By Adriaan Odendaal

As of October 3, 2020, according to BBC News’ interactive COVID-19 data visualization widget, the continent of Africa had 1,506,015 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 36,288 confirmed COVID-19 related deaths. It drew data from Johns Hopkins University and unspecified “national public health agencies.” My home country, South Africa (SA), accounts for 677,833 of these confirmed cases and 16,909 of the respective deaths—just below half of the continent’s cases of infections and deaths. I compared South Africa to the Netherlands next, having moved to Rotterdam just over a year ago. I opened the Google interactive map that appears whenever you search for anything COVID-19 related. I’m not the only one who developed an obsession with these interactive atlases of blue bubbles found everywhere from news websites to the World Health Organization (WHO) homepage. Being obsessed with data had become the big-data equivalent of so-called “doom-scrolling.” Yet, the ease with which I navigated this statistical information to get an instantaneous aestheticized overview obscured the local labor and material contexts that went into supplying the data from countries such as South Africa.

The Early COVID-days in South Africa

The first case of COVID-19 in South Africa was confirmed on Thursday the 5th of March by the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD). While I watched the digital blue circles blooming exponentially in the Netherlands throughout March, initially South Africa seemed spared. Africa remained relatively unblemished, only a constellation of small blue pin-pricks. Trying to prevent the eventual outbreak, South Africa went into a strict lockdown on March 23, 2020 and the hashtag #LockdownSA started trending to detail all the tribulations of daily life under a quasi-militarized quarantine. Shortly before the lockdown, a small Johannesburg-based data journalism team called Media Hack Collective (MHC) decided to launch its own South African COVID-19 data-visualization dashboard. The dashboard followed the organization’s core tenet of making data available to the general public in an accessible and understandable format. It tracked cases per province with a detailed breakdown of travel histories, location, age, and gender. Due to a lack of timely and effectively communicated official information during the early outbreaks, the dashboard became instantly popular.

Media Diaries – Episode 2

Despite having moved to Rotterdam, I continued working remotely for a social-impact podcasting company based in Johannesburg called Volume. During #LockdownSA one of our regular partners, the South African Media Innovation Programme, contracted us to produce a show called Media Diaries.^[9] This podcast was about the daily occupational struggles of journalists reporting on the COVID-19 crisis during the national lockdown, and sourced stories through voice-notes. The show’s premise was an intriguing paradox: “What happens when our journalists, the people we expect to be out in the world for us, are forced to stay at home?” The frustrations traditional journalists faced were easy to understand. The perspective of data journalists unable to do their work during lockdown was quite different, and showed something often ignored in discussions of data reporting. In the second episode of Media Diaries, we followed the struggles of MHC in maintaining their COVID-19 dashboard.

An Obstructed Flow of COVID-19 Data

MHC, led by award-winning journalists Alastair Otter and Laura Grant, launched their COVID-19 dashboard in mid-March to a phenomenal response. “We had upwards of 300 people looking at the dashboard at any given time,” says Alastair in one of the voice-notes sent to our producers. Their approach to COVID-19 reporting was to circumvent sensationalist journalism and misinformation by taking “hard solid data” and releasing it to the public in a form that was “understandable and usable.” Achieving this goal meant using only authoritative data provided by the South African Department of Health and the NICD.

When Laura sent her first voice-notes at a later stage, she sounded more distressed. “It started off with this amazing flow of information from the NICD,” she said. “They would put it on their website every day. Now the last time they put anything on their website was… three days ago.” The floor of initial public support for project became interspersed with concerned emails. “It’s not really our fault,” Laura had to explain, “The official info is just not coming through.”

Shortly after launching their COVID dashboard, MHC partnered with the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism to assist with the collection of reliable data. The Bhekisisa Centre sent press releases from the Department of Health to MHC, who would use the printed information to provisionally update their dashboard. The trickle-down data they had to work with necessitated a complete rework of their dashboard. “Earlier this morning we heard there were 709 confirmed infections in South Africa,” Alastair said when checking in with our team, “but beyond that number, there was very little data available.” The data that was coming through was one-dimensional. “We initially started off when the first few cases of corona-virus were announced the Department of Health and NICD put out very detailed information about the ages of people, their genders, where they have traveled to, their province, etc… [W]e built the dashboard on that information thinking this would be great.” Laura was sitting in her car, dogs jumping up at the window because they expected to be taken for a walk, when she described the consequent frustrations to me. “We are really struggling to get the data that we used to get at the beginning. So, we decided to change the dashboard and add international graphs and an African one and compare South Africa to other countries… I know we can definitely get data for that.”

Suggestions from the frustrated public that MHC assist with sourcing primary data seemed untenable. “I mean, we agree in principle that people should be assisting,” said Alastair, “but it’s a capacity issue at the moment for most of us.” In a more recent email, Laura told me how much work went into processing the data. “Collecting and keeping the database up to date is the most time-consuming part—that part could not be automated because the data was being published either in PDFs or infographics on social media.” At the time, even the NCIS website’s own dashboard was stalled. “Their data is further out of date as far as we can tell,” said Alastair, “which suggests, perhaps, that there is a huge capacity issue there.”

