Consequences of Immaterial Labor in Sleep Dealer Economics Term Paper

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Consequences of Immaterial Labor in Sleep Dealer
Over the years, the world has been experiencing changes in all aspects and factors contributing to life. Industrialization, globalization, and technology, in general, have been observed as major factors in increasing the witnessed changed. The labor and industrial environment has however been effect in all edges from social settings to cultural. To understand the phenomenon clearly researchers have turned the focus on the production affects in our social and labor practice. They have also used the affective labor and the direct collective subjectivities and constitution of communities. Post modernization has in one way turned affective labor in a position where it does not directly contribute to the production of capital but it is at the same time at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of laboring forms. In the global capitalist economy, immaterial labor, which is one form of affective labor, has gained a dominating position in regards to other forms of labor. In the growing economy, it is vital to look at the effect of immaterial labor and this paper is going to achieve that by analyzing Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer. In the film, the shift of immaterial labor in the dystopic militarized hyper capitalist future society breeds many hardships for the workers and portrays the consequences of a technologically advanced economy.
Sleep dealer is given in a platform that is not so different from us as it has high-speed networks which aid in bringing the relative distances together with people from different places around the globe, the perspective brings together three different places represented by a migrant, a writer, and a soldier. The story begins with a young gentleman who is observed to be looking for employment in the big cities as he seeks to leave his peasant life as a farmer. As the film touches on terror too, Memo dream to the employment world come true in a horrible manner as his home is identified as a hiding place for terrorists. The film shows a depressing future where all the borders are closed and a network of computers is used to turn memories into commodities, and there is militarization of the corporate warriors. Memo who resides with his family in their rural farm starts to suffer as the farm is taken over by a private company. To take control the movie shows the private company trying to sell back what it had initially taken from the community in the first place. This forces some individuals in the community to react by forming aqua groups to get back their water and resources through force. Regardless of all this Memo is only worried about the technology taking over.
Future scenarios in Sleep Dealer
Technology takes over the military as shown by Rudy who tries to fight terrorism by use of an American flying drone. The film attacks contemporary matters with aspects of the future. To the lives of many in the films, labor, technology, land use and migration are the themes that surround them. The privatizations of resources, use of drones in war and sweatshops that do not value humans are so clear. Most immigrants are seen to come from farmers' background but they find themselves in metropolitans within a short time. The film through the immigrants shows us the south and the north of the earth and the audience can clearly see how the world is divided. There is so much element of technology in Sleep Dealer yet the immigration issue is part of the main story. Rivera tries to connect the North and the South and people who are put apart by borders. Technology makes it possible for corporates to relocate their efforts in an attempt to avoid labor movements. It enables soldiers to do all the frightening things. Rivera shows that the moment we live in is a moment of battle on technologies.uù
The science fiction Sleep Dealer by Rivera also tries to explore the relations between the United States and the Latin America in an unusual location, that depicts an impoverished Southern Mexico, a couple of decades later or near future. Its broad scope covers, labor, migration, the proliferation of the borders which have deliberately created dissonance, labor violence, and exploration, and ultimate hope and wonder. Interestingly Rivera chose a location that challenges the hegemonic concept of a future that is already known, he uses rural, indigenous, agrarian Mexico for a futuristic sci-fiction film. Rivera tries to show interpersonal understanding of how the earth works. He encourages identification with a cyborg laborer and the protagonist showing the power of human agency and the importance of everyday mundane choices. The film depicts a dystopian future in which they explore the ways in which technology connects and oppresses migrants. In the film, the wall preventing migration is struck down but then workers are replaced by robots which are in the control of the emigrants.
In the title, the word sleep has profound meaning, the plot of the movie involves workers, and how they became replaced with cyborgs in the work environment, hence it is clear that Rivera title Sleep Dealer has a literal meaning, which is dealing with sleep in the work environment.
When one sleeps, there is no production or manufacturing and hence sleep deprives of precious time that could be used to create capital. According to the film, there is need to eliminate sleep so that human life could have uninterrupted flow having continuous functioning, if there is any sleep then it should be flexibilized sleep a pattern that one can easily control and only this way that one can maximize labor. Knowledge and information have monetized sleep in the film. For example, when scarcity of water began because of pollution knowledge monetized clean water through bottled mineral water. In the film, sleep has been monetized by education where cyborgs with more functionality, because they do not need sleep, are developed. Capitalizing on sleep is a neoliberalism, which aims at short terms profits over long-term accumulation.
Sleep dealer grounds collective experiences of intensified extraction, labor outsourcing and the uneven development in the post-NAFTA Mexico, but it does not focus much on deprivation of insomnia but on the social totality of cybraceros, which would work as sleep dealers in the factories. Rivera past life experiences might have an influence on most of his work. He was born of a Peruvian immigrant, and hence his socially conscious films. His films invert the science fiction genre concords to observe the hierarchical relations between the wider American hemisphere and the United States. Memo Cruz the protagonist endures sleeplessness and this is viewed as not an active plague nor a privatizati...