The fourth CLCF theme “Collectivities: Grassroots Organizing For and Against AI” is the most clearly grounded in activist and grassroots commitments to creating alternative futures “from below” in the AI and broader digital contexts. Considering equity, diversity and inclusion to be sustainable development goals led by communities, this thematic area is focused on imagining and designing futures through grassroots collective organizing and action, investigating the role of unions, associations, cooperatives, and other collectivities trying to re-appropriate, bargain and/or refuse AI in the workplace. This thematic group builds on the work of cluster members Rafael Grohmann, TL Cowan and Jas Rault to document and address the onerous nature of exploitative technologies and socialities in the online world through methods such as “Heavy Processing” (Cowan & Rault, 2024), an approach that requires deep community-led and community-engaged modes of operating.

This theme focuses on community-driven interventions towards critical futures with or without AI in the creative sector, or, how we can imagine and design creative sectors by articulating together diverse stakeholders and types of knowledge drawn from artists, activists, and workers as ways to mobilize knowledge. In this context, intersectional, feminist, Black, indigenous, anti-colonial, and decolonial approaches to technologies will help us to re-imagine collective design technologies, platforms, AI, and working conditions.  As some of our cluster members put it, in the Feminist Data ManifestNo, we do not research about people, but with them, in meaningful and non-extractive relationships.

In this thematic area, scholars and community partners will cultivate interventions through research and community partner residencies in regular workshops with the aim of envisioning collective digital futures through other forms of labour organization, AI and digital governance, and technology design. The theme will produce a digital archive of collective worker responses to these issues.

An initial activity underway by CLCF co-lead Grohmann and Research Assistant Helena Wright under this theme is CLCF is a project aiming to track strikes, protests and mobilizations by cultural workers in relation to AI around the world. These include Hollywood writers, game performers in the US and voice actors in Brazil, among others. In light of this, CLCF is aiming to develop this tracker as a resource for researchers, organizers, activists, policy makers and other workers.