The Overlooked Problems at the Source of the Data

The frustrations of MHC, and the struggle for reliable data updates during the lockdown, speaks to a larger issue at hand. There are few instances of fully automated data generation. There is always human labor and material conditions involved at some point in the data chain. What Episode 2 of Media Diaries shows—beyond the trials and tribulations of a small team of industrious data journalists—is that even the grand global data visualizations of Google, the BBC, and the New York Times rely on the same single local sources of information that the MHC dashboard used. In fact, both the BBC and Al Jazeera have made explicit use of data from the MHC dashboard. When you scroll down to a global overview of COVID-19 cases on Google’s dashboard, the material and labor constraints that hamper data collection in South Africa gets lost in the big sea of big data, aestheticized to encourage us to accept data as quantified facts. Our data-literacy can create dangerous false confidence when reading these dashboards and widgets. For example, Tanzania has stopped reporting data on May 8, 2020, after a final submission of 509 cases and 21 deaths. When you zoom out on most COVID-19 dashboards, Tanzania’s figures still stand at those paltry numbers. Has Tanzania, and Africa at large, been spared from the worst outbreaks of COVID-19? WHO special envoy Samba Sow warned of a “silent epidemic” in Africa due to a lack of testing on the continent, meaning data silences such as in Tanzania can also be caused by obfuscated data reporting.

Since Media Diaries came out in April, a third member, Gemma Gatticchi, joined the MHC team to alleviate the labor of keeping the dashboard updated. Fortunately, the Department of Health also started consistently releasing daily updates. However, as Laura told me in a recent email that the data updates are still unreliable. “Sometimes it would be 1 PM, sometimes it would be close to midnight. We had many late nights waiting for the updates.” It’s easy to forget about the struggles of Alastair, Laura, and the governmental staff at every level of COVID-19 data collection in South Africa, sitting at my laptop in Rotterdam, interacting with the blue dots blooming over the African continent.

 

Adriaan Odendaal is a content writer and web designer from Cape Town, South Africa. He is co-founder of the Rotterdam-based research & design studio internet teapot (https://internetteapot.com). He currently works for an open-source start-up in Amsterdam, as well as a podcasting company from Johannesburg, South Africa. He holds a BA in Visual Studies and Sociology and an MA in Media Arts Cultures. He has a keen interest in critical and creative coding as well as digital rights. Most recently,­ he led the production of the Kill Switch podcast for Access Now as part of their #KeepItOn campaign fighting internet shutdowns.

By Arianna Cortesi, Claudia Magnani, Roberto Romero, Paula C.P. Silva, Sueli Maxakali, Isael Maxakali, Ana Maria R. Gomes

OtherSkies, an OAD/IAU-funded project, tackles these questions by collecting native narratives, chants, and myths about the sky that have never been written down and recorded before, in collaboration with researchers of the Indigenous Village Aldeia Verde in Brazil. Soon after the project started, all Universities and the majority of services in Brazil shut down due to the rapid diffusion of the pandemic to all the federal states. To protect the indigenous people, the federal government declared the lockdown of the communities. Even so, the first cases of COVID-19 appeared in many indigenous areas of the country, some of which, due to the absence of internet and phone connection, faced severe isolation. Aldeia Nova is one of the indigenous villages of the Maxakali people that suffered this destiny. To overcome the difficulties of communications, the International Astronomical Union (IAU)-funded project “Other Skies” was modified to grant internet connection to the village, support the independent recording and production of material on indigenous astronomy, and start a virtual gallery for sharing astronomical Maxakali knowledge and their perspective of the world.

Under Other Skies: Dialogues of Different Cosmological Paradigms

The project “Under other skies” focuses on ethno-astronomy, particularly the astronomical knowledge of the Maxakali people, an indigenous population of Brazil. The Tikmũ’ũn people, better known as Maxakali, live in one of the smallest indigenous lands in the State of Minas Gerais, Southeast Brazil, which has been completely devastated by the late colonization of the area. Despite the loss of their territory and the increasing contact with the National Society, the richness of the symbolic and ritual dimensions of their world has attracted great ethnographic interest in the last century. A deep look at the Maxakali experience in everyday life, such as in ritual sphere, immediately shows us the complexity of the Maxakali sociality and cosmology. All their knowledge and practices are made by performing shamanic rituals through which they interact with non-human agencies (the yãmiyxop spirits) that inhabit their territory, sharing feasts, chants, food, and other many practices with them. From the Maxakali perspective, we can see that there are no clear boundaries between knowledge and practice, between the ancient past and the present, or between everyday life and ritual life. Everything in their experience, even astronomical knowledge, is inserted in a space-time continuum, which is activated by the constant power of memory and through the relationship with the multiple non-human subjectivities that inhabit it.

The idea of a dialog between scientific and indigenous knowledge about the sky was born from an encounter between one of the astronomers and two indigenous researchers and sciamans (leaders) of the community. The project will be conducted in Aldeia Nova, a Maxakali Village in Minas Gerais, and involves indigenous researchers, shamans, and elders of the village collaborating with anthropologists and educators of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, and astronomers and educators of the University of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The main objective is to collect and translate native narratives, chants and myths about the sky narrated by some of the elders that have never been written down and recorded before.

