1 Introduction

Digital technologies play an important role in contemporary practices of sociability. Many social and political practices are deeply reliant on technological and digital devices, which affect multiple arenas of social and political life (Brubaker, 2023; Fourcade & Healy, 2024; Lehdonvirta, 2022). Digital technologies are frequently discussed as both “causes” of and “solutions” to many societal problems and crises around the world (Nachtwey & Seidi, 2023; Tooze, 2022).

Critical diagnoses tend to focus on the historical development of the digital economy and its propensity to generate economic inequalities. Multiple critical approaches try to explain the digital economy through Polanyian (Grabher & König, 2020), Braudelian (Peck & Phillips, 2020), Schumpeterian (Staab, 2024), Marxist (Fuchs, 2021), regulatorian (Boyer, 2022), and Wallerstein-world systems lenses (Knoblauch & Löw, 2025). Much of the discussion focuses on explaining what is new, what is a continuation of patterns in the development of capitalism over the last 40 years, and whether the surge of platforms represents a new phase of capitalism (Srnicek, 2017; Zuboff, 2020) or its demise (Wark, 2019).

A second trend in the literature seeks a more societal diagnosis. Digitalization triggers major cultural and political changes. Rogers Brubaker (2023) refers to the present era as one of “hyperconnectivity,” carrying profound changes for the self, personal relations, and multiple institutional arenas. According to Andreas Reckwitz (2020), digitalization is a major part of the “society of singularities,” which marks a break with industrial modernity and a point of no return. These general diagnoses are reflected in multiple discussions within the social sciences around the effects of digital technologies in diverse areas of social life, including politics (Berg et al., 2020), labor relations (Jarrett, 2022; Woodcock & Graham, 2020), and social and affective practices (Fader, 2020; Papacharissi, 2015).

A third trend aims to conceptualize a change from liberal capitalism to a new social and economic formation that resembles forms of domination not intuitively connected to the digital economy. The “data colonialism” (Couldry & Mejias, 2019; Mejias & Couldry, 2024) thesis contends that digital companies and technologies are annexing human life for profit, enabling new forms of oppression that resemble classical colonialism. In a similar vein, the “techno-feudal” hypothesis points to a cultural and economic regression, where the domination of digital capitalism by a few firms and the ensuing blurring of the frontiers between the economy and the political amount to a new form of feudalism (Dean, 2020; Durand, 2024; Varoufakis, 2023).

These three trends suggest that the literature is dominated by frameworks that focus on one area affected by processes of digitalization, such as the economy, politics, and culture or, conversely, ones that attribute an epoch-changing character to the pervasiveness of digital technologies in daily lives. These analyses tend to ignore more situated local and national contexts, especially in areas of the Global South, such as Latin America (Lehuedé, 2024; Ricaurte et al., 2024; Valente & Grohmann, 2024). This results in a tendency to generalize specific experiences and changes as universal outcomes of digitalization. Although this tendency is understandable, given that a small number of companies control access to and use of digital technologies, homogenizing social experiences, it is essential to examine how the effects of digital technologies manifest in different contexts to better diagnose social and political crises in which digital technologies play a role.

This paper draws on this literature to propose an analysis of the digital economy that considers the cultural and social aspects of the effects of platforms and digital technologies in social and political practices. The first section interprets the digital economy by showing how these technologies shape people’s experiences and how differentiated social and political effects depend on the national, social, and cultural context in which they are embedded.

The second section argues that dependency theory, specifically the version put forward by Cardoso and Faletto in the 1970s can serve as a valuable tool for analyzing patterns of political dispute in peripheral societies, such as Latin American countries (Cardoso & Faletto, 1979). Thus, dependency theory can work as a complementary perspective to theories of digital capitalism due to its potential to illuminate how technological changes in the “center” (i.e., the “Global North”) not only function as an external shock to a peripheral economy but are also intertwined in specific configurations with local politics and patterns of domination.

Heeding recent calls to renew dependency theory through contemporary theorizing (Magnelli et al., 2024; Nobre, 2024, 2025; Svampa, 2019), the analysis of political power in the periphery in connection to the developments of capitalism in its “center” can shed light on situations of dependency, defined by the relationship between these macro socioeconomic trends and the ways they connect to previous patterns of distribution of political power in a dependent society.

From this perspective, a reading of new situations of dependency can add a critical vocabulary and theoretical approach that conceptualize the effects of digitalization processes in peripheral societies as co-constitutive with political dynamics native to specific societies rather than as an external force in the region. The main theoretical contribution consists in interpreting the concept of dependency as a way of understanding empirical situations through the connection between what is internal and external to a given society. Again, what is considered an external aspect (in this case, processes of digitalization and the digitalization of capitalism) takes on highly specific forms in peripheral societies, operating as a particular relational mode between groups and social classes in “underdeveloped” nations. Current approaches focus on the unequal exchange between Global North and Global South countries and societies, but does not focus on political relations inside specific nations (Rikap, 2026; Valente & Grohmann, 2024). Concentrating on situations of dependency is a way to shed light on political consequences and disputes in specific societies instead of merely tracing an unequal and uneven pattern of development in these technologies. Therefore, the approach proposed here is not a corrective or a critique of other interpretations of digital dependency but a complement to these attempts.

