Isabel Löfgren 100 Always attentive to technological revolutions, as evidenced by the prophetic song “Cérebro Eletrônico” (“Electronic Brain”) (1969), composed during the dictatorship, the singer and minister released the pop ballad “Pela Internet” (“On the Internet”) in 2004, which encapsulated this spirit. The lyrics sang: “(...) to create my homepage, to make my website, with how many gigabytes can you build a raft, a boat that sails, that sails on this infosea (...).” At the time, thinking in terms of gigabytes was visionary, as the few bits and bytes of our real lives were squeezed into small hard drives, dial-up (and unstable) internet connectio H n o s w . ever, this would also change with the infrastruc- tural revolution brought about by the privatization of Brazilian state-owned telephone companies4, underway since 1998, which reconfigured the country’s communication infrastruc- ture, pulling us out of an obsolete modernity and into the 21st century. Meanwhile, in the U.S., a post-adolescent Mark Zucker- berg was rehearsing his social algorithm from his Harvard dorm room, Jeff Bezos was still only selling books on Amazon, and Elon Musk was inventing the first mass-produced electric cars under the Tesla brand and developing the PayPal payment sys- tem. The frenzy of Internet 1.0 had nonetheless caused NASDAQ to crash, and neoliberalism took sway until the 2008 financial crisis shook the global economy. In universities, we were cap- tivated by the theories of McLuhan, Castells, Baudrillard, and Deleuze, we were all becoming “networked,” using metaphors like “rhizomes” and “global village,” fascinated by the rapidly ex- panding “super-information highways.” 4 The privatization of Brazil’s state-owned telephone companies, starting in 1998 to the early 2000s was a watershed in Brazilian political economy. It allowed the breakup of state monopoly over telecommunications and provided the access to landlines and the entry of mobile telephone companies and Internet providers into the country.
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