Grounded in two years of in-person and virtual participant observation with gig worker activists in Ecuador and the transnational network of activists of which they are part, this paper undertakes an ''ethnography of scale'' to concretely account for how the activists represent and manage a global-scale movement. I highlight three scalar devices observed: the First International Gig Workers' Congress, coordinated protest actions, and a book of gig worker testimonies. I argue that although the activists construct their movement as global, it is not scalable in the sense of being able to uniformly expand without changing the nature of the project. Rather, scale is enacted through mutually transforming engagements. This paper contributes an empirical investigation of transnational gig worker resistance contextualized in the Global South, and a theoretical nuance of critiques of scalability from STS through dialogue with CSCW concepts and empirical observations.

When tech initiatives end, the artifacts they leave behind continue to impact stakeholders. Following an orientation toward broken world thinking, our study introduces the concept of documental afterlives to refer to the range of fates to which these digital artifacts have fallen. In this paper, we systematically review the 118 websites listed in a publicly available database of refugee tech initiatives in Germany as they appear today. We identify that documental afterlives of these projects fall into categories of being broken, unattended, and memorialized. Given the value and impact of these artifacts, we argue that an ethical response to these afterlives requires that we attend to them through stewardship, centering the notion of care and drawing from archival practices. On an empirical level, this paper contributes an updated understanding of how the traces of our initiatives appear long after many of them have ended. Conceptually, our notion of documental afterlives calls on us to attend to the artifacts that we leave behind, recognizing their continued entanglement in social relationships.

This paper uses document theory to analyze Discover, a partially free-to-use application developed by Facebook’s philanthropic initiative Connectivity and released in the Philippines in May 2020. Discover’s design is predicated on the conviction that access to valorized forms of technology—in this case, popular websites viewed via the Internet—promises benefits to marginalized users who are presumed to lack resources needed to fully participate in contemporary informational capitalism. Document theory in HCI provides a framework that allows us to analyze the most popular websites as rendered by Discover. We argue that Discover’s logic of redaction and form moderation reproduces the very structural inequality that access to the Internet frequently claims to ameliorate. We conclude by pointing to potential applications of our approach in research at the intersection of HCI, ICT4D, and political economy.

This paper introduces document theory as a mechanism to analyze intimate platforms as sociotechnical systems. The theory, developed in documentation studies and applied to HCI, focuses on the casting mold or how agents, through particular means and modes, produce documents that govern social relations. We studied the process of creating a profile by identifying and mapping out the fields asked among the ten most popular online dating apps in the US. By looking at dating profiles as documents and their creation as a process of documentation, we argue that the current casting mold of these intimate platforms is designed to extract profit via invisibilization of labor in digital networks leading to the emergence of a constrained rational market agent. Our study illustrates how document theory makes visible the assumptions of technological systems, calling on us to imagine alternatives beyond incremental design changes given broader structural realities of market and power.

The term "digital divide" indexes a body of research at the intersection of digital technology and social equity, including research on inequality that criticizes and recapitulates the original concept. Based on a qualitative study at a community literacy center serving resettled refugees and immigrants, we show that the digital divide framework rests on a distributive logic, one that implies that distributing access to digital technology constitutes a form of social equity. Because this framework only considers valorized goods, skills, and uses, research has frequently ignored the startup, maintenance, and affective costs we found accompanied digital access for our participants. To account for these costs, we propose a theoretical adjustment to the digital divide framework, one where design is an act of configuring both costs and benefits together. We argue that considering such costs enables HCI researchers to engage more effectively with host communities in the non-innocent work of confronting inequity.