IAU Office of Astronomy for Development

The project was funded by the Office of Astronomy for Development, a joint project of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) with the support of the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI). Its mission is to use astronomy to make the world a better place, reminding us that we earthlings live in a pale blue dot orbiting one of the millions of billions of stars of this amazing and expanding universe. Every year, the OAD funds several astronomy-related projects that promote sustainable development through astronomy.

The Potential Risk we Could not Imagine

One of the questions of the OAD selection form is “Describe potential risks and how you will address these?” The words we wrote to answer this question describe several obstacles, without one mention of a world pandemic. The Other Sky project was based on the idea of a dialogue, developed in workshops, meetings, encounters at the margins, that eventually never took place; neither seemed plausible in the nearest future. Yet, we couldn’t give up! So we decided to restructure the entire project. To face this situation we altered the project schedule and budget, including the acquisition of an internet radio connection for Aldeia Nova, purchases of of computers and material to record and produce films and audio in the Aldeia. We also planned to create a virtual gallery, following the example of the exhibition Mundos Indigenas at Espaço do Conhecimento of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, in Belo Horizonte. These encounters left space for independence, and the audience became global.

The Virtual Gallery and the Space of Knowledge

The “Espaço do Conhecimento” (Space of knowledge) of UFMG launched the exhibition Mundos Indígenas in December 2019, where the public was presented with ways of living, knowing, and taking care from Maxakali, Pataxoop, Xakriabá, Yanomami and Ye’kwana peoples. It showed that “the history of Brazilian indigenous people is not only one.” With the closure of museums in late March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, visits to the exhibition were suspended. The exhibition schedule was extended until July 2021, which expanded the possibility of visitation, after the reopening of the museums will be authorized. Meanwhile, Espaço do Conhecimento UFMG prepared a series of new videos to provide the public with the experience of a virtual visit to the exhibition through YouTube videos, launched on September 21. The six videos of the Virtual Visit to the Mundos Indígenas Exhibition are available to the public on the Espaço do Conhecimento UFMG channel on YouTube, alongside messages from indigenous curators and a video on the teheys of Dona Liça Pataxoop.

A Virtual Re-birth

The project Other Skies, supported and inspired by the virtual exhibition Mundos Indígenas, will also create a virtual gallery to present Maxakali astronomy. The gallery will also include images taken from the Southern Photometric Local universe Survey collaboration (S-PLUS), a Spanish-Brazilian collaboration, to map the southern sky in twelve colours. The virtual exhibition will exemplify the heterogeneity of astronomical knowledge. Through an intercultural approach, it will promote an understanding of the different astronomical paradigms, and push back against a superficial approach to science and social biodiversity. An example is the story Star Women, already available in the exhibition Mundos Indigenous. Although COVID-19 marginalized even more Indigenous communities, it created the grounding for the diffusion of their knowledge worldwide. One day we will grab our telescopes and travel up north to the silent dark skies of the Aldeia Nova, to look with different eyes at the same infinite spaces.

 

About the authors

Arianna Cortesi holds a PhD in astronomy and is currently a post-doc at the Observatory of Valongo in Rio de de Janeiro, Brazil. In the last several years, she has been part of several outreach projects that combine art, music, and astronomy.

Claudia Magnani holds a degree in Anthropology of the University of Bologna, Italy, and a PhD in Education from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Currently she is a high school literature teacher and an independent researcher of Amerindian ethnography, gender studies, and female shamanism. She has been studying Maxakali traditions and culture since 2014.

Roberto Romero is an ethnologist. He obtained a PhD in Social Anthropology at the National Museum and is part of the Núcleo de Antropologia Simétrica, Brazil. He has researched the Tikmũ’ũn (Maxakali) population since 2011. He is part of the association Filmes de Quintal and he is one of the organizers of forumdoc.bh, a festival of documentaries and ethnic movies of de Belo Horizonte. He served as Assistant Director of the lungometraggio ‘Yãmĩyhex: as mulheres-espírito’ (Sueli e Isael Maxakali, 2019).

Paula C. P. Silva is a designer and doctoral student in Education at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. She has been developing ethno-design works and research among the Tikmũ’ũn since 2015. She is part of the Maxakali research group “Humm Yĩkopit (Asking the Earth),” of the Água Boa Territory, and of the “Study and Research Group on Indigenous Intercultural School Education” (GEPEEI). She has experience in graphic design projects in the areas of corporate internal communication, visual identity, and indigenous editorials.

Sueli Maxakali is a filmmaker, photographer and artist. A strong tikmũ’ũn leader, she made the films When the yãmiy come to dance (2011), Kõnã’ãg xeka: Dilúvio Maxakali (Pajé Filmes, 2016) and Yãmiyhex: women-spirit. She has participated in important film festivals throughout Brazil, such as Forumdoc.bh, Tiradentes Cinema Exhibition, Olhar de Cinema and Cine Kurumin, presenting and commenting on tikmũ’ũn audiovisual productions. Together with other women in her village, she produced a book of photographs, entitled koxukxop. Sueli is also an indigenous teacher and researcher, teaching, singing, and translating songs and stories of the yãmĩyxop.

Isael Maxakali is a filmmaker and visual artist. He holds a BA in Indigenous studies from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. In his films, he reveals aspects of the traditional culture of the Maxakali—their stories, songs, ceremonies and rituals, as well as the choices that these people have been making to live in a modern world. Isael works with his wife and filmmaker Sueli Maxakali. Together, with the help of the elders and shamans in their village, they record many aspects of their culture and help preserve and disseminate the values ​​of the Maxakali way of life.

