Labour and AI

As May also begins with International Worker’s Day, our theme for the month is AI and labour. Below are 3 books recommended by our team that explore the various ways advancements in AI impact the labour market.

Atlas of AI – Kate Crawford (2021)

We know AI is hungry for human data, but in this book, Crawford shows how AI systems also extract minerals and labour. This month we are paying particular attention to chapter 2 on Labour (pp.53/87) which focuses on Amazon fulfilment warehouses and how AI will manage our time in the future. What will they mean for our working lives and free time? 

The rise of Bullshit Jobs – David Graeber (2019)

In 1930 Maynard Keynes predicted that technological advances would have enabled a 15-hour work week in America and the UK. Instead, many people still work 40-hours plus in meaningless jobs. In “Bullshit Jobs” David Graeber asks why? We ask, instead of freeing us from work will AI just make our jobs more bullshit?
 

Islavery – Jack Qiu (2016)

Jack Qiu examines the linkages and continuities between slavery and the modern-day workers at Foxconn, the company which builds iPhones. He shows how our slavery to technology has driven worsening living conditions. Whilst we usually think of AI as software, it is reliant on hardware and recent reports show that Open AI paid it’s data labellers in Kenya less than $2 an hour. 

Sustainable AI

As June 5^th marks World Environment Day, we dedicated this month’s reading to focusing our awareness on the environmental impact of Ai and on issues relating to the development of more Sustainable Ai.

Below are some of the books our team have recommended:

Ai in the Wild: Sustainability in the Age of Artificial Intelligence – Peter Dauvergne (2020)

This book offers a critical perspective on the risks and benefits of using Ai to advance sustainability.  Dauvergne provides insight into ways AI technologies have been employed to protect the environment whilst at the same time highlighting failures, and the often hidden social and environmental costs of its development and use. 

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers our Lives – Siddharth Kara (2023)

75% of the world’s cobalt supply is mined in the Congo. Cobalt is an essential component of the batteries that power our smart technologies such as phones, laptops and tablets. In this expose, Kara highlights the toll of cobalt mining on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Blockchain Chicken Farm and Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside – Xiaowei Wang (2020)

This collection of essays explores how technology development plays out in rural China. From pork farmers using Ai in breeding, to the political intersections of e-commerce villages, the ties between globalisation, technology, agriculture and commerce are unravelled here. The essays spark new conversations about innovation, connectivity and collaboration in a digitized rural world.

Smart Cities: Critical Debates on Big Data, Urban Development, and Social Environmental Sustainability – edited by Negin Minaei (2022)

This book examines important issues relating to Smart Cities raising awareness of different environmental aspects of Smart Cities and what is necessary for cities to be able to respond to future challenges including climate change, food insecurity, natural hazards, energy production and resilience.

Digitalization for Sustainability (D4S) Digital Reset: Redirecting Technologies for the Deep Sustainability Transformation – (2023)

This report provides a blueprint for how to reconceptualise digitalisation in a way that enables it to contribute towards actual sustainable transformation. It argues for a digital reset aimed at achieving carbon neutrality, resource autonomy and economic resilience, whilst also respecting citizen's rights. 

Is Ai Good for the Planet? – Bendetta Brevini (2021)

In this book Brevini examines Ai through the lens of the environment. Ai has often been portrayed as a public good and a way to solve challenges including the climate crisis. Yet, as Brevini shows it has also contributed to this same crisis by running on technologies that exhaust scarce resources and on data centres that have immense energy requirements.

A city is not a computer: Other urban intelligences – Shannon Mattern (2021)

Mattern explores the idea of ‘smart cities’ and what gets lost when we imagine urban spaces as computers. In this book, she reveals how cities encompass various forms of local and indigenous intelligences and knowledge institutions, vital to correcting the increasingly more popular algorithmic models of urban planning. 

Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond: Feminist Ecocriticism of Science Fiction – Douglas A. Vakoch (2021)

Contributors from five continents explore the fictional worlds of Atwood, Butler and others and provide tools to counteract intertwined oppressions of the environment and women to create a more sustainable and habitable world.

