In their recently published book, Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry, JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine describe the nascent push for collective organizing in the tech sector, based on their experiences in tech industry and interviews with other organizers. In this excerpt, they highlight the importance of conflict in union building and how tech companies undermine unionization drives.

Among the data being fed to AIs and LLMs is cultural data. But who has a say in how this art to be used, and how are artists being compensated. Here, Mika (Jaeyun) Noh argues that South Korea’s cultural data governance model, based in part in its AI Basic Act, could be one other countries could adopt to regain control over how their cultural outputs are used.

Many hours of frustrating and long hours of work energize the robots we all see walking independently and performing menial tasks online. However, the engineers behind the scenes are rarely acknowledged, even when they control those robots just off camera. In this essay, Yifan Miller gives us a peek behind the curtain, showing the hidden labor that goes into making machines autonomous. In doing so, she raises important questions about cost of labor, allocation of resources, and accountability.

Just Tech Fellow Todd Whitney interviews artist and writer Ingrid Burrington about demystifying what technology makes invisible, their unexpected paths into journalism, and the importance of bringing levity and humor to serious work.