The Baroque as Grammar of Digital Modernity: Rethinking Labor, Informality, and Platforms from the Global South

This article proposes the Latin American Baroque as an interpretative matrix for analyzing digital modernity. Drawing on Echeverría’s modernidad barroca and Latin American theories of dependency and historical-structural heterogeneity, we argue that capitalism in the periphery functions as a heterogeneous assemblage of overlapping temporalities, logics, labor regimes, and infrastructures. Using this baroque lens, we examine the subsumption of baroque economies by platform capitalism, focusing on the sphere of informality and the real capture of popular viração . Finally, we show how the baroque ethos operates as a subjective grammar of digital labor in which self-entrepreneurship, compliant misbehavior, algorithmic management, popular economies, and “making do” practices are entangled within platforms’ operations. The Baroque thus becomes an operative matrix for analyzing platform labor and theorizing digital capitalism from the Global South.