Ana Maria R. Gomes received her PhD in Education at University of Bologna, Italy. She was a post-doc at the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Currently, she is Professor at the Faculty of Education, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil, in the PhD program Education Program for Knowledge and Social Inclusion. She is also the coordinator of the Intercultural Training Course for Indigenous Educators from 2008 to 2011 and currently part of the teaching team on Socio-Environmental Knowledge (Social Sciences). She researches cultural practices and learning in different socio-cultural contexts, ethnography, cosmopolitics, and sustainability.

By Alex Gekker & Anat Ben-David

With the rapid unfolding of the COVID-19 global pandemic, Israel was one of the first states outside East-Asia to impose involuntary surveillance measures as a means to combat the virus. Crucially, the government utilized the country’s permanent state of exception to bypass the parliament and deploy a hitherto classified anti-terrorism tool developed by its internal security service (Shin Bet) to track the location of coronavirus patients, identify infection-chains and notify citizens who have been in close proximity to an identified patient to self-quarantine. Despite the marked similarity to the Snowden revelations in terms of scope and granularity of data available to secret services on individuals, the extreme measures undertaken by the Israeli government were met by a legal battle ensued by a small group of activists and civil society organizations, but not by a public outcry. Rather, the majority of Israelis were willing to compromise their right to privacy for the technological protection offered against the virus, and expressed high levels of trust in the Shin Bet, even as the latter was often reluctant to take up the mantle. In this essay we draw on historian Daniel Rosenberg’s notion of “data before the fact” to reflect on how various uses of (big) data in Israel have led to compliance and confusion for the people involved.

Rosenberg suggests that data came to be a historically recognised category that is “given” (“data” means “that which is given” in Latin and thus not questioned or interrogated. Only the results coming from the data are. Recently, with the rise of massive data collection and machine learning techniques, data has further changed meaning, but retained that historically grounded sense of objectivity. This joins the tendency of computers being seen as “accurate” and “unbiased”— consider how Facebook claims that no user privacy is breeched because no humans are involved in seeing one’s personal details. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and David Berry suggest that computer software becomes ingrained in the very language and metaphors of how we think about “thinking” today. Various data dashboards, including in combating Corona, cement the data-reflected reality rather than being tools for discussing alternatives. In the Israeli case, the discussion of possible responses to COVID-19 and their implications became entangled with the computerised data gathered on the disease’s spread, in a way that limited potential objections to the measures imposed. We show this across three distinct episodes.

Shin Bet Surveillance

After a publication by investigative journalists, the Shin Bet’s surveillance system was exposed. Called simply “the Tool” it has been in operation since 2002 and used for continuous trawling collection of all available cell-phone data from every mobile device in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Officially used for counter-terrorism and previously (officially) used only targeted surveillance on specific individuals and in relation to a case, the Tool has nonetheless been employed for digital contact tracing across the entire land and marketed as an emergency extreme measure that is a “magic bullet” solution. Specifically the “Tool” allowed avoiding the need to deploy a voluntary digital contact tracing apps as done by other democratic states. Nonetheless such a civilian, Bluetooth-based phone app was developed, failed and re-developed again to a minimal reception by the Ministry of Health. One of the central arguments against adopting this latter, privacy preserving option, was due to the fact that the Shin Bet is collecting all data anyway. Yet, being a secret government agency, the Shin Bet is reluctant to share the specifics of the data collected. Early reports indicate a 5% wide margin of error. Out of 71 thousand people required to self-quarantine based on the tool’s data in the first week of July alone, about 22 thousand appealed, claiming to be false positives, and 60% of those appeals were accepted. Overall, the data presented of the effectives of the tool was lacking, included repeated numbers in different categories, and was unreliable. Nonetheless, the appearance of efficiency supported by seemingly impressive numerical data has led to a continuing adaption of the tool instead of other alternatives.

National Compliance Index

Another use of numerical data to create compliance rather than support policy was through the deployment of a “national index”, in cooperation with renowned behavioral economist Dan Arieli’s Kayma company. The index was developed by Kayma as a single entrant to an urgent tandem presented by Israel’s National Corona Response Centre. Despite potential financial and practical concerns, the company was selected to monitor various “commercial and civilian data sources” in order to track how compliant the population is with Covid regulations. Prominent on various platforms—including on the main page of the country’s most-read news website—and asking citizens to self-report on “compliance” such as hand-washing or mask-wearing, the index generates a variety of dashboard statistics, while being extremely opaque in its data sources. As in the previous case, the numerical data, information visualizations and dashboards derived from the index were available to the citizens only in their final, “ready-made” state, such as “what is the level of compliance to the lockdown in your home city compared to other cities”? discouraging reflection and encouraging the very thing they were supposedly measuring – compliance.

Lack of Ministry of Health Data

Many of the unclarities above could have been addressed – or at least mitigated – by clear and transparent reporting of Covid-19 infections and transmissions data by the governmental body responsible, Ministry of Health (MoH). Yet, despite repeated requests, throughout the first month of pandemic the data was published by the ministry’s spokesperson as cropped images on the ministry’s Telegram channel. This required a dedicated manual input of the information by volunteers to keep track of the official numbers. Even later, with a new updated data dashboard, users could not receive numerical information and moreover each new version overwrote the previous one. Data scientist Dan Bareket who kept those previous versions manually has shown that there are gross differences between those older and newer versions.

