Asian Labor Futures Podcast

Kriangsak T., PhD
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Politics
  • Updated Biweekly

Asian Labor Futures is about reimagining labor and labor's power and redefining what the future of work mean from the standpoint of workers themselves. It is grounded in what I call “other-than-expert” knowledge. asianlaborfutures.substack.com

  1. Jun 9

    One Year of Asian Labor Futures: the New Chapter

    Dear friends, This July, Asian Labor Futures turns one, and this milestone alone deserves reflection and recognition. When I first launched this Substack, I didn't have a complete roadmap. To be completely honest, I still don’t. Up until now, I’ve treated this space as a conduit for my curiosity and creativity. It has been an invaluable space for me to hone public communication skills and connect fragments of thoughts. I only have a few paid subscribers, all of whom I know personally, and I want to sincerely thank their foundational support. Also, to every single person who has left a comment, shared a post, or engaged in solidarity: I really appreciate you! In this post, I want to take a moment to look back at what this year of writing has brought me and share some exciting updates about where Asian Labor Futures is heading next. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Groundedness and Gratitude Every now and then, I succumbed to the platform’s algorithmic nudges—the seductive idea of rapid growth or generating a steady stream of income. But reality has a way of grounding us. I have felt that Substack’s libertarian vibe is a poor fit for “my people”. Moreover, its algorithm seems designed to keep creators busy with superficial chitchat rather than focusing on substantive work. This is a social platform inherently at odd with my worker-centric, movement-building approach. Lately, subscriber count has plateaued, and despite being here for almost a year, I have learned very little about who my readers actually are. Despite these roadblocks, building this Substack has both deepened my thinking and reshaped other areas of my work. My favorite pieces to write are those that cross-pollinate ideas, like blending adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy or Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work on moss ecology with my own research on labor activism. This synthesis has led to breakthroughs in how I understand adaptation and resilience, both in grassroots organizing and organizational structure. I hope these insights offer some value to you. I recently wrapped up the “Reimagining Asian Labor Futures” course with the Asian Labor School, while many early posts have become central discussion points for Season 3 of the Continent of Resistance podcast—my collaborative project that I have been a co-producer and co-host since 2024. I can’t wait for the new season to be available! The Next Chapter This July also marks a significant milestone for me. I am wrapping up my Just Tech fellowship, bringing an incredible two-year journey to a close. As I prepare for the next chapter in my personal and professional life, I’m also excited to share that applications for the next cohort are officially open! If you work on labor and technology, and are interested to apply, please feel free to reach out. I’d be happy to answer any questions about the fellowship. While Asian Labor Futures has taken a slow but steady pace, big things have been brewing behind the scenes. I am very excited to share two major updates about the future of this project. A New Digital Home I’ve been working with an incredible group of designers from Taiwan to build a dedicated website for Asian Labor Futures. They are from Co-Assembly Cooperative, the very first design cooperative in Taiwan. I highly encourage you to check them out! Working with like-minded Asian creators who share a deep commitment to social and labor justice has been an absolute joy. A New Research Collective In parallel, my collaborator Pei Palmgren and I are building a small collective of seasoned Asian researchers deeply embedded in grassroots organizations. Envisioned as a worker-owned cooperative, it will provide research consultancy and strategic advisory at the vital intersections of labor, migration, technology, and climate justice. With the funding landscape shifting rapidly—as traditional nonprofit aid dries up and private capital rushes in—it is more urgent than ever to build a grounded, collective effort that shapes regional strategy from the bottom up. It is still in the very early stages, but I am incredibly energized by this new journey. Drop me a line if you’re interested to partner or connect with us. What would happen to this Substack? I haven’t fully decided on the fate of this newsletter just yet. Once our new digital home is properly built and decorated, I will reach out to ask all of you—my subscribers and followers—whether you’d like to migrate with me to the new space. Thank you for being part of this journey. Stay tuned for what’s next! With gratitude, Kiang Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe

