Writing a book demands courage. Authors need to have something to say, and that usually comes at the price of contesting popular claims, pushing against cherished beliefs, and being that somebody who sounds the alarm on what needs to be told and retold. No wonder authors never do this alone. We rely on people and institutions to give us the strength to proceed.
I was fortunate to have been accepted to the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center Residency Program in April 2023, where I got to write more than half of this book. It does help that Bellagio happens to be one of the most beautiful places in the world, and fellows are supported by amazing food, the company of other fellows, and most importantly, a lot of uninterrupted time to think and write. I wrote this book in the gorgeous little office called Veduta, previously occupied by legends like Maya Angelou and (more recently) Amanda Gorman. I got to run my ideas past several visiting workshop participants from different disciplines and contexts, which further sharpened my thinking.
I was doubly lucky to have had multiple experiences at the center that further shaped this book. The first was in August 2020 when the Rockefeller Foundation invited me to be part of a consortium of technologists, philosophers, economists, lawyers, artists, and philanthropists visiting Italy to explore how AI can be harnessed to create a better future for humanity. In 2023 I got to continue this discussion through an event organized by Marietje Schaake and Francis Fukuyama at Stanford University on building synergies to identify education, research, and policy needs caused by the onset of emerging technologies in global contexts.
This book, however, was born in the field. I am not one of those Indiana Jones anthropologists who embarks on a solo mission to investigate some exotic tribe. I strongly believe that contemporary and digital anthropology is a collective effort to sustain relationships with people and institutions. This helps to give value to our participants as much as they give value to researchers like me to help think of new ways of being and doing.
My book’s arguments are brought to life with storytelling from people and organizations in India, Bangladesh, Brazil, and elsewhere. I am lucky to have Usha Raman by my side, who in 2020 cofounded FemLab, a feminist futures of work initiative, with me. FemLab has become a platform for several of the projects that I have drawn inspiration from for this book. Our goal is to center the voices of those at the margins, to build digital campaigns to translate research into accessible insights for our targeted groups, and to shape inclusive technologies and designs. We have built something beautiful, where our global team continues to engage empathetically with one another. FemLab started small but has grown to be a collective of junior and senior scholars and practitioners across the world that has enabled this book in many ways.
I am grateful for seed funding from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), a Canadian grant agency, and other funding support from UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and a major design company for supporting my field projects. While I have engaged with different teams for different projects, two people have become indispensable to me: Siddhi Gupta and Shruti Singhal. I would like to thank Siddhi Gupta, a brilliant designer and educator, for her creative illustrations in this book, for being my go-to person to help build my research teams in India, and for working closely with me to run them. I am thrilled to have Shruti Singhal as an anchor who wears numerous hats, including being the backbone of FemLab’s media outreach and engagements, and for her meticulous editorial support for this book.
I would like to thank the members of the IDRC research team—Sai Amulya Komarraju, Chinar Mehta, Pallavi Bansal, Shweta Mahendra Chandrashekhar, and Upasana Bhattacharjee—who have done a remarkable job pursuing organizations and women workers in the field despite numerous obstacles, including COVID-19-related challenges. This book draws from this project, especially for the feminist futures of work section in chapter 4. I am grateful to Justice Adda, a legal and design nonprofit in Delhi and FemLab’s research partner, for inspiring me to tell good stories to institute change.
I am thankful to John Warnes, Erika Perez-Iglesias, and their team at UNHCR Innovation Services for partnering on a digital leisure project in refugee settlements in Brazil in 2021, which was built on my book The Next Billion Users. I would like to thank Amanda Alencar, Daniela Jaramillo-Dent, and Julia Camargo for their fieldwork collaboration, and Paula Wittenburg for her research assistance. I use some insights that emerged from this project in the introduction and elsewhere in this book. Furthermore, I am grateful to Natasha Rusch for her leadership in the AI-enabled antipoaching software project in Africa and the support from Konrad Adenauer Stiftung and the Digital Asia Hub for helping us share our work in their outlets. I use some insights from this project in chapter 1 of this book.
The section on hacking creativity in chapter 2 draws from the digital creativity project funded by a global design company. They hired me to explore how the next billion users adopt digital tools to shape their everyday creativity. I am grateful to Laura Herman, a UX industry leader, who worked closely as a liaison to ensure we translated academic research into industry-related insights. She is one of those rare internal disruptors with agency that we need more of to make headway with such synergies. I am indebted to our research leads, including Sai Amulya Komarraju, Kiran Bhatia, Siddhi Gupta, and Devina Sarwatay, and research assistants Stuti Dalal, Gargi Shivanand, Manisha Madapathi, and Upasana Bhattacharjee for making this project a success.
A big thank you to influencer Trupti Shirodkar for partnering with us to launch the Hacking Creativity masterclasses. Manisha Pathak-Shelat at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, provided invaluable advice in the digital learning segment and continued institutional support for multiple FemLab projects. Pathak-Shelat and I, along with UX researcher Kiran Bhatia, have collaborated several times on different research projects that have been influential in my thinking for this book.
What has been particularly exciting for me is bringing field insights to the table when in discussion with folks in the public and private sectors concerned about the future of AI. I have been invited to give talks and workshops at city festivals, corporate leadership events, government panels, tech workshops, and similar events around the world, all of which contributed to shaping my thinking. I cannot possibly thank the full range of actors I have engaged with.
I recognize how rare an opportunity it is to penetrate the walls of corporate and state leadership, especially for academics. For this, I am grateful to my speaker agent Deborah Rey-Burns for helping me gain access and to event guru Monique van Dusseldorp for her ongoing recommendations on diverse and fascinating events. I am also thankful for my friendships with Shaun Wiggins at Soteryx, Lance Shields at Adobe, Charles Hayes from IDEO, Mark West at UNESCO, and folks at RNW Media, Prosus, Google, Spotify, Liberty Latin America Telecom, NetHope, UNDP, UNHCR, Europol, and many others who have opened doors for me and been receptive to engaging thoughtfully and responsibly in the Global South.
Academic solidarities have come from scholars including Nathaniel Persily at Stanford University, Mark Deuze at the University of Amsterdam, Andrea Medrado at the University of Westminster, Simeon Yates at the University of Liverpool, Carlos Carlos (ChaTo) Castillo at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and many others. These networks of care have been essential for my mental health in an academic climate that can be viciously competitive and self-consuming. I would also like to thank my MIT Press editor Noah Springer for his responsive and thoughtful approach during the fragile period of writing. He gave me much-needed encouragement along with constructive feedback, which helped me enhance this text considerably. I would also like to thank the rest of the MIT Press editorial team for their meticulous efforts to improve this text and the anonymous reviewers for their encouraging comments and useful advice on how to strengthen this book. I truly respect their investment of time and energy in this book, especially at a time when everyone is stretched thin.
Lastly, when I speak about courage, my most formidable task has been to ensure that I do justice to the courage of all the Global South participants that my teams and I have worked with. Despite their uphill battle due to chronic sociopolitical and economic constraints, they exude hope for a better future. The least I can do is sustain that momentum.