digital activism | 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...)

Recipes of Resistance: Global Digital Gastro-solidarity for Palestine

 Ashley Thuthao Keng Dam  March 26, 2024

 Listen to a reading of this post.

From the North in Safad (where my father is from) and Galilee to the South East in Al-Lydd (where my mother is from) and down to Jerusalem and Gaza, the food differs but is united at the same time, through love and history… Palestinian food is found in the home. That is where it all begins. (Joudie Kalla, Palestine on a Plate, 2016) Food is the most precious part of Palestinian heritage. For Palestinian food not to go extinct, the young have to learn from the old. (Aisha Azzam, Aisha’s Story, film forthcoming 2024) Around the world, millions have taken the streets in support of a free and thriving Palestine in the face of active genocide and the continuance of settler colonial violence. Visible on the streets and all over social media feeds, scattered among flags and keffiyehs, are images of the vibrant watermelon. This trinity of nationalist symbols bear a shared honoring of an ancient yet enduring cultural intimacy with Levantine lands. A cursory search about the history of the Palestinian flag’s colors (black, white, red, and green) leads one down many possible origins and mythologies behind the green portion of the flag. These include but are not limited to representing influential Arab dynasties, peace, Islamic faith, as well as a deep love and appreciation for the olive trees which bloom across the landscape. The keffiyeh, a traditional scarf, embodies similar sentiments entangled in its design. Within its iconic weave, visual histories of Palestinian trade pathways, robust fishing culture upon the Mediterranean sea, and once again, the olive trees. Last is the watermelon, which was used as a covert placeholder for the flag during a period of occupation when the display of the flag itself was forbidden. In essence, at the core of these symbols are Palestinian foodways and culture. (read more...)

Screenshots of the Field: Viral Loads and the Contagious Potentials of Digital Ethnography

 Tankut Atuk  March 30, 2021

Metnin Türkçesine buradan erişebilirsiniz.

Over the course of the past six months, I have been actively doing fieldwork on HIV care in Turkey on Zoom. Believe it or not, for an anxious person like myself, who to this date did not approach or talk to anyone in the field without being completely soaked in sweat, I have actually been enjoying doing research online. I recognize the “anxieties, challenges, concerns, dilemmas, doubts, problems, tensions, and troubles” that arise from digital fieldwork, particularly given that the quality of being virtual does not guarantee exemption from gendered, ableist, and racialized violence. However, these issues do not exhaust the methodological possibilities and relational potentials of online research, which I address in this blog post. (read more...)

Biella Coleman, 2015 Forsythe Prize Winner, on IRC, Anonymous, and Wild Publics

 Gabriella Coleman  October 30, 2015

It is truly an honor to join the cast of previous Diana Forsythe Prize winners and honorable mentions. In this blog post I decided to consider briefly a topic left unexplored in Hacker Hoaxer Whistleblower Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous that may be of interest to scholars working at the intersection of anthropology, media studies, and science and technology studies: the type of public Anonymous enacts with a lens directed at the communication infrastructure—Internet Relay Chat (IRC)—that helps sustain it. In many regards, IRC is one of the core communication technologies that helps support what Chris Kelty has elegantly defined as a recursive public: “a public that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public” (2008:3). His work addresses various features of this public but one of the most important concerns how hackers have the knowledge—and by extension the power and ability—to build and maintain the technological spaces, whether it is IRC or mailing lists, that are partly, or fully, independent from the institutions where hackers and geeks otherwise labor. Image: “You call it piracy” by Anonymous – Operation Payback IRC channel. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons. (read more...)