Ultimately, the paper aims to demonstrate that analyzing digitalization through the lens of capitalism offers a productive research agenda for examining specific practices shaped by digitalization in the context of contemporary crises and political struggles. To show the potential of this approach, the paper presents two examples from Brazil that can be read through the lens of new situations of dependency. First, a discussion of current struggles around platform regulation in Brazil will show how political disputes around content moderation on digital platforms can shed light on political deadlocks in the broader Brazilian political system. This general discussion is exemplified by another example showing that dependency can be founded not only in the political system and institutions but also from “below.” This is visible in the discussion of the repurposing of social media platforms as labor platforms, as analyzed by Pinheiro-Machado and co-authors (Pinheiro-Machado et al., 2024). These cases are not demonstrative case studies but instead illustrate a theoretical argument; the claim concerns how such situations should be analyzed rather than whether sufficient evidence is presented here.

These two examples are complementary because they illuminate different social and political forms of sociability in Brazil that are shaped by economic developments in digital capitalism but operate differently in Brazilian society due to pre-existing and established patterns of domination. Both the disputes over platform regulation and the informality and precarity of labor relations are longstanding features of Brazilian history and society, and both are deeply affected by digitalization processes. As a result, reading these digitalized social and political conflicts through the lens of situations of dependency can connect trends in peripheral societies with major developments in the center of capitalism. This can show that a local differentiation of digital capitalism and its political effects not only reflects power asymmetry between technology-producing and technology-consuming societies but also reconfigures and reinforces patterns of domination in different countries.

2 Digitalization as a Part of Capitalism’s Development: The Role of Human Experience

American companies such as Meta, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft and their Chinese counterparts Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi provide services directly through the internet rather than employing digital technologies within traditional supply chains. From this perspective, they function as what Gillespie (2018) terms the “custodians of the internet”: to use the internet and access the functions essential to contemporary social and political life, one must be connected to their ecosystems.

An explanation for the economic growth of these companies lies in the decline in productivity growth in the global capitalist economy since the late 1970s (Benanav, 2020; Brenner, 2006; Srnicek, 2017; Streeck, 2014). Understanding the crisis as one of demand and retrenchment of major economies to the financial sector (Krippner, 2011), a major advantage of the commercial internet serving as a core economic feature is, borrowing Krippner’s expression, the possibility of capitalizing on crisis.1

Firms that positioned themselves at this favorable conjuncture gained major competitive advantages (Peck & Phillips, 2020). Notably, these companies organize themselves by controlling data and acting on the non-productive side of markets. This entails a combination of commodification – through which new ways of exploring markets arose) – and disruption –through which traditional economic sectors were pressured by technological advancements, such as the emergence of platforms, Big Data, and, more recently, artificial intelligence (Seidl, 2023). These companies were thus able to expand their economic value as capitalist accumulation was in crisis and spreading to the financial sector.

Much of their activity is a form of demand rationalization, which does not mean that they contribute something new to the productive aspect of the economy. Yet the size and prominence of their ecosystems make them more than mere firms acting in a specific market. As Staab (2024) argues, these companies become the market, or “proprietary markets,” by exercising various forms of social control. In their ecosystems, companies can exercise power over the flows of information, prices, performance, and access that are practiced within their boundaries. Instead of acting as competitors in the market, they try to privatize it to gain full control of all factors in their ecosystems (p. 65–100).

These companies’ biggest asset is their control over what happens within their socio-technical boundaries, where they can access the largest number of users possible (Birch et al., 2021). Accordingly, one crucial aspect of the digital economy is the controlled access to flows of information through companies’ capacity to collect, organize, and classify information that is legible to them in the form of personal data. These data, aggregated in huge sets, give immense power to the corporations or organizations that access it exclusively (Fourcade & Healy, 2016, 2024). These companies do not own the data, but they control what happens within their boundaries, which are legally protected through complex forms of regulation mostly based on contract and intellectual property law (Determann, 2019).

Because these companies operate under the pressure to produce and have control over massive amounts of data, they benefit directly when people are actively or passively legible to their technologies. Users are thus incentivized to make themselves more legible, in a kind of struggle for visibility, despite dubious and sometimes paradoxical consequences (Fourcade & Healy, 2024, p. 192). The need to participate in digital environments outweighs the aversion to surveillance promoted by digital technologies, and companies make it interesting for users to make themselves more legible to them. These incentives can change people’s behaviors and attitudes, even if only through resignation (Birch, 2023, p. 39). This does not mean that the creation of data is only a form of intrusion in the realm of privacy or manipulation to oblige someone to stay in a technological environment. Neither does it imply that someone is coerced to use a specific platform to say “happy birthday” to a friend or offer condolences via a social network (Fourcade & Healy, 2024, p. 62). Interpreting users’ activity in digital environments requires paying attention to how cultural and social boundaries are contextually negotiated, as companies and organizations’ actions turn the data and information collected and created by digital technologies into a crucial tool for the reproduction of capitalism.