AI and Faith

This month’s reading takes us back to one of the main focuses of this project, the relationship between faith and AI. The use of AI in religious practice, and the impact AI has and will have on religion is an ongoing discussion. The rise in religious chatbots  and the growing focus on ethical AI are just some areas where the relationship between religion and AI continues to evolve in ever more interesting ways. Below are some of the books we are reading this month, most focus much more closely on Islam and Christianity, though we know these discussions are taking place across different faith spaces. If you have any suggestions of works that look at AI from the lens of other faiths, please feel free to send us your recommendations.

Muslim and Supermuslim: The Quest for the Perfect Being and Beyond – Roy Jackson (2020)

The growing transhumanist movement in its most radical expression imagines humans being replaced by a ‘Superman’. In this book, Jackson looks to Islamic tradition to explore the question of what this ‘superman’ would involve, what does it mean to be human and what can Islam tell us about the future human and how does this tradition respond to the challenges raised by transhumanism?

AI, Faith and the Future : An Interdisciplinary Approach- edited by Michael J. Paulus Jr, Michael D. Langford (2022)

This is a multidisciplinary work that explores the present and future impact of AI and provides technological, philosophical and theological foundations for thinking about AI. Related to this are reflections on the impact of AI on relationships, behavior, education, work and moral action. The book offers a guide to more reflective and ethical design and use of AI from the perspective of Christianity.

Religion and the Technological Future: An Introduction to Biohacking, Artificial Intelligence, and Transhumanism - Calvin Mercer, Tracy J. Trothen (2021)

What are the religious and ethical implications of new technological changes such as biohacking, nanotechnology, cryonics, robotics and AI? This book offers perspectives from various religions and applied ethics to explore ethical questions about the use of new technological breakthroughs that are transforming society. The book also includes a survey at the beginning and end which enables readers to reflect on their own levels of acceptance for the application of such technologies on humans.

The Artifice of Intelligence: Divine and Human Relationship in a Robotic Age - Noreen L. Herzfeld (2023)

This book explores what it means to be created in the image of God and to create AI in our image. Again, focusing on AI from a Christian perspective, Herzfeld examines two questions, is it possible for humans to have an authentic relationship with an AI? And, how does the presence of AI change the way we relate to one another as humans?

Cyber Muslims: Mapping Islamic Digital Media in the Internet Age – edited by Robert Rozehnal (2022)

This anthology explores the variety of digital expressions of Muslims from clerics to activists, artists and social media influencers. The case studies take in the vast cultural and geographic landscape of the Muslim world and contextualize cyber Islam within broader social trends.

Implicit Religion Special Issue: Artificial Intelligence and Religion Vol. 20 No. 3 (2017)

This special issue on AI and religion explores some of the ways religion and AI are intertwined and the need for religious studies scholars to engage in further study of AI and religion. Beth Singler’s introductory article lays out three arguments for this, before providing the space for several papers that each engage with the interplay between AI and faith in different ways.

Vol. 20 No. 3 (2017): Artificial Intelligence and Religion

Islamic Ethics and AI

This month we reached out to scholars working more specifically on AI and Islamic ethics to suggest readings for our team.

Our guest curator this month is Dr. Junaid Qadir, Professor of Computer Engineering at Qatar University. He is also director of IHSAN Lab in Pakistan which  aims to facilitate human development through technological solutions. His research interests among others include applied machine learning, human-beneficial AI, ethics of technology and engineering education. He has written several articles and worked closely on projects relating to the incorporation of Islamic ethics within AI development.

In his own words:

While these books are not specific to AI, and deal with technology in general, they are relevant for studies critically engaging with AI.

Acknowledgement: Input received for this list from Dr. Amana Raquib, Dr. Jasser Auda is gratefully acknowledged.

