Big Tech & Society

IT for Change's Big Tech & Society Media Fellowships offered journalists and media professionals the opportunity to pursue deeply researched, investigative long-form projects in print and audio on issues at the intersection of technology, policy, and economy. Specifically, it was geared towards supporting work that is focused on the Global South, which surfaces strong regional and local narratives of technology, capitalism, policy, and development from Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America, and integrates economic and gender justice concerns within its analysis.

These pieces represent the first crop of work that the Fellowships have delivered. They contain topics ranging across a broad array of emerging developments, lesser-known policy debates, and key political conjunctures within the Global South's digital economy’. ↑ 

The Davos 2022 Roundup

The history of the Davos Summit, hosted by the World Economic Forum (WEF) every year, is a history of capital and its growing voice at the decision-making table of global governance. The star of Big Tech has been particularly ascendant at the WEF, with digital technology increasingly informing the economic and social relations of our times and those to come.

This special issue analyzes both rhetoric and action in the context of Davos 2022. The three featured pieces probe into the ways in which multistakeholderism and techno-solutionism are forwarded as ideal responses to the problem statement of governance of the digital, and examine the underlying corporate capture currently underway by the ‘Davos Class’. ↑ 

Feminist Re-imagining of Platform Planet

Platformization has transformed life, leisure, work, and play within the social, political and economic spheres. The omnipresence of the extractive logic of platform capitalism, evident in the increasing Amazonification of the market and the Facebook-ification of the public sphere is blurring the boundaries between public and private. Furthermore, the state-capital nexus manifests in a new form of data-governmentality, disciplining and disenfranchising marginal subjects.

With this special issue on the Feminist Re-imagining of Platform Planet, we seek to open up a collective re-imagining of the platform context, answering the hard questions on how platform capitalism can be dismantled.

In the public sphere, private-owned and controlled online spaces have offered new opportunities for voice and expression for historically marginalized communities. But these spaces do not guarantee the right to be heard. Feminist movements and activists who have been forced to take to digital platforms for political mobilization find themselves struggling against unilateral regimes of private censorship.

In the political sphere, core governance functions such as welfare provisioning are increasingly being mediated through private digital infrastructure in many contexts. The platformized state is morphing foundational economic infrastructures into quasi-public utilities, without putting governance frameworks in place.

As the network-data phenomenon blends into and becomes inextricable from the social and economic, our aim is to build on the important epistemic project of feminist-izing the digital. The essays in this issue unpack and interrogate the current paradigm to reclaim the vision of gender justice in the platform planet. Watch this space for new essays each week!

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this special issue are the authors' and do not necessarily reflect the views of Bot Populi. ↑ 

A New Social Contract for the Data Age

An instructive, even if odd, place to begin our inquiry into a changing social contract in the digital society might be the distinct archetype of the repentant Big Tech defector. These individuals, ranging from executives, developers, investors, product managers, inter alia, follow a seemingly similar narrative arc. From playing pivotal roles in shaping the course of Big Tech, they now provide confessionals in the Augustinian mode, screeds warning the world at large of the disturbing chaos that surrounds them. Former Facebook executive, Chamath Palihapitiya, speaks contritely about creating “tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works”; billionaire hacker, early Facebook investor, and Napster founder, Sean Parker, now identifies as a ‘conscientious objector’; García Martínez, the former Facebook and Twitter executive tells us about how “throwing the elections” was a watercooler joke at the Twitter headquarters. Many of their clarion calls would have one believe that we are inching towards the Deleuzian ‘Control Society’, “where mobility is fostered inside certain strictures of motion, where openings appear rather than disappear, where subjects (or, for that matter, objects) are liberated as long as they adhere to a variety of prescribed comportments”. This isn’t to suggest that the seeds of change lie with individual Big Tech reformists, but rather to illustrate how Big Tech’s phenomenal power to undermine democracy, the rights of citizens and workers, scares even those who have been its beneficiaries.

However, as Laura Mann puts it, “They [Big Tech] are firing on all cylinders. So must we!”.

This special issue on A New Social Contract for the Data Age, through interviews with four leading feminist voices – Deborah James, Laura Mann, Kate Lappin, and Anita Gurumurthy – explores the core of Big Tech’s usurpation of the data commons, the melding of real economy value chains with data value chains, or what Kate Lappin identifies as the unique challenge of factoring in “the commercialization of every part of our lives, the commercialization of every interaction we have through digitalized data”. The interviewees also explore and imagine new, focused heuristics and modes of resistance rooted in the urgency to popularize the idea of data as public good, the need for regulating Big Tech, and the path forward for producers in the Global South to gain their share of value in the global digital economy.

Read the latest interviews from the Special Issue on A New Social Contract for the Data Age below. Watch this space for the latest outputs from this series. ↑ 

May Day

We might only be at the cusp of the economic crisis that has been brewing within the belly of the Covid pandemic, but it is already starting to blow up around the world. In this special issue, we bring you a range of incisive analyses that combine critique, prognosis, hope, and even anger.

Our effort has been to take a deep dive into the intersections of labor, the digital economy, and the Covid pandemic through engaging and critical long and short reads and interviews that delve into various facets of worker rights in the global economic context.

This crisis has seen millions across nations, rich and poor, sliding into unemployment over the past six weeks. Livelihoods that are not essential in a time of global lockdown are no longer viable. Informal workers at the very edges – farm and wage workers, and micro entrepreneurs – are struggling with lack of access to work. Even as precarity looms large over their future, gig workers are battling it out on the frontlines as the world orders in everything.

Never has there been a more important or urgent time to talk about labor.

Explore all the articles from the May Day Special Issue below. Also check out more articles over at Bot Populi’s New Precariat section. ↑