November 13 2024, Asia Meetup

The Asia Regional Meetups are bimonthly text-based gatherings that bring together folks from the Asian region to share, connect, seek help, and release stress by celebrating each other. In addition, it is a time for us to find ways to support each other, and help us understand what is happening in our part of the world. If you cannot attend the monthly meetups, we are taking notes of each gathering and linking to them below.

The Asian community is connected during the week in different ways. Either through the Asian channel on the TCU Mattermost or via different events organized on various topics during the year.

Date: Wednesday, November 13 2024

Time: 5:30pm IST/ 6:30pm MMT / 7am EST / 12pm UTC (What time is it in my city?)

Who: Facilitated by Sapni

Where: Text-based format in the Regional Asia channel on the TCU Mattermost.

• Don't have an account to the IFF Mattermost? you can request one following the directions here.

Notes

We have @strangerobot with us today. He is a design researcher and practitioner based in India working on fleshing out what Design Injustice means in the context of platforms.

Would like to share something about yourself and your work beyond the brief introduction above?

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I used to be a designer in past life, now I work as a researcher broadly on issues in-between design, caste and digital platforms. I also love to make rare hot-sauce, wine and meats, research is more of a side hustle

Based on your research on design, caste and digital platforms, how do you see the interplay of caste with platform design and platform experiences? I feel within the Indian context, Caste (and by extension class) is the infrastructure on which "successful" platforms are built. There are multiple perspective one can take to decode this but broadly:

1. Apps are designed/built/funded by an Industry and VC field dominated by Oppressor Castes, and thus reflect what kind of platforms get built.
2. The apps predominantly default to an imaginary user with upper-caste sensibilities, positioning and their conveniences in their design and marketing processes
3. The exploitation of workers on these platforms is rooted in both capitalism and brahmanism, where workers (often from marginalised castes and religion) are not treated as an equal stakeholder in the design.

Taking off from your comments on social heirarchy here, how do you see the experience of social hierarchies on digital platforms? Do you see them replicate it, facilitate it or accelerate it?

Since digital platforms are kind of built on existing hierarchies of power, whether it caste, race, gender or labour, they are inherent to how these platforms function. Within the context of caste in India, its been very difficult to uncover it as most digital platforms and startups rarely even mention the word caste, they act "casteless", same way tech doesn't see race and gender. I think the answer is somewhere in between, the platforms do replicate the existing hierarchies but also they adapt and create new models of enforcing them, not always evidently visible.

For example, On Meta platforms, users of marginalised caste are not protected against hate-speech, Caste wasn't a protected criteria till 2020 I think. Even now caste hate-speech gets flagged at a lower rate than other forms of hate-speech. Casteism is a default and there is an indifference to it on digital platforms

Another case will be, A prominent food delivery platform Zomato introduced a "Pure Veg" mode on its Application. On surface level its just an issue of dietary preference, but zomato went as far as to segregate delivery workforce. Given the context that "pure vegetarianism" in India is associated to practices of untouchability and Purity-Pollution, the "innocent" feature becomes caste coded and digitally re-creates offline casteism. In this case, caste is repackaged as a feature.

On that note, do you see anything in this realm that is respectively an exclusively Indian problem, a majorly Asian problem, and a global concern? It also stems from the fact that caste might no longer be a problem exclusive to South Asia, given the diaspora. I think the nature of problem is kinda global on two accounts,

1. Oppressor Caste Indians are everywhere, they are the engineers and CEOs and Manager and Billionaires in the US and other places, They have carried caste with them. As evident in the CISCO case and How Equality Labs wasn't allowed to conduct caste workshops at google, a company lead by a Brahmin. Its also important to acknowledge that there are roots of caste in colourism as well, and Uppercaste Indian diaspora is noted to be racist to Afircan-Americans and other marginalised groups.
2. In a global context it gets very messy as not a lot of work has been done, we know from research that engineers from marginalised caste get harassed and bullied in tech companies. We also know that these organisations actively participate in building racist and colonial tech etc etc

What would a digital rights approach, technique or framework that considers caste look like? I guess for the lack of better term, how should folks in digital rights address inequalities created by the caste system as they build tools, research and products?

I think its a multifaceted issue, first and foremost, Digital rights spaces don't have any representation of members of oppressed castes. Given the precarious nature of the space and frankly casteism within the space, Oppressed caste voices never get to speak for self.

On the other hand, I feel caste has to be centered in research and tool-building. Often caste is either completely erased in these conversations or added as footnote. Sometimes when it is centered, too many parallels are drawn from other global contexts like race and region, which doesnt do justice to complexity of the challenge.

How do you think oppressed caste voices can be made more visible in discussions around digital rights?

Active funding and active hiring.

Are you aware of any organisations, content creators, and/or storytelling initiatives actively seeking to promote oppressed voices on digital rights?

Not any I am aware on digital rights but hopefully something soon

Is it that on the global front, the "inclusion" parameter is nationality, and regional representation, more than going into the nuances of a specific place?

I think its an important discourse in tech/design now, un-nuanced conversations on DEI and Decolonisation has also flattened complexity of each context. For example, In India, upto 80% of population comes from what can be broadly called "caste-oppressed" but their representation in tech leadership, especially outside India may as well be in single digits or zero.