Cyborg Resistance on the Digital Assembly Line: Global Connectivity as a Terrain of Struggle for the Commons in Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer

摘要

This article explores the politics of global connectivity in Alex Rivera's film Sleep Dealer (2008), focusing on this science fiction film's critical engagement with the problems and possibilities of connectivity in digital capitalism. Through its depiction of an imaginable, near-future world governed by digital connectivity, the film reflects back on contemporary global connectivity as a terrain of proliferating antagonisms. In so doing, Sleep Dealer dispatches celebratory technological fetishism and totalizing technological pessimism alike by evoking the political possibilities offered by emergent transnational networks of social cooperation amid an increasingly clenched and contested infrastructure of digital connectivity.