Those episodes come together to showcase how data can be wielded as a cudgel rather than a precise tool: collected through undisclosed means and used to create popular compliance, suppressing discussions of measures or alternatives.

 

About the authors

Alex Gekker is Assistant Professor in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He writes about how sociotechnical systems are designed to influence users, and his research touches upon maps and surveillance, quantification, the datafication of society, the experience economy, and interface critique. He has co-edited two Open Access books, Time for Mapping: Cartographic Temporalities (Manchester University Press, 2018) and Playful Mapping in the Digital Age (Institute of Network Cultures, 2016). In the past he has worked in a variety of media positions, as journalist, editor, and spokesperson.

Anat Ben-David is Senior Lecturer in the department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication at the Open University of Israel.

Out of Reach: Distance Learning in Peruvian Rural Areas During the Pandemic This blog post aims to analyze the actions carried out by the Peruvian government regarding distance education and contrast them with the uses and practices of technology in Andean rural communities. Likewise, it problematizes digital inclusion and exclusion that is reflected through the digital divide: who is included and who is excluded from the Peruvian public school in the new normal setting.

 

Por Karla Zavala Barreda

La cuarentena y las medidas de distanciamiento social han afectado el desenvolvimiento de las actividades escolares a nivel nacional. En marzo, luego de aplazar el inicio del año escolar por dos semanas, el Ministerio de Educación desplegó el plan de enseñanza a distancia ‘Aprendo en Casa’. La estrategia, a través de señal televisa y radial abierta, busca reemplazar la educación presencial a través de sesiones de aprendizajes adaptadas a dichos medios. La difusión del contenido también se apoya de las radios comunitarias. No obstante, esta estrategia no incluye a los centros poblados, donde hay un nivel muy bajo de conectividad, y donde se encuentran comunidades que están fuera del alcance de la señal de los medios masivos y de la cobertura de internet.

En el Perú, la educación rural tiene un modelo de alternancia donde los estudiantes asisten intermitentemente a clases. Luego del anuncio del inicio de la cuarentena obligatoria, dichos estudiantes regresaron a sus hogares, los cuales en muchos casos no cuentan con medios o conectividad para acceder a los contenidos de Aprendo en Casa. Cabe preguntar entonces, ¿cuál es el estado de los estudiantes en comunidades rurales en el país que ha implementado una de las cuarentenas más estrictas a nivel mundial?

Educación a Distancia en Zonas Rurales

Frente a esta problemática de acceso al contenido escolar, se anunció la adquisición de un millón de tabletas a ser repartidas a los estudiantes y maestros de áreas rurales clasificadas en los quintiles 1 y 2 de pobreza. En este contexto, cabe recordar que el gobierno peruano ha implementado desde hace treinta años programas de compra equipos informáticos en el sector educación, tales como Una Laptop por Niño, proyecto Huascarán, Jornada Escolar Completa, entre otros. Sin embargo, estas adquisiciones no ayudaron a amortiguar la necesidad de educación a distancia que emergió durante esta crisis sanitaria, convirtiéndose así en el gran elefante blanco del que poco se ha discutido.

Asimismo, la solución ofrecida para acortar la brecha de conectividad de las zonas rurales es la inclusión de tabletas con chip y cargadores solares. Pero sin señal satelital de internet en el área donde usarán la tableta, el chip no podrá conectarse a ningún lado. Esta coyuntura es un recordatorio de la materialidad de la infraestructura digital. Depende de cables, de satélites, de proveedores y operadores para que la señal llegue a quienes están fuera de alcance. La brecha digital entre zonas urbanas y rurales es abismal. La conectividad en áreas rurales no alcanza más del 20%, a esto se suma que el servicio ofrecido es de baja calidad, y la velocidad de conexión es lenta.

Al implementar el aislamiento social obligatorio, las zonas rurales fueron expuestas a un grado mayor de vulnerabilidad al no contar con infraestructura y conectividad en sus hogares. Esta situación se agrava en un país donde el gobierno apenas conoce a la realidad de la población. Mientras el Ministerio de Educación señala que el 94% de los estudiantes escolares está accediendo a los contenidos de Aprendo en Casa, la Defensoría del Pueblo –institución nacional que defiende y promueve los derechos de las personas y la comunidad– indica que en provincias el poco acceso a educación durante la pandemia ha incrementado el número de deserción escolar. Por ejemplo, en Cerro de Pasco, más de 7000 estudiantes no acceden a la educación a distancia. Situación similar ocurre en una de las regiones más pobres del país, Huánuco, donde más del 30% de escolares tampoco cuenta con acceso.

