For years, Julian Posada (Yale Assistant Professor and DiPLab research associate) has been one of the architects of the field of digital labor studies. From helping shepherd the transition from the European Network on Digital Labor (ENDL, 2017–2018) to the International Network on Digital Labor (INDL, 2019–present), to co-organizing three consecutive INDL conferences, he has been present at every stage of a research community finding its shape and its ambitions. Today, INDL has created several regional chapters, in Middle East and Africa, in Latin America, and now (thanks to Julian Posada) in North America, too. This foundation has its first public moment: a Symposium on Labor and Artificial Intelligence, hosted at Yale University on April 28 and 29, 2026. The event brings together scholars and practitioners to examine how workers are building, using, and pushing back against AI systems. The programme opens with a keynote by Julia Ticona and closes with a roundtable featuring organizers from across the platform economy. Researchers and doctoral students are especially encouraged to attend the doctoral colloquium on April 28 (1:00–5:30 PM, KT 401), where emerging scholars can workshop their research alongside peers ahead of the main symposium on April 29 (9:00 AM–5:00 PM, HQ 134).

The podcast Penser les Luttes (Radio Parleur / Le Média TV) has just released a new episode titled Artificial Intelligence and Its Hidden Slaves (in French). We’re glad to share it here, as it features our colleague and DiPLab research associate Myriam Raymond. In the episode, Myriam Raymond speaks about who actually trains AI systems: the data workers behind tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Paid per task, often invisible, these workers label images, correct outputs, and perform the micro-tasks that make large language models function. As she explains: identifying objects in images, creating small visual assets, validating model outputs. Essential work, systematically undercounted. Myriam draws on her recent fieldwork for DiPLab, including her study on AI data workers in Egypt (part of a growing body of investigations into this workforce in the Global South). The episode also features sociologist Juan Sebastian Carbonell, who contextualises the rise of data work within broader questions of offshoring, automation rhetoric, and labour restructuring.

DiPLab’s Antonio A. Casilli was invited to speak on Pillole di Eta Beta, the technology programme broadcast on Italy’s RAI Radio 3, in an episode that opens with a striking new phenomenon: in Los Angeles, people are being paid to simply live their lives on camera. Wearing body-mounted cameras and sensor bracelets, workers film themselves doing household chores. Thousands of US workers have already been recruited for this work, paid a few dozen dollars for hours of first-person footage that becomes raw material for the next generation of autonomous machines. For Casilli, what is unfolding in Los Angeles is the latest iteration of a phenomenon that has involved millions of workers across Asia, Africa, and Latin America for over a decade: training algorithms, labeling images, moderating content. A digital proletariat that the technology industry systematically erases from its triumphant narrative. And yet without it, none of its products would function. The episode also raises a harder question about users. Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go, recently sold 30 billion video sequences, captured from players navigating the real world through augmented reality, to a robotics delivery company. Millions of people filmed streets, parks, and shops without knowing their footage would end up training autonomous delivery systems.

DiPLab’s Antonio A. Casilli was invited to launch the brand new Cyber Revolution podcast as the guest of its very first episode. In conversation with Hugo Pompougnac, president of the association Espaces Marx, he discusses DiPLab’s research on data workers, their working conditions, their forms of organisation, and their emerging strategies of resistance. The conversation situates this new workforce within a longer history: that of working-class antagonism. Because however novel the algorithms, the platforms, and the micro-task interfaces may seem, the dynamics at play (exploitation, invisibilization, collective struggle) are ones the labor movement has always known.

On 9 April 2026, DiPLab co-founder Antonio A. Casilli spoke at the Dénumérisons ! symposium at the French Assemblée Nationale, at the invitation of MP Lisa Belluco. The question brought to the floor: behind the apparent “freedom” and “intelligence” of digital platforms lies a workforce whose rights are systematically violated. Click workers, data labelers, content moderators, and micro-task workers who keep AI systems running are exposed to violent content, subject to constant algorithmic evaluation, and denied basic labor protections. Any serious effort to regulate AI must begin by putting the human beings who build it back at the center, making their labor visible, their rights enforceable, and their dignity non-negotiable.

Public debate about work tends to fixate on numbers: jobs created, jobs lost, jobs threatened by automation. Job Quality in a Turbulent Era, a new volume edited by Agnieszka Piasna and Janine Leschke (Edward Elgar Publishing), asks a harder question: what is actually happening to the quality of work? The full book is available in open access via Edward Elgar Publishing. DiPLab’s Antonio A. Casilli and Paola Tubaro contribute a chapter examining how AI and platformization are “fissuring” contemporary workplaces: fragmenting tasks, eroding protections, and reshaping job quality across sectors in ways that aggregate employment statistics simply cannot capture. The volume brings together a wide range of perspectives on how gender, precarity, migration, technology, and environmental conditions are reconfiguring work in an era of ongoing economic turbulence.

DiPLab’s Antonio A. Casilli recently appeared on Trenta Minuti (RAI Radio 3), alongside labour law scholar Valerio De Stefano. The conversation (in Italian) was prompted by a case that illustrates, with uncomfortable clarity, how AI rhetoric is being weaponised in the workplace. The multinational InvestCloud has announced the closure of its Italian branch, initiating collective redundancy proceedings. This is allowed by law if companies are downsizing in case of poor economic performance. But in 2024 the Italian branch recorded €500,000 in net profit and €9.9 million in revenue (up 63% on the previous year). This is not a company in crisis. So, to circumvent the law, the company employed the language of automation to justify a global reorganisation that has more to do with cost-cutting than with any technological necessity. The justification invoked: AI replacing jobs, which, in their eyes, is justified and inevitable. The broader debate about AI and employment, Casilli argues, is too often reduced to a single question: will it destroy jobs or create them? The more honest answer is this: the one certain effect of AI on work is to make it more precarious. The number of data workers does not shrink as AI expands — it grows. Behind every algorithm are human beings producing data, training models, labeling images, moderating content. Invisible, contingent, and essential. When asked for the most striking story encountered in his research, Casilli mentioned Kauna Malgwi. A former content moderator, she went on to establish the Digital Rights and Mental Health Initiative Africa, supporting the mental health of data workers exposed to traumatic content. Time magazine named her among the 100 most influential figures in AI. Her story is a reminder of what the industry prefers to forget: behind every AI system, there are workers made of flesh and blood.

