Chapter Title: Information Technology Professionals: Innovation and Uncertain Futures
Book Title: Life Support
Book Subtitle: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor
Book Author(s): Kalindi Vora
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt155jms0.6
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
University of Minnesota Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Life Support
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
ora.indd 67
3
Information Technology Professionals
Innovation and Uncertain Futures
I
n popular magazine articles about outsourcing to India, journalists writing
for U.S.-­based magazines in the late 1990s to mid-­2000s countered fear
of American workers’ future obsolescence by asserting that the creative and
innovative work of U.S. labor would always be essential for world economic
growth.1 This creative and inventive labor is contrasted with a description of
the kinds of jobs appropriate to people in South Asia, work that could be replicated almost anywhere and that is merely reproductive of prior invention.
Giving voice to how this assumption is embedded in the international division
of labor, Akash G.,2 a software engineering consultant in Bangalore, described
to me a general anxiety about the dominance of outsourced contract work in
Indian programming: “we are doing your work—­but what do we have [for
ourselves]?” When asked to characterize the difference between Bangalore
and the United States in terms of company culture and general quality of life,
Akash pointed out some of the complexities of diaspora and immigration in
the digital age: “There are people who want to be in both places. In terms of
work, Indian companies and Indian subsidiaries do predictable work—­not
challenging. Technical people tend to look for a challenge. The more innovative work happens in the US.”3 Discourses about India as a site of mimicry
and reproduction of what the United States and Europe have initiated in high-­
tech industries, as opposed to innovation, engage colonial legacies of racialized
labor allocation as well as an understanding of “reproduction” as relatively
unimportant work.
67
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM
68
Information Technology Professionals
As a result of the balance of production in India and consumption in America, a situation arose in the years around the turn of the millennium in which
Indian programmers were made appropriate for highly specific types of work.
This work supported projects external to India’s own needs in a way that recapitulated colonial practices of labor allocation, based as they were on a racialized geography that was folded into the contemporary international division
of labor. The reterritorializing of labor occurred through a differentiation of
laboring bodies and lives, achieved in part through the disciplining of workers
by the threat of company relocation away from workers. It also occurred by
the detachment of India from notions of innovation through its prefiguring
instead as a site of service provision, as described in the preceding chapters.
One practical result was that the majority of IT workers in Bangalore in the
early and mid-­2000s always knew their jobs were potentially temporary and
that they needed to strive to keep up with the ever-­changing skill sets necessary for maintaining employment.
The control of worker mobility across physical borders between nation-­
states but also between rural and urban spaces supported the differentiation
of labor, and many workers who were able to move across borders described
their Indianness as marking that labor as less innovative and therefore undervalued. This differentiation was not necessarily only about racial difference
as embodied but also about how it has been institutionalized in the form of
business process outsourcing (BPO) contracts, body shopping, and documents like the H1-­B visa.4 Consequently, the process of differentiating labor in
IT illustrates a tendency in the global economy not explained by traditional
political economy, a phenomenon wherein the market actually determines
people’s life options, rendering workers who are appropriate for only certain
types of work. As this chapter explains, this process is quite different from the
forces of basic supply and demand, which are often assumed to control the
flow of workers within the global division of labor.
Outsourced IT work is temporary and is organized to provide short-­term
support rather than to develop a product through its life span. It also provides
substantially less compensation in relation to work performed in metropolitan centers. The temporariness and displaced nature of IT labor in India
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Vora.indd 68
16/01/2015 11:38:2
ora.indd 69
Information Technology Professionals
69
makes it similar to commercial gestational surrogacy as a form of contracted
work, and as with surrogacy and call center labor, outsourced IT work requires
that the worker submit to a partial capture, or limitation, of his or her life options
to secure employment. Like loneliness and alienation in the work of call center agents, particular costs and conditions characterize outsourced IT work,
including forced flexibility, temporariness, and the experience of differential
valuing of labor and lack of access to creative and innovative work that contributes directly to Indian society. These concerns also represent use-­values of
programming labor not acknowledged by the international division of labor.
The ethnographic narratives presented in this chapter describe work in
Bangalore, the hub of India’s IT industry in 2005–­6. I pair the narratives with
a reading of the novel Transmission, written by Hari Kunzru and based on his
own experience with this industry. Juxtaposed “to make the fictional, the theoretical and the factual speak to one another,”5 together these narratives insist
on the centrality of creativity, innovation, and imagination in the social lives
and experience of transnational IT workers. The life histories conveyed in the
ethnographic narratives tell the story of how the IT industry in Bangalore was
built on the demand for reproductive coding work outsourced to India by U.S.
and European firms; the experiences of these IT workers also indicate the
central role of creativity in work as both a need of workers and as a quality
that—­when evacuated from the Indian tech industry—­cheapens Indian
labor. The aesthetic rendering of the life of an IT professional moving between
the United States and India in Transmission illustrates a theory of exploitation
through forces of mobility and immobility and a form of partial capture of
affective, creative, and social life that is unique to the IT industry; it also
provides a portrait of hacking or piracy as a form of protest and resistance.
The novel thus provides a theoretical commentary on the transnational IT
industry that suggests that the transmission of one’s creativity and self has
become a site of the coerced extraction of value, where only those with a
wealth of accumulated value have the privilege to communicate themselves
outside of relations of production.
Creative work that engages a programmer’s full skill set is imagined in
programmers’ narratives as the most desirable employment, but the general
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM
70
Information Technology Professionals
perception is that such jobs do not come to India (though the hope is always
that they will soon be coming). A restless dissatisfaction and future orien­
tation therefore characterizes those hoping for a more substantial stake in
what is imagined as the cosmopolitan future of technology work in India. This
restlessness stems in part from the friction between changes brought about
by the growing globalization of everyday life and work in India and cultural
values that discourage career moves that might be considered a gamble. The
temporariness associated with these jobs clashes with Indian norms of a
middle-­class profession, and as a result, those who find the best positions
tend to have elite backgrounds that make them conversant and comfortable
with real or virtual interfaces with foreigners and foreign “business culture.”
These tensions reveal what Jonathan Inda and Renato Rosaldo call the “conjunctural nature of globalization,” indicating some of the “large scale processes
through which the world is becoming increasingly interconnected and . . . how
subjects respond to these processes in culturally specific ways.”6
The desire for creative and innovative work opportunities in India also
carries a political content in its resistance to the cheapening of labor and the
concomitant desire for India to be able to consume the value it produces,
thereby allowing for more material equity between India and other nations.
Programmers narrate a sense of their labor as having a potential social utility
beyond its exchange for a wage, and beyond the basic contribution it makes to
projects outsourced from high-­consumption countries like the United States.
Interviews also suggest that being located in India means that conditions do
not allow access to a stable and knowable future for even middle-­class Bangaloreans. This instability derives from the skittishness of transnational capital
in Third World cities as well as the highly mobile nature of technology work.
This particularity in the temporality of Bangalore life is specific to its position
in global labor markets yet reveals the inflection of globalization’s reorganization of space and time as represented in Third World spaces hosting trans­
national capital.7 The fantasy of connectedness that engaged IT professionals
through online forums in this period therefore had a political potential that was
largely unrealized but was most potent in the open source movement, which
continues to exists in tension with corporate and individual profit-­based interests in maintaining property rights to source code.
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Vora.indd 70
16/01/2015 11:38:2
ora.indd 71
Information Technology Professionals
71
As a fictive text, Transmission explores elements of fantasy and imagination
that cannot be contained by labor valuation. It suggests that the IT industry,
which trades in and valorizes creativity and imagination, creates frustrated
desires among “merely reproductive” laborers that can generate uncontainable
political potential through the very technologies of code and communication
that enable the industry. A reading of Transmission as a theory of communication and communicability points to imagination as a realm of power and productivity that is always fraught with and in conversation with the contingencies
of constraint on the material body and the material world. As such it illustrates
the relationship between co-­constitutive and differentially valued existences
in both the Indian and U.S. contexts. These laborers’ lives can be read, through
ethnographic and fictive narratives, as demonstrating the differential investment of value—the accumulation of vital energy as biocapital—in the realms
of relative comfort, sensual pleasure, and the sense of risk versus security. The
assignment and achievement of use-­values like comfort or security are thus
revealed as evidence of the exploitation and accumulation of value. We also
see the way that fantasy valorizes certain spaces of existence over others, contributing to their richness and supporting the lives of those who live within
them. At the same time, these enriched spaces are populated by subjects who
turn out to be unstable placeholders that always require work to be sustained.