The economic imperative of data accumulation and the transformation of human interaction through platforms are therefore co-determined. This analysis illustrates the relationship between human experience and the evolution of the digital economy. To be seen as a user means to be involved in the digital economy in various ways, which depend on the degree of active and passive participation. As highlighted by Fourcade and Healy (2024), new forms of stratification can emerge in an “ordinal society” where everything is measured and classified and the benefits and perils of this process are unevenly distributed. The social and political biases in technological developments reproduce longstanding patterns of domination in intensified forms, as Ruha Benjamin (2020) convincingly argued in her analysis of a “new Jim Crow,” whereby digital technology reinforces racist worldviews and hinders black people’s freedom. This example shows how an economic and cultural logic fits with “classical” forms of oppression: when companies “see” what happens in their digital ecosystems, they do not do so neutrally, precisely because of the role that locking in users plays in the production of economic value.

This kind of biased outcome derives directly from the economic organization and function of platforms, as well as their role in capitalistic accumulation in general. It also has major consequences for forms of sociability in contemporary societies. The economic pressure and compulsion to be active and legible for platforms is highly controversial due to the way they change social and political relations and, more specifically, produce and reinforce inequalities. A social framework that connects the social and political practices that occur in and around digital platforms must deal with the latter’s role in capital accumulation and analyze external impacts on contemporary societies more generally.

It also must acknowledge that it is not possible to find a “one-size-fits-all” approach to the social effects of digitalization. As much of the literature on digital colonialism highlights, the effects of digital platforms and digital economies cannot be seen through the same lens for the whole world, given that the spatial logics of digitalization are differentiated (Knoblauch & Löw, 2025). From this perspective, a sociological and political perspective on the problem is necessary that highlights both general trends in development through a global lens and their manifestations in local, more nuanced situations. In the next section, I propose a reading of digitalization through dependency theory, specifically the version elaborated by Cardoso and Faletto (1979).

3 Digitalization and New Situations of Dependency: Political and Economic Domination in a Unitary Framework

Digitalization impacts conflictual social dynamics. Theoretical diagnoses have attempted to connect the effects of digitalization processes on social institutions and practices with an overarching theory of what is wrong with digitalization and its social impacts. As mentioned above, the theses of digital colonialism and techno-feudalism provided a political critique of digitalization, but they rely on a general framework to identify what is wrong with the expansion of the digital economy in different areas of social life. Some scholars, especially from Latin America, instead argue for a critique that goes “beyond data colonialism” (Valente & Grohmann, 2024) and is anchored in theoretical projects native to the region or mobilizes and adapts concepts to analyze and critique local processes, such as the notions of algorithmic governmentality (Ricaurte et al., 2024) and digital sovereignty (Lehuedé, 2024).

The concept of dependency and situations of dependency presented by Cardoso and Faletto helps advance this political critique. A situation of dependency is a historically determined configuration in which a given mode of insertion into the world economy has been internalized as a specific arrangement of alliances, interests, and conflicts among national groups and social classes. The decisive formulation is that the external is expressed as a particular type of relationship between social groups and classes in dependent nations (Cardoso & Faletto, 1979, p. 15). Dependency organizes society internally and can be understood only by analyzing this internal organization.

Dependency theory can be considered an “organizing axis,” as defended by Maristella Svampa (2019), for multiple critical approaches developed in the second half of the 20th century. Within a complex intellectual tradition, Fernanda Beigel (2024, p. 13) differentiates between dependency as a changing historical condition, dependentism as a social theory established between 1964 and 1973, and dependentists as the academics who developed this approach in different countries and institutional spaces 2. This means that a “dependentist” analysis of the present must be thought of as both highlighting the persistence of dependency and showing what is different in current times, given the intrinsically historical aspect of dependency (Nobre, 2024, 2025).

Cardoso and Faletto’s Dependency and Development in Latin America, originally published in 1969, represented a change of perspective in studies of Latin America’s political and social reality (Svampa, 2019, p. 205). Its main objective was to explain the social and economic transformations in Latin America from the crisis of the 1930s until the new authoritarian regimes of the 1960s. In the context of a critique of developmentalist approaches, it demonstrated that the connection between peripheral societies and the global market followed different paths of articulation, enabling new “situations” of dependency, where transformations of productive structures were combined with the growing exclusion of popular masses. Crucially, this implies that dependency was compatible with growth and industrialization. What the external relation determines is not the absence of development but the form it takes, a point that separates the authors from readings of peripheral capitalism as condemned to stagnation.

