On Monday 17th, I got myself ready for some pleasant Zoom fatigue. At 9.30 am CET (2.30 pm in India) I joined three hours and half roundtable on feminist and intersecionalist perspectives on platformization. During five high-quality presentations, I learned about the increasing permeation of platformization in India’s informal economy, care work, and more.
I may be suffering from the Eurocentric bias, but even through the Zoom mediation I felt the vibrant atmosphere of Indian disorganization that brought me to visit the country right before Covid. The roundtable, named “Platform Economy, Gendered Informality, and the Future of Work”, was organized by the MICA-Fem Lab, whose aim is “understanding […] communicative ecologies of marginalized women groups and other vulnerable populations in specific sites of informality in the Global South […] by taking a user-centered and feminist approach to design and deployment of new media tools”.
Platformization in the Global South is receiving increasing attention. The western platform’s ecosystem seems to be slowing down, contrary to eastern innovation. The publication of two important books as Platform Capitalism in India and The Platform Economy: How Japan shaped the consumer Internet dig into this underrated field. In this context, the first public appearance of the Fem Lab project – which is composed by researchers spread across the globe – is worth to be followed. I was happy to see that the research group actually kept its promises, not only by taking intersectionality seriously, but by translating it into actual practices.
The roundtable started with an introduction carried by professor Usha Raman. She immediately pointed at what I see as one of the foundational paradoxes of the digital condition: what to do when the means of empowerments are also the means of manipulation? Platformization is a double edge sword. The digital is material, a bulk of India’s population is an informal sector and 90% of woman perform informal labor. In this sense, platformization makes what was invisible visible, contrary to what normally happens. Moreover, as rightly pointed out by Raman, not all platforms are technological. In some places or sectors, such as sanitation, they take the form of agencies, and they promise better conditions and the ability to articulate demand. “Sometimes, groups of people can become platforms” says professor Raman. In addition, not all these sectors are platformized in the same way. If this complicates our understanding of what a platform is, it also allows to raise some important questions. To what extent this is a false promise? What are the communicative practices of women? Platforms are there, and they keep filling voids. That is a fact. A feminist approach to this issue could then help to rethink the vocabulary of work and how we describe precarity, says professor Raman. In my perspective, one of the most interesting approaches lies in the feminist take on platform’s design and architecture. What does a contract mean and how can we make it more compassionate? How can we design ethical platforms, that feedback notions of rights and organization? Again, issues of class, race, gender were bound together. “Laws can change, but if attitudes do not.
After the introduction, five sections took place. Sai Amulya Komarraju asked how woman use digital tools, and she raised the problem of them moving across the city to be able to work, as well as that of the fight for getting insurance. Woman actually created “whisper networks” via WhatsApp groups for discussing their issues. These groups can escalate into organized protest, but the difficulty of establishing trust in marginalized communities points toward the need of spaces of affinity and sharing that go beyond mere complaints and protests, says Amulya.
In the second section, Cinar Mehta focused on the sanitization sector, as well as recycling and housekeeping companies. In India, these platforms became intertwined with the government’s effort to privatize what is not yet private. The public money is driving platformization.
In the third section, Pallavi Bansal proposed a feminist take on algorithms. She conducted field interviews with drivers and found out that the incentive model created by platforms is neither driver centered, nor woman centered. The car is expensive and needs to be repaired. One woman interviewed said that before marrying she was driving 18 hours per day, but buying the car turned out to be a mistake, because after her marriage and after having children, the care responsibility only allowed for her to work 12 hours. Moreover, in many cases systems are designed so that the driver must complete a minimum of twenty rides per day. This clearly goes together with information asymmetries (the platform has access to the data but the driver does not) and privacy concerns. “Platforms always try to balance service providers and users, but they use the data to manipulate the system”, Pallavi claims. Interestingly, Pallavi concludes with the need of some degree of standardization of this kind of platforms.
In the fourth section, Upasana Bhattacharjee dealt with platformization and entrepreneurship in artisanal work in Bangladesh. Here, it is no surprise to find the self-entrepreneurial logic at work: “The persons become the brand that they are selling”. Fortunately, some platforms that are coming up now are not e-commerce based, but they are mean to create skill workers that focuses on up-cycling. That could be a good kind of platformization: using tech to teaching tech.
In the final session, Siddharth Peter De Souza brings is the missing perspective on the intersection between contracts, legal design and storytelling. Contracts are being automatized, and there is a need for building empowerment inside them. Why does legal information need to be the way it is, unilateral and full of legal jargon? Some of notices are now represented trough comics.