Islamic ethics of technology: An objectives (Maqāsid) approach - Amana Raquib (2015)

This book offers a unique exploration of technology through the lens of Islamic ethics. It endeavors to expand the scope of Sharia law by addressing ethical inquiries and dilemmas that surface within our postmodern technological culture, where clear religious-ethical guidelines may be lacking. The book delves into the concept of Maqāsid (objectives) as a universal ethical framework, ripe for interpretation and application in the context of today's global technology landscape. Readers seeking alternatives to the prevailing technological paradigm, particularly those interested in the intersection of Islam and the modern world, and how contemporary ethical challenges in technology are being addressed through ijtihad (independent legal reasoning), will find this book to be a valuable resource.

Comparative theories and methods between uniplexity and multiplexity - R.Şentürk, A. Açıkgenç, Ö. Küçükural, Q.N. Yamamoto et al. (2020)

This book offers a critical and comparative exploration of major social theories and methodologies, unveiling the inherent Eurocentric and Uniplex biases present in conventional social sciences. Within the Uniplex paradigm, the world's complexity is reduced to a singular universal way of understanding and experiencing it, exemplified by positivism, idealism, and scientism. This contrasts with the holistic worldview of Muslim and premodern civilizations, characterized by a multi-layered understanding of reality, knowledge, and truth. The authors advocate for Multiplexity, advocating a more comprehensive approach that encompasses multiplex ontology (recognizing multiple levels of existence), multiplex epistemology (embracing diverse ways and levels of knowing), and multiplex methodology (utilizing a range of methods for theory generation) to better understand the intricacies of phenomena.

Re-envisioning Islamic scholarship: Maqāsid methodology as a new approach - Jasser Auda (2022)

This book represents a serious attempt to outline an Islamic intellectual framework based on a transformative Quranic Worldview. The author describes that the normative Islamic way can only be determined in the backdrop of a detailed systematic study of the Quran, the infallible word of God that represents the divine, eternal perfect message of Islam for all time. The author advocates a five-step holistic methodology encouraging Islamic scholars in all fields to continuously reflect on revelation (Quran and the authentic Hadith) and its objectives (maqāsid) through a deep understanding of concepts, values, commands, universal laws, and proofs. The book also proposed a move from the tradition of Maqāsid Al-Shariah to the more comprehensive and authentic paradigm of Maqāsid Al- Quran (Quranic Objectives) noting that the former now also suffers from the same limitations (namely: imitation, partialism, apologism, contradiction, and deconstruction) that mainstream disciplines suffer from.

Islam, Muslims, and modern technology. Islam & Science, 3(2), 109-127 - S.H. Nasr (2005)

Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr offers a thought-provoking critique of modern technology, underscoring the grave peril it poses to the environment and the human habitat—an issue of paramount concern for humanity. Furthermore, the author delves into the impact of postmodern technology on time-honored crafts and the spiritual well-being of individuals. Within these insights, the author imparts valuable recommendations for safeguarding the vital facets of human civilization.

Read here

Technology in Muslim moral philosophy. Journal of religion and health, 55(2), 369-383 - E. Moosa (2016)

This article delves into the position, role, and significance of technology within the realm of Muslim moral philosophy. The author highlights how our cognitive processes are inevitably influenced by both our tools and the environment we inhabit. It is argued that technology, broadly defined as the knowledge and instruments employed by humans to enhance the quality of life, is deeply ingrained in Islamic ethical discourse. The author draws upon early Muslim encounters with technology to elucidate the theological foundations of using technology for the betterment of human existence. Additionally, the article examines the distinctions between modern technology and its premodern predecessors, shedding light on how technology shapes our conceptions of personhood, consciousness, and value.

Read here

AI versus Human Consciousness: A Future with Machines as Our Masters. Renovatio - F. Muhammad (2022)

This article delves into the challenges presented by AI and the ongoing debate surrounding the feasibility of achieving AI with human-level consciousness. The author contends that consciousness, when correctly comprehended, inherently involves a subject, and that artificial neural networks can, at most, provide a representation of consciousness, with the subject itself remaining elusive. Furthermore, the article explores the profound philosophical inquiry into AI, underscoring the pivotal role our values play in shaping our definitions of consciousness, intelligence, soul, self, personhood, and ultimately, what it means to be human in a world increasingly driven by technology.

