2024 May Day Special Issue
Dear Reader,
It’s that time of year again! As we celebrate May Day 2024, we reflect on the changing shape of labor struggles in the platform economy. Our special issue this year takes stock of how the explosive momentum around artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is altering the terrain for work and worker rights. In addition, we bring you some on-the-ground reporting from a region that often gets overshadowed: the Middle East and North Africa.
First, however, a quick look at some important developments from the month gone by.
We begin with Amazon’s recent announcement that it would be ending its ‘Just Walk Out’ checkout system. The startling revelation at the heart of this story is the fact that the entire system ran on an elaborate, outsourced workforce in India, who facilitated the process by gleaning shopping information from surveillance footage. Indeed, the costs, glitches, and inefficiencies of this set-up proved simply unsustainable, forcing Amazon to roll back the feature. As commentators observed though, this development simply goes to show how often today’s exuberant narratives about AI 'breakthroughs' continue to hide much more murky and familiar dynamics of cheap labor and exploitation across the Global South.
Also on the labor front, recent numbers show the persistence of turmoil in the tech sector despite early optimism in the year, with layoffs for 2024 having already reached 74,000 so far. While the stock markets are back to rallying for the big players in this sphere, it appears that venture capital investment remains largely stagnant, and are yet to rebound to the liberal splurging that preceded last year’s downturn.
Moving on, this past month saw tensions around TikTok come to a head. The US President has signed into law an ultimatum for parent company, Bytedance, dictating that it either divest from TikTok completely in the US or be banned from operating within the region. In addition, the company has also been asked by the EU to provide a risk assessment around mental health concerns for users or be subject to suspension there too. As these maneuvers attempt to restrict Chinese tech power, it remains to be seen whether it marks a significant escalation in this on-going conflict and whether the latter feels compelled to respond to these measures.
Such geopolitical dynamics were visible in the field of AI as well, as leading competitors released new models of their Large Language Models, and this past month also saw significant developments in the scramble to shape Africa’s AI futures. The China-Africa summit drew new partnerships and inroads for China’s sizable influence in the region. Meanwhile, Kenya announced a new alliance with a number of EU countries for building a national AI framework. Unfortunately, as the race to gain pre-eminence in shaping the regulatory landscape and standards for AI grows more intense, the potential for a consensus on basic norms seems to be becoming more and more difficult to achieve.
Finally, April saw the release of Global Digital Compact (GDC) Zero Draft, which is to serve as a framing document for intergovernmental negotiations around a digital agenda. This is a significant step in the UN process towards a GDC, and the political footings established at this stage are likely to prove meaningful till the end.
Coming back to our current issue. This month on DataSyn, we bring you two special features! Firstly, we reached out to a set of key voices from the frontiers of research and practice around platform labor to get an insight into the AI question as it pertains to the worker’s movement. Second, the latest from our Big Tech and Society fellows, we are pleased to put out a brand-new podcast series, EcoMinassat, which puts the spotlight on the platform economy in the MENA region. In addition, in a bonus feature: we stay on the pulse of global multilateralism, with a critical review of the Global Digital Compact Zero draft.
In solidarity,
The DataSyn Team
PROLETARIAT MATTERS
Labor and Artificial Intelligence: Emergent Frontiers of Struggle
Various Authors
As a special feature this year, we reached out to a number of scholars, organizers, and activists to briefly speak on the newest addition to the political landscape of work: AI. As the exuberance around Machine Learning (and especially, Generative AI) reaches new heights, how are these technologies shaping the everyday struggles of the workplace? What are the new possibilities and obstacles that they generate, for both discipline and resistance? What are the ways they may be mobilized in the future? These are crucial questions that address what is more and more becoming a defining element in the fight for digital justice and worker power in general.
Have a look at these thoughtful and perceptive responses from Adio-Adet Tichafara Dinika, Kriangsak Teerakowitkajorn, Pratiksha Ashok, the International Trade Union Confederation, and Uma Rani, Rishabh Kumar Dhir, and Nora Gobel from the ILO!
