At the same time that the internet was being built and celebrated as this kind Paris Marks, and today, July 15th, is the last day

that you can order a t-shirt for this first batch. So if you want to get it as soon as possible,

you have to get your order in today. Now, if you still want a t-shirt after this day batch. So if you want to get it as soon as possible, you have to get your

order in today. Now, if you still want a t-shirt after this day, that's fine. You can still order

one. It will just be shipped at a later date. So just a heads-off about that. And from now on, I won't

start off the episodes by letting you know about t-shirts. We'll just get right into it. So this week's guest is Alex Rivera.

Alex is a filmmaker who has written and directed a number of short films, along with two feature

films, the 2008 science fiction film Sleep Dealer, which is set primarily in Tijuana, Mexico,

and kind of interrogates what a future of hardened borders and restricted migration

would look like with the integration of some of these new technologies that have been talked

about since the early days of the internet in the 1990s. And he also made the 2019 film, The Infiltrators,

which is kind of a hybrid of documentary and a scripted film

set in an immigration detention center. So Alex is doing really interesting and really important

work. And based on that introduction, I don't think you'll be surprised to hear that most of our

conversation will be revolving around sleep dealer and Alex's thoughts on how these

technologies that are often promoted as inherently liberatory could and certainly do mean

very different things for people in the global south and that often these really positive narratives

fail to seriously consider how these

technologies will actually interact with capitalism and, you know, the migration politics

and other forms of inequality that exist in the world system today. I think one of the things

that really stood out to me in this interview, and there are a lot of

important points that Alex makes as we talk about the film and his larger ideas on these topics,

...