Read here

Islamic virtue-based ethics for artificial intelligence. Discover Artificial Intelligence, 2(1), 11 - A. Raquib, B. Channa, T. Zubair and J. Qadir (2022)

This paper critically analyzes contemporary AI approaches which proceed on a vision of innovation for the sake of novelty, profit, or economic growth that is grounded in neoliberal capitalistic thinking. This paper next positions a holistic Islamic virtue ethics approach for AI grounded in the context of Islamic objectives (maqāṣid) as an alternative ethical system for AI governance. The paper also summarizes the findings and salient points of agreement among Islamic AI ethical community on the purpose, development, and governance of AI systems based on the discussion during the First International Conference on Islamic Ethics and AI organized in Lahore, Pakistan in December 2021.

Read here

The Smart City

This month we join the UN-Habitat initiative in focusing on the challenges and opportunities created by urbanization, and how to foster sustainable urban futures. AI and other digital technologies are very much part of shaping these urban futures for our cities, particularly in the development of smart cities. Therefore, we are taking a closer look at the discussions around smart cities and the extent to which they may promote or hinder urban sustainability.

Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn? - Simon Marvin & Andres Luque-Ayala (2016)

This book examines the challenges and possibilities of smart urbanism in the context of global cities and the developing world.

Smart Cities in the Gulf: Current State, Challenges, and Opportunities - eds. Wael A. Samad & Elie Azar (2019)

This edited volume focuses on the unique context of smart city development in the Gulf region, which is home to several wealthy and rapidly growing cities. Several case studies are used to to analyze and provide policy recommendations around four themes including smart city frameworks and governance, resources and infrastructure, ICT technologies and the social perspective.

Undoing Optimization: Civic Action in Smart Cities - Alison B. Powell (2021)

This book provides a historical account of what the smart city was, is and is becoming and how technology-driven assumptions increasingly frame civic action. Through case studies of smart-cities projects around the world, the author examines the civic use, regulation and politics of technologies and how forms of citizenship shifts in response to technological change and issues relating to big data and surveillance.

Digital (In)justice in the Smart City - eds. Deborah Mackinnon, Ryan Burns & Victoria Fast (2022)

This volume of essays foregrounds the issue of social justice and how we should consider urban digital justice in the smart city. The collection provides critical theoretical and empirical insights into the concept of the smart city and imagines alternatives cities.

Rethinking Smart Urbanism: City-Making and the Spread of Digital Infrastructures in Nairobi - Prince K. Guma (2020)

This book draws on Nairobi as a case study to explore the multiple ways cities and infrastructures are constructed and reconstructed through ICT innovation and appropriation. This book provides new insights into the debates on technology and urbanity in an African context. 

Mega-Urbanization in the Global South: Fast Cities and new urban utopias of the postcolonial state - eds. Ayona Datta & Abdul Shaban

This collection uses the concept of ‘fast cities’ to explore the rapid growth of cities even when their environments or population dynamics may not allow for it. Case studies from the UAE, Qatar, Zambia, Indonesia, India, China and South Korea capture the politics and practices of fast cities. The book explores the paradoxes between intended and unintended outcomes of fast cities and argues for the promotion of ‘slow urbanism’.

AI :The new weapon of Islamophobia and oppression

This month our reading theme focused on the more pernicious effects of technology and more specifically on how new technological developments have been weaponized in the ongoing surveillance of and oppression of Muslims globally. The insatiable desire for information and the ease in accessing it today through advanced AI surveillance systems, has pushed us into radically new frontiers in the relationship between states and their citizens, between the industries of state repression and productivity and towards digital authoritarianism and heightened social control. Post 9/11 the counter-terrorism has been one of the main arguments for the global expansion of state surveillance systems. The racialization of Muslims (often reduced to a singular mass) as the main subject in need of observing, means that they are disproportionately represented as the main subject of the surveillance industry, and here we see how institutionalized Islamophobia reproduces the broader social and political systems that oppress Muslims.