    7 min

  2. May 30

    Spirituality, AI, and Illusion of Separation

    Dear friends, Life has a way of arriving all at once. I’ve been yearning to write, but illness got in the way. Since recovering, I've been catching up with our ongoing Reimagining Asian Labor Futures course. It is a heavy world to witness right now: migrants on hunger strikes in the US, escalating strikes in Iran, and the relentless killing of Palestinians despite the so-called “ceasefire.” Lately, I’ve found myself thinking deeply about wholeness. Specifically, what it means to live and work as complete human beings in a world that constantly tries to separate us. My own research on automation makes me acutely aware of its limitations; because AI relies entirely on our past data, it lacks the living presence required to teach us about futures. Inspired by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee’s recent piece on AI and spirituality in Emergence Magazine, I want to invite us to view our collective resistance to AI and automation not merely as a defensive fight, but as a reclamation of labor as a sacred site of human dignity and shared liberation. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Wholeness and The Tragedy of Modernity Carl Jung once warned that modern society risked becoming dangerously one-sided: cultivating the intellect while cutting itself off from the unconscious depths of the soul. For Jung, human wholeness depended on the difficult and lifelong process of integration, or the reconciliation of consciousness with the unconscious, reason with feeling, or intellect with spirit. The tragedy of modernity is not simply that we have become rational, but that we have mistaken rationality for completeness. This fragmentation is deeply embedded within capitalist society. We are trained to identify with the ego alone: the productive or the measurable self. We learn to value speed over slow reflection, and efficiency over relationship. The parts of ourselves that cannot be quantified: grief, intuition, care, and spiritual longing, are treated as irrational residues to be managed or eliminated. Artificial intelligence emerges from this worldview and intensifies it. It reflects a civilization increasingly unable to distinguish intelligence from wisdom, or data from consciousness. They reproduce language without embodiment, and simulation without soul. What inspired all of this reflection came from an insightful article on AI and spirituality by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee in Emergence Magazine. Vaughan-Lee points to the interlocking crises we face, spiritual and ecological, as posing an existential danger to our species. In capitalist society, we have lost our way, cultivating only the growth of the ego while suppressing and stunting the soul. AI, as the apotheosis of consumerism and extractivism, accelerates us toward that cliff. And it does so hand in hand with the destruction of our planet, our only home. The Illusion of Separation and Autonomy Yet, the soul has always resisted domination. Human beings are not machines to be optimized. We are contradictory, emotional, relational, and unfinished. When societies suppress the dimensions of life that cannot be instrumentalized, they create profound alienation. This alienation deepens when we forget what our teacher Thich Nhat Hanh called interbeing—the profound truth that nothing exists in isolation, and that we are all fundamentally interconnected. To understand interbeing is to recognize that the worker, the community, the soil, and the tools we use are part of a singular, living web. Technological reductionism, by contrast, relies on the illusion of absolute separation. It seeks to chop up our lives into discrete, exploitable metrics, stripping away the “inefficient” elements of our existence: our need for deep rest, our messy emotional realities, and the slow, unquantifiable time required to build genuine relationships of care. Reclaiming Labor as a Sacred and Collective Act Both the lens of interbeing and Vaughan-Lee’s analysis expose the inherent limitations of AI: it is a machine of the past, a calcification of accumulated historical data. The work we are called to do, by contrast, must be future-oriented, transformative, and deeply human. Labor, at its core, is the way we participate in interbeing. It is how we care for one another, shape our material reality, and sustain life. When we engage in purposeful labor—whether through formal employment, organizing on the ground, or the invisible, vital work of care within our communities—we are exercising our capacity for collective wisdom, empathy, and agency. The ultimate danger is not just that machines may displace human hands. It is that entire societies are being reorganized around values that render human beings disposable, replacing the vibrant, relational nature of labor with a hollow, mechanical efficiency. As we move forward, let us reject the illusion that AI can save us, or that progress is measured by the speed of our extraction. The real change, or the kind that heals our social and ecological polycrisis remains deeply, quietly human. It lives in our souls, and our collective will to demand a world that honors our whole selves. Our task is to defend labor as a site of human dignity and collective resistance. We must cultivate a practice of work and struggle that refuses to be quantified, structured around the real needs of our communities rather than the demands of capital. We are here to be awake, to care for one another, and to build a future where our labor is an expression of our shared liberation. In solidarity, Kriangsak (Kiang) Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe

    9 min

  3. May 14

    Who's Steering Our "Driverless" Future?