Following the Maia and Faria’s reconstruction of the authors’ argument, different national situations differed according to their economic trajectory, forming different alliance systems and domination regimes. Between the 1930s and the early 1960s, developmentalist coalitions incorporated urban working classes into national political life, enabling a period of mass democracy labeled as “developmentalist populism,” a political ideology with contradictory objectives relating internal economic expansion with the social distribution of economic results. These fragile alliances broke down across the continent, a process followed by a military dictatorship in Brazil in 1964 – the case analyzed by Cardoso and Faletto’s book. Other military dictatorships in the region began in the 1970s, such as in Chile (1973–1990), Uruguay (1973–1985), and Argentina (1976–1983). Following Cardoso and Faletto’s explanation, the emergence of authoritarian regimes was part of a broader process whereby the army fulfilled the function of a “technocratic arbiter” replacing traditional politicians, in line with foreign capital’s demand for new areas of investment (Maia & Faria, 2024, p. 196). These regimes constitute a form of dependency not because they were externally imposed but because the deepening of industrialization through the association of the state with foreign capital and domestic industrial groups required the political exclusion of the popular sectors that the previous arrangement had incorporated. Authoritarian rule is the internal political form that this external association took.

In this theoretical constellation, Cardoso and Faletto’s (1979) work is methodologically useful for analyzing digitalization processes and their relation to political and social practices in deeply unequal societies, such as those of Latin American countries. This can be done by connecting a general tendency and change at the center of capitalism (i.e., the development of digital capitalism) to the web of inequalities historically tied to social and political relations: economic domination and socio-cultural relations are not dimensions analytically independent from one another, and economic relations of production have a socio-political nature (p. xi).

Additionally, the authors argue that dependency does not have fixed characteristics and cannot be measured through degrees. Every new situation of dependency must be investigated for “differences and diversity,” highlighting its contradictory aspects and effects (Cardoso & Faletto, 1979, p. xiii). The interplay between a general trend and concrete situations of dependence makes the theory a valuable heuristic tool that surpasses its context and can be actualized for contemporary purposes.

Cardoso and Faletto’s (1979, p. 13) main methodological insight concerns the reciprocal determination between the economic and social components of development and their analysis of the behavior of social groups. Development is the result of the interaction of social groups and classes, and the social and political structure modifies itself through their interests. To connect changes in economic structure to alterations of political institutions and disputes, it is necessary to explain “the links that may exist between internal and external determinants” (1979, p. 13).

Cardoso and Faletto (1979) avoid interpreting these links in mechanical terms because it is necessary to “delineate the interconnections between these two levels, suggesting the ways through which external factors are interwoven with internal ones” (p. 15). Dependency is then a concept that aims to understand certain events and situations through how “internal and external structural components are linked” (p. 15).

From a methodological standpoint, economic power is expressed as a form of domination and is reflected in institutional politics and local struggles. In other words, a dominant social group tries to impose itself economically and politically for its benefit and develop “an economic order consistent with its interests and objectives” (p. 15). For Cardoso and Faletto (1979), “the modes of economic relations, in turn, set the limits of political action” (p. 15). Economic factors with worldwide intricacies manifest in this way in dependent societies, where politics gain a certain degree of autonomy but remain conditioned by external factors. How social groups try to navigate this constellation must be analyzed to understand the relation between the two poles of this equation.

For Cardoso and Faletto (1979), an analysis of the historical process of the constitution of the periphery of capitalism’s economic international order should explain the dynamic of the relations between social classes within a specific nation. External conditions are structurally embedded both in the articulation of the economy, social classes, and the state with the economy of the central countries and in the kind of economic and political organization that prevails in each situation of dependency (Cardoso, 1972, p. 29). From this perspective, there is no clear distinction between what is an external or internal factor contributing to a country’s dependence; instead, the internal dynamic of a dependent country is a particular aspect of a more general dynamic of the capitalist world.

These methodological and theoretical considerations are relevant to a diagnosis of the effects of digitalization in dependent societies because they shed light on the different shapes a global tendency in digital capitalism takes in places such as Latin America. Situations of dependency reflect the political and social dynamics that have historically unfolded in specific nations, evolving in response to and in interaction with developments in the capitalist “center.”

This paper proposes an actualization of this framework through the notion of digital situations of dependency. These situations manifest how digital technologies articulate the economic and political organization of dependent countries, appearing as players structurally embedded in the economy, class relations, and the state and political disputes. A digital situation of dependency is not merely the “exploitation” of a peripheral or dependent country by digital companies or Global North economics but the shaping of its internal dynamic as society adapts to the entrenchment of digital technologies and companies in a particular way.

Since digital ecosystems are created to lock users in their systems, there are attempts to maintain users in this kind of economic, social, and technological relationship. Thus, digitalization is arguably embedded in social practices that are congenial to social and political processes that happen locally, even if intertwined with global technology and economic processes. Digitalization processes work as a catalyst for multiple crises by gradually infiltrating societies and converting “the (offline, legacy) institutions and practices through which democratic societies are organized” (van Dijck et al., 2018, p. 2).

