Episode2 for Safety Nets: Let Me Zine

Transcript

Episode 2: What Filipino caregivers and migrants workers can do for their digital autonomy? with Eloisa Guerrero

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Safety Nets: Let Me Zine project is funded by Talent Development grant from Stimuleringsfond, Creative Industries Fund NL. Thank you, Stimuleringsfonds and the Netherlands for making this possible.

Nami (Hereafter referred to as N): In today's internet landscape, where personal data and privacy are constantly at risk, how can users from marginalized communities protect their online identities?

[Intro music]

N: Welcome to the podcast Safety Nets: Let Me Zine. In the 2nd episode, I'll be talking with an artist Eloisa Guerrero about her recent workshop for Filipino caregivers and migrant workers in Canada to protect their privacy on big social network platforms.

N: Hello, Eloisa. How are you? I guess it's the evening in Toronto, right? Our recording is now remotely being done as we live quite far each other :)

Eloisa (Hereafter referred to as E): It's a cold and rainy night here. Thanks for inviting me to speak on your podcast.

N: I'm grateful to have you on my radio. We met in the peer to peer festival, along with a residency program in CO Berlin some years ago. And since then, we've been staying in touch and working together. For listeners who don't have enough context about you, could you please introduce yourself?

E: Sure yes, Hi, my name is Eloisa. Guerrero and I'm an artist primarily working with media and software. I also work as a digital accessibility specialist.

N: Thanks. So indeed we also worked together at Zine Camp Festival at Worm Rotterdam (the Netherlands). Do you remember that? It was to do a skill-sharing the basic web coding techniques in HTML & CSS at Rotterdam. And the main focus of the workshop was to introduce Semantic HTML principles to participants, like how to make a website accessible by using semantic HTML tags, which are tags that can be well recognised by web browsers so that screen-reader users can also experience the website without barriers. I was mostly in charge of giving the participants basic knowledge of writing HTML & CSS codes. And the importance of semantic HTML part was done by you, as you're a part of the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group. I remember people were very into learning it from you. How has been your exploration in the web accessibilityAccessibility (often abbreviated to A11y — as in, "a", then 11 characters, and then "y") in web development means enabling as many people as possible to use websites, even when those people's abilities are limited in some way. going on? Also, are you engaged in any other working groups?

E: I'm part of a couple other working groups, mostly those related to Assistive Technologies as well as the Sustainable Web Interest Group. I'm not as active as I'd like to be, but I try to pay attention to what goes on in those groups. Right now there is a lot of movement in the Accessibility space because of the enforcement of the European Accessibility Act (EAA). And it requires all businesses and organisations that provide goods and services in the European Union to meet a certain level and standard according to the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

N: Yeah, indeed I remember already when we met for the first time you shared your study note that contains how you research the web accessibility with me. You really care the user side. For me by the way, the accessibility on the web was quite a new thing. It seems that you're involved in ethical activities in the digital space. Before getting into main questions, it'd be still nice to get to know you just a little more? How come have you been diving into software art and handmade webzine-making practices? What made you do that? (And.. what is 'software art' btw?)

E: Sure. “Software art” is basically just an umbrella term I use to denote any artworks made digitally or through computation, beyond the web and net-based art. I consider anything that is programmable as software. So I grew up on the internet making webpages for fun, and I still find it a lot of fun, that's why I still try to do it on my own personal projects and websites. I also make zines, and so it's not uncommon to bring that sort of format to digital, because hypermedia and hypertext have such unique features, such as using nonlinear narratives or interactive media. So it's quite a lot of fun. I've been also working with Twine, which is a software that creates non-linear narratives or games. I use it for zines. It's a type of electronic literatureElectronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. that you can only make through a website or software.

N: I deeply feel a connection with you in that you actually started to make webpages for fun.

E: When I first tried to learn HTML, i was just looking at other people's websites and then copying them and trying to figure out. I didn't read a formal book or a course. I just learned from copying other people. And that was a lot of figuring out what things meant and how things were working. And nowadays I try to re-document and try to re-understand it better. But it's still a lot of fun to tinker and change things here and there, not just in terms of codes but also in terms of user interface User Interface (UI) is anything that facilitates the interaction between a user and a machine. In the world of computers, it can be anything from a keyboard, a joystick, a screen or a program. In case of computer software, it can be a command-line prompt, a webpage, a user input form, or the front-end of any application. or design… You're never done. So it's always a lot of fun to keep constantly changing things.

N: Yeah true, you also mentioned in the end the unique features of the web, such as the hypertext and hypermedia. For instance, linking another page to a webpage.. That's actually a true charm, because I feel like you're really doing a journey. You are moving to another dimension of space. And umm yes, this is also a similar or an extended question. What does it mean to you that you're making your websites on your own? And I know you have skills to host your own web server. I wonder what these activities mean to you.