DiPLab’s Thomas Le Bonniec is the central voice in a new mini-series on Le Code a Changé (France Inter), one of France’s leading technology radio programs. Across three episodes, host Xavier de La Porte draws on Le Bonniec’s research and personal trajectory to examine one of the most urgent questions facing Europe today: what does it mean to be technologically dependent on American Big Tech, and what, if anything, can be done about it? Episode 1 — The Omnibus directive: a threat to personal data The series opens with the EU’s proposed Digital Omnibus directive, which Le Bonniec describes as a potential “oil spill on our personal data.” Framed by European policymakers as a simplification measure to ease regulatory burden on businesses, the directive risks quietly dismantling core protections established by the GDPR. Le Bonniec’s concern is that the directive introduces a subjective definition of personal data, allowing companies to decide for themselves whether the data they hold qualifies for protection. The right of access (one of European personal data protection pillars) is directly threatened. “You cannot be a free citizen if you are under constant surveillance,” he warns. “Mass surveillance, when named as such, tends to be associated with states… but corporations are just as capable of it.” Episode 2 — America, digital colonizer The second episode widens the lens. Le Bonniec traces a convergence between Silicon Valley’s techno-solutionist ideology and the political currents of Trumpism. Both share a vision of history in which a self-appointed elite carries the future of humanity on its shoulders. Europe’s digital dependency is not merely industrial, he argues: it is political. The erosion of European values and the mass capture of European data by American platforms represent a form of domination that too many European leaders continue to underestimate. Episode 3 — Story of a whistleblower The final episode is the most personal. Le Bonniec speaks from direct experience: he previously worked as a subcontractor for Apple, listening to recordings captured by voice assistants without users’ knowledge. Despite repeated scandals implicating Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft in mass data collection, no meaningful sanctions have followed. His conclusion is not resignation but a call for collective action: stop blaming individuals for structural problems, invest in free and open-source software as a path to sovereignty, and consider dismantling digital monopolies rather than merely regulating them.

In collaboration with the ILO (International Labour Organization), ACM SIGCAS (the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computers and Society), and Yale University, DiPLab is proud to share the call for papers of the 9th annual conference of the International Network on Digital Labor. INDL-9 will take place from September 9 to 11, 2026 and, for the first time, will be hosted at the headquarters of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva. The deadline for abstract submissions is April 30, 2026 (via the Sciencesconf platform). Submit Your Abstract We aim for this call to reach every scholar, practitioner, and organizer working on digital labor and AI. INDL conferences have consistently provided a space where rigorous research intersects with real-world practice, and where interdisciplinary dialogue is not only encouraged but expected. With this ninth edition, we aim to raise the bar even higher.Hosting our conference at the ILO — the United Nations agency at the heart of global labor governance — lends this edition a singular importance. This is a moment of convergence for our field and a unique opportunity to deepen our collective commitment by connecting scholarship with workers’ advocacy and global policy debates. > “AI Supply Chains: Building an Interdisciplinary Research Agenda for AI and > Labor” > > Theme of this edition This edition seeks contributions that explore: •  Transparency and traceability in AI models •  Working conditions and occupational safety and health of human-in-the-loop workers •  Best practices in ethical AI and corporate social responsibility •  Social dialogue in AI-mediated work •  Organizational, legal, and financial perspectives on investment in ethical AI •  Regulatory compliance, including developments such as the EU AI Act •  Proposals for genuinely human-centric AI supply chains •  Ecological sustainability of AI infrastructure We also warmly welcome submissions on themes that have defined and strengthened our community over the years, including (but not limited to): algorithmic management and workers’ resistance, platform cooperativism and alternative business models, legal and institutional responses to platform labor, and the gendered dimensions of digital labor.Please consider submitting your work and, above all, help us spread the word. See you in Geneva! Read the Full Call for Papers This edition of the INDL conference is organized through a collaborative partnership between DiPLab (Digital Platform Labor), the ILO (International Labour Organization), ACM SIGCAS (the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computers and Society), and Yale University.

Video of the seminar “AI and Water Justice: Data Centres as Sites of Struggle”, featuring our colleague Nicolas Diaz Bejarano who is working with DiPLab and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile on our common project SEED: Social and Environmental Effects of Data connectivity: Hybrid ecologies of transoceanic cables and data centers in Chile and France. Nicolás Diaz Bejarano is an architect (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia), researcher, lecturer and PhD candidate in Architecture, Design and Urban Studies at UC Chile. Currently, Nicolas is a doctoral researcher at the Millennium Nucleus: Future of Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR), where he studies hyperscale data centers exploring how society intertwines with digital data matter in local territories. In 2023, Nicolas won the CCA “Architecture as Public concern” 2023 fellowship with Marina Otero Verzier and Serena Dambrosio for exploring environmental justice of data centers in Quilicura, Chile. In 2025, he was co-curator of the Chilean Pavilion – Reflective Intelligences – at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale with Linda Schilling and Serena Dambrosio and a member of the ECOS-ANID collaboration project SEED: Social and Environmental Effects of Data connectivity: Hybrid ecologies of transoceanic cables and data centers in Chile and France.