Purple Code – Details, episodes & analysis

Martina researches the use of digital technologies in rural indigenous communities in the Puna of Jujuy, Northwest Argentina. The Jujuy Puna is part of the so-called Lithium Triangle, a high-altitude desert area where lithium - one of the most important minerals for the production of digital technologies - is mined and processed, leading to the pollution of scarce water resources. In addition, the rural and indigenous population, who have always lived in this region, are excluded from the products of this exploitation. In this episode, Martina talks to us about the political meanings and consequences of these processes for everyday life in the Puna villages, about issues of digital sovereignty and the struggles of the communities. She argues that the spread of algorithmic digital media represents a new dimension of a centuries-old structure of coloniality for indigenous peoples in Latin America.

After a long summer break, we are back with a new exiting guest: Clara Herrmann. Since 2019, Clara has headed the JUNGE AKADEMIE, the international artist-in-residence program of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. For JUNGE AKADEMIE she developed the program HUMAN MACHINE and initiated and curated the project AI ANARCHIES with a fellowship program and an autumn school co-curated by Nora N. Khan and Maya Indira Ganesh and a final exhibition and event in 2024: The Anarchy of the Soul. Clara was co-founder and coordinator of the Digital Solitude program at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, where she developed and curated the project Web Residencies. In this episode, Clara guides us through her work as a curator, the specific challenges of her projects and the undertakings to open up art while leaving it with complete autonomy in times of great politicization.

Rukhsana* is a queer software developer and poet who recently moved to Berlin. In this episode, Rukhsana talks about her journey in designing software, coming from South Asia and the particularities of power during the migration process. She talks about how she has managed to take space - both by chance and by the efforts of her family - in the tech field that has been dominated by a narrow section of people. We also discuss if diversity in high positions in the tech space can change things from within or if there are structural conditions that need larger solutions. On poetry, Rukhsana elucidates, "I have grown to see poetry beyond a language; for me poetry has transcended language, so I often feel that I carry poetry with me just walking on the streets, by observing beautiful things, by having lovely conversations, that is also poetic for me. So, for me poetry does not need to be in a language, on a piece of paper, or to be expressed always. But when I feel the need to express, I write. It also gives me the freedom to write when I want to." *Name has been changed to protect the identity of the guest.

In this episode, our conversation with Leil-Zahra Mortada draws from their expertise on digital rights, online security, and open source investigations from anticolonial, feminist and queer perspectives. Their work spans across the fields of art/ filmmaking, activism and research, and includes the archival project “Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution”; the awarded “Breakup in 9 Scenes”, and the decolonial-feminist music research project Sound Frontier focusing on marginalized music and sound art. Apart from their work with different organizations Indymedia, Mozilla Foundation and Tactical Tech, Leil-Zahra has also been part of forming several political collectives and alternative media groups in Lebanon, Egypt, Spain and elsewhere. By working on the intersections of human rights and digital technologies, Leil-Zahra brings forth several pertinent questions in this episode: who produces digital technologies and whose rights are included? How do marginalized communities engage with them? And what are the alternatives to present day technologies? The interdisciplinary nature of their work further facilitates our discussions on the structural frames for studying digital technologies.

In this episode, we are talking to Mona Sloane, a New York University (NYU) based sociologist working on design and inequality, specifically in the context of AI design and policy. Mona talks with us about her many struggles and her engagement as a feminist tech researcher and activist who strives for more justice in the digital world. One of her many projects is the Terra Incognita NYC project, an investigation of New York City’s digital public spaces in the pandemic, a project that showed the escalated impact of well-known issues that exist within digital space—such as the digital divide, harassment, disproportionately impacted communities. In 2020, Mona was added to the “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics Hall of Fame”. Mona is a Senior Research Scientist at the NYU Center for Responsible AI, and an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, as well as a Fellow with NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK).

This conversation with Eliana Quiroz, digital rights activist and author from Bolivia and temporary fellow at the Hans-Bredow-Institute in Hamburg, delves into the many implications of digital media for women. Eliana has co-founded the Bolivian digital rights collective and has fought for decades to improve digital rights in Bolivia. As she explains, this entails to maneuver a highly polarized political context, and to maintain a stubborn persistency. She has engaged in fostering free software, in drafting and lobbying a data protection bill, and to support self-defense strategies against online violence directed towards women and indigenous communities. She furthermore elaborates on how being a woman in male dominated tech and political communities affects her work - a situation to which Sana, Bianca, and Lena can relate very well, as becomes clear in the conversation. Eliana Quiroz on Twitter : @e_liana

This first episode introduces the hosts of the podcast, who are Berlin based researchers from the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society. They introduce themselves and explain why they look at digitalized societies through an intersectional feminist perspective. They see the podcast as a way to listen to voices that are often silenced when talking about the digital transformation of societies, and to take seriously the personal views and experiences of their future guests in order to challenge the aura of objectivity of digital technologies that is dominant in public and academic discourse.

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/

In this episode, we speak with Basma Mostafa, a journalist from Egypt living in exile in Germany. We speak about the role of journalism and the use of digital technologies including social media during and following the Egyptian revolution. We learn about the increasing threats to press freedom and military violence against journalists, lawyers and activists in the country, and hopes of fighting the Egyptian regime from exile. Basma's story is reflective of the struggles faced by exiled diaspora in Germany and what it means to miss 'home' when the home of one's memory and imagination no longer exists. We ask Basma about what different movements can learn from the Egyptian revolution that started more than 13 years ago and if there is potential in building international diasporic movements in Germany. More information about Basma Mostafa: Basma Mostafa, is an award-winning Egyptian journalist with over a decade of experience investigating the human rights abuses in Egypt. Mostafa's fearless reporting has led to her imprisonment 3 times. She is a fellow with Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and was nominated for the global True Story Award 2024.

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.