E: I guess, with the way that the internet is right now and we were forewarned by its inventors and pioneers of the Internet that currently we move around in very centralised, very concentrated setup, networks. We're on more apps than ever before, and most of the internet is owned by an oligarch or a select few. We've become so dependent on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. And most of the servers on the Internet that these apps and websites run on are owned by only selected few. If the servers that these apps run on go down, the internet is at a standstill. Just the other week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was down for a few hours and it suspended daily operations from all over the world. So for me, making my own websites and running things or hosting locally is a form of resistance and a form of play.

N: Yea true, it's really crazy to think of the world where we now live. Things are super centralised, this is not even a new story or not a surprise. In Korea, there's a very centralised social network platform called Kakao Talk. I'm not sure if you heard of it.

E: Yeah, I've heard of it.

N: A few years ago, a data center of the Kakao Talk had a fire. The thing is that, before the fire, they didn't ever distribute their infrastructure all over other places. So, the data center was totally off for some days.. The thing is that the Korean society, everything works with Kakao Talk and its infrastructure. For instance, taxi drivers are also connected to the Kakao Talk business. We are highly relying on this kind of platform. So yea with the data center with the fire became a chance for many people to realise how we are relying on such a big platform. So for me making my own webpages or even trying to run your server and studying it.. Of course it's never perfect, it's clumsy. There are a lot of errors but it gives me freedom in a way. I guess it's the same for you?

E: Yeah, I agree. In terms of the centralised networks, in the Philippines, everything runs on Facebook. Businesses, government agencies use Facebook to provide services or to give information like that's the main source of information that a lot of Filipinos get news from.

N: Oh I actually didn't know that in the Philippines a lot of people are intertwined with Facebook.

E: Yeah.

N: Indeed, now is a good time to get into the main point. There's something that I really want to learn from you as for this. As you know, my current project is about exploring how people's self-expression and privacy matters online has been evolving on the web landscape transformation. And I also aim to research how autonomous site-operators can strengthen protective layers on their websites. However, unfortunately, today's Internet is facing a lot of fears about our privacy, like how our personal data is processed and what users and creators can do in order to prevent information leakage, etc. How do you see the urgency of the privacy issues on the web?

E: It's very concerning, because a lot of small businesses and artists rely on places like Instagram to promote themselves. And to promote their art. Unfortunately we are at the mercy of the company that maintains and operates these apps. They often change their user rules and agreements to sneakily add in stuffs like by posting you're allowing them to run these through their AIs. Everyone is at the mercy centralised platforms. It's very difficult to try to balance being able to promote yourself and keeping operations working. While at the same time making your own content and information private and secure. There's not a really bulletproof way to protect yourself when you're on these platforms. The best advice is not to be at such platforms at all but it's not easy, right?

N: Yeah, you've just mentioned a very interesting aspect which is that we live in an era to keep promoting ourselves because of economic pressure. Also there's maybe some useful information that is shared on such platforms, and we don't want to miss it out. There's a feeling that we don't want to miss things out just like FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). It's very not easy to divorce. So now… this is a natural bridge to talk about your recent workshop. That was the main part I want to introduce to the listeners. I know some months ago you hosted a workshop, which is for Filipino migrant workers living in Canada. Think it was for CCESO (Caregiver Connections Education and Support Organization), right? Could you please elaborate what the workshop was for? And if I'm not correctly phrasing something, please correct me.

E: Sure, so like what I mentioned earlier, in the Philippines, Facebook is pretty much daily driver for many Filipinos, and that goes the same for migrant workers who live abroad and use it to keep up with the news from back home.. That means it becomes a breeding ground for scams, phishing, and mis- and disinformation.False information spread deliberately in order to deceive people The workshop was mostly to inform participants of the common ways that they may (or already have been) targeted through this. Some of them are very elaborate scams. So we went through the different-very common types of scams that people often experience. We also showed them ways to do a lot more fact-checkings to direct them more reliable outlets and sources so that they are more critical of the information they get from Facebook, even if they come from their friends and family.

N: Yeah, I know a friend working at Facebook. Her job is to filter violent or sexually harassing content. And I think there are different departments in Facebook group, like.. per region of the world, like the Middle-East area or Western European area… And she's working in a Turkish department. Her task is to filter such crazy violent content being uploaded. Working for that is stressful for her. But without such controls, it's really a mess. Indeed there'd be reasons that people of immigrant groups or migrant workers are situated in a more vulnerable situation to be scammed. It's not about their personal things. It's all this geopolitical environment. So at the moment I want to ask you why you wanted to touch the urgency that there is a barrier for especially the migrant workers. What made you specifically pinpoint on the aspect of “Filipino migrant workers” because there are many other groups of people on the Internet.

