UC San Diego

Third World Manager is a documentary fiction film about the impact of entrepreneurial culture on social activism in Brazil structured around the story of Angelo Madson, an independent radio host and media democracy activist from Belém do Pará, in the Amazonian territory. The film combines observational and counterfactual narrative strategies anchored in a metafictional structure informed by Epic Theater of Bertold Brecht. In this text, I investigate the term Third World Manager as a performative category of platform labor and as a situated interchangeable expression for producer-artist (the author as producer, Benjamin, 2005) or the organic intellectual (Gramsci, 1982), in the Global South. Hypothesizing a slippage between the figure of the media activist and the entrepreneurial subject, I consider how artists and producers can challenge the practice of managers as technocratically neutral, in the light of the new morphology of the infoproletariat (Antunes, 2019), as a way to inhabit management and resist the accelerated corrosion of working conditions, particularly in the Global South. By using the film as a case study and analyzing my work as a no-budget activist filmmaker, I argue for a genre (or design) of planning that incorporates a mix of collective improvisation, playfulness and commonality as potent tools for avant-garde forms of organized collaboration.