Edition 131: The war is lost, the economy is destroyed
...and the authorities need to show people what they have risked their lives for
Hi everyone, it’s been great to hear people say nice things about appearing in your inboxes again. A quick thing: if you are or know anyone with an interest in space or astronomy (doesn’t matter where you’re based), please fill in this form and my colleagues would love to chat.
I’m Anjali Ramachandran, a Director at Storythings. Welcome to the Other Valleys.
Links
Iran is doubling down on forcing women to wear the hijab, with the increased use of face recognition: “Iranian traffic officials started using it in 2020 to issue fines and send women warnings by SMS text about wearing a hijab when inside a vehicle. Mousa Ghazanfarabadi, the head of the country’s parliamentary legal and judicial committee, spoke last year in support of “exclusion from social services and financial fines'' for hijab violations. “The use of face recording cameras can systematically implement this task and reduce the presence of the police, as a result of which there will be no more clashes between the police and citizens,” he told Iranian news outlet Enghelabe Eslami.”
Meet Hug, Paro, Pepper and Robear: some of the robots in Japan that are (or were) engaged in elder care. It’s not a technological utopia though: in most cases the robots created more work for staff than they should have, and there’s always the problem of e-waste, “potentially toxic and exploitative processes of resource extraction, dumping of e-waste in the Global South, and other negative environmental impacts that massively scaling up robotic care would entail.”
How India’s caste system limits diversity in science, a really good investigation by Nature magazine with data. Read multiple interviewees talk about how the playing field is not level at any stage, and how privileged castes dominate elite institutions (unsurprisingly).
Nastia Podorożnia is a journalist from Ukraine working in Poland. She created a free Telegram bot called Martynka “that will accompany girls and women on their way from Ukraine to safety”. It’s proving to be a really useful resource, particularly for those who’ve been through trauma.
An interesting interview about newsletter growth with Tyler Denk of beehiiv, the platform that grew Morning Brew to millions of subscribers. We work on newsletters a lot at Storythings so this one gave me pause for thought.
Inside the controversy of how OpenAI underpaid over 200 Kenyans to ‘perfect ChatGPT - then sacked them.’ Amidst everyone raving over ChatGPT in the Global North, these stories - including how data was sourced by Meta and a Time investigation into SamaSource, their ethical outsourcing partner (who have now stopped doing work for Meta), not everyone remembers the debt that humans have to pay.
A Chinese writer who moved from China to the US reflects on their e-commerce shopping sprees buying things they don’t really need, from Taobao to what replaced it in the US: the much reviled Shein. None of us need 10 phone cases, or similar!
Amazon has launched Amazon Air, its freight service, in India, in partnership with Bengaluru-based cargo airline Quikjet. It will initially deliver goods in Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru.
On a much more serious note, India is today evoking emergency laws to ban a BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The film has been discussed violently on social media the last week. Here, Salman Zafar writes about the increasing leaning of Bollywood to the right, alienating Pakistan.
Opportunities
WaterAid is looking for a Global Head of Campaigns who can be based in the UK, Senegal, Nigeria, Kenya or South Africa. Deadline January 29.
I’m a trustee of Chayn and they’re looking for an Administrator (remote). Deadline January 29.
Thejesh GN, based in India, offers an INR 1 lakh/$1400 grant for anything meaningful, preferably (but not necessarily) Creative Commons work. Anyone from anywhere can apply. Here’s the very simple application form. Deadline March 15.
UNICEF Venture Fund is looking to make up to US$100K in equity-free investments to provide early-stage (seed) funding to for-profit technology start-ups developing software solutions using frontier technologies for climate action. Deadline: TODAY, January 23.
PLUG: Storythings is releasing the results of a research project on how people’s attention and media behaviours are changing since the advent of the pandemic. In Part 4 of Attention Matters, Say No Faux, we talk about how the authentic trumps the polished in our hybrid social media-filled working world. Subscribe.
3 Questions With…Sara Wahedi
Sara Wahedi is the CEO and Founder of Ehtesab, Afghanistan’s first civic technology startup. Ehtesab has been providing near real-time security and city service alerts through the Ehtesab App (search for it on the App Store or Google Play) to Kabul residents since June 2020, and is expanding to three major cities across the country by the end of this year. Earlier this year, she was named as one of TIME Magazine’s Next Generation Leaders, MIT Technology Review’s Innovators under 35 and the BBC's Top 100 Women for her work in democratizing access to information for Afghans. Sara previously worked at the Office of the President of Afghanistan, responsible for supporting social development policy and projects across the country. She is also currently completing her studies in Urban Studies and Data Science at Columbia University.
1. Ehtesab launched in 2020 to help citizens get real-time alerts to crises in Kabul, like roadblocks, accidents and so on (which may or may not be caused by the political situation). How have things changed since you launched, particularly with the Taliban gaining power again in Afghanistan in 2021?
The brain-drain has been crippling for us. It’s difficult to keep team members, understandably, who wish to leave the country at any cost. There are many who are ardent and have remained with us for over three years, but due to the sensitive nature of the team, it takes us a few months to screen every candidate and ensure the team’s safety and that of our data and platform. Also, there has been a significant decrease in the interest of supporting Afghan-led initiatives. There was a significant wave of support immediately following the Taliban takeover in 2021, but keeping the app running, especially following the Ukraine invasion, has felt impossible. The entire team also has to work from home, due to security concerns, as the Taliban raided our office on the first day of the invasion, which has meant that the team has been working from home for almost two years. With the worsening electricity, keeping computers and mobile phones on is difficult, especially when we need to be active 24/7 to monitor reports. We also have to be extremely strategic about the wording of our reports and alerts, so as to ensure that we do not become a target of Talib censorship.
What one thing do you wish could happen for you to make Ehtesab even more impactful than it is currently?
Even if we have double the budget we have now (which is 20,000 USD), we could reach half a million Afghans through our alerts. It has been incredibly difficult to find funding for Ehtesab, so if we were able to increase our funding, it would have an unbelievably large impact in our ability to expand the service across the country.
What are you reading at the moment and why?
I am currently reading Wonders of Spiritual Unfoldment by John Butler. I stumbled on a few excerpts of his book on social media. The book is a sort of travelogue of Butler’s spiritual journey, discussing the importance of quiet and solace, of connecting with nature, and becoming more cognizant of our surroundings and a better understanding of the ’self’ - it is an incredibly fascinating book and I would recommend it to anyone.
The title of this newsletter
…is from this article about Russia clamping down on their LGBT population.
Endnote
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Till next time,
Anjali