E: As a Filipino immigrant myself, I am very much aware of the danger and precarity that migrant workers face. Especially since they are far away from their families and their places of home. So they are in a very vulnerable situation where their points of contact or connections to these people and places are very concentrated on places like Facebook and Whatsapp. It's very centralised networks. A lot of scammers know this. That's why it's very common for them to target these people specifically. Esepcaiiy for those who remit or send money back home, yeah that's a huge source of income that gets deducted from their paycheck. I've often worked with CCESO on other events and workshops involving the Filipino migrant experience, so I felt it was an important topic to touch on.

N: I guess this is one of the most common narratives of the scam or phishing online.

E: Yes, for sure. It's also that a lot of these scams are also ways to make money. In the geopolitical sense that Filipinos are often taken advantage of by giving them and paying them the Philippines' wage instead of the global North wage. Because the labour is so cheap in the Philippines.. They're often..

N: Yeah a lot of people in the Philippines can speak very good English so because of that many of them have a capacity to work in the global market already. But their economical context is still not in a parallel.

E: Yeah for sure. I saw a news item the other day about stores in the US or North America hiring Filipinos to become virtual cashiers in restaurants and shops. The restaurants and shops would have tiny monitors, and Filipinos would be the ones who are operating from the Philippines because their labour is so cheap. It's cheaper to hire virtual cashiers in the Philippines than to hire actual cashiers in North America. That's how easy it is to take advantage of them. And there were even some posts on Instagram of these CEOs or.. They would often post about paying their secretaries from the Philippines very low wage. And then they rip the benefits of that work. Basically they offload all of their manual labours to these assistants, paying them wages in the Philippines instead of paying them in the global North wages. It's very extractive. It's taking advantage of these people. That becomes a very common thing going on. For example, in terms of the example that you talked about people monitoring Facebook for filtering content, there is actually a documentary called The Cleaners. It was actually a lot of the dark sides of this Facebook's auditing. So a lot of Filipinos are hired to screen this very disturbing media and materials before in order to block them from being posted publicly . A lot of it is involved in psychological damages to these people because they were not given any sort of care or therapy or any sort of like.. help for them to recover from having seen such atrocious images. That's another form of attractiveness that happens because they can pay them so little and not give them any health benefits. But still reap the rewards from their labours.

N: Huh, this is really frustrating to hear. Sometimes I just think there are a lot of polarisations in our society. All this unfairness in our physical living context is just transferred to the digital context as well. It's just the same. Also we are now talking about phishing and online violence, who are more vulnerable, and so on. We never can say that this is only a personal matter. It's not that they are not wise or not smart enough. We can never say that. It's like such a societal aspect.

E: It is as well as the disinformation machine is very sophisticated. It's not just one or two bad apples giving them bad information and propaganda to people. It's actually a very well orchestrated machine driven by very specific groups who have political agendas. For example, the Duterte election pretty much a result of this information machine on Facebook. A lot of information or a lot of propaganda on Facebook was circulated around that time. That was very pro Duterte. And it's still happening right now. There's still a lot of examples of this information machine like that. And it's hard cus some of them will come from people you know and trust. Because people will also just repost without fact checking or double checking the information, it's very easy to send and repost to other people on your network. And it'll just circulate. It's a kind of takes on your life of its own. And that's how it goes in a circle, right?

N: Yea, I think people who have very much like desperate economic desire in their economic state would be very hard to avoid. Yea, it's very frustrating.

E: It is also that.. It's not necessarily just people who lack the education to be able to know whether certain information is correct or not. This is even the most educated, the most aware people can still be tricked by certain things. The persuasiveness of this campaign can be very sneaky and very difficult to undermine no matter what education level you are in, because again… it could also come from a source you trust so you have that bias. You have your own personal biases that kinda work against you.

N: Also people tend to believe things as they want to believe.

E: Exactly. It's not really cut and dry. It's not just a matter of the lack of education.

N: Well, I've aimed to eventually talk about the positive future as well.. but..

E: Haha..

N: But that's actually the fact. It's reality. So to change the topic to a more practical scope, what kinds of activities did you provide with the participants in the workshop?

E: We had an impromptu workshop where… We printed very comical templates of Facebook, like text boxes.

N: Interface?

E: Yeah. And we asked participants create their own Facebook “scams” that they might have seen or heard about, or have experienced themselves personally. So they drew this or wrote it on pieces of paper and they shared it. They also shared their own stories and close-calls with these scams. And it doesn't target anyone in particular. It can be anyone and anywhere. And it can be very convincing.

N: And do you remember any of the shared phishing experiences of the participants?

