(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.

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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)

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