Bangalore’s Local-­G lobal
Over the course of a year in 2005–­6, I spoke to both U.S. Silicon Valley–­based
and Bangalore-­based Indian citizens who work or have worked in the IT sector. I conducted interviews with employees of two different BPO firms, one
Indian owned and one headquartered in France, and both servicing contracts
with the United States. TAMCO, a relatively young Bangalore-­based company, was founded by a transnational programmer who returned from the
United States to invest his saved capital in this start-­up and hired colleagues
from among peers in Bangalore’s open source community. It provided three
services: outsourced medical transcription, legal software design, and general
technology-­based services for Indian governmental projects. Allcom, conversely, imported top management professionals from France, but hired project managers in Bangalore. It specialized in telephone-­based communications
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM
72
Information Technology Professionals
software for call centers. The TAMCO and Allcom employees I interviewed
represented an elite and small group of workers whose perspective on the
IT industry in India was often informed by having spent time in the United
States or other Indian centers of high-­tech industry, including Mumbai and
Hyderabad; this mobility is not a characteristic of the majority of IT workers
in India.
The city of Bangalore maintains a number of simultaneous profiles. Host
to a collection of prominent technical schools, it became an international site
of computer engineering and programming in the 2000s. By the time of my
research, IT work in Bangalore accounted for one-­third of India’s IT export
earnings.8 Bangalore is home to transplanted IT professionals from all over
India and, to a lesser extent, all over the world. As the capital of the state of
Karnataka, Bangalore is also a center for regional arts and culture, including a
vernacular film industry, in addition to being an administrative and bureaucratic center for the state. As Karnataka’s city with the most resident foreigners, foreign currency, and domestic and international financial investment,
Bangalore lures people from rural areas that aren’t located closer to Bombay
or Chennai. Bangalore is also what draws the social scientist from the West: a
site of seeming contradictions produced by transnational capital funneled into
the technology sector of a country that has largely skipped the steps between
comprador industry and postmodern electronically mediated capitalist production. This leap, however, has only occurred for portions of the population,
and the tensions between rural interests in Karnataka and the interests of the
small number of wealthy Indian and foreign technology companies reveal what
happens when high-­tech centers of transnational capital come to roost among
failing subsistence farms and generally unstable domestic production.
Cities in the Global South that serve as hubs of transnational circulation,
like Bangalore, Delhi, and Bombay, lend themselves to being imagined and
configured as part of a highly interconnected world, one kind of cosmopolitan
fantasy. The body of the worker in such places also gets reconstituted as it
negotiates spaces in these cities and the economies that operate there, becoming an archive of specific skills and practices as well as a node within a larger
production scheme of transnational business processes. Bangalore citizens
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Vora.indd 72
16/01/2015 11:38:2
ora.indd 73
Information Technology Professionals
73
expressed a number of concerns that gesture to the city’s intersection with
what is imagined as the connected world. For example, there had been ongoing demand for attention to the unmanageable traffic conditions in a city
where so many people must commute along the single road leading to the area
outside of town where the IT campuses are located. Local politicians must
cater to such demands of the personnel of multinational corporations that set
up branches in Bangalore, while also placating local constituents. Competing
demands for political attention and state funding also included insistence from
domestic noncommercial interests to improve infrastructure in the state of
Karnataka’s rural areas rather than directing all resources to Bangalore. Meanwhile, the imagination of connectedness, the situation of increasing commercial construction, and the simple presence of capital attracted regional migrants
to the city, putting a strain on civic resources, while corporations were constantly threatening to move to other Indian cities or alternate competing locations in the Global South.9
At the same time as a fantasy of connectedness gives members of the transnational capitalist class a sense of access to many of the things they identify
with a cosmopolitan or American lifestyle, the divide between rural and urban
Karnataka belied the reality of this connectedness. A divide also existed within
the city of Bangalore, where college graduates coming to the city from outside
of Bangalore had trouble going directly from their technical school training to
U.S. jobs or jobs with U.S. subsidiaries in Bangalore, jobs in which office culture
modeled itself on that of the United States. According to urban residents, male
migrants to the city from rural areas also had trouble interacting with urban
women and adjusting to urban social structures in general. This divide between
rural migrants who are at a cultural loss and urban residents who feel cosmopolitan in their connection to the rest of the world suggests that Bangalore is
as much a part of a network of transnational cities as it is part of Karnataka.
Bangalore resident and software development consultant Anand N. would
now be atypical, but he provides a portrait of the period when the IT industry developed in India. Programming was a hobby to which Anand devoted
much of his time beginning in high school, and he actually quit school before
graduation to begin managing the website for an IT industry magazine; this
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM
74
Information Technology Professionals
coincided with the dot-­com boom of the late 1990s in the United States and
elsewhere. By age twenty, Anand had become head of the magazine’s tech­
nology department and was sent to the United States to build a website for
an affiliate of his company. He had never built a website before, but as head of
technology, he was the only person available. Anand later went back to finish
his twelfth standard in pre-­university (the Karnataka equivalent of the U.S.
high school) and then began working as an independent consultant in Bangalore. At the time of the interview, he had recently taken a position with the
small start-­up TAMCO.
Anand’s story describes how rapidly IT took root in India, heavily relying
on people with computer experience, no matter their age or range of skills.
Like many others in his level of the profession, Anand had access to a personal computer in high school, a rare situation in the early 1990s even among
middle-­class and upper-­middle-­class families in urban India. To have a computer at home before 1991 would suggest that someone in the family was
conversant with computers and had connections overseas through which to
obtain a personal computer. Uniquely positioned to take advantage of the IT
boom in India, and part of the attraction of India as a site for IT development,
the class represented in Anand’s narrative predates the growth of the telecommunication technologies sector following India’s liberalization of the national
market in 1991.10 As Smitha Radhakrishnan points out, “most of those who
make up what has been dubbed India’s ‘new’ middle class had parents who
were part of the ‘old’ one.”11
Middle-­class professionals like Anand tended to feel that Bangalore was
burdened with the discomforts of ill-­planned urban growth, and there was
also an underlying sense that the presence of transnational capital in the city
was only temporary. The growth of Bangalore was driving up the prices of
consumables, labor, and, consequently, rents, because with growing compe­
tition, it was difficult to sustain “cheap labor” and low salaries. Some IT companies were becoming impatient with both rising operating costs and with
Bangalore’s city administration and were moving to other cities in India, such
as Chennai and Hyderabad. Cities in Maharashtra and other nearby states
were rearranging their tax structures and construction regulations to entice
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Vora.indd 74
16/01/2015 11:38:2
ora.indd 75
Information Technology Professionals
75
these companies. There was also speculation that some companies were planning to leave India for Southeast Asia, where there were cities whose IT labor
was cheaper than labor in urban India.
Meanwhile, Karnataka’s politicians who paid attention to the needs of the
rapidly growing city of Bangalore were perceived as ignoring the needs of
rural Karnataka, and vice versa. In general, newspaper articles and editorials
cited the state government’s failure to acknowledge how fast Bangalore was
growing and the attraction this held for people from the surrounding areas.
The city’s population was around four million in the early 1990s, and by early
2006, it was between six and seven million; by decade’s end it would be well
over eight million and still increasing. The opinion of residents of Bangalore
was that the government, by failing to promote programs to advance rural
development, also failed to discourage the high rate of urban migration.
Just as Bangalore’s administration and infrastructure were operating simultaneously in the realm of Indian and international demands, the programmers
interviewed in Bangalore cannot be described accurately as residing only in
India. Their location in Bangalore is one that is always informed by Bangalore’s relationship to transnational capital, and they themselves often travel
along the paths that capital takes in and out of India. In his sociological study
of IT work performed in India for foreign contracts, A. Aneesh describes the
state of workers who visit the United States or even migrate virtually for their
jobs as the “transnational condition”:
One can easily see how immigrant programmers miss being in the United
States when they have left it, and look forward to coming back for another
spell and renewing their attachment. One can also see that they wish to
return to India during their stay in the United States. The transnational condition means that one loses a single cultural or national mode of being without being aware of it, that one is reborn without the memory of the past life;
only those who saw the person before are struck by the change.12
The excerpts from Akash’s interview at the beginning of this chapter provide
details of how this condition differs from the situation of diaspora, which is
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM
76
Information Technology Professionals
characterized by residence in a place that is not home yet is haunted by the
migrant’s longing for home. The transnational condition points to one type
of cosmopolitan habitation, where no singular place is really home, and where
travel, whether it be virtual or actual, is less a choice than a means of living.
