Series | Platypus

Transnational Solidarity: Exploring Alternate Global Imaginaries of Work

 Lucy Pei  September 23, 2026

One day in November 2022, I was meeting with Carolina, one of the main activists of the gig worker union Frente de los Trabajadores de los Plataformas Digitales del Ecuador (FRENAPP) in Ecuador. Carolina was using Canva (a free online graphic design website) to create sample book covers. She had just found a template featuring an epic-looking rendering of the Earth. “Let’s add the different types of gig workers to the top of the world,” she said. She took her time scrolling through different free clipart websites until she was satisfied with the images she pasted on top of the globe (Figure 1). She inserted a placeholder title for the book: “La Precarización en las Empresas de Plataformas a Nivel Mundial” (Precarization in Digital Platform Companies at the Global Level). She included slogans at the top of the sample book covers which translated to “An exploitation with a new economy,” and “If the precarization is global, the fight is international.” She credited the slogans to an international alliance of gig worker organizations of which FRENAPP was a part. In the sample book cover Carolina created, the viewer and the clipart gig workers lie outside of the stylized image of the whole earth. The globe becomes the prominent scale, superseding national borders, buildings, and neighborhoods. Images such as this call the scale of the global into being and visually assert the connection between the cause of gig workers and the scale of the world as a whole. The title of the book reinforces the idea of the global scale. (read more...)

Beyond Delivering Food: Networks, Risk, and the Hidden Infrastructure of Gig Work

 Ambar Reyes  September 16, 2026

Este contenido también está disponible en español.

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I was picking up an order on 67th st and Columbus Ave when I saw the guy get on my bike and start to ride away. I got out of the shop and grabbed him; he said, “Sorry, I thought it was my bike.” A friend helped me hold onto him so we could call the police. The guy tried to break free and reached into a DoorDash bag he was carrying… Suddenly, he pulled out a syringe and started threatening us with it. I let go of his shirt but kept holding onto a backpack he was wearing; eventually, he slipped out of the backpack and ran away. I called the police to hand over the backpack and the DoorDash bag (which contained multiple syringes and a knife), but they never showed up. (read more...)

Reclaiming the Future of Work: Series Introduction

 Lucy Pei, Joy Ming, Kim Fernandes, Rosemary Steup  September 7, 2026

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Debates about the future of work often center around adapting the workforce to fit capitalist proposals of what work should look like. Pre-digital examples include scientific management, just-in-time production, and de-skilling of industrial labor in favor of more mechanized and automated processes. Recently, capitalist proposals of arrangements of work have centered on digital platforms, algorithmic management, pervasive surveillance, and the deskilling of white-collar work through aggressive adoption of large language models (generative AI). In the face of these changes, workers are expected to accept their new, typically more controlled, unstable, exploitative work arrangements, re-train and re-skill to find employment in different or new types of work or face un- and under-employment with whatever safety net might be available. Underlying these changes to work arrangements is a drive for efficiency and profit. (read more...)

Networks of Knowledge Sharing: Becoming-With Mushrooms in Academia

 Jennifer Foley  August 13, 2026

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This piece is one branch of Becoming-With, a multispecies collective autoethnographic project developed with Dani Dilkes, Mandy Penney, and our four mushroom companions (Lion, Pearl, Blue, Pink); from here forward known as the Mushy Collective. Together, we explore what it means to “become-with” mushrooms by thinking through mycelial structures while cultivating fungi and imagining more generative futures for academic spaces. Within this project, my post will explore my personal journey reconsidering resource sharing, writing, care work, and decentralized collaboration through fungal logics. I will turn attention toward the hidden infrastructures that sustain the academy while often remaining undervalued. (read more...)

Platform Workers’ Organizing Diaries: Messages from Union Organizers to Researchers

 Javed Siddiqui, Abdul Nayeem, Ambika Tandon, Anushree Gupta, Eesha Kunduri, Isha Bhallamudi, Manju Goel  August 3, 2026

यह सामग्री हिंदी में भी उपलब्ध है।

ಈ ವಿಷಯವು ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿಯೂ ಲಭ್ಯವಿದೆ.

ఈ కంటెంట్ తెలుగులో కూడా అందుబాటులో ఉంది.

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This article is the fifth and final post in a series about gig and platform worker unions in India written by members of the Labor Tech Research Network . Read the introduction to the series here, the second post in the series here, the third post here and the fourth post here. Collectivization, unionization, and resistance by platform workers form prominent themes in emerging scholarship on platform work, with exciting new collaborations taking place between researchers, platform workers, and gig worker unions. As more researchers join these ranks, we are attentive to the risks of research fatigue and exhaustion faced by gig workers and organizers, who receive numerous requests for interviews and other forms of data collection. When practiced non-extractively, this space opens up possibilities for researchers to collaborate and co-create resources that are useful to unions and workers in their mission to win basic work rights and establish dignity of work. (read more...)

Automating Language, Losing Relationality: Feminist Reflections on African Language AI

 Mpho Primus, Siri Lamoureaux  July 28, 2026

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A grandmother pauses before answering a child. The meaning of her words lies not only in the words themselves, but in tone, shared history, the relationship between speaker and listener, the setting, and even the silence that precedes the response. None of these become part of the training data for today’s large language models (LLMs). (read more...)

The Hotspot as a Sociotechnical and Political Object: Frontline Healthcare Professionals and Public Conversation alongside the Intensification of a U.S. Measles Outbreak

 Katharina Rynkiewich  July 24, 2026

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John Snow’s 19th century dot-map (from the series introduction) is representative of a shift in the public management of infectious diseases towards measuring density of confirmed cases within a geographic region. This practice is referred to in epidemiology as spatial clustering and as “hotspots” more colloquially. Today’s outbreak investigations use visual representations of disease spread as a standard practice. Johns Hopkins’ COVID-19 tracker was one such communicative tool for showing the intensification of an outbreak across space and time. The visual becomes representative of a more than normal number of confirmed cases in spatial and temporal balance, to allow the viewer to identify what we reference as hotspots. In what follows, I will examine the utility of the term hotspots through an investigation into the public discussion of the current United States measles outbreaks (2024—) put in contrast with the localized practice of frontline healthcare professionals in South Florida. I will show how hotspots have meaning beyond their colloquial uptake as clear and accurate representations of who is getting sick. (read more...)