The occupation in Gaza is one key example which sheds light on AI technologies of oppression, which tested out here, are then exported into other locations like Kashmir and Myanmar and very quickly became part of a global network of violence and repression. This month our readings tackle this topic with examples from Palestine, China and the US where more sophisticated technological systems are being utilized as part of the military with an even greater impact in terms of violence and the erosion of human freedoms.

The Palestinian Laboratory: How Israel Exports The Technology of Occupation Around the World- Antony Loewenstein (2023)

This book looks at the way Israel’s military uses the occupied Palestinian territories as the site for the experimentation of weaponry and surveillance technology which are then exported globally. The book places Israel and its occupation of Palestine within the broader framework of the arms industry, global surveillance and Israel’s relationship to global human rights violators.

Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City - Darren Byler (2022)

Anthropologist Darren Byler chronicles here the dispossession of the Uyghur community and the intersection of global capitalism, Chinese colonialism and information technology in the production of racialized, unfree populations as data subjects used as targets for experimental technologies of surveillance. 

In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony – Darren Byler (2021)

An earlier book from Byler, this one details the surveillance and high-tech policing in Xinjiang where over a million Uyghur, Kazakh and Hui Muslim citizens are detained in “re-education” centers. The book details the malicious effects of technological developments and their adaptation for the creation of a racialized and repressive camp system. 

Isamophobia and Surveillance: Genealogies of a Global Order- James Renton (2019)

This collection of articles argues that the currently global surveillance order is partly a result of Western conceptions of Muslims as well as the outcome of centuries of European thinking around religion, governance and revolution. All these have evolved over time to produce an voracious desire for ever-expanding surveillance which has consequences not just for Muslims but for the existence of the liberal democratic state.

Forever Suspect: Racialized Surveillance of Muslim Americans in the War on Terror – Saher Selod (2018)

This book examines the systemic racial profiling and surveillance of Muslim Americans during the War on Terror. Selod delves into the experiences of Muslim communities, revealing how government policies and practices have unjustly targeted individuals based on their religion and ethnicity. The book sheds light on the far-reaching consequences of these surveillance efforts and their impact on civil liberties. It calls for a critical reevaluation of counterterrorism measures to protect the rights and dignity of Muslim Americans.

Diversity, Gender and AI

This month we have another guest-curated reading list by one of our very own scholars here at Leiden University. For our theme on Diversity and AI, we reached out to Dr. Eduard Fosch-Villaronga. He is an Associate professor and Director of Research at the eLaw Centre for Law and Digital Technologies at Leiden University. His most recent research  on Diversity, Robots and AI takes an intersectional approach to how robots, AI and algorithmic decision-making processes impact different communities including the LGBTQAI+, elderly, or under-resourced communities. You can find more information here.

Ai for Diversity - Roger A. Søraa (2023)

This book examines how AI technology and the selection, use and training of data can have ill-fated consequences unless we critically examine the dangers of these systems. Søraa questions how AI technologies lead to inclusion or exclusion of a diversity of groups within society.

Data Feminism - Catherine D'Ignazio & Lauren F. Klein (2023)

 D‘ignazio and Klein present an alternative way to think about data science and data ethics informed by intersectional feminist thought. They explore how data science contributes to and perpetuates various inequalities. Beyond gender, they focus on issues of power, who has it, who doesn’t and how it influences data science in many unidentified ways. The book provides steps towards destabilising the status quo of established gendered and racialized power hierarchies in data science.

Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action - Kevin Guyan (2022)

This is the first book that specifically addresses queer data (data relating to sex, gender, trans identity/history and sexual orientation), and explores how existing data practices present an incomplete account of LGBTQ lives. Guyan shows how increased knowledge about queer identities is a crucial tool for action impacting decision making in various areas such as resource allocation, legislative changes, access to services and representation.