The particular transnational condition of the programmers interviewed for
this project is one mediated by access to transnational capital and to code as a
transnational language and currency of labor.
To gain a better sense of the lives of Indian IT workers living abroad in
the United States, I spoke with several software engineers of Indian origin in
the area known as Silicon Valley before departing for India. These men (the
majority of software engineers are male, as was every person whom I was able
to interview in California) lived permanently in the United States on green
cards or were on multiyear work visas through the companies that had hired
them. In general at that time, Indian middleman agencies, known as “body
shops,” were the main source of tech labor recruited from India and placed
guest workers with different clients for project-­based labor. In their initial
recruitment of programming labor, body-­shopping firms use fantasies of the
West, “tapping into desires produced by the earlier colonial system.”13 These
intermediary companies work as go-­betweens for independent Indian technicians and U.S. businesses, keeping a fee or sometimes a percentage of the
employee’s income by accepting a dollar salary on their behalf and then paying them an Indian salary plus a living allowance to meet the much higher cost
of living in the United States. People who travel to work in the United States
through body-­shopping firms usually return within a year or two, spending
some if not at least half of that time “on the bench,” meaning they wait in
crowded, inexpensive housing with other recruits to be picked up on a contract.14 The body-­shopping firm refers them to possible jobs, but there is no
guarantee of employment. This system keeps a surplus of Indian programming labor close at hand for contract work with U.S. companies. The interviewees with whom I spoke were part of a minority who were not placed
through body shops, though they were in the United States on temporary work
visas. Often American companies will request that technicians be sent to the
United States, in which case those people will work on contracts supported by
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Vora.indd 76
16/01/2015 11:38:2
ora.indd 77
Information Technology Professionals
77
employer-­specific work visas for anywhere between two weeks and two years.
Such employees are often expected to attend virtual meetings with the home
company during the Indian business day (the U.S. evening and night) and to
otherwise keep up with their responsibilities at home after hours in their U.S.
positions. They are paid their Indian salary in rupees by their Indian employer
and are given a living allowance in dollars to cover the vast difference in living
expenses between India and the United States. The Indian employer is paid a
fee in dollars for the contract of its employee, a portion of which goes toward
the worker’s rupee-­based wage.
The daily lives of the software technicians I interviewed in Bangalore
involved a full Indian workday, which usually meant eight to ten hours at the
office with short breaks for tea and lunch. IT professionals described spending their leisure time in activities they associated with an urban middle-­class
lifestyle, such as eating in restaurants and cafés and shopping in malls, as well
as other non-­class-­or location-­specific activities, such as spending time with
family and seeing movies. They shared a feeling that you could now buy anything in India that you could buy in the United States, allowing you to approximate the same lifestyle with a few small differences. One earns less because
the wage is in rupees, but the buying power of that wage is more, because labor
in general is cheap in India, particularly when one is paid by a transnational
company whose salaries tend to exceed domestic wage brackets. A person in
Bangalore organizing his or her life around the fantasy of a U.S.-­style middle-­
class existence can also pay people to cook and clean in their homes and to
drive their cars in the formidable Bangalore commuter traffic. Many of the
programmers interviewed also spent significant time talking online and in
person with other IT professionals who belong to a social and professional
collective of open source aficionados in Bangalore, meaning that their hobby
and social interests, like their paid work, partially revolve around programming. They would meet in cafés or at each other’s houses to socialize and talk
shop and lamented the lack of common public space for such meetings as is
available in U.S., European, and to some extent larger Indian cities. A universal
interest was in the latest technological developments and getting hold of
them, because they were usually not immediately available in India.15 Most
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM
78
Information Technology Professionals
of the interviewees have personal web logs (blogs) and generally participate
in virtual communities that are international, giving them acquaintances and
collaborators outside of India.16
Bangalore’s situation in 2006 was largely the product of a specific moment
in transnational capitalist production: relying on electronic transmission of
labor and commodities, the high-­tech industry could move its minimal infrastructure to whatever location offered the cheapest cost of production. Because
the major variable in these costs has been labor, competition between industrial centers for such jobs becomes a competition for which places can offer
the lowest global price for labor. As the previous chapter on call centers argues,
the “cheapness” of Indian IT labor is artificially produced and entails costs
for the worker and locality that do not figure into the calculation of the “local
cost of living” that determines wages.17 It also shows how the development of
public policy, city infrastructure, and regional planning, represented by Bangalore’s city and Karnataka’s regional planning, were reoriented to attracting
and retaining the interest of transnational IT companies and managing the
traffic and demands their presence created to the detriment of existing local
and more rurally based needs and interests.
Making Indian Programmers
Appropriate for Outsourced High-­Tech Work
Working as a project manager for TAMCO at the time of the interview,
Ramanathan (Ramu) N. described the typical Indian IT professional as having
completed high school through the twelfth standard then having spent several
years working on an engineering degree while trying to get absorbed by one of
the major IT companies through on-­campus recruitment. He explained that
many large IT companies in India pursue this mode of recruiting as their primary way of finding new employees. Once someone is hired, she enters training programs that are designed to produce her as the desired type of employee.
In this sense, a company “creates its own talent.” He said that the Indian engineering education system doesn’t produce people with a lot of marketable
skills, just theory. “Tata Consultancy Services [one of India’s largest IT companies] and others like it have perfected the mode of producing their ideal
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Vora.indd 78
16/01/2015 11:38:2
ora.indd 79
Information Technology Professionals
79
employees. Most students would think of this as another step in the education
process. It pays them minimally, and they aren’t working on any real projects.
This leads to talent lock-­in, because when you are hired, they tend to sign you
into an agreement that you’ll stay four to five years, with a penalty clause for
breaking the contract.” Ramu believed that this process is the reason why the
IT industry in India is service oriented rather than product development oriented, which would require horizontal knowledge. This kind of training produces a type of employee that Ramu had trouble imagining as someone who
could participate in product development or problem solving. For example,
he said most of these companies would produce specific parts of IT systems
for Fortune 500 companies, with contracts on a piecework basis. He contrasted this to the development of something like an Indian Microsoft Word.
“Software products don’t exist in India because of the very nascent domestic
market. We would have to compete internationally, but the problem is that
India is so far away from the consumer’s market.”
The process of actively forming workers as appropriate for the specific
demands of outsourcing interests becomes visible in the tapping and recruitment of college-­educated Indian youth for both BPO programming and call
center work. In the case of computer programming BPOs, most companies
recruit directly from college engineering programs, putting their new hires
through a lengthy training period where they develop the applicable skills that
supplement their theoretical college training. These skills are very particular
to the position for which they are being trained, and as trainees, they are not
paid what a regular employee earns. In this way, companies make a very small
and low-­risk investment in creating their own employee pools. Those who
cannot perform at the end of the training period are told to leave and must
start the whole process again with another company. Someone could thus
spend years in a position without having achieved a full salary for his level of
skill, a pattern similar to that found in call centers, although in call centers
there is far less of an opportunity for upward mobility.
Ramu’s comments about the “typical IT guy” indicate that India’s system for
producing software engineers is organized around providing flexible and just-­
in-­time skills for the specific requirements of BPO work rather than around
This content downloaded from
137.110ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM
80
Information Technology Professionals
building products for a domestic market. As he explains, this does not result in
a population of engineers who are likely to have the necessary time, skills, and
resources to do product development. He sees the software engineering education system in India as contributing to the lack of jobs doing innovative work
in India. The educational system is reactive in that it is focused on producing
people who can get the types of jobs that are sent to India. The structural logic
of this educational system, which is both compliant with and reinforcing of
international labor demands on India, recapitulates the logic of the colonial
labor allocation in India under the British, where local labor was organized to
serve the needs of a distant consuming population, in the interests of building
a distant society. This structure is more complex because of the transnational
and non-­governing nature of IT companies, but the impact on education and
the limited opportunities for professional development, employment, and
engagement with the needs of India’s society are at least in part a material
inheritance from that system of organizing labor and education in India.18
The just-­in-­time production of appropriate labor for the needs of outsourcing firms has also contributed to the general sense of temporariness and lack
of future stability in Bangalore. In the mid-­2000s, there was a growing sense of
the temporariness of employment in relatively new sites of middle-­class jobs
like programming BPO firms and call centers. This existed in tension with the
general valuing in Indian society of jobs based on their long-­term potential.19
In their sociological report on trends among Bangalore’s population of IT
workers, Carol Upadhya and A. R. Vasavi describe some of the shared traits of
the Indian IT industry and its employees.20 They note the general sense of precariousness most programmers experience in relation to the security of their
jobs, knowing that they are likely to be laid off or transferred with little notice
if there is a downturn in the economy or if the company loses a foreign client.
