RightsCon, Taipei
Date: Thursday, February 27
Time: 10:15 to 11:15
Run time: 60 minutes
Room: 201E
Venue: The Taipei International Convention Centre (TICC)
Language: English
Session ID: ID # 24444 – “Stories in/around the Machine”
Scheduled in the program for RightsCon 2025
Panelists:
- Akkanut Wantanasombut, Tamsang-Tamsong, a community-based delivery platform & Chulangkorn University, Thailand
- kathleen azali, Serikat Pekerja Media dan Industri Kreatif untuk Indonesia (SINDIKASI) Jawa Timur, Indonesia
- Srujana Katta, Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union (TGPWU) & University of Oxford
In conversations with:
- Pratyusha Ria Kalluri (Stanford University)
- Ellena Ekarahendy, artistic team lead
Format: in-person dialogue (speakers, facilitators, and participants must be physically present in order to join the session). An open-ended format where experts share ideas and map out solutions in dialogue with participants.
This roundtable will discuss some of the themes emerging from the project ‘Stories in/around the Machine’ (SI/ATM).
In conversation with two AI experts, roundtable participants will discuss some of the findings from the “Stories in/around the Machine” project, showcasing illustrations, collages, and comics from twelve artists from the region.
More about ‘Stories in/around the Machine’ (SI/ATM): SI/ATM explored how algorithmic systems have become entangled in the rhythms of informal work and life in Asia. By engaging a network of workers, unions, researchers, and artists in the region, this project teased out tales of troubles, tinkering, and trickeries of living with such technologies. Focussing on a number of contexts across South and Southeast Asia, SI/ATM sought to interrogate, destabilise and reframe the universalist and global north centric discussions of ‘AI and Work’ that dominate much discourse in academia, development and government sectors. In many parts of Asia, a vast majority of workers earn their livelihoods through a variety of nonstandard jobs. For example, the informal sector accounts for over 60% of the Indonesian workforce and over 90% of the Indian workforce. The stories of how these largely informal settings in Asia encounter and embed algorithmic technologies paint a very different picture as compared to the global north. Through storytelling and visualisations, this project illustrates these rich and lively stories of Asian informal economies in/around/with/against machines — from trials of Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) initiatives that seek to challenge profit logics, to anecdotes of mutual aid and care between workers navigating uncertain waters. In unpacking our interlocutors’ tales — shared with us in a number of languages including Bahasa Indonesian, Cantonese, English, Telugu and Hindi— the project also interrogates the vocabularies used in the world of computing, and as well the oftentimes ill-fitting metaphors, policies, and futures imposed in the wake of this encounter with algorithmic technologies.
What do you want to learn from participants during the session?
This roundtable takes inspiration from Amrute and Murillo’s intervention, ‘Computing in/from the South’, where they ‘position the South as a method to change dominant frames about the past, present, and future of computing’. Using stories from Asia where our team is from, we hope to collectively interrogate, destabilise and reframe universalist discussions of AI and work common in this field across academia, developmental sectors, and governmental work. The stories from the majority world, as gathered from over 38 hours of interviews and visualised by 12 artists from Asil (with different positionalities across race, caste, gender, sexuality, and disability), paint a very different picture from the stories we hear in the global north which dominates much discourse today.