Read on.
THE NEW DIVERGENCE
EcoMinassat: Platformization in the Middle East
Yosr Jouini
While recent years have seen a surge in research and coverage around the platform economy, it is crucial to remember that important stories from this domain still persist in obscurity. Indeed, one of the major blindspots of this popular attention has been the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, which remains significantly underreported. Our Big Tech and Society fellow, Yosr Jouini, seeks to fill this gap with an exciting new podcast series. Join Yosr for a three-episode ride, exploring key facets of the platform economy in the MENA region, its contentious ground realities, its worker struggles, and its relationship to crucial issues of gender and immigration.
Read on.
THE POLICY TABLE
The Global Digital Compact We Need for People and the Planet
Anita Gurumurthy, Nandini Chami, Shreeja Sen and Merrin Muhammed Ashraf
The Zero Draft of the Global Digital Compact (GDC) to be adopted at the Summit of the Future is crucial to international digital cooperation under a transformative vision of global digital governance. As advocacy efforts gather pace in the run-up to intergovernmental negotiations, our colleagues at IT for Change delve into the details of the GDC zero draft, identifying shortcomings and dangerous points of ambiguity that need to be rectified for any substantive movement towards a just and equitable multilateral agreement.
Read on.
The Sins & Synergies Lounge
Amazon’s rollback of its cashier-less ‘Just Walk Out’ technology in Amazon Fresh stores, has brought increased attention to the artificiality of artificial intelligence as it came to light that the system largely worked due to hundreds of human reviewers validating the purchases. Amazon’s very own Mechanical Turk job platform provides a “distributed workforce” that helps outsource the cognitive labor that keeps such systems working. Elizabeth Stephens’ paper provides timely and thoughtful observations on the artificiality of “thinking machines” and the conditions of labor that sustain them through a comparative analysis of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to the 18th-century chess-playing automaton of the same name that was promoted as the world’s first “thinking machine.”
'AI Art’ often animates the tension in debates about the value of human labor in an age of artificial intelligence. Offering a surprisingly fresh perspective on these “mean images,” you cannot miss artist and writer Hito Steyerl’s piece in the New Left Review. While her discussion on the composition of “mean images” as marking a shift from representational to statistical rendering of life is especially notable, her attention to its “means of production” is an especially brilliant diagnosis of precarious labor in Machine Learning industries and a call for untraining ourselves from the techno-futures it creates.
Clickwork, ghostwork, and other forms of labor that make artificial intelligence “intelligent” are often explained away as work that simply “trains” the model till it can achieve its independent potential. Underlying this theory of AI’s progress is a relentless comparison between human and machine intelligence and capability that increases the perceived value of AI at the cost of devaluing human labor. Read along as Stephanie Dick, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Matt Canute reflect on How AI Sets Limits for Human Aspiration to observe that this story of progress is made possible only through a “shrinking definition of intelligence that excludes many human capabilities.”
Also check out this thoughtful research report, Centering Rights in the Platform Workplace for an excellent primer in the debate about regulating platforms for workers by Shreeja Sen, Sreyan Chatterjee, Sonakshi Agarwal, and Amoha Sharma.
This May Day, yes, it is bread we fight for—but we fight for roses, too. Tune in to Platform Cooperatives with Trebor Scholz on the Talking about Platforms Podcast to reach into the history of worker-owned co-operatives to present-day experiments with platform co-operatives. And while you are there, make a detour to check out this investigation into alternative futures driven by platform co-operatives which experiments with a community rights-based framework for data governance. Ranjitha Kumar, Viraj Samir Desai, and Natasha Susan Koshy from IT for Change under the research brief, Creating Sustainable Data Cooperatives in the Global South, return to the field to outline essential institutional frameworks necessary for the effective and sustainable functioning of agricultural data cooperatives in India, and the Global South.
Post-script
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