 

Prácticas desde la Periferia

A casi dos meses de la clausura del año escolar, las tabletas aún no llegan a los destinatarios. Y aunque llegaran, la distribución de dichos dispositivos no resolverá las dificultades de conectividad y acceso a información. Es en este escenario donde acciones como las del alcalde de Corani, localidad de Puno, al sur de país, llaman la atención, no solo porque contrató la instalación antenas satelitales para brindar conexión a cinco comunidades rurales en extrema pobreza, sino por el razonamiento detrás de esta acción: proveer acceso libre a internet. Mientras los sistemas digitales continúen absorbiendo y embebiendo actividades sociales, la infraestructura de conexión efectivamente determina y restringe cómo los usuarios se comunican y acceden a información. Es por estas razones que el acceso a internet se ha declarado como un derecho humano, ya que no solo ayuda a difundir contenidos educativos sino también a acceder a servicios del estado sin necesidad de desplazamiento geográfico, y conocer los derechos.

Al optar por la transmisión de sesiones de aprendizaje a través de medios de comunicación e internet, el gobierno peruano no garantiza el derecho de acceso a la educación a quienes no cuenten con los medios necesarios para acceder a dicho contenido. Al condicionar dicho acceso, se incrementa la vulnerabilidad de poblaciones rurales en extrema pobreza. En contraste, lo sucedido en Corani no solo beneficia a los estudiantes, sino también a los miembros de la comunidad, que pueden acceder a información respecto a los bonos repartidos durante la pandemia, y también a los estudiantes universitarios o de carreras técnicas, que gracias a este servicio pueden conectarse a sus clases virtuales.

A la vez, se hace frente a una problemática que pasa desapercibida: la compra de paquetes de datos móviles. Durante la cuarentena, miembros de comunidades rurales adquieren semanalmente paquetes de datos para que sus hijos puedan acceder a la educación a distancia. Imágenes de niños buscando señal en la cima de las montañas se han compartido en las redes sociales sin cuestionar quién cubre el costo de esa conexión. En otras palabras, la educación que antes era gratuita se constituye como un costo adicional al estar mediada.

Por otro lado, nuevamente la materialidad de los contenidos digitales necesita ser abordada. Internet no está compuesta de solo bits y señales que fluyen de manera invisible en el aire. El contenido audiovisual demanda el uso muchos datos móviles, y a su vez esta transmisión de datos depende de infraestructura que provea conexión. Si contrastamos la penetración de celulares se puede observar que más de un 85% de hogares rurales cuenta con un dispositivo móvil (INEI, 2020). Sin embargo, solo un 5.9% tiene acceso a internet. Poniendo este dato en el contexto actual y los retos que el distanciamiento social presenta, cabe cuestionar qué tanto se toman en consideración los celulares en la difusión, diseño, y desarrollo de la educación a distancia. Por ejemplo, si el ancho de banda no es óptimo, ¿hay versiones lite (bajo uso de datos, poco uso de imágenes, etc.) de las páginas y apps educativas? ¿Por qué no se toma política de mobile-first como en otros países?

Estos interrogantes abren el diálogo para dejar de privilegiar la adquisición de tecnología de punta y el uso de nuevos medios en estrategias nacionales sin tomar en cuenta el ensamblaje socio-técnico que permite la conexión a Internet. En el Perú hay muchas áreas que siguen fuera de alcance, y no es coincidencia que sean los mismos espacios geográficos donde se encuentran las comunidades rurales. Por otro lado, decisiones como la compra de tabletas sin una propuesta íntegra hace evidente la falta de planes sostenibles en el tiempo para la implementación de iniciativas tecnológicas, que si bien buscan cerrar las brechas digitales, no parecen tomar en cuenta la realidad de las diferentes regiones del país.

 

Karla Zavala Barreda holds an MA in Media Arts Cultures, and is a PhD student at University of Amsterdam in the Department of Media Studies. Her research focuses on software studies, interface criticism, game studies, algorithmic literacy, and critical design. She is interested in the intersection between software, design, and education. She tweets at @karlazavala.

By Jelke Bosma, Eva Mos & Niels van Doorn

Things are bad right now and they will probably get worse in the future. Once the global pandemic caused by COVID-19 is finally under control, the afterlife of this public health crisis is likely to have a devastating impact on our national and local economies for years to come. But not everyone will be affected in the same way and to the same extent. We have already witnessed how the pandemic has brought long-standing inequalities with respect to income and wealth distribution into sharp relief. Some social groups have access to the resources (e.g. time, space, capital, influence) necessary to weather this crisis, or even make a profit from it, while many others scramble to protect their lives and livelihoods. In many ways, COVID-19 intensifies and accelerates these inequalities and will ultimately push them to a breaking point, a point that even conservative governments have been trying to steer clear of by introducing economic rescue plans.

Importantly, the ongoing platformization of labour and livelihoods embodies a similar logic of intensification and acceleration. While the term “disruption” has been overused—and poorly describes the economic and social impacts that platforms like Uber, Airbnb, or Deliveroo are having—we nevertheless think it is safe to say that these impacts are significant. Platform companies are reorganizing how people work and make a living, and how citizens and their governments manage and take care of others. Emerging in the wake of the 2008 recession, they have exacerbated the unequal distribution of opportunities and risks along lines of class, gender, race, and nationality—even when they claim to empower working people.

Over the past few weeks it has become clear that things are no longer ‘business as usual’ for these companies, as they are not only facing new challenges but seizing opportunities that have arisen from the current crisis. Meanwhile, we are seeing new local platform-based initiatives springing up, driven by networks of citizens as well as private organizations aiming to assist the most vulnerable members of their communities.