E: Yeah. One of them was… I think they were trying to sell her something. I don't remember very well. Someone was impersonating another person. And she asked a very personal question that only the person would know. And they did not give the correct answer basically. So she realised that it was not the person that she knew. It was a person who was imitating or impersonating. It was actually very scary at the end of the workshop, some of them felt very scared and hopeless, because this ain't gonna stop anytime soon. This keeps happening. This is scary if you're not vigilant about it. I guess, another thing is that like what I mentioned with migrant workers, since the 1970s there's been a huge exodus of Filipino migrant workers that started with a dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Senior. It has not stopped since then. It only got worse.. More and more people are forced to move abroad to work. They left their home and family, because the living wage in the Philippines is not enough to sustain them and their families. A lot of immigrants did not really want to leave. It was not their choice.

N: But living in a new context is very hard. You also know it. Now you're based in Toronto, Canada and you live there as a Filipino person. I also have been living in Europe as an East Asian. We all know how big it is. I've been living in Western Europe for 10 years but I'm still struggling to adjust myself to such cloudy rainy, wet cold weather in Autumn and Winter. It'd be even harder for you cus you're from a tropical country.

E: For sure… And it's not just cultural but also environmental. For example, the winter is very difficult for people who had lived in tropical countries and that's something that you'll never get used to…

N: Haha, this is not going in a little different direction. But yeah, you never get used to it.

E: Yeah, we don't have winter. We only have two seasons; Rainy season and summer, because of climate change too…

N: Yes, we've been talking about weather as an example of the cultural difficulty in living as a foreigner in another place, but the point we wanted to address is that living abroad is not always necessarily chosen by themselves. Some people make the decision since it's just inevitable. To back to the flow, as a summary of your workshop could you please share some useful tips for the privacy protection on the big tech platforms with the listeners?

E: Don't believe everything you see or hear, even if it's coming from your friends and family. It doesn't cost anything to do a web search to do some fact-checking. You'll be better off doing a quick web search rather than just reposting or regurgitating false or malicious information to other people. And it could be harmful to do that more so than just doing a simple Google search. Always be vigilant. And being aware of the political landscape that we're in because that will always control the narratives. Especially on Facebook where the algorithmsThe word Algorithm means a set of finite rules or instructions to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations" Or "A procedure for solving a mathematical problem in a finite number of steps that frequently involves recursive operations. will be giving you fake news or propaganda... It's a lot of that. As well as that, limiting the number of people, not only the number but limiting your audience who can access you or your content, because… again, any sort of personal information that you give can be used against you. It can become the next phishing scam. And so be more careful about what kind of personal information you give in public. It's going to be very important.

N: Yea cool, It's great that you share these with us. Thank you. True, you need to be aware of the political landscape you're situated in. Also, what I find especially useful from what you've said is that we should also be more conscious of who we are making our content accessible to. Thanks. So I have the last question. How do you speculate the Internet as a public space? What are the dangers and what are the hopes that we can still have?

E: I mean, the internet is a space that should be for all, that belongs to each and every one of us, and just like public spaces, it is a shared ownership and we all play a role in digital stewardship to make sure that we create and foster a safe environment for different types of people from all walks of life. That means being careful about what you share and who you share it to. The things that you say or the things that you don't say, you know, things like that. And understanding that somebody can or will see everything that you post on the Internet and understanding repercussions of being visible on the Internet. That's kinda dystopian. It started from Utopian but became dystopian. In the end, the bottom line is that the Internet is what we make it to be. So it's also within our power to turn it into a better place. It's going to be difficult because again there are very few people in power who hold that authority. That's why I think making websites and hosting your own thing is again a form of resistance and form of play. I think these apps and these platforms are not there for us to enjoy or so. It's to sell us things, right? And I think we need to take it back and do things that are not for profit necessarily. To make our place richer, more colorful, not as a shopping mall or a place to scam each other.

N: That's a sweet metaphor.

E: I think that's the dream that Tim Bernet originally had for further World Wide Web. I think that's something that we should slowly try to get back into.

N: Yea, as you just said, the fact that the web is highly ruled by only a few people who have power and capitals sometimes makes me feel a little helpless but this is, on the other hand, a reason why the autonomous activities matter. Therefore I really hope what we're talking about gets more and more widely spread out. Yes, thank you very much. It was very great to learn your insights through this episode.
N: What you shared today makes me reflect about how the economic and geopolitical environments of a group of people in the world influence the online dimension of their lives. And.. I hope we collaborate for something else again in the near future! Thanks again and stay in touch!

E: Sure, Thanks for having me. :) Bye

[Outro music]

Safety Nets: Let Me Zine project is funded by Talent Development grant from Stimuleringsfond, Creative Industries Fund NL. Thank you, Stimuleringsfonds and the Netherlands for making this possible.