As a response, these software engineers must constantly develop a new supply
of technical skills to be marketable in an ever-­changing industry. They found
that among engineers in India, there was a general expectation and understand­
ing of job insecurity and the need to remain flexible in response to changes in
the U.S. and other foreign economies. Men in particular experienced pressure
to find stable, long-­term employment, no matter how the individual felt about
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Vora.indd 80
16/01/2015 11:38:2
ora.indd 81
Information Technology Professionals
81
the nature of the work itself. Call center and IT work through BPO units carries the weight of impermanence and constant change associated with the so-­
called electronic age and, as a result, generates anxiety and a lack of a feeling of
futurity among those employed in these industries.
Open Source and Gray Market Creativity
The delimiting of Indian IT labor as appropriate only for reproducing existing
invention and knowledge forms, which occurs through a feedback system of
the stereotyping of Indian labor together with the response of Indian educational and IT institutions, constrains the autonomy of the worker in a way that
alienates her ability to engage with society through that work, for example, by
creating software that would serve the immediate needs of the Indian public.
This constraint is not complete, as some privileged programmers find ways
to make connections to Indian society through start-­up companies. However,
in general, as in call center work, where an agent must produce a persona that
divorces him from his immediate social context and affirms the value of the
society of the transnational consumer by protecting it from his otherness,
or in the work of the gestational surrogate, who is figured by her contract as a
subject of biological reproductive service rather than as an author or creator of
the child with property rights and therefore grounds for social connection to
the fetus and infant, the gendered allocation of reproductive labor to Indian
IT workers advances accumulation for those who are recognized as authors,
inventors, and owners at the expense of (reproductive, service-­providing)
workers. The resistance of the free and open source software movement to
the definition of creative authorship as strictly individual and property protected;21 the insistence on creativity as evidenced, at least in part, in a product’s immediate social utility; and the circulation of open source code outside
the logic of currency and intellectual property has made it a space of alternative creation. Through open source coding and the open source movement,
some programmers find a way to engage with society in India and perform
nonalienated labor,22 for example, by utilizing code to participate in nongovernmental organization work or shareware projects, while challenging implicit
rules and assumptions embodied in law without necessarily breaking the law.23
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM
82
Information Technology Professionals
Nearly every software engineer with whom I spoke in Bangalore mentioned
that open source “hacking around” by a few people has yielded the most successful software development in India. Open source software serves as a site
of innovation that does not rely strictly on the international economy. For
those who have regular access to a computer and the Internet, it can operate as
an alternative for innovation to the circuit of intellectual property and patents
around knowledge commodities. As Ramu mentions, programmers anywhere
can interact with a market and community of users through open source. If
code represents both a language and a currency in mainstream global capitalism, then open source represents a domain that is at least partly communal
and where this currency has different means and ends. Though access still
depends on a privileged knowledge of computer language and the availability
of hardware and Internet communication, open source is a sphere that uses
a currency of capital (code) but does not necessarily circulate it to generate
further capital.
The space and culture of creativity offered by open source programming
was idealistically imagined against the standard ways that authorship, invention, and innovation are regulated as knowledge commodities in the
corporation-­driven market. This primary understanding of creative authorship is gendered and relies on a distinction between authorial, masculine discovery and feminine, reproductive, servile support labor. In biological and
biotechnological research and development, and in genetic therapy research
and development in particular, there are very particular notions of what
counts as invention, and these are engaged with legal protections of intellectual patent and property. The history of scientific invention and experiment is
characterized by a privatized system in which a privileged investigator, almost
always an independently wealthy man, was legally and officially the author
of the discoveries that came out of the work of hired technicians in the lab,
“because of [his] resources and class standing.”24 In their discussion of the
Supreme Court case Moore v. Regents of the University of California, Waldby
and Mitchell describe the way that biotechnological innovation in the field
of genetic science is mediated by a discourse of invention precipitated by the
potential of research to become commodifiable intellectual property. This
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Vora.indd 82
16/01/2015 11:38:2
ora.indd 83
Information Technology Professionals
83
case examined the property rights John Moore had to knowledge derived
from the study of cancer cells from his body that turned out to be economically valuable for the development of therapies. Part of this discourse was
determined by earlier cases and the passage of the Bayh-­Dole Act in 1980,
which was “designed to reinvigorate ‘innovation’ by assigning patents to corporations rather than the U.S. government, because . . . assigning them to the
government has resulted in a huge waste of innovation.”25 Innovation here
becomes the creation of commodifiable knowledge-­as-­property with the fastest turnaround time possible. Any other use of patents to protect research is
then wasteful. The passage of this act together with other changes in intellectual property law boosted the early software industry into high profitability,
particularly through legislation in the mid-­1980s through the early 1990s that
deemed new materials, including even algorithms and business models, patentable, and in the 1990s, software was legally redefined as a technical innovation akin to physical machines.26 Waldby and Mitchell point out that the Moore
case raises the question of who is performing the inventive labor in a context
that involves, in that instance, materials produced by individual human bodies
that yield marketable knowledge commodities. The case was settled in favor
of the Regents of the University of California, in part because it was determined that individual body parts could not be owned by the individuals from
whom they were derived, meaning that the production of these parts was not
in itself considered the creative, inventive labor.27 This labor was predetermined through earlier legislation to be visible only through the lens of property
and patents, which are now part of the means of (commodified) knowledge
production in the Marxist sense. Laws protecting intellectual property rely
on historically gendered notions of active and passive creativity, where “support” labor, like that performed by nonauthorial lower-­class hired workers
or through embodied or physical production, does not figure as producing
property and is therefore not recognized as an invention or the result of creative labor.
The lack of property and patents in the Open Source Initiative, which provides protection of this status through trademarks and licensing protocols,28
engenders an arena for inventive labor that is visible as such to the market
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM
84
Information Technology Professionals
but does not require the same access to state and legal power that protects
this status in the private or commercial realm. The enthusiasm of Bangalore
programmers for open source resulted in part from its ability to give them a
community of like-­minded creative laborers whose goal is to push forward
technological innovation outside the temporality of the market and of property relations while remaining a challenge and an interrupting presence to that
space and temporality.
The sentiments of computer programmers in Bangalore around the desire
for creative work that connects them with a community and provides a sense
of contributing to the global progress of technical knowledge raise a number of
questions about how capitalist accumulation depends on the distribution of
labor worldwide. One such question is, What are the necessary conditions for
accessing creative work and having one’s innovation recognized as such, and
how are they distributed geopolitically? Waldby and Mitchell’s discussion of
inventive labor suggests that it is American and U.S.-­inflected intellectual
property rights and patentability that dominate access to the realm of inno­
vation in technology fields. At the same time, those with the right nexus of
capital, education, and cultural knowledge of the United States can gain access
to circles of creativity that have been organized against this hegemonic definition of innovation, mainly in the form of open source programming. Even
as open source programming supports many for-­profit software systems, its
global popularity, relative accessibility, and community-­based ethos suggest
potential instability in the current mode of producing knowledge commodities and the system of global distribution that determines who gets to create
them and who will reproduce them.
Despite the life of open source programming in India as a site for creative
production, it is the American start-­up company that has become the organizing model of creative achievement in the Indian market. Although companies
such as TAMCO that have begun to switch from BPO to Indian contracts are
still the minority, many people in IT want to see them as a positive sign of
future trends. In an interview, Akash said that he felt that the lack of demand
for innovative work by Indian workers may also be connected to a risk-­averse
attitude among Indian software engineers: “I’ve gathered that the average
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Vora.indd 84
16/01/2015 11:38:2
ora.indd 85
Information Technology Professionals
85
person here—­the HR person, engineer, manager—­wants stability and avoids
risk. If you look at the history of the US, a lot of innovation has happened. Ten
years ago, the main concern [for someone trying to build a career] was that
you had to survive. Now peoples’ parents have already established themselves,
and so they have more freedom to take risks.” The kind of risk taking necessary to establish a business in which one can choose to do innovative work
connected to the Indian public, rather than outsourced contract work, is limited to a small number who have the financial and cultural capital to create a
start-­up company.
Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s ethnography of genetic research and development
firms in India examines the fantasy of the start-­up in India in the specific
context of biomedical research and design firms.29 He points out that Silicon
Valley start-­up culture is precisely what Indian biotech companies and public
labs are trying to incorporate into their own functioning. Sunder Rajan argues
that this makes entrepreneurship both a cultural form and a form of subjectivity.30 He notes that although there is a formula for running a start-­up that is
taught in MBA programs, how start-­ups evolve is quite varied.31 Indian cultural practices in business were described by IT professionals in Bangalore’s
transnational class as not directly meshing with the sense of personal freedom
and possibility necessary to initiate a start-­up or even to negotiate the structured notions of innovation within corporate software development. In other
words, to incorporate the U.S. start-­up model as an opportunity to work around
the infrastructure of BPO work requires a major shift in cultural attitudes
and resubjectification and will be materially limited to those who already have
significant capital to invest. In this way, the fantasy of the start-­up reproduces,
or at least fails to challenge, the management of access to innovation by the
electronic transmission of labor in outsourcing—­or the business models and
labor valuation that are part of its structure.
Future prosperity in Bangalore, and in the current moment in global capital, is often a game of attracting venture capital that is transmitted electronically.32 The late 1990s marked the financialization of the IT industry, linking
waves of hiring and firing to stock market changes and setting the current
norm for professionals to develop ever-­new skill sets at the ready to keep or
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM
86
Information Technology Professionals
find new jobs.33 The understanding of this access to future prosperity and the
promise of creative work showed up in interviews as a structure of desire
around the idea of the start-­up company paired with the immediate practice
of open source coding or “hacking around.” Venturesomeness, a distinct type
of capitalist risk taking, relies on a specific understanding of the future. This
idea of the future is particular to a transnational capitalist business culture that
only partially overlaps with Indian business culture.34 At the time of his interview, Jehan had recently attended a conference on starting a small IT business
sponsored by venture capitalists and owners of small start-­up companies
in the United States. He said that one of the speakers described Delhi as the
only place other than San Jose where he has seen so much start-­up interest.
Jehan speculated that middle-­class people in India were getting to a point
where they could start to save capital. In the years following this interview,
Bangalore appears to have taken the lead from Delhi as the greatest producer
of Indian start-­ups, though start-­ups remain more of a desire than a reality
in most Indian cities.35 Because it reinforces the hegemonic model of innovation deriving from the U.S.-­centered IT business culture, this mode of self-­
imagining valorizes the lives of those who already have access to “innovative”
ways to invent their future lives, whereas the Open Source Initiative represents
a somewhat more accessible terrain of innovation for programmers.
Futures: Temporariness and Risk
One tendency of contemporary capitalist processes that is reflected in the sense
of temporariness described in Bangalore is the drive to cut costs by operating
only in the present moment. This temporality offers another way to think
about the flexibilization of labor. Aneesh notes, “In a competitively structured
field of capitalism, body-­shopping and just-­in-­time labor are important
schemes to tap globally dispersed labor while avoiding the overhead costs of
large labor inventory.”36 As mentioned earlier, BPO projects in IT and to some
extent call centers have short-­term agendas and do not often incorporate
Indian firms into the full life cycle of projects. In the discussion of call center
work in the previous chapter, this temporality and lack of career trajectory
also showed up among call center workers when agents talked about their
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Vora.indd 86
16/01/2015 11:38:2
ora.indd 87
Information Technology Professionals
87
future hopes in terms of what they will do after quitting their call center jobs.37
As we will see in the next chapter, contracted surrogacy also operates in a
forced temporariness, which creates tensions between the different expectations for future social connection among surrogates and commissioning parents. The tendency is to offer minimal training and commitment to the future
of the worker or the site of production, with maximum energy going into
the production of a given product right now. This emphasis puts the burden
of flexibility, of constantly adapting skills and knowledge, on the worker.38
Meanwhile, the future is conceived more and more in terms of risk and risk
management. Bangalore becomes a place of temporary prosperity for some
but not a place that can manage its own future prosperity.
The feeling of temporariness and instability around the presence of jobs,
international capital, and Bangalore’s general boom in IT was a theme that
came up repeatedly in interviews and casual discussions. Siddhartha, a graduate student from northwestern India, noted that even for someone outside
of IT, there is a general feeling of temporariness in Bangalore. Akash agreed
when I relayed Siddhartha’s comment, adding, “A lot of people feel that the
city doesn’t make you want to settle here. Places like Chandigarh [a city in
the state of Punjab] and Gurgaon [an industrial suburb of New Delhi] are
growing, so it will be interesting to see how many people stay in Bangalore.”
Interviewees expressed concern that many companies were dissatisfied with
the rising costs of doing business in Bangalore and were considering cheaper
places in India and abroad, to which they could relocate. The large number
of rural migrants who have come to Bangalore in response to the perception
of increasing amounts of money to be found there are another element contributing to the feeling of temporariness Bangaloreans expressed. Many wondered how these migrants would be absorbed if the flow of money from IT
companies were to stop.
The condition of a suspended future is not exclusive to IT workers in India
and in fact connects physically mobile labor migrants to those whose labor is
transmitted electronically or through transnational export. For example, after
Ramu moved to the United States to finish his graduate education, he worked
at two prominent consulting firms and did independent research at another
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM
88
Information Technology Professionals
well-­known research university. Despite its prestige, he became dissatisfied
with his work, which did not allow him to use his technical skills. But his visa
status, dependent on full-­time employment, wouldn’t permit him to take time
away from work to sort through what he wanted to do next. H1-­B visas allow
programmers to stay in the United States for one to two years, renewable up
to six years. In the United States, immigrants are discouraged from having
children with this uncertain future, and spouses who are allowed to accompany visa holders cannot work, meaning that most of those who choose to
come to the United States are young and single.39 The application process for
getting a green card in the United States would have required him to apply
after working there for five to six years, then to wait two or three more years to
hear the result. Ramu was not willing to take the risk of putting ten years of his
working life into a largely uncertain future. As a result, he moved back to India
one year before our interview and ended up at TAMCO.
For programmers like Ramu who have the flexibility to make changes to
their situation to secure a better chance at a stable future, going back to India
can mean an increase in control over life options in comparison to those of
the H1-­B visa holder. Ramu described a situation in which his choices were
either to put his life, including career, social community, and future plans,
on hold indefinitely for the chance to keep his current life in the United States
or to cut his losses and return to India, where his citizenship at least gave him
the right to stay in one place long enough to attempt to plan a future. Of
course, the positioning of Bangalore as a temporary place for transnational
capital to alight is beyond his control. Even so, he remains optimistic about
the future of IT in India and therefore of his own position in relation to it.
Aneesh describes this quality of immigrant lives as being caught between
transnational capitalism’s demand for free labor and the pressure of state and
nationalist concerns.40
One cost, then, of participating in short-­or indefinite-­term labor is the
security of future earnings and stability. This is evidenced by people’s sense of
temporariness about Bangalore’s situation in the mid-­2000s and their accounts
of the risks involved in India’s IT industry. Aneesh notes, “The more integrated an economy is into the global ebbs and flows [of capital], the more
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Vora.indd 88
16/01/2015 11:38:2
ora.indd 89
Information Technology Professionals
89
vulnerable are people’s social worlds.”41 This vulnerability is caused by the
reliance of those who work in industries organized around BPO contracts,
such as IT and call center work, on the whims of transnational investors.42 The
knowledge and sense that a person’s current life situation is unstable characterizes a position without a tenable future or a position that has a future that
must always be deferred until there is present stability. This lack of a future
was described in the previous chapter as one aspect of a compromised quality
of life. In the analysis resulting from his ethnographic research with genetic
research and development firms in the United States and India, Kaushik Sunder Rajan argues that biotechnology is a game constantly played in the future
to generate the present that will enable that future. He describes this as a
“grammatical” change in which life gets transformed into a calculable market
unit, oriented toward conjuring “corporate promissory futures.”43 Similar to
Waldby and Mitchell, Sunder Rajan imagines a temporality and “grammar” of
capital that depends on the calculability of “life,” particularly as it pertains
to risk and risk management. Sociologist A. Aneesh sees the management of
future risk as a part of the organization of a growing variety of disciplines,
including biology and computer science, around code and communication.
