El trabajo gratuito bobo en los planes para el desarrollo de la economía digital en América Latina

Abstract

More than 50% of the Latin-American population has internet access and nearly 78% of these users are active on social networks like Facebook. Some of these digital-native companies are enriched in parallel with the increase of its network users. This relation had been studied by different authors from a critical approach, defining this dynamic as a type of free labor where the user pays for access to these platforms by their data and interactions. The research proposes a qualitative analysis of the role of this concept on the incipient discourse about the development of the digital economy in Latin America, from organizations like CEPAL, CAF and some governments, which is compiled in documents like Ecosistema y la Economía Digital en América Latina, using a priori categories that represent the historic roles that are associated with free labor activities. This analysis is complemented by a series of semi-structured interviews with experts that participated in the development of these documents, with the purpose of confront them with the absence of the free labor concept on a discourse in which the main idea is the development of the newest economy of data that exacerbate the role of the user and the exploitation of the value of their online interactions, and this situation also has a connection with the exclusion or subordination of Latin American countries from the Global Value Chains.