    (original photo by Hoseung Han on Unsplash; edited by myself) Dear friends, In March, I wrote about Baidu’s Apollo Go experiments in Wuhan. The takeaway is that the so-called “self-driving” car is far from autonomous. At the end of April, the myth of autonomy hit a physical wall in Wuhan. Over 100 stalled vehicles reportedly paralyzed the city's traffic, leading to suspension of new permits. Meanwhile in the US, Waymo made headlines in February when it was pushed to reveal more about its operations. Despite the “driverless” marketing, Waymo relies on a corps of backup responders in the Philippines. Today, I want to shine a spotlight on the workers deliberately kept invisible and connect them with those who train the machine. As we start seeing them as essential parts of the assembly line, it becomes clear these workers hold a unique, untapped power over the fragile system. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Global Backseat Driver The revelation came during a February 2026 Senate hearing, where Waymo’s Chief Safety Officer admitted that when their robotaxis encounter “edge cases”— scenarios the AI cannot resolve—they “phone a human friend” in centers located in two cities in the Philippines. The resulting online debates were often clouded by xenophobia, revealing how little the public understands about the global tech infrastructure. Offshoring isn’t new; AI is just the latest shell. These workers designated internally as ‘fleet response agents’ are the ones who tell the car how to navigate a confusing construction zone or while encountering a plastic bag. While Waymo insists these agents do not “drive” the cars, they provide the cognitive judgement that the machine lacks. In the industry’s own infrastructure, these Filipino workers act as the human hardware required to bridge the gap between code and the chaotic reality of city streets. But we must remember that these responders are only the last mile of a much longer labor supply chain. The Chains of Data and Automation Workers Companies like Waymo rely heavily on the global labor platforms like Scale AI and Remotasks for its data pipeline. This work is maintained by Filipino annotators who work 12-hour shifts labeling 3D LiDAR data points, training Waymo’s software to navigate real-world environments by identifying everything from pedestrians to roadside signage. In cities like Cagayan de Oro in Mindanao, several thousands of data annotators perform the grueling foundational labor for companies like Waymo and Alphabet, its parent company. It is a multi-billion dollar industry built on invisible workers, from the US vantage, who often earn as little as $1.00 to $2.00 per hour, frequently bypassing local labor protections. This invisibility is a theme explored in Glenn Diaz’s 2017 acclaimed novel, The Quiet Ones. In the crime thriller set against the backdrop of globalization, BPO workers navigate a world where they are physically in the Philippines but mentally and linguistically tethered to the US. They are “the quiet ones” because the global economy requires their silence to function. The moment the customer, or the robotaxi passenger, realizes a Filipino worker is steering the experience, the “magic” of Western innovation evaporates. The frequent incidents of Baidu’s Apollo Go and Waymo vehicles getting stalled by something as trivial as a plastic bag—whether on the streets of Wuhan or at intersections in San Francisco—reveal not only the invisibility, but fragility in action. These breakdowns turn robotaxis into useless chunks of metal blocking public streets. The magic disappears. From the Bottleneck to Openings The reality of this ‘just-in-time’ workforce is undeniable: without the Global South, the driverless dream grinds to a halt. But where the industry sees a “risk,” we must recognize our leverage. The very fact that Waymo’s fleet freezes without human input grants these workers a unique structural power. In theory, we could use such power to create a massive disruption. For too long, tech giants have rendered Global South labor invisible. But invisibility allows for operation under the radar. Much like the protagonists in The Quiet Ones, a group of BPO workers have learned to exploit loopholes in the system, reversing the flow of extraction through their own subversive schemes. For labor activists, the strategy is rooted in a clear paradox: the industry’s push for global expansion only intensifies its dependence on this specific, localized labor pool. Our resistance must be as global as their supply chains. By connecting the dots from the data annotators to the fleet responders, we see that the machine does not move without us. Our struggle is to turn that dependence into power. They may own the cars, but we own the intelligence that makes them more than just expensive scrap metal. Until next time, Kriangsak (Kiang) Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe

