, and claim success while not really
disturbing manufacturing and trade.

Brazil, to state the obvious, is an extremely large and diverse country,
whatever comes will be fought over hard and internal contradictions are
abound in a country as unequal in all respects such as this. But there
is no obvious silver lining in this, not the least because the
development is part of a global trend, rather than a national outlier.

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