Like Sunder Rajan, Aneesh sees an epistemic shift around “life itself.” For Sunder Rajan, the regime of biocapital names this shift, whereas for Aneesh, it
is the rendering of life as language, his example being the genetic code.44 The
goal of promoting life, whether it is the life of an institution or the life of an
individual, is organized around the ability to program the future, both in the
sense of writing code within IT and also in the sense of providing a dependable plan for the future. In the lives of the many people in Bangalore whose
income depends on IT and communications companies who do BPO work,
life cannot be calculated in a way that allows for risk management, nor does
it allow for a dependable plan for the future. As Ramu’s story indicates, there
is a similar lack of futurity in the lives of Indian migrant workers in the United
States, so that temporariness is not exclusive to geopolitically separate spaces
of production but works through technologies like work visas to constrain
the mobility and futurity of workers in centers of consumption as well. As
theorists begin to describe an epistemic shift in life under capitalism toward
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM
90
Information Technology Professionals
managing future risk and future plans, we can see a tendency among Indian
workers at many class levels to live under conditions without a sure future,
which characterizes their role in supporting lives elsewhere.
Fantasy and Differential Lives in Transmission
Whereas the open source movement points to the ways that alternative social
and economic spaces can be created through the same technologies as the
formal economy and social relations of capital, Transmission suggests that
even within the dominant capitalist system of value, we can think about alternate use-­values for interstitial spaces that form around and between legitimate
spaces of capitalist production and redirect their resources to other ends. It
also underlines the potential of fantasy and imagination as realms of pro­
duction that do not always follow conventions that lead them to reproduce
already-­existing systems of value, production, and exploitation. Like the Banga­
lore programmer Anand profiled earlier, the protagonist Arjun Mehta in Hari
Kunzru’s novel spends most of his free time before moving to the United States
hacking around with networking and coding. The programs he writes rely on
spare resources from idle computers, situating themselves as small pieces distributed across multiple machines. Together these fragments form an “interstitial world.”45 Arjun’s exercise in creativity, consisting of various experiments
with programming code, take place not apart from legitimate spaces—­here
the normally accessed areas of his former college’s computer network—­but
between the legitimate areas of the college network. This production of use-­
values outside the system of legitimate production and consumption is one
way that otherwise outlawed needs are addressed in the novel. The primary
example of this form of production is the main action that drives the plot:
Arjun’s creation of a computer virus as the means of using and demonstrating
his unique genius and creativity to secure a job.
Hari Kunzru is a British-­born author who worked on the U.K. edition of
the technology magazine Wired during the late 1990s dot-­com boom. This
period was presumably his source of background information for the novel,
published in 2004, which is a comedic and also tragic account of the inter­
woven fantasy and material worlds of Arjun, an Indian software technician
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Vora.indd 90
16/01/2015 11:38:2
ora.indd 91
Information Technology Professionals
91
who moves to America to “become his dreams.”46 The juxtaposition between
ethnographic interviews and analysis of the novel is meant to open up multiple possible readings of these narratives as well as to trouble the genre distinctions and truth-­claims of the fictive, empirical, and theoretical. As explained
in the introductory chapter, the fictive nature of the novel functions as a
repository of the living labor of fantastic social relations, which Tadiar argues
are “unrecognized productive forces of globalization itself.”47 Its aesthetic rendering of the life of an IT professional who moves between the United States
and India presents both a theory of exploitation operating through forces
of mobility and immobility unique to the IT industry and a unique mode of
resistance in the form of hacking or piracy. This reading of the novel as a
theory of the particular limits and politics of IT work is thus helpful in reflecting on the role of the open source movement in Bangalore’s IT community,
even if its motivations are not self-­consciously the anti-­labor-­exploitation politics of a socialist labor consciousness.48 The novel sheds light on how the
opportunities of IT professionals are part of a larger structure of differential
global mobility and privilege, where the relative discomfort and immobility of
the many serves to provide the comfort and pleasure that valorize the lives of
the few, and how this differential is tied into the very ways that subjects imagine the value of themselves, their lives, and their access to a meaningful future.
The narrative of Transmission begins just as the main character, Arjun, successfully secures a job with an IT headhunting company called Databodies.
He subsequently moves from India to the United States and joins a group
of other programmers who share an apartment in a low-­income housing unit
somewhere near Silicon Valley. Once he arrives, he realizes that rather than
placing them with the desirable jobs promised to get recruits to come to the
United States, Databodies brings programmers from India and then markets
them as cheap labor to companies without the guarantee of even an interview. Arjun does eventually get hired into a good position with an antivirus
company. A year into his work, Arjun feels like he has finally achieved a long-­
held fantasy of his life. This life, to which he has always felt entitled, is defined
by the postcolonial logic of Bollywood cinema and the American dream in
Indian popular culture, which locates wealth and individual achievement as
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM
92
Information Technology Professionals
not only possible but attainable through travel to the United States. But then
Arjun is downsized and must leave the country because of his visa status.
Unable to let go of this fantasy, no less admit failure to people back in India,
Arjun hatches a plan to get his job back. In a moment that testifies to the material power of commitment to shared fantasies and their role in organizing
and producing the meaning of the good life, Arjun responds to losing his job
by joining the world of computer virus writing, a gray economy of creativity
that exists in between the legitimate spaces of production. He plans to crack
the virus in front of his old boss and get rehired. Arjun explains how to solve
the virus to his former boss, intending to impress him and regain his lost job,
but the plan misfires when his former boss instead takes credit for Arjun’s
solution and refuses to give him his job back. Arjun is not seen as a legitimate
source of such knowledge by his former boss, or worthy of credit by his former
coworkers, who witness his solution.49 In desperation, Arjun responds by
launching another version, and the virus grows uncontrollably, disrupting the
entire world economy and making Arjun a fugitive from the law.
Arjun’s existence and experience are juxtaposed with those of a number of
other characters, particularly Guy Swift, a high-­powered, London-­based management consultant whose life takes place both literally and figuratively above
that of Arjun’s as Guy jets around the world in the first-­class cabin. The differential nature of the lives portrayed in Transmission suggests a global economy
that leaves certain types of individuals and their conditions of existence more
invested with value than others. The volume and kinds of use-­values available
to different characters and the varying ability of individuals to consume what
gives them pleasure demonstrate these differences, which are always situated
in specific juxtapositions between characters or events. Similarly, in discussing the valorization of the First World through consumption of Third World
cinema and images of the Third World in general, Jonathan Beller says, “Just
as global capital needs the reality of the Third World as labor to valorize itself,
the global psyche/aesthetic requires images of Third World reality as realism
to valorize itself. These two registers of production are not essentially separate
spheres—­they are codependent.”50 This mode of valorization supports Trans­
mission’s suggestion that the discomfort, terror, and unease of the Third World
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Vora.indd 92
16/01/2015 11:38:3
ora.indd 93
Information Technology Professionals
93
are required to valorize the sensory pleasure of the First World. Such juxtapositions in Transmission mark uneven flows of value from one space into another.
These flows of value occur when certain use-­values are designated as necessary to one space of living and not another, becoming visible in the uneven
distribution of room to move, of comfort, of the time and effort it takes to get
something done, and of the experience of temporality itself. For example,
denied use-­values haunt the fantasy life of Arjun and are what bring him to the
United States in the first place. However, the reader sees that even in America,
his life is characterized by differentials, experienced through the insecurity of
his immigration status, the taking away of his job, and the lack of opportunity
to express creativity and value in his labor.
The work done by Arjun’s imagination is structured by dominant conventions, expectations, and designations of meaning and use, but the world of
Transmission is also a space where it becomes obvious that those structures
can break down. Bollywood, in collusion with larger structures of the global
market and its cultural norms, is the primary organizing structure of the fantasy and value that inform Arjun’s knowledge of what is necessary for a good
life. Bollywood film structures Arjun’s desire for a good life and his imagination in producing his life, making it central to the way his needs are created
and the way these spheres are valorized. Neferti Tadiar describes this process
as “fantasy-­production,” explaining that fantasies often operate as alienated
means of production, appropriated by the system that produces desires which
valorize only specific lives and experiences.51 The productivity of fantasy in
this sense is multifold. Fantasy represents and produces the real world as
we understand and experience it, marking some lives as more valuable and
some lives as less valuable, and as the plot of Transmission suggests, its effects
can create ruptures in its own structures.