Invisible women: Data bias in a world designed for men - Caroline C. Perez (2019)

This book exposes the widespread data inequities between men and women. Perez reveals how the gender data gap disadvantages and silences women in all aspects of life from homes to healthcare and the workplace. Using a variety of case studies she exposes how the absence of women’s data and experiences costs not just time and money but also lives.   

Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need - Sasha Costanza-Chock (2020)

The approach of Design Justice is one led by marginalized communities and seeks to challenge structural inequalities.  Design justice brings attention  to the relationship between design, power and social justice. Costanza-Chock highlights the  ways objects are never equally perceptible to all, and asks for designers to pay attention to the way these differences are shaped by connected systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism and settler-colonialism. 

The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need A Feminist Reboot - Yolande Strengers & Jenny Kennedy (2021)

Strengers and Kennedy highlight the extent to which societal prejudices have been embedded into modern technologies like Siri, Alexa and various home devices. New devices that carry out domestic responsibilities reproduce the nostalgic ideas of the 1950s housewife, white, middle-class and nurturing. These newer devices similarly are designed and marketed to perform domestic, care and other responsibilities traditionally seen to be part of ‘wifework’.

Visuality and AI

This month we explore the intersection of visuality and AI. From the evolution of computer vision to the ethical considerations surrounding AI-generated visuals,  and visuality within Islam, these texts reflect on how we perceive and communicate through visual means.

Operational Images - Jussi Parikka (2023)

From military surveillance to digital art, Parikka explores the concept of operational images – images that not only represent but actively participate in shaping our understanding of the world.  Parikka expands the notion of ''operational images' to encompass digital art, interactive displays, and advanced surveillance technology, arguing that operational images, once the exception, are now the rule, influencing everything from climate models to the proliferation of selfies in the cloud. The book, a seamless blend of theory and visuals, provides a toolkit for understanding how art, politics, and technology intersect.

Machine Vision - Jill Walker Rettberg (2023)

This book delves into machine vision technologies offering a comprehensive examination of its historical and contemporary applications. From the emergence of smart surveillance cameras to the ubiquitous use of TikTok filters, Rettberg explores how these technologies are reshaping our perceptions of the world and interpersonal relationships. By dissecting both fictional and real-world instances, including art, video games, and science fiction, the book illustrates the diverse cultural impacts of machine vision. 

The Perception Machine - Joanna Zylinska (2023)

Constantly capturing and being captured through photography, we contribute to machine learning databases that, in turn, generate novel images. 'The Perception Machine' delves into the metamorphosis of photography through computation and its impact on human perception, exploring the shift from CGI to AI. Zylinska  intertwines media theory and neuroscience coining the term "perception machine" to encapsulate both the technical realm of images and their infrastructures and the sociopolitical implications arising from the contemporary automation of vision and imagination.

Seen and Unseen - Sanaz Fotouhi & Esmaeil Zeiny eds. (2018)

 With a focused examination on Islam and Muslims, this volume scrutinizes how  fixed and stereotypical visual representations  have been constructed while also exploring alternative and challenging depictions that disrupt existing belief systems. The exploration encompasses diverse perspectives, covering issues from Brunei, Iran, Egypt, England, and cyberspace. Through essays drawing on historical paintings, book covers, photography, and news, the scholars in this volume unveil the diverse and sometimes contradictory visual cultures that shape perceptions of Islam and Muslims.

Provocative Images in Contemporary Islam - D. Kloos, M. Westmoreland, L.Schmidt & B. Barendregt (2023)

This volume delves into the provocative nature of images and their impact on perceptions of Islam across various societal, political, and geographical contexts. The authors challenge readers to consider whether these images contribute to or complicate prevailing narratives, exploring whether they sensationalize or evoke pride in Muslim legacies. Beyond traditional considerations of art and aesthetics, the volume examines how images intentionally or unintentionally provoke emotions, confront norms, and engage individuals in religious contemplation.