Various news outlets have reported that the popularity of on-demand delivery services has grown massively in cities across the globe, especially in large metropolitan areas now dealing with increasingly severe lockdowns.¹ In New York City, for instance, couriers for food delivery platforms like DoorDash and Caviar are facing an ambivalent situation. Whilst workers realize that their services are more needed than ever, at the same time they are worried about their health and safety because these platform companies offer no proper protections or insurances to independent contractors.² While many workers take pride in their job and half-jokingly praise the empty streets in Manhattan, they also feel they should not have to invest in protective gear. Quite a few couriers warn that social distancing is often impossible when waiting at a restaurant with other delivery workers.

Although most delivery companies have by now arranged their own financial assistance programs for couriers who get infected or are required to self-quarantine, these initiatives generally offer relief up to just 14 days and require them to submit documentation that is difficult to obtainin times of crisis.³ With such high application thresholds, it is unclear how many couriers have gained access to these emergency funds, which appear to be little more than a public relations strategy.

Beyond these limited reactive measures, which force couriers to keep working until they are physically or legally unable to work, companies like Uber, DoorDash, and Deliveroo continue to disavow responsibility for their workforce by fighting reclassification legislation that would force them to provide a more comprehensive safety net. Instead, Uber’s CEO has recently petitioned the US Federal government to step in and provide the protections America’s new first responders now need more than ever.⁴ In fact, he recently got what he wanted, which may have negative implications in the future.

The abovementioned companies, in tandem with Amazon, are primarily focused on expanding their delivery markets by further rolling out and diversifying their outsourced logistical services. NYC’s ride-hailing industry is taking a big hit due to COVID-19, which is also wreaking havoc on the restaurant and hospitality industry.⁵ In response, drivers and restaurant workers are turning to delivery platforms to salvage part of their income, while Uber and Amazon are exploring the possibility of delivering test kits in the near future.⁶ Uber and Lyft are also trying to capitalize on an increased need for the private transportation of vulnerable people and critical goods through their Uber Health and LyftUp initiatives, respectively.⁷

Meanwhile, DoorDash is partnering with NYC’s government to deliver food to “medically fragile students,” and has also launched a “package of commission relief and marketing support” for new and existing partner restaurants.⁸ DoorDash is investing heavily in COVID-induced market growth. The company allows new restaurants to sign up for free and pay no commissions for 30 days, and it creates priority access for restaurant workers looking to start as Dashers. Across the Atlantic, the situation in Amsterdam and Berlin looks a bit different. While delivery companies in these cities are also signing up scores of restaurants that have had to close their doors to dining customers, couriers working for Deliveroo, TakeAway, and/or Uber Eats are not yet seeing a similarly high boost in orders. Neither are they getting the tips or bonus incentives one may hope for during this crisis.

In Amsterdam, couriers who have a financial buffer are staying home as much as possible, particularly students for whom the pay-outs are not worth the risk. Still, the streets continue to fill with food delivery workers, many of whom are immigrants with little choice but to keep working regardless of how bad the circumstances get. Other sources of income have mostly been discontinued and, like their peers in NYC, they are only receiving standard emails and notifications from platform companies warning them to keep their distance and fulfil the logistical promise of contact-free delivery. That this promise is a fantasy becomes painfully clear when picking up an order at an otherwise closed McDonald’s restaurant, where more than a handful of waiting couriers converge around the door each time it opens wide enough to push the next bag of fast food through.

Another thing we are not yet seeing in European cities is the kind of crisis-driven service diversification and public-private partnerships that platform companies are currently experimenting with in the US This might soon change, however, as Deliveroo, JustEat, and Uber are allegedly all in conversation with the British Government about providing delivery support to elderly and vulnerable people.⁹ Due to the conjunction of an increased public need for logistical solutions and a decreased demand for ride-hailing services across Europe, Uber may be looking for similar ways to reallocate its drivers in other countries.

Ride-hailing is not the only segment of the gig economy to be negatively impacted by COVID-19. Due to mandatory social distancing and home quarantine measures, domestic cleaners working through platforms such as Handy and Helpling are losing most of their income. In the Netherlands, for instance, Helpling bookings are down 40% and the cancellation rate is expected to rise to 50-60%.¹⁰ Cleaners in Amsterdam—mostly immigrants—are facing difficult times, since most of their clients have asked them to stay away until further notice. One cleaner said she lost about 1,200 euros over the last two weeks and is now fully dependent on her partner’s income. When asked whether she had checked her eligibility for financial assistance—which the Dutch government recently made available to independent contractors hit by the COVID-19 crisis—she admitted having no idea such a rescue program existed, let alone if she would qualify. Her response highlights the vulnerability of migrant gig workers, who often do not master the native language and have trouble accessing information pertinent to their livelihood. Even when access is obtained, navigating the red tape in a foreign bureaucracy can be exceedingly difficult.

In conclusion, the pandemic is impacting the gig economy in two significant ways. First, it accelerates the ascendency of on-demand delivery as the dominant and most rapidly expanding service market, at the expense of ride-hailing and domestic cleaning. Secondly, it intensifies gig platforms’ experimentation with public-private partnerships and forms of service provision that cater to special needs populations. By seeking new ways to support the social reproduction of vulnerable consumer groups during a time of crisis, while continuing to discard the reproductive struggles of their workforce, platform companies are leveraging this public health crisis in a bid to become increasingly infrastructural. That is, COVID-19 generates a state of exception that offers companies a window of opportunity to test-drive their desired scenario of becoming privatized digital utilities that control and monetize critical data flows.¹¹ The question that remains is, to what extent will this state of exception become the rule?