When he eventually loses his job in the United States at the antivirus firm,
Arjun is thrown into a state of disbelief and desperation, expecting that once
he achieved a programming job in America, he would be able to maintain it as
part of his fantastic understanding of American life. The knowledge of his own
value and his fantasy-­based expectations do not line up with his now problematic visa status, his family’s expectations and inability to hear or understand
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM
94
Information Technology Professionals
his situation, or his anger that he remains invisible and disposable. To enact
and demonstrate his value, Arjun writes a brilliant computer virus housed in a
video file featuring a musical dance clip of Leela Zahir, his favorite Bollywood
actress: “Arjun knew what was going on behind the eyes and the smile, how
Leela was stealing resources from other programs, taking up disk space, making herself at home. How perhaps she was doing other things—­malicious,
corrupting things.”52 This description of Arjun’s virus working behind Leela’s
smiling face indicates hidden power that doesn’t get communicated because it
isn’t in a recognizable currency, because those who open the file are confused
and caught off-­guard by this appealing yet unfamiliar feminine figure. The figure of Leela doesn’t carry universal value, because her fame doesn’t exist outside of spheres that consume Bollywood film, but it does carry the product
of Arjun’s creativity, which is able to “make itself at home” in any computer
system, utilizing resources for its own devices. The virus speaks and acts for
Arjun in demonstrating his skills and his right to a good life. This insistence is
mediated by the Bollywood actress who is part of Arjun’s self-­imagination, the
language of programming which is his own language, and the self-­knowledge
that he has the creative potential and skill to create something that antivirus
groups will not be able to decode.
Reflecting on the period of the Leela virus from some unspecified date long
after Arjun has disappeared and become a legend among computer programmers, the narrator points to an inability to know the content or presence of
imaginations that do not line up with dominant narratives. “Ringtone is also
one of several Leela variants that have never been conclusively linked to Arjun
Mehta, a gap in the record that opens up vertiginous and troubling possi­
bilities. Were other people out there dreaming of Leela Zahir?”53 This comment also expresses the extent of the intrusion of the virus’s effects into valued
life: the realm of the imagination does not exist fully within the metabolism
of capital, reproducing the status quo of use-­values. Because of the way fantasy
and imagination work to valorize some lives over others in occasionally unpredictable ways, what denotes a “fully human life,” or “the good life,” is always
potentially impermanent, even for those who have seemingly attained it. At
the same time, this depiction of power and imagination in the novel is not
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Vora.indd 94
16/01/2015 11:38:3
ora.indd 95
Information Technology Professionals
95
redemptive, and though there is space for its existence and impact on the
world, the price for stepping away from the legitimate economy of creativity
and production is the potential annihilation of one’s being:
At that moment [Arjun] understood. Sooner or later they would find him
and then life as he knew it would be over. All I wanted was my job back.
All I wanted was to work and be happy and live a life in magic America. . . . They
were calling him a terrorist, which meant that he would probably just join
the ranks of the disappeared, the kneeling figures in the orange suits against
whom anything was justified, to whom anything could legitimately be done.
It was the revenge of the uncontrollable world. He had tried to act but
instead had made himself into a nonperson.54
Cyberspace functions as a liminal region between spaces of reality and fantasy
for Arjun as well as for the world of the novel. This liminality emphasizes
the way these spaces actually permeate one another, with very material effects.
As we find out from the historical narrator who speaks at the end of the novel,
on the day the virus was released, a number of new things came into existence
and many old things simply disappeared. For example, the day “came to be
known as ‘greyday,’” a day on which a “certain amount of money simply ceased
to exist.”55 People’s identifying information got muddled as government databases were rearranged, communications broke down, and people were unable
to navigate in the world. The metaphor of the hidden power behind the virus
is a reminder that the benefits of a given system of valorization are unstable,
as is much of what we consider the material balance of our reality. Part of this
instability derives from the unknowability of the fantasy realm and what is
transmitted between it and the material world.
In many ways, the questions raised by Transmission address the physical
and experiential consequences of the segregation of different types of lives
intended to maintain the density of “valued” existence in only some of those
lives and spaces. The balance between spaces of outlawed need and hyperconsumption requires a differential investment of value into those spaces, something that traditional political economic measures of value cannot indicate.
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM
96
Information Technology Professionals
One of the difficulties in arguing for the generation of value through the work
of imagination is that this form of production does not entail a method of
quantifying the value it generates. The use-­values that are central to Transmis­
sion have material consequences in their production and consumption but
cannot be measured by the socially averaged labor time invested into them.
Transmission shows how imagination, existing as both a shared social structure and as part of individual identity, is a practice in which use-­values do not
necessarily line up with what is dominant. Arjun takes action in his life on the
basis of a system of value that derives from a dominant fantasy of the good life
but mistakes himself for a subject fully entitled to a position in that fantasy.
To him, a good job in America is so fundamental to his subjecthood that he
must take any measure to preserve it. This use-­value for his job is, of course,
not accounted for by the human relations representative who fires him or by
the terms of his visa. Though it originates in fantasy, the mandate to pursue
only the “good life” and nothing less—­here a relatively straightforward job
and residence in America—­is undeniable.
Differential Experience and Valorizing Other Lives
Operating in parallel to the conditions of call center work in the previous
chapter, in Transmission, communication of oneself is a pleasure and a privilege, and most of the novel’s characters communicate messages that serve the
interests of others rather than themselves. Moving back and forth between
Arjun’s story and the stories of other characters, the narrative provides a critique of the fantasy of the good life as characterized by the pace of electronic
communication and the material conditions of hyperconsumption. The novel
suggests that the fantasies sustained by characters that must remain outside
of spaces of socially and culturally valued life, spaces that prove to be sites of
the accumulation of others’ vital energy, are part of what valorize those spaces.
In Arjun’s experience of waiting months for a job while on the bench in the
United States with the headhunting agency, and in his inability to communicate his value as a person and worker once he obtains a job, the novel also
points out details that elaborate how the unavailability of creativity and innovation in jobs available to Bangalore’s IT workers as well as the enforcing of a
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Vora.indd 96
16/01/2015 11:38:3
ora.indd 97
Information Technology Professionals
97
condition of insecurity and instability with regard to the future are characteristics of spheres of existence where value is more extracted than accumulated.
The reader can also see, however, that even those who achieve this valorized
life are susceptible to the instability of the system that has privileged them.
The forced temporality of IT present in both the Bangalore ethnography
and Transmission, characterized by lack of a sense of stability and a dependable future, denies IT workers a sense of future possibility and potential, use-­
values, and life necessities that are denied as part of the devaluing of Indian
labor, even in elite IT circles. The unmarked costs of being made into flexibilized and reproductive workers under conditions of unending instability and
temporariness correspond to affective expenditures by Indian IT workers that
are not compensated and, as such, are reflected in the workers’ devaluing as
“cheap” labor. Interviews with Bangalore IT professionals indicate that there
is no difference in the quality of Indian contract workers and their U.S. counterparts. It is also clear that though many IT professionals chose to reside in
India and work for a lower rupee-­based salary, they remained sensitive to the
ways that Indian IT labor is figured artificially as less innovative and creative
and therefore of lower value. What has been described in other chapters as the
costs and illegibility of reproductive labor appears in IT as taking up the work
of communicating and reproducing the projects, code, and social or market
agendas of others. Added to this is the particular orientation of the IT industry toward an ever-­decreasing future horizon.
The experience of time and movement through space is defined sensually
in moments of juxtaposition in Transmission. Guy Swift, the character juxtaposed most starkly with Arjun, is a thirty-­three-­year-­old British citizen who
is a “millionaire on paper” and president of his own image-­consulting and
marketing firm called “Tomorrow.” Swift experiences his relationship to the
future as a sensation of pleasure in the present moment, a pleasure that results
from the failure of others to get to this moment, and hence to the future, as
quickly as himself: “He feels the future as actually connected to him . . . he
would feel cocooned in the even light and neutral colors of a present that
seemed to be declaring its own provisionality, its status as a non-­destination
space.”56 Because he is often traveling between various global cities to visit
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM
98
Information Technology Professionals
clients, Guy is often seen sitting in first class, being attended to by people and
technological devices designed to increase his comfort and pleasure. In fact,
he perceives the very objects in his environment as instrumentally oriented
toward a future where the present is defined only as a transitional moment.