    8 min

  4. May 2

    The Scaffolding of Allyship

    Dear friends, This piece arrives in the wake of May Day 2026. It is my custom to remain silent on International Workers’ Day itself, stepping back to ensure that workers’ voices occupy center stage. Last week, I attended the Labor and AI Symposium at Yale University. The personal highlight was joining a roundtable with two speakers from the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). Sharing my work alongside fellow labor advocates was a powerful reminder of why we do this. But being in a prestigious institution was a reminder of the friction inherent in how we do it. In the spirit of May Day, I want to offer some critical but solidaristic reflections on moving from institutional allyship to genuine partnership with workers. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Great Wall of Privilege Since this visit was my first to New Haven, Connecticut, I arrived with no preconceived notions of the city. Walking through the downtown area, I was struck by the city’s two starkly different faces. On one side is the polished, Ivy League glow of the Yale campus; on the other is the heavy, everyday reality of poverty within the Black community. This contrast mirrors a feeling I have carried for a long time: the tension of straddling the worlds of intellectual exercise and social change. Just as I was startled by the divide between the sophistication of Yale campus and the post-industrial struggle of its surroundings, I’ve long struggled with the chasm between the research produced by academic institutions and the immediate, material needs of the workers I stand with. While scholars are often preoccupied with deepening theoretical analyses of labor platforms, my work in coalition-building exposes a different urgency. Workers desperately need their labor and employment to be recognized by legal frameworks so workers can access basic rights. Historically, this institutional distance was framed as a prerequisite for 'objectivity.' But today, those boundaries have hardened into a Great Wall—one that keeps out the very people whose lives are being “studied.” The Precarity of the Bridge Existing in the space between these two worlds is the work of democratizing knowledge. Out of a personal frustration that research often dies in gated journals, I have committed to using inquiry as a tool for organizing, worker empowerment, and policy advocacy from below. But a bridge is a fragile thing when the distance it tries to cover remains far too wide. For the past two years, the Just Tech Fellowship has allowed me to keep one foot in academia and the other in practice. This support is the only reason I can offer the Asian Labor Futures pro bono. However, even with this rare support, we remain caught in an exhausting, transactional choreography. As an intermediary organization, we find ourselves constantly translating the “immediate needs” of workers into the “deliverables” required by institutions. Whether it is a Western foundation or a university research center, the dynamic is often the same: we are asked to bend our reality to fit their reporting cycles. To Our Institutional Allies: Reimagine Collaboration In my experience, both academic and philanthropic collaboration often feel like a forced contract. Whether you are a researcher or a program officer, you frequently approach community-based organizations with a “packaged deal.” You arrive with the framework already set, the methodology fixed, and the goals decided by university administrations or board priorities. Sometimes, if the research grant is already secured, our names are included as “partners” without us even being asked. This is not an invitation to co-create; it is an invitation to sign off on a project already in motion. To truly move from allyship to partnership, both foundations and academia must resist the urge to control the output. True solidarity means moving away from top-down metrics that serve your donors more than our communities. It means trusting the people on the ground to define what success looks like. To Academia, true co-creation means starting the conversation before the grant is written. It means asking: “What research does your movement actually need to win?” . Ultimately, if you want to change the world from the inside of these resourceful institutions, academic workers too must organize. You must build your collective power to contest the terms imposed by your own administrations. The walls are high, and for the most part, they exist to preserve the status quo. To break them down requires both the willpower and the action to start from within. In solidarity, Kriangsak (Kiang) Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe

    7 min

  5. Apr 21

    Reimagining Asian Labor Futures Begins

    (Photo by Oh Taeyeon on Unsplash) Dear friends, This post arrives a little late. I was away in New York City for my retreat. I'll share some updates about the fellowship I've been part of since 2024. A transformative journey now nearing its close. This month, my colleagues and family in Thailand also celebrated Songkran, the traditional Thai New Year. Communities across Southeast and South Asia share versions of this tradition, all rooted in the solar calendar and a common spirit of cleansing and renewal. Water is poured to wash away the old year's dust. Space is made for what comes next. In that spirit, some news about convergence and renewal across my projects, and a reflection on what collective organizing can offer to complement critical art at this technological moment. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. A New Page Since August 2024, I've been part of the Social Science Research Council's Just Tech Fellowship, which is always a source of inspiration and support. During my retreat last week, I got a privilege to use a space at the New Museum—New York's museum dedicated to contemporary art, and home to NEW INC, its incubator for practitioners working across art, technology, and design. The museum had just reopened with New Humans: Memories of the Future, a sweeping exhibition exploring how technology reshapes what it means to be human. A fitting setting for our cohort of researchers, artists, and technologists all grappling with the question of just technological futures. This May and June, I will be offering a new course, Reimagining Labor Futures, at the Asian Labor School. Structured over five sessions, the course is built around the research and writing I’ve developed through the Asian Labor Futures initiative since its launch in July 2025. This course is the culmination of almost two years spent immersed in the study of labor and technology. It is an invitation to look beyond both the narratives of technological inevitability and "tech for good" and instead analyze these shifts through a labor movement lens. My hope is to create space for activists and organizers in Asia. Not only to examine the impacts and limits of technology, but to build strategies that contest and reshape the systems dictating our ways of working. The Old Fight We’re In The dominant AI discourse—and the way this technology is built and deployed—is deeply problematic. The stakes for workers and labor movements are enormous, not least because we are all producers of the data that fuels these systems. Perhaps the most consequential impact is the radical organization of work and concentration of economic-political power in the hands of a few technology corporations. There is an undeniable class dimension to this shift. The traditional institution of waged work—long critiqued by the left—is visibly eroding. The past decade of platformization has made waged employment the lesser of two evils when set against the gig economy’s stripped-down alternative. Platform workers in on-demand logistics and services have been on the front lines, laying track across a digital frontier that often lacks basic protections. Now AI data trainers face heightened precarity, frequently under conditions that are mentally and physically abusive. For labor organizers, proactively engaging with the rollout of AI is no longer optional. Most of Asia still serves as a source of extraction for the global tech industries. The implications vary by country and sector, but this structural position is the common condition. What We Offer This brings me back to the critique of technology through art and design, to what I’ve been learning from my fellow cohort members. Many of them are artists and creative technologists, and their work is genuinely illuminating. They make visible what corporate narratives obscure, they stage encounters that provoke new ways of seeing. I have deep respect for these practices. And yet, walking through New Humans, I noticed that most of the artistic responses on display shared a common grammar: the individual creator confronting the machine, the singular vision made legible through the institution. Even when the work named exploitation or surveillance, the mode of engagement remained fundamentally individualist. It is a limit of form. And it points to what the labor movement can uniquely offer in this moment: not just critique, but collective contestation. A vehicle for organizing the power to change the conditions. The AI battleground is, above all, a fight against the imposition and closure of choices and collective agency. As I’ve learned from the engaged artists and technologists, technology is a matter of choices, and choices are always possible—but only if there is organized power behind them. The labor movement can and must find a strategic point of intervention. To do that, we need to understand exactly what we are up against: the strengths, the limitations, and the vulnerabilities of these systems, which are plentiful. I look forward to starting that process with you. Until next time, Kriangsak (Kiang) Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe

    8 min

  6. Apr 10

    Oil Crisis and Rage in South and Southeast Asia

    Dear friends, The current massive oil disruption has exposed dynamics in Asian politics and workers’ power. In Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, mass movements recently proved they could topple entrenched authoritarians, yet they now struggle to stop fuel price hikes. Meanwhile, in the Philippines and Indonesia in particular, experiences from decades of working within parliamentarian politics are forcing governments to internalize the costs of the crisis. In this piece, I examine the “warp and weft” of Asian labor politics contrasting the street power with the institutional anchor of the workers, and why the future of the region depends on synthesizing the two. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Sri Lanka and Bangladesh: After the Uprisings In South Asia, social movements were powerful enough to topple dictators but are now institutionally weak to stop gas price hikes because these are backed by IMF-mandated austerity. Sri Lanka’s 2022 Aragalaya movement forced President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee. Yet, in March 2026, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake—the very man many hoped would champion the poor—raised fuel prices by a third and reintroduced QR-code fuel rationing. Why? Sri Lanka is trapped in the post-revolutionary ‘democracy’. Dissanayake’s 2024 two-thirds parliamentary majority gave him immense democratic legitimacy. Because his party, the NPP, was the political beneficiary of the uprising, people are struggling to strike against a "people’s government" that is currently using its legitimacy to enforce IMF-mandated austerity. Bangladesh follows a similar logic. The 2024 student uprising that toppled Sheikh Hasina proved that mass mobilization can bring down entrenched power. But in the aftermath, the energy has been absorbed into constitutional battles. The government introduced rationing on March 6, then quietly lifted it on March 15 before the end of Ramadan. The fuel crisis is producing localized rage—gas station workers attacked or killed in fuel thefts—and queues stretching for kilometers, yet there is no coordinated response from labor. This is because, under Hasina, most major unions were appendages of the state, the Awami League. When the regime fell, those labor structures collapsed or went into hiding. Philippines and Indonesia: Keep the Rage Burning The Philippines is seeing the most organized resistance in the region right now. After President Marcos declared a National Energy Emergency on March 24, transport groups launched nationwide tigil-pasada: transport strikes. The No to Oil Price Hike coalition—uniting jeepney drivers, motorcycle taxi riders, tricycle operators, and platform workers—took to the streets with structural demands: wage increases and the repeal of the Oil Deregulation Law and the TRAIN (The TRAIN Law (Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion) Law. The 1998 Downstream Oil Industry Deregulation Act dismantled the stabilization funds that once buffered pump prices, transferring control entirely to a handful of large oil firms. By 2025, jeepney drivers were spending an estimated 60% of their daily earnings on fuel alone. Workers are not just asking for temporary relief; they are contesting the very rules of the market. Last September, I wrote about the rage of youth in Indonesia—an uprising symbolized by Affan Kurniawan, a 21-year-old delivery rider killed during a protest in Jakarta. The protests began over lawmakers awarding themselves housing allowances nearly ten times the Jakarta minimum wage, but Affan’s death made the economic stakes of the working class visceral and undeniable. In that piece, I asked: what does the future hold for enraged Indonesian youth? This crisis is beginning to answer that question. That uprising forced the Indonesian government to internalize the cost of ignoring workers. The Prabowo government has pledged no increases for subsidized fuel in 2026, absorbing the fiscal blow through cuts to ministry spending and a new coal export tax — even as the deficit approaches its legal ceiling of 3% of GDP. In a region where governments are passing every cost directly to workers, Indonesia is holding the line. Why? Prabowo is not just afraid of another Affan Kurniawan. Organized labor’s role as a political agent has forced the state to internalize social stability as a non-negotiable cost. That is what institutional power looks like when it works. Not just the capacity to mobilize, but the capacity to have already changed the rules of the game. The ‘Ungovernable’ and the ‘Indispensable’ What we are witnessing across Asia is not a series of disconnected crises, but interconnected struggles. The uprisings in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh proved that when the politics becomes a machine for its own survival, it does no longer serve the people. These movements opened the door to the future, and they did not need to ask for any permission. The power is theirs to begin with. The civil society and organized labor in the Philippines and Indonesia represent indispensable political actor that occupies that open space. While a mass uprising can topple a leader, it is the organizational muscle of transport unions and platform worker coalitions that keep the government in check from sliding back into the old logic of the IMF. These two models are the warp and weft of Asian labor politics. Without the explosion of the street, the institutional work remains trapped in the illusion of political participation. But without the institutional anchor, the explosion eventually dissipates into a vacuum filled up by the elites and technocrats. The political future, then, cannot be made in either the street or the union hall. It is made in their synthesis. It is the capacity to be both ungovernable in the face of injustice and indispensable in the work of governance. In solidarity, Kriangsak (Kiang) Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe

    9 min

  7. Mar 30

    Outside Artificial "Intelligence": Embodied Knowledge and Thick Solidarity

    Dear friends, In my last piece, I wrote about Apollo Go’s robotaxis in Wuhan and framed their technical failures as a strategic opening for workers. I want to stay with this a little longer, because that technological limit is telling us something important about what “artificial intelligence” actually is, and what workers actually do. A book I’ve been reading, Ways of Being by James Bridle, opens with a provocation: intelligence is not what we think it is. We’ve built AI on a narrow idea of what minds do: calculating, optimizing, processing symbols. But Bridle argues this image was always incomplete. Intelligence doesn’t happen inside a brain; it happens between a body and a world. I want to use that as a jumping point for rethinking solidarity, not as feelings or a posture, but as a form of social infrastructure. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Collective Knowledge that Machines (Fail to) Replicate Driving is one of the most complex tasks humans perform, yet it feels effortless to most of us. It’s nearly impossible to replicate in a machine. There’s a technical name for this: the Moravec paradox. What is easiest for us is hardest for machines, and vice versa. Driving is a relational activity: reading the slight hesitation of a motorbike about to cut across your lane, sensing the rhythm of a street that slows at certain hours, knowing from experience that the puddle on this corner is deeper than it looks in the rainy season. This knowledge lives in the relationship between a body and a place, built over years of moving through it. It cannot be cleanly extracted and fed into a training dataset. Yet workers are mislabeled “unskilled,” a classification with a long history, from the factory to the platform economy, of management taking exactly this kind of knowledge and placing it up the chain of command. What remains with the workers gets reclassified as simple execution requiring no particular intelligence. The robotaxi is the same story, albeit unfinished, played out on the street. And where the machine still falls short, tech companies now recruit people who desperately need income to close the gap, training algorithms in real-life conditions, on poverty wages, so the machine can eventually replace them too. What Workers Build Within the Entanglement I’ve often felt a disconnect between the reality I see on the ground and calls for “full automation” or “post-work” futures coming from some corners of the Western left. These are important political horizons, but they can obscure the immediate question facing workers who are already inside the system and cannot simply opt out. But the delivery riders I work with don’t have that option. By economic necessity, they are inside the relationship with the machine—the app, the algorithm, the gamification system. The question for them is not whether to engage with technology, but what to build within that entanglement. Workers are not jut redefining themselves in the process. They are building something inside these platforms that the algorithm never intended and cannot control. This isn’t just about collective bargaining; it’s about workers coming to know one another, recognizing that the social world the algorithm depends on is actually ours. The routing algorithms that guide platform logistics are built on the accumulated navigational intelligence of thousands of workers. This is collective labor in its purest form. And it raises a clear political demand: what is collectively produced must be collectively owned. The moment we begin to claim that knowledge together, we reclaim our “world-making rights.” What This Means for Solidarity Building Building collective power from within is difficult. Not just strategically, but subjectively. Platforms are designed to deplete the very capacities that organizing depends on: the desire to connect, the capacity for trust. What we can do as movement builders is support workers' initiatives that start small and molecular: a mutual aid project or a savings circle. These are the first bricks of a solidarity infrastructure. This is similar to what scholars Roseann Liu and Savannah Shange call thick solidarity: building from workers' actual, embodied positions, across real differences in their conditions, led by those most directly inside the machine. Unlike thin digital connections designed to keep us isolated, thick solidarity creates recurring obligations, shared risk, and belonging that doesn't disappear when accounts are deactivated. One framework I’ve found generative comes from the US-based Building Movement Project, which uses scaffolding as a central metaphor. Scaffolding is the support system that makes it possible to build something larger than ourselves. Not the final structure, but what protects our collective energy while we’re building it. It’s what moves us from constant reaction toward shared governance and lasting power. Platform worker movements desperately need this kind of bridge between current capacity and actual need. Between what capital permits and what justice requires. And we should be honest with ourselves: what we’re building in the meantime may not look pretty, but that’s ok. Until next time, Kriangsak (Kiang) Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe

    8 min

  8. Mar 20

    Can We Stop Robotaxis From Taking Over?