Techno-Orientalism

This Month's reading list is a special one curated by our team member Weiyan Low. 

In his words:

As a project that explores relationships with technology and contends with the Euro-centric view of technological determinism/modernity, it’s important to consider the elements that constitute, inform and replicate such a gaze perpetuated upon the recovering world (post-colonial Global South). As a counterpart to orientalism, techno-orientalism emphasizes the dehumanizing ways the East (especially East Asia) is viewed through the lens of Anglo-American speculative science fiction. Dystopian worlds where China has become the hegemon, or where the “East” has overtaken the West in development, while a curious proposition has a tendancy to re-hash notions of savagery and moral decay argued in orientalist texts; of which white protagonists yet again carry the burden of course-correction for sake of “humanity”. Futuristic, cyborg, yet never really human, the body of the oriental “other” echoes tropes of the Yellow Peril.

Writings on techno-orientalism advocate for critical readings of media texts (film, TV series, graphic novels, books etc.) in accounting for the ways in which orientalist rhetoric persists. For researchers especially, it confronts us with the ways in which the framing of technology to geography, culture and spirituality are mediated in seemingly “innocent and unassuming ways”. The majority of the selected texts explore how techno-orientalism is being navigated in gendered, racial and literary perspectives; they also collectively reveal the depth to which such a trope of orientralism extends beyond just media portrayal and alternative ways of seeing from Asia.

Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media - D.Roh, B. Huang & G. Niu (2015)

This provides a good introduction to the history and grounds under which techno-orientalism has been concieved, as a contiuation of an orientalist gaze reflecting the fear of a future under a hegemon from the East.

Intimacies of the Future: Techno-Orientalism, All-under-Heaven (Tian-Xia天下), and Afrofuturism. Verge: Studies in Global Asias 9(1), 109-133 - L.W. Luo (2023)

Luo explores how everyday citizens imagine the future of global relations though a connection between politics and speculative fiction. Media texts project put forward both a sense of ‘other’ and host of the ‘gaze’, which  is mirrored in international relations (IR). As exercises in world-building, Tian-Xia like Afrofuturism critiques “normative” (liberal Western) visions of the world that also reflect utopian visions grounded in Chinese Philosophy.

Read here

Playing with Being in Digital Asia: Gamic Orientalism and the Virtual Dōjō. Asiascape: Digital Asia. 2. 20-56 - C. Goto-Jones (2015)

Video games have received little attention in techno-orientalism literature compared to film and television series. This is a shame as video games are highly interactive and put forward more questions about the experience of racialized power relations and appropriation in a medium where the audience is active, and not passive. Jones puts forward the term gamic Orientalism, in articulating how Japanese martial arts videogames feed into the creation of a techno-Orientalist fantasy world through the “mastery” of martial arts and bodily memory. This article also questions where or what “digital Asia” as a question for (re)locating “the field”.

Read here

Reimagining Asian Women in Feminist Post-Cyberpunk Science Fiction - Kathryn Allan (2015)

Kathryn Allan’s chapter, in the edited Techno-Orientalism,contrasts cyberpunk fiction, which objectifies and orientalizes female cyborgs, with works that attempt to reposition them as the subject. In a reading of Tricia Sullivan’s Maul and Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, Allan articulates a “feminist post-cyberpunk” subgenre that creates a space for nonwhite characters due to globalization and reorients the subject matter around issues of gender and race, moving such characters from the periphery to the center. 

 D. Roh, B. Huang & G. Niu (Ed.), Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (pp. 151-162). Ithaca, NY: Rutgers University Press.

