“Machine Sentries: The Planetary Marketplace that Sells Surveillance” PhD Thesis, University of Oxford
My doctoral thesis examines the flows of outsourced surveillance technologies, from its mottled past to its digital data futures today. Technologies, systems and logics have been exported across various borders throughout the centuries, often following colonial and imperial relations. Through a mixed methods approach, this work untangles the power relations and messy geographies in the planetary marketplace that purports to ‘sell’ surveillance.
“Projects in/around the Machine”, University of Oxford, 2021-22.
Stories In/Around the Machine is a project that explores the stories of how AI/ML systems have become entangled in the rhythms of informal work in Asia. By engaging a wide network of workers, unions, researchers, and artists in the region, we aim to tease out tales of troubles, tinkering, and trickeries of living with AI/ML systems.
In many parts of Asia, the 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 working lives here, in the majority world, paint a very different picture from the stories we commonly hear in the global north, which dominate much discourse today. Through storytelling and visualisations, this project seeks to illustrate the rich and lively stories in the informal economy in/around/with/against/after/before/above/beneath machines—from domestic workers operating behind online storefronts, to anecdotes of algorithmic resistance from street vendors.
In some cases, AI/ML technologies seem to have enabled access to better livelihoods, and in others, they seem to have brought on increased worker surveillance, amplified patriarchal control over women’s work, expanded the shadow labour force, and shrunk workers’ opportunities to organise. What complications do these technologies bring to aspirations for decent work in Asia? Which are the continuities, and which processes are reconfigured? How do workers and organisers grapple with perpetual surveillance, extractive logics and forced optimisation? What are the stories in and around these machines?
This project is funded by the Minderoo AI Challenge Fund.
Researcher at the Program for Democracy and Technology (DEMTECH) & the Oxford Commission on AI and Good Governance (OxCAIGG), 2018 – Now.
As a researcher, I am involved in a variety of projects on topics around digitalization and its effects of socio-political life. This includes writing papers, memos, hosting civil society workshops and co-creating tools such as the DemTech Navigator (2019), a guide that curates resources about digital harm and privacy for civil society (development of tool was based on DemTech Program’s civil society workshop series which was conducted in collaboration with various civil society practitioners).
NoTechForTyrants
NT4T is a group of organisers and researchers working to disrupt actors and processes that house and enable violent tech processes. NT4T coordinates research, hosts teach-ins, talks, workshops and conducts public campaigns to achieve its aims.