About
Digital technologies have been the transformative force of the 21st century, changing the way we live, work and interact. Data, once the exclusive preoccupation of the statistician, is now the life-blood of our economies and societies. Those who control data mark and mediate our social location in society. They also decide who is included and excluded from the digital ecosystem.
Data, and the digital intelligence harvested from it, are today the purveyors of destiny. As data-based systems become the basis of development, important questions about justice and rights emerge:
• How can women farmers in Vietnam hope to compete with AI driven agricultural bots controlled by Japanese agritech companies?
• How will people’s social media history determine their access to work, credit and entitlements?
• How will ecommerce negotiations impact marginal developing countries?
• Who has control over the digital intelligence in Smart City projects?
• How does society really measure the worth of data?
and many more...
It is questions like these that got us interested in thinking about a space that could bridge the silence between digital rights issues and their connections to social justice. With a Jitsi webinar and a collective desire to explore these digital rights debates, Bot Populi’s journey began in 2018.
Founded by seven global organizations, Bot Populi is an alternative media platform dedicated to looking at all things digital from a social justice and global south perspective. We cover and report on the ways in which the digital world affects different aspects of our lives- in obvious and unexpected ways. We wish to make a dent in public consciousness about the digitization of our world. In the process, we seek to influence the norms, rules and practices that contribute to transformative change.
We will be making periodic updates featuring articles, videos and interviews on a range of issues.
To know more and support our work, please get in touch with us at hello@botpopuli.net and subscribe to our updates.
Founding Organizations:
Agencia Latinoamericana de Información (ALAI)
Data Justice Lab, Cardiff University
Derechos Digitales
Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN)
InternetLab
IT for Change
Just Net Coalition
BIG TECH WATCH (BTW)
The Big Tech Watch aims to interrogate the increasing power of Big Tech companies over our democracies, societies, economies and more – basically all aspects of our everyday living. BTW works as a record keeper of sorts, aiming to make visible the linkages between algorithmically powered corporations, global justice, social equity and human rights.
BTW provides analysis about corporate excess – from anti-competitive practices, killer mergers and acquisitions, to back-doors in trade deals. It also covers relevant law and policy developments.
FEMINISM IN THE DIGITAL AGE
The Feminist Observatory of the Internet (FOI) examines the relationship between feminist struggles and the digitally-mediated world.
It investigates the restructuring of gender power in the digital paradigm, unpacking old concepts for their new meanings, focusing on: the public sphere, citizenship, sexuality, rights and more.
THE NEW PRECARIAT
Over the past decade, debates around emerging technologies and the ‘Future of Work’ have gained in both momentum and attention.
The New Precariat documents and illustrates the ongoing challenges that labor faces in the digital economy. It reports on the political economy of work in the new context – precarity and informality, dataveillance, gig economy, gendered dimensions of labor, technology-led displacement, exploring new imaginaries of labor rights and the right to work.