A Spicepunk Manifesto: Towards a Critical Movement of Southeast Asian Heritage-Based SFF - Ng Yi-Shen (2022)

A recent attempt to capture what has been simmering in Southeast Asia, Ng Yi-Sheng presents a “spicepunk manifesto”, a means of encampuslating the current themes embedded in Southeast Asian speculative fiction. Spicepunk is first and foremost a post-colonial endeavour, sprikled with handfulls of revisionist history, spirituality/religion, alternative timelines and a re-assessment of “our” world outside the Western ‘normative’ of linear time and technological determinism that often prevade well-trodden genres of sci-fi/fantasy.

Read here

Luddite Week

This Month's reading list is another special one curated by our team member James McGrail. 

In the 19^th century mill workers rebelled against big mill owners who were using machines to automate their work. They came to be known as Luddites for the name “Ned Ludd” used to write threatening letters to their employers. Since “Luddite” has been used as an epithet for those with an atavistic hatred of technology. However, in recent years, thanks to books like “Blood in the Machine” by Brian Merchant, and the prospect of similar labour disputes arising from AI technology has led to a critical reassessment of Luddites. Perhaps, Luddites have something to teach us about how to resist the worst mores of modern technology. In this month’s reading group, we discussed four works which propose ways to be a modern Luddite.

How to Get Into Fights With Data Centers: Or, a Modest Proposal for Reframing the Climate Politics of ICT - White Paper- Anne Pasek (2023)

Anne Pasek is a researcher of environment and technology at Trent University. Among her many projects is a Zine conference which aims to reduce the carbon intensive process of academic conferencing. This zine is a part of those conferences’ proceedings. In this zine she explores the environmental impact of data centres. Counter to narratives of personal responsibility over data streaming, Pasek argues that regardless of our data usage, data centres are always on. Therefore, the question should not be how to cut down our internet use, but how we can stop the next data centre being built. In this zine she explores possible options for finding data centres, forging coalitions, and fighting data centres.

Read here

Manifesto for ‘algorithmic sabotage - The Algorithmic Sabotage Research Group (ASRG) (2024)

The Algorithmic Sabotage Research Group (ASRG) is “an ongoing, conspiratorial, aesthetico-political, practice led research framework focused on the intersection of digital culture and IT.” In this manifesto they offer an outline of how to undermine the power and authority of algorithms. The Manifesto was written collaboratively online and was open for anyone to contribute to. This collaborative approach is based on the belief that “the mobilisation of mutual care and solidarity is a direct counter to computational segregation, algorithmic precarity and necropolitics.” Technology researcher Dwayne Monroe has written a breakdown of each of the points on the ASRG manifesto.

More here

Cartography of generative AI - Estampa (2024)

Estampa is a group of researchers working in fields of audiovisual media and digital environments. In their research on AI they take a critical and archaeological approach which generates a focus on the sprawling infrastructures underlying technology. In this work they aim to “map the phenomenon taking into account the tensions controversies and ecosystems which make it possible.” Through this counter mapping they aim to dispel the mythic charge which surrounds AI and replace it with a space to understand the “different levels of human resources displaced to different geographies, precured and invisible by the technology innovation industry.” The critique of Estampa’s mapping is one both of labour, like the original luddites, and environmental as in Pasek’s work.

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Machines in Flames - Thomas Dekeyser, Andrew Culp and Dana Papachristou (2022)

Machines in Flames follows the story of the mysterious CLODO group. A group of self-proclaimed computer workers who in the 1980s carried out dozens of attacks on information processing centres in Toulouse France. Starting with World War One computing processes, which was used to produce ballistic grids for shelling, this documentary charts how warfare and violence have been built into the DNA of computers. Since that time machines have been used to create distance between governments, and the violence of war. It was for this reason that the members of CLODO decided to attack and destroy computer businesses which were producing technologies for the French military. Unlike Luddites CLODO were concerned with what machines are developed to do. They were concerned with how surveillance systems were becoming omnipresent in our society, and the collapse of boundaries between, state, Capital, and military. The 1980s they argued was the time to intervene before this process became normalised. These observations seem particularly prescient, especially in the context of recent revelations about the use of AI software “Lavender” by the Isreali state in Gaza.

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