Purple Code

Purple Code Team

Intersectional feminist perspectives on digital societies

  1. With Aida Eyvazzadeh and Sakine M. Bozorg

    06/17/2024

    With Aida Eyvazzadeh and Sakine M. Bozorg

    Aida Eyvazzadeh and Sakine M. Bozorg are former content moderators in Berlin who worked for a global social media platform. The are both from Iran and in this episode, they talk about why and how migrant workers in Germany constitute as a crucial labor supply to the global platform economy. They explain what content moderation is, how it is labor intensive work and requires several skills. Instead of being valued, content moderators face high control on their work and even repression, a kind of corporate authoritarianism that reminds them of the authoritarian regime in Iran. They go on to recount their experiences of challenging these power asymmetries through the German institutional resources and trade unions, and the difficulties they have faced in doing so. Talking about these experiences, they suggest ways for unions to reflect and make certain changes. Beyond these institutions, they also find hope in networking with different communities in Berlin and internationally for sharing resources and finding possibilities to organize. Aida currently works in the civil society sector and Sakin is an independent researcher and essayist. She is also part of the Data Workers Inquiry project (https://data-workers.org/) that is supported by the Distributed AI Research Institute and the Weizenbaum Institute and is launching on the 8th of July this year. To know more about content moderation work in Germany, you can access this article here: https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/wge/2/2/article-p176.xml To access Sakin's talk at the Transnational Forum of Alternatives to Uberisation at the European Parliament, please click here: https://left.eu/events/transnational-forum-of-alternatives-to-uberisation-4/

    1h 24m
  2. With Armaghan Naghipour

    12/21/2023

    With Armaghan Naghipour

    Our guest Armaghan Naghipour is a lawyer specializing in migration and anti-discrimination law and the deputy chairwoman of DeutschPlus (https://www.deutsch-plus.de). Most recently, she was State Secretary for Science, Research and Equality in the State of Berlin. Prior to that, she held various advisory positions in Berlin state politics, including helping to draft Berlin’s state anti-discrimination law. In the wonderful atmosphere of the Grüner Salon at the Volksbühne Berlin, we talk about Armaghan's experiences as a political advisor and State Secretary, about what it is like to take on responsibility as State Secretary and to shape society in these specific political structures, but also about the hesitation and the feeling of being an impostor, and what it is like to jump in at the deep end. We talk about the responsibility that comes with such an appointment, about discrimination characteristics of AI from a legal perspective and how legal frameworks shape our everyday lives. We touch upon the anti-discrimination law in Germany and specifically the Berlin anti-discrimination law, upon how Armaghan's parents fled Iran in the 1980s when she was 1 year old, and how the topic of migration is a recurring theme in her professional work as well as in this podcast. Last but not least, we talk about the power that comes from these kinds of conversations. Many thanks to Johanna Hampf and the Weizenbaum Institute, the Berlin Design Week and the Grüner Salon. Many thanks to the audience and to all our listeners.

    1h 3m

About

Intersectional feminist perspectives on digital societies