Jelke Bosma is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. His research is part of the project Platform Labor, funded by the European Research Council, which investigates dynamics of value on Airnb. He has a background in Urban Studies and his research interests include platform urbanism, housing and urban theory. He tweets at @jelkejelke.

Eva Mos is a PhD candidate working in the Platform Labor project at the University of Amsterdam. With a BA and MA in Sociology, Eva traces and studies intersections between welfare state transformation and the platform economy. She does so through ethnographic study of post-welfare platforms operating in Amsterdam and Berlin. She tweets at @EvaMos5.

Niels van Doorn is Assistant Professor of New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is also the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded Platform Labor research project (2018-2023). His current work focuses on the platformization of labor and social reproduction in post-welfare societies.

 

Footnotes

¹ Tyler Sonnemaker, ‘Instacart Plans to Add 300,000 Additional Workers as Demand Surges for Online Delivery’, Business Insider, 23 March 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/instacart-to-add-300000-shoppers-as-online-grocery-delivery-surges-2020-3; Sean Captain, ‘What It’s like to Be a Delivery Worker in the COVID-19 Era’, FastCompany, 24 march 2020, https://www.fastcompany.com/90480629/what-its-like-to-be-a-delivery-worker-during-the-covid-19-pandemic; Alina Selyukh, ‘From Grocery Stores To Pizza Delivery, Some Companies Are On A Hiring Spree’, NPR.org, 24 March 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/03/24/820624379/from-grocery-stores-to-pizza-delivery-some-companies-are-on-a-hiring-spree.

² Kate Conger, Adam Satariano and Mike Isaac, ‘Pandemic Erodes Gig Economy Work’, The New York Times, 4 April 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/technology/gig-economy-pandemic.html.

³ Dara Kerr, ‘Gig Workers Say Sick Pay for Coronavirus Is Hard to Come By’, CNET, 26 March 2020, https://www.cnet.com/features/gig-workers-with-covid-19-symptoms-say-its-hard-to-get-sick-leave-from-uber-lyft-instacart/.

⁴ Edward Ongweso Jr, ‘Uber Asks US Government to Give Its Workers Health Insurance’, Vice, 23 March 2020, https://www.vice.com/en/article/8847qb/uber-asks-us-government-to-give-its-workers-health-insurance.

⁵ Sean Captain, ‘What It’s like to Be a Delivery Worker in the COVID-19 Era’, FastCompany, 24 march 2020, https://www.fastcompany.com/90480629/what-its-like-to-be-a-delivery-worker-during-the-covid-19-pandemic; Austa Somvichian-Clausen, ‘How NYC’s Restaurant Industry Is Surviving amid Coronavirus Closures’, TheHill, 20 March 2020, https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/accessibility/488670-how-nycs-restaurant-industry-is-surviving-amid.

⁶ Sarah Emerson, ‘Amazon and Uber Suggest Delivering Coronavirus Testing Kits. Gig Workers Are Worried’, Medium, 20 March 2020, https://onezero.medium.com/amazon-and-uber-suggest-delivering-coronavirus-testing-kits-gig-workers-are-worried-2c7b550604e1.

⁷ ‘Uber Considers Med Delivery As Riders Plummet’, PYMNTS.Com, 20 March 2020, https://www.pymnts.com/news/ridesharing/2020/uber-considers-med-delivery-as-ridership-plummets/; ‘Supporting Our Community’, Lyft, 20 March, 2020, https://www.lyft.com/blog/posts/supporting-our-community.

⁸ @NYCMayor, ‘We’re also partnering with @DoorDash to get food to the homes of medically fragile students. No child will go hungry. Not on our watch.’, Twitter post, 21 March, 1:22 AM, https://twitter.com/NYCMayor/status/1241158218396708865; Tony Xu, ‘Supporting Local Businesses and Communities in a Time of Need,’ DoorDash, 17 March 2020, https://blog.doordash.com/supporting-local-businesses-and-communities-in-a-time-of-need-41c0742fbc03.

⁹ Rowland Manthorpe, ‘Coronavirus: Takeaway Firms JustEat and Deliveroo in Talks with Government on Providing Care Packages to Elderly,’ Sky News, 16 March 2020, https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-takeaway-firms-justeat-and-deliveroo-in-talks-with-government-on-providing-care-packages-to-elderly-11958494.

¹⁰ Hella Hueck, ‘De Werkster Is Ineens Niet Meer Nodig’, The Financial Times, 23 February 2020, https://fd.nl/ondernemen/1338913/de-werkster-is-ineens-niet-meer-nodig?fbclid=IwAR2oIf3-H5mzafmgS4hgx2WJU77JLdlQhLnoG3AlJTWIbjSUe9qQCpdAcZs.

¹¹ Julie Yujie Chen and Jack Linchuan Qiu, ‘Digital Utility: Datafication, Regulation, Labor, and DiDi’s Platformization of Urban Transport in China,’ Chinese Journal of Communication 12, 3 (July 3, 2019).