Guy’s existence is almost entirely “future” in its content. More specifically,
these objects, including other human beings, are stationed to “get him into the
next world, ahead of the curve.”57 The comparative element of this experience
invokes not only Arjun but also the original context from which Arjun emerges
from among the sweaty interviewees in the Databodies office. Here there is
no certainty of arrival in any kind of “future,” and the terms of the present are
composed of the denial of the very use-­values in which Guy is ensconced.
Transmission’s juxtaposition of separate realms of existence and the conditions
resulting from their differential valorization denaturalizes this separation.
Because different people and spaces become useful within capitalist production in divergent ways, and in fact the differential life available denotes the
transmission of vital energy from one to another, attention must be paid to
the specificity and difference of types of labor and its conditions. Not all labor
is the same (neither in a temporal, epochal sense nor in a horizontal, democratic sense). Gayatri Spivak addresses this relationship in the context of time:
Whereas the Lehman Brothers, thanks to computers, earned about $2 million for . . . 15 minutes of work, the entire economic text would not be what
it is if it could not write itself as a palimpsest upon another text where a
woman in Sri Lanka has to work 2,287 minutes to buy a T-­shirt. The “postmodern” and the “premodern” are inscribed together.58
The co-­constitutive spaces characterized by vastly different qualities of living,
including the qualities of time, space, and sensual comfort, must necessarily
remain separate to support the different uses of the people who live within
them. This naturalized separation is belied through their situation of close
proximity in Kunzru’s narrative.
The juxtaposition of Guy Swift’s context of travel with that of Arjun’s highlights the fact that though communication may be happening constantly,
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Vora.indd 98
16/01/2015 11:38:3
ora.indd 99
Information Technology Professionals
99
communication of oneself can be a privilege and a pleasure. Facilitating communication of the messages of others, on the other hand, is another performance of devalued and potentially depersonalizing labor. Those who may not
communicate themselves, for example, the Indian call center workers discussed in chapter 2, do the affective work of both repressing their identity and
communicating a false one in its place. The coerced transmission of the messages of others operates to invest value in those others, through esteem, idealization, and increasing their access to pleasure and ease at the expense of the
lives of those doing this labor. Jonathan Beller describes a similarly invisible
labor performed by the title character of the film, Curacha: A Woman without
Rest, as she involuntarily participates in preexisting representations of herself
as an image.59 Beller describes the film as about the last day in the life of a live
sex performer who understands her very body as a sign for the city of Manila.
Because of her work as a performer, but also because of the relationship she
experiences as coproducing the set of signs that constitute Manila, Curacha
experiences herself as merely a representation of herself. She must
submit [her body] to [the images’] logic in order to survive. . . . Evacuat[ing]
her body and its living connections . . . she can no longer grasp Manila in a
way that is experientially immediate . . . because her experience of the city is
always already mediated by her decorporealization, that is, her experience
of herself as an image.60
The labor of providing the medium or form for relaying the messages of
others is also a kind of decorporealization and a severing of “living connections.” Like the call center agents described in the previous chapter, characters
in Transmission invest time, energy, and affect to gain cultural fluency and to
support enabling fantasy worlds at the expense of the ability to sustain living
connections to others in their immediate social environments. In fact, this
lack of connection spares the person on the receiving end of this labor from
the need to treat these figures as anything other than a commodity, increasing
the sense of pleasure and security in the knowledge that they are meant to
consume and hence accumulate the value these others produce.
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM
100
Information Technology Professionals
Transmission gives us a character who, like the IT professionals in Bangalore who turn to open source programming with the hope of using creativity
and skills disallowed in their paid work, turns to hacking and cyberspace as
currency and space through which to express the value and social connection
of meaningful work and creative intellect, as well as the right to a good life as
promised by mainstream fantasy economies. Transmission reiterates the neces­
sity of the venues of expression and alternative production sought out by IT
professionals in Bangalore.
The frustration of Bangalorean software engineers is similar to that of
Transmission’s main character: they feel an inability to access creative work
through employment because of the way that U.S.-­based high-­tech companies
undervalue Indian innovation and business culture as nonentrepreneurial
and most fit for reproducing prior invention. Like call center workers, software engineers express the frustrated desire to connect affectively and socially
with their immediate world through their work. Instead they are held in a state
of limited action, a sort of partial capture characterizing reproductive labor
in the global economy that allows them to exist in a temporality specific to
reproduction of the messages and invention of others. This temporality suspends the future in favor of an extended temporariness of life and work.
Conclusion
The curtailment of opportunities for IT professionals to do work that directly
serves the Indian public, and that allows for production that is recognized as
creative and innovative, and therefore high value, is part of what enforced the
cheapness of Indian IT labor in Bangalore in the early 2000s. These losses to
quality of life, together with structural reorganizations that shifted public policy toward developing support for temporary needs at the expense of providing
long-­term support for the needs of residents, represent forms of evacuation of
the means of individual and social thriving. Such “outlawed necessities”61 and
limits on future thriving characterize Bangalore IT’s role in the contemporary
life support system that, as previous chapters have argued, has inherited the
legacies of colonial labor allocation and the international division of labor that
formed in the wake of European colonialism through globalization.
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Vora.indd 100
16/01/2015 11:38:3
ora.indd 101
Information Technology Professionals
101
The limits on the nature of work and forms of subjectivity that arise from
the enforcement of a devalued and reproductive role for Indian IT labor are a
somewhat surprising corollary to the other forms of capture and limitation
found in India’s labor history and in contemporary call center work and commercial gestational surrogacy. In Bangalore’s IT industry in 2005–­6, available
work consisted primarily but not exclusively of outsourced projects contracted from the United States and Europe. Software programmers described
their desires for the potential to be creative and innovative in their work and
for access to and realization of a fantasy of middle-­class conditions organized
around consumption. The concern among programmers that the value they
produced did not primarily benefit India, and the desire to instead be part of
the entire life span of a project, including its benefit to the immediate community, represents use-­values of the programmers’ labor not acknowledged
by the international division of labor. As testament to the desire to keep the
fruit of their labor “at home,” programmers described open source as a space
of promise for skirting the limitations of the global division of labor on Indian
programmers’ ability to create products that enact living connections to society and other people. The non-­market-­regulated space of open source programming represents one place where programmers can imagine that these
desires can be pursued and can bring together the like-­minded as a community. This promise and desire represent investment in a potential future where
the flow of value from India to the United States is destabilized.
The particularities of the social lives and imaginaries of transnationally
mobile IT professionals in Bangalore point to trends in the imagination of
what types of labor are appropriate, and therefore what types of jobs are
sourced, to Indian IT workers.62 These details illustrate common experiences
that provide insight into the globalization of high-­tech labor while also indicating the diversity of everyday practices that constitute the complex reality
of IT work. The experience represented in these narratives underlines how
fantasy and imagination produce and impact material practices and opportunities for such workers who are conscious of both the limits on their mobility
and future options and of the hypermobility of their labor. The narratives
point to the ways that processes that generated new use-­values in India and
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM
102
Information Technology Professionals
the United States created new consumers and structures of feeling among
the small but growing middle class in India as represented in Bangalore, alienating this population in some ways from the majority of Indian society. These
representations of the experience of working in IT suggest that even at an
elite level, India has been largely illegible as a site of innovation. They also
point to the centrality of the actual and imagined hyperconnectedness of
people and events in the contemporary world and how the sense of human
belonging and future possibility that such connection can entail is alienated
when communication is both a primary and privileged realm of conveying
one’s value as a social being and also a biopolitical form of transmitting and
accumulating value.
The structures of imagination that hold up the fantasy of middle-­class life
through consumption that transcends location, for example, in Jehan M.’s
assessment of living in the United States versus India, and in Arjun’s Bollywood-­
riddled confusion of reality and fantasy in his sense of entitlement to the good
life, are also revealed to be inconstant in these narratives. Where living in the
United States once represented the realization of an Indian middle-­class dream,
it has been replaced by the imagination entailed in middle-­class consumption.
Like the market itself, these fantasies exhibit tendencies in specific directions
but are ultimately unpredictable. Finally, as is evidenced in the hopes attached
to the open source movement, the role of imagination as a political space and
activity with material consequences promulgates alternatives to the dominant
processes of valorizing some lives over others, yielding use-­values from in
between the legitimate spaces organized by the capitalist metabolism that harvests vitality and deposits it into privileged lives and lifeworlds.
This content downloaded from
137.110.40.12 on Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:20:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Vora.indd 102
16/01/2015 11:38:3