Digital capitalism’s primary drive to keep users in “proprietary markets” manifests differently in peripheral societies, enabling different patterns of media consumption and of reorganization of markets and forms of sociability. Focusing on the role of situations of dependency created by digitalization processes can explain political and social dynamics as intrinsic factors in Latin American societies. Political elites and local capital can be seen as enablers of a dynamic that ensures domination by international capital, making it difficult to separate what is an exogenous influence and what is an endogenous process of political domination.

This perspective can both aggregate and complicate current strands in critical thought that view technological imaginaries as an external force influencing regional governments, which may mobilize such imaginaries to expand state domination over citizens (Ricaurte et al., 2024, p. 2). However, this perspective may reinforce a dualism between Global North countries, portrayed as agents of political and economic development, and Global South countries, depicted as passive recipients of an algorithmic governmentality that sustains “an unbalanced social order through automation” (Ricaurte et al., 2024, p. 3).

An approach centered on situations of dependency can reconstruct how specific technologies are received by citizens and political elites through processes marked by tensions between social groups with antagonistic social and political interests. In this view, politics is the filter through which economic influxes pass and are adapted to a specific socio-political reality. This perspective can open a research agenda in which the trends and developments of digital capitalism are also examined via their reception in peripheral societies, particularly where social and political conflicts are interpreted as expressions of how economic and technological dependency takes shape.

This approach avoids the notion that social consequences of platforms and digital capitalism exclusively derive from the properties of the business model, with the same expected effects in multiple societies (with minor variations). An example of this approach would be the techno-feudal thesis (Durand, 2024; Varoufakis, 2023). It can also enrich studies that highlight the critical appropriation of technology by users, but at the expense of a deeper analysis of their political economy (Bonini & Treré, 2024).

In the framework proposed here, what refracts the global tendency is not users’ ingenuity but the political and class structure that receives it—the alliances that form around new technologies, the groups whose position they consolidate or threaten, and the institutions through which conflicts over them are processed. This is why local variation is constitutive of a critical appropriation of technology in local contexts, on the part of both political elites and citizens. The claim that digital technologies acquire their significance from the societies in which they are used is, therefore, not the truism it may appear to be. It is not merely that local uses vary but that the political and class structure through which a global tendency is processed determines the form that this tendency takes. This is why the effects of digitalization in a peripheral society result neither from the properties of platforms nor from local particularities alone. Analyzing situations of dependency entails reconstructing precisely this articulation.

The next section will examine an example of political and legal disputes in Brazil around platform use, interpreting it through the interrelations of new situations of dependency with social and political conflicts.

4 Diagnosing Situations of Dependency: Disputes Around Platform Dynamics in Brazil

As argued in the previous sections, digital capitalism’s development largely relies on locking users into digital ecosystems. From this perspective, economic development can generate new situations of dependency in Latin American countries, which are marked by a high degree of inequality and permeated by political conflicts. In this context, a brief account of contemporary political conflicts in the case country from within the political system is necessary.

Brazil’s political system is famous for its coalition presidentialism.3 Presidents must attain a majority in Congress to pass legislation, but this majority takes a specific form: most Brazilian political parties are considered part of a center-right coalition called “centrão” (big center) and function as enablers or blockers of political programs in exchange for political and financial resources. Brazilian “centrão” parties can work as members of coalitions of different political projects, acting as veto players for legislation in exchange for resources. According to Zucco (2009), the organization of conflicts around the coalition does not involve primarily ideological motives but the distribution of resources and nominations to cabinet positions. Following Nobre’s (2022) account, this combination of “‘lack of ideology,’ the governism that characterizes the system, and the formation of legislative supermajorities and government super-coalitions” shows the greater weight of “internal opposition” to the coalition than the formal opposition in specific political disputes and conflicts, which “[threatens] the functionality and effectiveness of governments themselves” (p. 33).

This characterization sheds light on disputes around platform regulation in the country. Brazil has a traditionally active civil society sector and political activists on digital matters, such as open source and copyright, which has become a relevant player in international forums (Gorwa, 2024, p. 33; Santaniello, 2021). The Brazilian Internet Bill of Rights (Marco Civil), which was adopted in 2014 (Affonso Souza et al., 2017; Medeiros & Bygrave, 2015), limits internet providers’ liability for third-party content to cases in which they fail to comply with a judicial takedown order.

The connection between the liability regime established by the Marco Civil and the account of digital capitalism given above runs through the regime itself. By conditioning intermediary liability for third-party content on a prior judicial order, Article 19 establishes the courts as an exceptional and retrospective corrective to a regime of rule-setting that remains private. Regardless of its merits as a safeguard against private censorship – which were substantial in the context in which the bill was drafted, its structural effect is to confirm the platform as the ordinary rule-setter within its own boundaries. This is the legal form of the proprietary markets or data enclaves described previously, that is, privately owned digital infrastructure within which economically consequential activity takes place and to which other actors must seek access on the owner’s terms.

