Dr Hemangini Gupta is a Lecturer in Gender and Global Politics at the School of Social and Political Science and is a member of the Critical Data Studies cluster at Edinburgh Futures Institute. Her research interests include global and transnational feminisms, data and cloud economies, data materialities, startup capitalism and labour, and gender and sexuality.
Funding from the Futures institute supported Dr Gupta to put together four video essays that accompany her forthcoming book, Experimental Times: Start Up Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India (December 2024).
The people behind India’s digital economy
Dr Gupta’s work spotlights the often-ignored experience of the ordinary people who sustain the digital economy in Bangalore. Now known as Bengaluru, the capital of India’s Karnataka region is known to be a “digital city” where entrepreneurship and digital start-ups are encouraged. People from all over India are drawn to Bengaluru and the possibility of a better life, but Dr Gupta is keen to illuminate the flipside of the technological dream.
Dr Gupta’s interest in the people behind the digital economy began with her PhD research on startups when she worked as an intern in the digital startup scene in India. Later, while working as a college teacher in the United States during Covid-19 lockdowns and widespread job cuts, Dr Gupta wondered how her former colleagues in the digital economy sector were managing. She then had the idea to start a collaborative filmmaking project between her students in the US and her former colleagues in India, resulting in the video, One Life in Bangalore.
One Life in Bangalore is one of the four 5-10 minute video essays included in Dr Gupta’s companion piece project to her forthcoming book. The videos vary in terms of style. Bangalore, Bengaluru and Technology in the South are more formal, featuring a straightforward reportage format. In contrast, One Life in Bangalore and another video called A Professional Life, are informal video collages put together from the recordings and photos of the films’ subjects.
For Dr Gupta, piecing together informal clips moves towards a truer representation of people in this new technological world, allowing them to speak for themselves and tell their own story. For instance, the video A Professional Life documents a woman’s move from Goa to Bengaluru and the challenges she faced finding secure employment. “Bangalore is the land of opportunity,” the woman explains in the video “If you’re willing to learn and adapt you can go far.” But by the end of the research, several workers had lost their jobs to the digitisation of their role, and they were laid off with little notice.
As Dr Gupta said:
“I was interested in who these workers are… It was aspiring middle class women in the global South who were taking the risks as this company I worked with tried new systems; and ultimately their jobs were automated, and they were rendered redundant.”
The impact of cultural change on ordinary Indian citizens
The videos, Bangalore/Bengaluru and Technology in the South examine the impact of technological and societal change in India. Bangalore/Bengaluru reveals that 15,000 start-up businesses were launched in the Karnataka region in 2023 according to official figures. While business may appear to be thriving, Dr Gupta argues that these start-ups involve risky, precarious finance and use human labour to extract as much profit as possible. Dr Gupta said: “People in Bangalore pride themselves on this very digital economy but they don’t always think about who works to sustain this.”
Bangalore/Bengaluru further reveals that technological growth in Bengaluru has led to the emergence of a middle class travelling to work by car and living in gated communities, cut off from other residents. A clash has arisen between the India of the poorer classes and the “global city” dreams of a middle class unaware of ordinary workers’ needs. Dr Gupta aims to educate and inform people about these issues and sees the videos as a freely available resource and teaching tool.
Materialising the Cloud
Dr Gupta’s latest project ‘Materialising the Cloud’ aims to uncover the environmental and societal cost of Artificial Intelligence (AI) particularly in data annotation. This work is usually undertaken by underpaid and undervalued workers in the Global South, requiring an enormous amount of labour.
“I want to get a sense of what data annotation work looks like. There are many ethical AI companies in India who say: We want to rethink the place of this work in a global supply chain. We want it to be fair wage. We want workers to own their data. We want to see if we can have a common community model of data ownership and work.”
Dr Gupta also wants to look at the digital economy in Scotland and how the environmental costs stack up as Scotland continues to build huge energy-intensive data centres.
Further links and information
Dr Gupta has co-organised a panel event in the Edinburgh Futures Institute’s Autumn 2024 season on 12 November 2024, to be held in-person and online. Book your free tickets: Contesting Computing: Imagining Feminist Futures
Watch the four ‘Experimental Times’ video essays
Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India
