Personal Assistant to Billionaires: How Global Economic Inequalities are Reproduced

During my last year working as a personal assistant in California, I witnessed the actualization of various academically coded proponents framing Noble's (2018) argument within my own daily reality. While caring for the three-year-old child of my employer (CEO of an extremely profitable software company), I witnessed how younger generations are being socialized into existing neo-colonial biases & neoliberal economic structures via new digital platforms. When I first began working for this elite family, I was initially stupefied by the extraordinary and expensive technology integrated into the children's home and their everyday environment; Cutting edge digital advancements that I had only ever seen within movies, framed the kids understanding of 'normal' life; the technological marvels were more accessible to these elite children then their own parents. After officially signing a high-earning assistant contract with this billionaire family, my privileged employers provided me with the sole set of keys to my new 'work car'' - a digitally modified and upgraded model of Tesla SUV that the only vehicle (among their enormous fleet of expensive cars) deemed to be appropriate to deliver their children to and from their scheduled activities.

One morning, I was running late to work and didn't have time to swap cars before picking up the youngest, three-year-old child (Kyle), from his gated private pre-school at noon. I had assumed that my 2012 minivan (fully equipped with two rows of target-brand car-seats) was a suitable temporary alternative to transport the toddler back to his home. Moments after I picked up Kyle in my personal car and began our 30 traffic-packet descent to his family's gated million-dollar estate home, I realized the error in my initial perception.

After his 100th failed attempt to vocally command my not-smart car to play his favorite song 'Baby Shark' like he did every day while riding in the Tesla; Kyle became inconsolable and panicked. I had to pull-over on the side of the busy freeway because I heard him start to hyperventilate in between desperate sobs about needing to communicate with the 'Google God,"; lacking the comprehensive capabilities to grasp why the digital platform was no longer audibly responding to his random directives. The absence of this technology from even for a brief moment of his ' normal ' life, both terrified and aggravated him. Between violent outbursts, he screamed at me and my car; lumping both the vehicle and I into the same perceptual category labeled " stupid monsters" and "bad guys." During the longest 30 minutes of my entire life, I came to understand that his extreme and unprecedented tantrum stemmed from his apparent belief that Google was somehow a natural human-right rather than an expensive privilege. Regardless of my explanation, Kyle would not relinquish the idea that I was somehow actively/purposely infringing upon his life-sustaining need to access the popular platform's comforting all-knowing digital voice & 'objective' answers.

After not speaking to me for almost a week following this incident, his parents apparently convinced him that he should 'pity' me because I couldn't personally afford to own my own smart car rather than be upset at my lack of individual access to the endless pool of seemingly objective knowledge perceptually linked to technology. His elite family members pushed him into covering his deep-seated anger and mistrust with superficial sympathy; a belittling expression of his parent's subliminally subjugating ideological position. This idea soon spread to Kyle's older sibling, who shortly after this incident, told a (Hispanic, female) elementary school supervisor that he didn't have to listen to her anymore because she was apparently economically disenfranchised and thus, 'obviously' dirty and unintelligent.

Per Noble's (2018) analysis, this scenario can be understood as evidence of the microscopic processes making up privileged youths’ early-childhood socialization into the globalized (colonial-based) social stratification, structural/systematic inequalities, and oppressive neoliberal systems of power. These subliminally sites of sociocultural reproduction are where these elite youths learn how to reify their elevated socio-economic/political place of power within the Western world's industrial 'information society' and furthermore, how to systematically distinguish themselves from the mechanically marginalized and dehumanized technologically-lacking outsiders.

References:
Broussard, Meredith. 2018. Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. Boston: MIT Press.
Korn, Jenny Ungbha. 2018. “Equitable Cities Instead of Smart Cities: Race and Racism Within The Race For Smart Cities.” Journal of Civic Media 1, no. 1: 34-45.
Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press.
McIlwain, Charlton. 2017. “Racial formation, inequality and the political economy of web traffic“. Information, Communication, and Society 20, no. 7: 1073-1089.