The Brazilian political landscape’s development after the rise of Jair Bolsonaro, the extreme right president from 2019 to 2022, changed the landscape of internet regulation and the perception of the public sphere around those issues. Bolsonaro circumvented the need for a large coalition for electoral purposes by using digital technologies during his campaign. Nobre defined Bolsonaro’s praxis as a new form of digital party. In a comparison with digital parties in Europe (Gerbaudo, 2019), Bolsonaro employed the affordances of mainstream social networks and platforms, such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Telegram, to gain a competitive advantage (Nobre, 2022, p. 107).

Platform affordances have altered the terms on which national political constituencies can be built. On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s 2018 campaign showed that concerted action via mainstream social networks could substitute for party machinery and the coalition-building process that was considered necessary to win elections (Nobre & Teixeira, 2026). On the other hand, digital capitalism in Brazil could thrive through the inner workings of the political system as soon as the representatives fully understood the electoral consequences of these companies’ power. Digital capitalism’s development in the country is characterized in large part by the lack of decisions from the political system. This points to a distinctive characteristic of digitalization processes in Brazil and their embeddedness in economic and social life, namely, the transition from legislative to judicial regulation, which can be traced based on disputes around platform regulation after Bolsonaro’s rise.

The most prominent regulatory effort came with Bill nº 2630/2020, introduced in the Senate in May 2020 under Bolsonaro by an opposition senator and approved by the Senate the following month before moving to the Chamber of Deputies. It set transparency requirements for paid political advertising and restrictions on message forwarding in instant messaging services, established a regulatory council to oversee implementation, and modified the liability regime, creating exceptions for platform advertising and the failure to address systemic risks (Kira et al., 2025, p. 19).

The political system determined the form that this contest took. The bill was never rejected. Its consideration by the Chamber was accelerated with an urgency motion in April 2023, already under a new government; the vote scheduled for the following month was then withdrawn from the agenda, and the bill was formally shelved by the president of the Chamber in April 2024.4 What defeated it was not a majority against it, but the lack of a decision, which is the characteristic output of a veto structure in which blocking capacity is cheap and non-programmatic parties have no ideological stake in the matter. Firms seeking to prevent the measure did not need to assemble a formal coalition but only to make postponement costless. Bolsonaro’s use of social media did not render the bill meaningless. It exposed the problem the bill was meant to address, while the political system it had circumvented supplied the mechanism through which it was neutralized.

From the theoretical approach developed above, processes of digitalization are filtered through the organization of political classes and groups by appropriating their affordances in local conditions. The consequence is a determinate national form of platform capitalism rather than a simple lack of regulation. In this case, the general trend of locking users in ecosystems was embedded in the challenge to an ossified political system, breaking previous notions of coalition and enabling the rise of a new political group in Bolsonarismo. But it also reinforced the system’s immunity to change as tech companies’ interests were incorporated with political alignments that benefited from the status quo. The dispute over Bill 2630 was thus a dispute over whether the rules governing digital ecosystems would continue to be written privately, which explains why the opposition mounted against the bill was concerted (Kira et al., 2025).

Digital capitalism in Brazil is then fragmented and prone to conflicts, which also affect companies’ ability to thrive in the country. In response to congressional inaction, the Supreme Federal Court held Article 19 of the Marco Civil to be partially unconstitutional in June 2025, establishing through adjudication a liability regime that the legislature had declined to enact and opening the way for executive regulation in the absence of a statutory framework (Hartmann et al., 2025).

The notion of a digital situation of dependency is helpful to analyze this context because digital capitalism’s drive to lock users in ecosystems, set the rules, and govern these ecosystems, meets a pre-existing local structure with a history entirely independent of digitalization: a political system in which non-programmatic parties operate as veto players, trading blocking capacity for positions and resources, and in which effective opposition to any given measure is internal to the governing coalition rather than external to it. To prevail, tech firms and Big Tech did not have to construct a coalition because a blocking capacity was already available. Regulatory failure is thus neither the result of external interference nor an autonomous national outcome, given that economic interests become indistinguishable from an internal veto player. In short, the political system reproduces its own immunity to change while incorporating a new set of stakes.

This indistinguishability makes the concept of situations of dependency fruitful for engaging with the digitalization process. The framework rejects the question of whether the deadlock was caused by the lobbying of foreign firms or by the domestic structure of coalition presidentialism. Lobbying was effective because of the structure, and the structure acquired new content because of lobbying.

Another example of how social and political dynamics can be interpreted by identifying situations of dependency is the new meaning that the social use of platforms gains in peripheral societies. Due to the high levels of inequality in Brazilian labor markets, informality is a structural aspect of the economy inherently intertwined with the formal economy. This makes the country a very propitious place for the development of platform work, such as courier and Uber driver jobs (Abílio, 2023).

