Crisis of Vectorial Ecosystems

Suryansu Guha
UC Los Angeles
Film, TV, and Digital Media

Zizi Li
UC Los Angeles
Film, TV, and Digital Media

This interdisciplinary collective brings together twelve graduate students from four campuses (UC Los Angeles, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Davis) with backgrounds across social sciences, humanities, and media arts. The group discusses issues concerning labor, infrastructure, and capital at the intersections of digital economy, supply chain capitalism, and state-corporate extractivism—an urgent research area against the operations of pandemic capitalism. We utilize a variety of texts and scholars from different disciplines to approach the continued and exacerbated conditions of exploitation, extraction, and dispossession experienced by varying precarious communities. This is made evident in the paradox of the corona economy, in which conglomerates are earning extreme profits off the labor performed by unprotected “essential” workers across industries, who are trying to sustain their everyday livelihoods, and in the ever promising capitalist future in this time of crisis. Our group rethinks the political economy of crisis as it intersects with how Big Tech has transformed our (im)material relationships with vectorial ecosystems of labor and/as infrastructure and natural resources. Together, we bring in alternative frameworks and epistemologies via a transnational decolonial lens that is grounded in the specificities of locales (e.g. Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, and North America) to imagine subversive potentials.