January 10, 2023

The platform economy has rapidly managed to make itself very visible in the towns and cities of India. In small towns, Zomato fleets make up most of the little traffic you contend with. Every horrible hotel you boarded at in Vizag is now some sort of OYO monstrosity. Meesho delivers radioactive bhaang from UP all over the country. Yet, most of the recipients of these services know next to nothing about the lives of the people doing the work. This exhibit was a small effort to stem the tide.

December 12, 2022

These days, there's a lot of money thrown at people making sense of the gig economy. Much of this lands up in the pockets of Big Tech lobbyist 'independent researchers' and in more unfortunate cases, think tanks that are barely aware of their consistent compliance towards Big Tech's ends. Despite the spigot of funding in this direction, there's little clarity on what it actually means, its economic model, the nature of the surplus it appropriates, and how that matters to workers everywhere. Despite many spirited attempts, yet another webinar on the future of work is going to bring us no closer to understanding a rather easy economic arrangement. This podcast came about when I was in IT for Change, working with a great team to try and give you a simple understanding of the platform economy and its machinations.

August 30, 2022

Three years ago, I was tasked with coming up with a newsletter that lays bare Big Tech hegemony from an unapologetically Global South vantage point. The result was DataSyn (a nod to project Cybersyn), which provides a minimum of two compelling essays every month detailing Big Tech capture in various realms of our lives, an editorial that sums up the mood of the month, and reading recommendations (like the Syllabus, but focused on digital justice). It is, quite frankly, the best thing of its kind. An easy thing to proclaim about something sui generis.

September 30, 2021

The e-Shram portal was launched in 2021 by the Indian Union Minister for Labour and Employment. The previous summer, millions of internal migrant workers made their way across India on foot as a national lockdown was announced- many perished along the way. Despite constituting over 93% of India’s workforce, unorganized workers have been left out of social protection nets. As an initiative that sought to tackle the deep precarity and dearth of protection for unorganized workers, eShram was welcomed by trade unions across the board. This report represents some of their early concerns with the portal, and some of their concrete recommendations on making it work for workers.

January 8, 2019

A friend of mine who works at Apple got in touch asking me what constitutes quintessential Bangalore imagery. I rattled off a whole bunch of things that I thought had some memetic value and swiftly forgot what I had spoken about. A week later they come back with this illustration of an auto with luridly coloured stickers of eyes, birds and other things. They really understood the assignment. They then proceeded to ask me if I would be able to arrange for an auto and a set of stickers to replicate the illustration for a photo shoot. I did this too in the course of a week and that's the picture on the Apple music album cover for 'Kannada Hits'. The guy who lent his auto for the job did so gratis, and I ran into him during the pandemic- he still had the stickers on 3 years after the shoot. I bet he still does.

February 2, 2018

In 2018, Bengaluru's waste workers went on strike to protest the vitiating state of working conditions that led to the death by suicide of their fellow worker Subramani. This was also the time the municipality of Bengaluru instituted a new centralised biometric system to track workers checking in for the day and paying the wages directly to their accounts. Many former full time workers of the BBMP found their names missing from the new regime of salary disbursals, thereby forgoing wages for months on end as they registered on the database. The pourakarmikas' fight, as state employed waste workers are known in the state of Karnataka, has been a spirited one with many gains over the years that only reinforces the power of organized struggles.

August 7, 2015

In the 2010s, for 6 straight years I was the head editor of an agency that largely serviced startups in Bangalore and smaller startups based all over the world. I managed to work on everything from orthodox tea, a wellness app, a nascent fintech startup that really blew up, a granola bar company, and even one of the first AI/ML startups that I was aware of in India. It was an interesting experience overall.

December 6, 2023

At a time where opening any app leads you to a ten-second reel of an interesting place, person, culture, or cuisine, Ellias’ films seem to have also fallen under the wheel of an algorithmically constituted digital modernity where content creators dare not linger on a moment beyond a tightly prescribed limit. His films are usually accomplished by an intimate familiarity with their subject and an unspoken appeal to the audience to spend more time with such subjects. While the new mode of content production might have brought so many more people, cultures, languages, and things to mass audiences than we could ever know what to do with, Ellias’ filmmaking reminds us that it is always worthwhile to scratch beneath the surface.

June 30, 2022

A cursory online search of ‘Bangalore’ would immediately invite a plague of epithets such as ‘Silicon Valley’ and ‘IT Hub,’ or more prosaic ones like ‘Pensioner’s Paradise’ and ‘Garden City’. In the stupor of what social scientist Narendar Pani describes as a “culture of amnesia,” it would strike most people as unusual that Bengaluru, or Bangalore, as it was called until 2014, was the largest unionised public sector city in India until economic liberalisation in 1991. If the city was to be labelled after its organised public sector history—which is unlikely, given how unfashionable it sounds—it would still retain a certain vacuous character that the others possess, confusing the steady march of capital and post-colonial developments for assorted essentialising shorthand.

July 9, 2021

During the pandemic, as dominant platforms captured vital data infrastructure and strengthened their market hegemony, platform workers around the world continued to confront an increasingly precarious future of work. However, workers are conceiving new solidarities and imaginaries to challenge and mitigate against the logic of the platform economy. This article explores one such notable movement within the digital economy – that of ‘platform cooperativism’, with examples of novel initiatives from across the Global South. Despite being a genuine force seeking to reclaim digital technologies for the people’s interests, cooperatives face an uphill battle to viability, particularly due to the data disadvantage of most Global South nations. Therefore, to tap into the radical potential of platform cooperatives, the legal and economic terrain must allow them to flourish. Some concrete steps in this direction can include establishing an enabling policy environment, facilitating access to new and sustainable sources of finance for cooperatives, instituting regulatory frameworks for the protection of data rights, creating consumer awareness, and incentivizing participation in these enterprises.