In this context, Pinheiro-Machado et al. (2024) make an interesting case for qualifying Instagram, a social network, as a labor platform in the Brazilian context. According to them, Instagram became a major space for informal work, even though the network does not offer the option of a “business account” to many of the users who use it for economic purposes. Instagram’s use goes beyond the promotion of “regular” economic activities (e.g., a profile to promote a local store) and is now an end in itself, through which people aspire to become digital influencers or work as part of “a constellation of e-commerce platforms” where they get paid as intermediaries for other businesses (Pinheiro-Machado et al., 2024, p. 19). As a part of the struggle for algorithmic visibility, the authors identify a tendency toward homogenization, where marketing strategies about how to do well in the digital market become a new economic venture in the form of a “pyramid scheme.” Individuals start by offering a singular product or service, then mentorships in an area of expertise and, finally, courses on digital marketing at large (Pinheiro-Machado et al., 2024, p. 22).

Pinheiro-Machado et al.’s (2024) report resonates with Marins’s (2025) ethnographic work. Marins reports that an Uber driver and an app-delivery courier told her very enthusiastically that they were investing in digital marketing, advising her to do the same. She shows how observation and dialogue with multiple workers from different sectors and degrees of precarity “reveal extremely tight relationships between the daily struggle for survival and the digital structures managed by major tech companies based in Silicon Valley” (p. 3).

The focus on social media platforms’ repurposing as labor platforms contrasts with the critique of precarious labor on labor platforms such as Amazon Turk or ride-hailing and courier services. On an application designed as a labor market, this condition is a given because the application allocates tasks, sets prices, and disciplines performance; an analysis of its consequences can proceed from its design, as much of the critical literature on the subject does (Tubaro, 2021; Woodcock & Graham, 2020). In the case of the use of Instagram in Brazil, it is the application’s design script and immediate social purpose diverge from its local institutional function through the structural mediation of the labor market.

This repurposing of social media as labor platforms can be understood as a new form of digital dependency that emerges in contexts where class conflicts are filtered through new technologies and platforms. It assigns new meaning to what a specific platform can accomplish through its interest in locking users into its ecosystem. Digital platforms thus become actors in dynamics that are external to their official economic activities: a social network becomes a driver of precarity and of a culture that values self-employment, ultimately acting as an ally to political projects aimed at dismantling social protection networks (Marins, 2025, p. 10).

This dynamic illustrates how digital situations of dependency operate “from below.” The informality that structures Brazilian labor markets is not a novel effect of platformization but a historical pattern of domination that digital technologies update and reinforce (Abílio, 2023). Instagram’s architecture of visibility does not create precarity exogenously; it is absorbed by and gives a new form to a structural feature of Brazilian capitalism that long precedes the platform economy. The labor case mirrors the political dynamic discussed above: just as Brazil’s coalition presidentialism incorporated digital tools without altering its underlying logic of domination, the country’s informal labor market incorporates platform affordances while reproducing, rather than overturning, longstanding patterns of precarity. Even though the influencer economy is a global phenomenon, this mechanism has a different position in a given class structure. In the Brazilian case, a social network is absorbed as an infrastructure of subsistence by workers already located in structural informality. The sequence documented by Pinheiro-Machado et al. (2024), in which a seller of a product becomes a seller of mentorships and finally a seller of courses on selling, reproduces the structure of the direct sales and resale chains that have organized informal subsistence work in Brazil for decades (Abílio, 2014; Oliveira, 2003).

Digital capitalism did not create Brazilian informality, but it did reorganize it by supplying an infrastructure through which informal work can be individualized and scaled beyond the reach of personal acquaintance. In doing so, it has converted existing social ties into commercial reach. Conversely, the structure of the Brazilian labor market determines what the platform becomes in this context. Where informality is a permanent feature of the economy rather than a residue awaiting absorption, a social network acquires a mass of users for whom it functions as a means of subsistence rather than a channel of professional self-promotion. Further, the absence of any formal counterpart means that the economic activity conducted on the platform generates value for it without generating legal obligations. Informality is, therefore, not merely the context in which Instagram operates in Brazil, but a condition of the form that part of its monetization takes in the country.

From this perspective, global social and economic transformations can affect social and political relations in diverse ways, producing contradictory orientations that coexist in peripheral societies. In line with Cardoso and Faletto’s (1979) argument, processes of digitalization can also be understood as generating situations of dependency, combining elements of political disputes that are global and often mirror debates taking place in Global North countries with patterns of domination that are characteristic of the Global South (p. 27).

5 Conclusion

This paper argued that processes of digitalization are better interpreted as trends of development from within capitalism than as an exogenous technological shock that changed the economy and, consequently, politics and sociability. As a development that aimed to solve multiple crises in capitalist accumulation, major companies of “digital capitalism” became the largest capitalist firms in the world, and the way they operate has an immense impact on people’s experiences. This is because these firms aim to lock users in their digital ecosystems, where users’ behaviors can be observed to enable further valorization and economic growth in the non-productive side of markets.