    Dear friends, It may be time to talk about robotaxis, or “driverless” taxi service. Not as a tech trend to get you excited, but as the next front in a battle that platform workers across Asia have been fighting for over a decade. The struggles of ride-hailing drivers and delivery workers in China and across Asia are still unfolding. Still raw. Yet, the rapid rise of robotaxis now threatens to upend this already precarious workforce once again. What took more than a decade to build; nascent labor organizations among app-based drivers may face another round of disruption, destabilizing the political formations workers have painstakingly built. I want to resist the narrative of inevitability and to encourage activists to think strategically. Our labor built the platform economy, and that history provides a map for our next moves against robotaxis. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Chinese Platform Drivers in Surviving Modes In China, ride-hailing drivers have long worked under intense pressure to make ends meet. According to a report by the National Business Daily, multiple regions issued warnings since mid-2024 that platforms had flooded the market with overcrowded drivers. As a result, drivers’ daily revenues reportedly dropped sharply, pushing many to the brink. A 2024 labor review compiled by an anonymous Chinese collective known as “Straw Mushroom Stewed Chicken” (草菇炖鸡), published by an international editorial group Chuang, documents what survival looks like under these condition. In megacities like Beijing and Shanghai, male drivers have resorted to eating, drinking, and sleeping in their cars to save on rent, relying on paid bathhouses for hygiene. This gave rise to the “smelly car” trend on social media. Platforms like Didi responded with disciplinary measures and blacklisting features, rather than addressing the underlying dispatch algorithms or revenue-sharing models. At the same time, the workforce saw a threefold increase in women drivers, adding a gendered dimension to these conditions. And still, workers pushed back. Before shutting down in mid-2025, the China Labor Bulletin's Strike Map recorded 25 driver protests in 2024 alone, nearly 40 percent of all transport and logistics collective actions that year. Drivers were organizing under crises. Into this sitting, the robotaxis like WeRide and Apollo Go (which this article will focus on) arrived. Robotaxis Stealing the “Rice Bowl” Since its 2022 debut, Baidu’s Apollo Go has scaled rapidly across more than twenty Chinese cities. By early 2026, Apollo Go had begun operations in Dubai and partnered with Lyft in Europe. Wuhan has become its primary laboratory—the first city to integrate autonomous vehicles into its highway system and urban grid at scale. As reported by Baiguan and Chosun News, the competition is brutal. Pricing data from the Wuhan Economic Development Zone reveals an impossible competition for ride-hailing drivers. Though Apollo Go's official starting fare may be slightly higher than ride-hailing platforms, heavy subsidies and aggressive promotions have gutted actual prices. Passengers report paying 4–16 yuan for a 10-kilometer robotaxi trip, compared to 18–30 yuan with a ride hailer. In mid-2024, a taxi company in Wuhan submitted a petition to the city’s transport bureau, accusing robotaxis of stealing the “rice bowl” (fànwǎn) of local drivers. Among drivers, the vehicles earned a mocking nickname: shǎ luóbo : the “dumb radish.” The term refers to the machines’ awkward behavior in complex urban environments. The machines freeze at stray plastic bags, stall at confusing intersections, and create traffic jams while recalculating. Drivers joke about this. But beneath the humor lies a deeper anxiety. For many in Wuhan, ride-hailing was already a fallback livelihood, entered after losing jobs in manufacturing or construction during earlier economic slowdowns. Ride-hail driving was the “last resort” rice bowl. Now even that is under threat. Wuhan as a Laboratory for Our Struggle We must look at China as a laboratory. What is happening in Wuhan is a preview, moving at unprecedented speed. The rapid expansion of Apollo Go into the Middle East and Europe in 2026 (and WeRide into Southeast Asia) confirms that the global rollout is not a distant future. It is already here. However, we have been here before. Our consent, given out of economic necessity, was the very fuel used to build the platform economy. Now that same dynamic is powering the shift to AI-driven autonomous vehicles. We built these platforms with our labor. We have the right to decide whether they continue to run over our livelihoods. As these companies go global, our resistance must do the same. If the technology is identical in Wuhan and in Dubai, then our strategies for disruption must be shared across borders. The strength of logistic and transport workers has always been our ability to disrupt the flow of the commodities and the city. With robotaxis even more dependent on predictable environments than human drivers ever were, this weakness in the system is an opening in ours. The future of labor is a social struggle we have already been waging for a decade. We know this terrain. It is not too late to stop the robotaxis in their tracks. Until next time, Kriangsak Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe

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Asian Labor Futures is about reimagining labor and labor's power and redefining what the future of work mean from the standpoint of workers themselves. It is grounded in what I call “other-than-expert” knowledge. asianlaborfutures.substack.com

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  • Creator
    Kriangsak T., PhD
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    13
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Kriangsak Teerakowitkajorn
  • Show Website
    Asian Labor Futures Podcast