Technology, Labor Rights, and Political Power in Kenya and Across Africa

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

If you want to understand how technology is interacting with democracy and politics and with conceptions of the future, you have to pay attention to Africa, and in particular to Kenya, where a variety of issues and questions are at play.

For this episode, I spoke with Nerima Wako-Ojiwa, director of Siasa Place, and Odanga Madung, a tech and society researcher and journalist, about the intersection of technology, labor rights, and political power in Kenya and across Africa. The conversation explores the ongoing struggles of content moderators and AI data annotators, who face exploitative working conditions while performing essential labor for major tech companies; the failure of platforms fail to address harmful biases and disinformation that particularly affect African contexts; the ways in which governments increasingly use platform failures as justification for internet censorship and surveillance; and the promise of youth and labor movements that point to a more just and democratic future.

A transcript is forthcoming.