This interpretation of the digital economy allows for a critical reading of practices of sociability that are mediated through these companies and their digital application. In this context, bringing back Cardoso and Faletto’s (1979) methodological insights can shed new light on the nexus between digital capitalism and local and political dynamics, marking a point of departure for the study of political aspects of digitalization, especially in dependent nations. The intertwinement of developments in the “center” of capitalism is better understood when considering patterns of domination in the political system of “peripheral” nations. From this perspective, political developments can be read alongside an interpretation of capitalism and an analysis of social and political relations permeated by multiple inequalities.

The framework for identifying digital situations of dependency can reveal constellations of governments, technology companies, and users (Berg et al., 2020). Situations of dependency politically mediate, in peripheral countries, technological and economic developments that occurred in the north. The Brazilian case is clear in this regard: historical national trends, such as the political system, highly unequal labor market, and precarity, are both transformed and reinforced by the incorporation of digital technologies. Digital capitalism in Brazil also has its own challenges and takes a specific form, as detailed throughout the paper. Therefore, it is not only an external shock to a peripheral society but also transforms class and political structures through new digital situations of dependency. Further research could employ this framework to search for new intertwinements of digital capitalism and political relations in peripheral countries. The case of artificial intelligence and its need for cheap labor, energy, and land is also crucially significant, as highlighted by Rikap (2026). The framework presented in this article offers a way to connect this phenomenon with political processes in specific countries.

The broader implication concerns the critique of digital capitalism. The same corporate structures, the same business models, and the same interfaces generate different problems in different places because they encounter a constituted arrangement of classes, institutions, and prior patterns of domination that determines what technology comes to do rather than a neutral field of users. The interaction between global platform structures and local social conditions is what should be analyzed. Two consequences follow for the cases discussed here, formulated as implications for how the problems are posed rather than as policy proposals.

In the case of platform regulation, the implication is that the transplantation of regulatory designs developed in the center, without regard for the political structure that will process them, will lead to failure. A statutory framework modelled on an external approach fails in Brazil not because the model is defective or the country is not developed enough to properly enforce it but because it must pass through a veto structure whose default output is inaction and whose members have no programmatic stake in the outcome. This also accounts for the displacement of the dispute toward the judiciary, which has become the effective arena of platform regulation in the country by default rather than by design, with consequences for legitimacy and stability. To take the framework seriously is to accept that the design of a regulatory instrument and the analysis of the coalition that would have to carry it are not separate tasks.

In the case of platform labor, the Brazilian debate has been organized almost entirely around the employment relation, and specifically around whether drivers and couriers should be recognized as employees. If a substantial and growing share of platform-mediated work takes place on platforms that do not recognize it as work at all and offer no counterpart against which a claim could be brought, then a regulatory reclassification will not reach it, however successful it is on its own terms. The framework proposed here suggests that the relevant horizon is instead the decoupling of social protection from the employment contract, which is a claim about the structure of informality rather than about platforms: the platform intensified and gave a new form to a problem it did not create, and the remedy is to address the problem itself.

This paper offers a specification of what must be analyzed if the problems are to be posed correctly. It opens the way for a research agenda that treats the political mediation of digital capitalism in peripheral societies as its object rather than its context of application. From this framework and this theoretical proposition, it is possible to advance studies of political and legal regulations but also class conflicts and social practices within dependent societies.

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Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP), Brazil, Grant 2024/22703-8. I would like to thank the reviewers and the editors for their valuable feedback on this paper. I would also like to thank Prof. Sergio Costa, who gave me the opportunity to present some initial ideas on this topic in his course “Global and Regional Transformations: Challenging Methodological Nationalism” at FU Berlin, and my colleagues at the Research Group “Critical Theory of Institutions”, in particular Rafael Marino, who discussed an earlier version of the paper with me.

Date received: 1 October 2025

Date accepted: 18 August 2026

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1. 1 On the intrinsic connection between digitalization and financialization, see Staab (2024) and Vogl (2021). For both authors, the relationship between the two processes is co-constitutive. Digital technologies enabled the development of contemporary finance via the processing of data and the communication of information at unprecedented volumes and speeds. At the same time, financial capitalism is a major inspiration for the mode of accumulation of these companies.

2. 2 Valente and Grohmann (2024) applied Ruy Marini’s version of dependency theory to analyze the platform economy. For them, the main contribution of Marini’s approach to the digital economy is his notion of unequal exchanges, which sheds light on the “extremely unequal dispute between agents in central nations and dependent nations in the race to the development of digital technologies” (p. 4). In this framework, the main axis of criticism concerns peripheral nations’ role as providing raw materials, manufacture, and the platform work necessary to develop and train digital systems. In comparison, Cardoso and Faletto’s approach offers a political critique of these relations by analyzing “how political relations constitute the decisive mediations in relations between the national space and the world market” (Maia & Faria, 2024, p. 206).

3. 3 This brief description is based on Nobre’s (2022) reconstruction.

4. 4 This chronology follows the Chamber’s official page: https://www.camara.leg.br/proposicoesWeb/fichadetramitacao?idProposicao=2256735, accessed August 13, 2026.