Technological innovations have been instrumental in bringing in many changes within the everyday lives of the people. They have reduced the time that people usually used to spend outdoors, as well as have become instrumental forces in normalising ways of lives that counter the requirement of communitarian bonds and social solidarity. While a utopian view of technology ushers in a sense of gradual opening up of the society in a manner which gives rise to less gatekeeping and more democratic management, a dystopian view argues that technology causes the creation of a more social and cultural inequalities (Leonardi & Pirina, 2020). Technology acts in accordance with the dominant social ideology in place, as Marx (1867/1976) had argued, and does not act as an autonomous institution enabling historical transformation, but rather works in accordance with the broader issues surrounding labouring processes and work organisations. A simplistic understanding of technology can point one towards concluding that they help individuals in gaining a better control of their lives. Some technological innovations help in routinising and regularising certain aspects of individual human lives by interfering with the nature and content of human interactions. Within urban spaces, these processes undergo further modifications because of the existent capitalist valorisation processes, often at the disposal of the upper echelons of the society.
Cities, as Robert Park notes, are the human being’s most successful attempt at remaking the world in the image of the actually living individual’s thoughts and desires. However, ‘if the city is the world which [the individual] created, it is the world in which [the individual] is henceforth condemned to live’ (Park, 1967, p. 3). In other words, cities reflect the inhabitants and users therein as ‘what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from … what kind of people we want to be’ (Harvey, 2012, p. 4). Everyday life in any city is characterised by a certain mundanity, which often becomes the reason of being overlooked by academics interested only in the spectacular nature of an event or a process (Debord, 1961, 1968). This mundanity of everyday life retains itself—albeit often modifying itself—amidst the waves of migration. Most urban centres today realise that migration, both national and international, is a key aspect of their social fabric and developmental trajectory (Buhr, 2017). Belongingness is an important part of developing a sense of having a right to the city because it provides individuals with a consciousness that allows them to be active subjects within the processes that they are a part of (MacDonald, 2008). Thus, it also becomes critically important for capitalism to restrict the extent of belongingness that migrant workers possess because it caters to a state of psychological domination and subordination, which constitutes an important role in the process of establishing a state of subsumption in the society. In other words, economic exploitation fulfils only a part of the agenda that capitalism possesses, which only become complete with the complete domination over the human essence of the workers. It becomes easier for capitalism to do that in the case of migrant workers because migrant workers already remain under tremendous pressures of social stigmatisation and structural violence. This becomes an essential part of their everyday lives creating conditions of a ‘bad state of social being where they are seen akin to machines’ (Migrant Gig Worker from Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, June 2022).
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S. D. ROY