The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has prompted countries worldwide to craft policies and regulations that capture both the promise and peril of this transformative technology. While resource-rich nations and private-sector giants have been at the forefront of AI governance debates, many countries in the Global South are now joining the regulatory race. Indonesia offers a particularly instructive case. The country introduced a National AI Strategy in 2020 and a circular letter on AI Ethics in 2023, and is currently drafting a presidential regulation on AI governance. However, these efforts unfold amid mounting concerns that the country’s digital policies may be drifting toward authoritarian tendencies, raising questions about whose interests AI regulation ultimately serves.

This study presents findings from a multi-sited ethnographic study examining the policy-making process behind Indonesia’s emerging AI regulations. By tracing how various policy actors, such as government officials, industry representatives, civil society organizations, think tanks, and academia, imagine AI, the research reveals how historical precedents, contemporary power structures, and global policy discourses shape the country’s AI governance. The study underscores that Indonesia’s AI policy is neither a straightforward adoption of Global North models nor a purely local affair. Instead, it reflects a dynamic interplay of political, economic, and technological interests that echo the country’s long-standing tradition of using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to project visions of modernity and consolidate elite power.

This paper highlights the discrepancy between the high hopes of a digitally transformed society, expressed for example in political policy documents and business plans of tech companies, and the sometimes rather hesitant experiences and realities in the everyday life of ordinary people. These ambiguities are also expressed in the news media, and we will, through text analysis, discuss this ambiguity expressed in the news section vis-à-vis the cultural section in Swedish newspapers.

Thus, this paper examines the importance of “the widespread belief that large data sets offer a higher form of intelligence and knowledge that can generate insights that were previously impossible, with the aura of truth, objectivity, and accuracy” (boyd & Crawford, 2012, p. 663). We focus on the Swedish context, a relevant case as it is a country with an ambition to be at the forefront of the digital transformation and with a long history of “datafying” its citizens through the welfare systems and bureaucracy.

Based on a distant reading of selected national news media, this paper will first examine how discourses about digitalization and digital transformation have evolved during a period from the early 2000s to today. Second, we will examine through close reading (discourse analysis) of selected news articles, from selected time periods, how the content of these discourses has changed, and the role of various actors in society in constructing, maintaining and challenging these discourses.

The structural transformations at the turn of the century, intensified by digital economies, have reshaped labor, making precariousness a persistent rather than transitional condition. The decline of stable employment in favor of flexible work has led to existential insecurity, affecting workers’ mental health and social identities. Amid this backdrop, digital platforms such as Instagram and TikTok have become key spaces where work-related narratives are contested, negotiated, and redefined.

This research investigates how digital practices on these platforms contribute to shaping representations of labor, oscillating between rupture with traditional models and continuity with neoliberal ethics. Using digital ethnography, visual analysis and computational methods, the study examines mainstream media narratives, Instagram meme discourse, and TikTok content. Discourse and topic analyses of Italian newspaper posts highlight how mainstream narratives reinforce neoliberal ideals, portraying younger generations as unwilling to work. Conversely, meme culture on Instagram deploys irony and satire to challenge productivity rhetoric, exposing the contradictions of precarious work.As Instagram, also TikTok offers a broad perspective on labor discourse, encompassing both narratives: one that reinforces entrepreneurial self-optimization and another that, through humor and storytelling, challenges hustle culture and mainstream work ideals. These platforms provide spaces for alternative labor imaginaries, where irony, cynicism, and satire function as tools of resistance against hegemonic work discourses. By amplifying marginalized voices, Instagram and TikTok facilitate a critical engagement with labor, productivity, and economic value, offering a window into emerging cultural sentiments that disrupt the dominant neoliberal work ethic.

This presentation examines an original dataset of genAI images of fat and disabled people and consequently argues that GenAI images can be understood as part of the social and political infrastructure that upholds what Rosemarie Garland-Thompson calls “the normate,” the ideal subject form upon which a given society is designed to privilege and for all subjects to desire to emulate. Like the GenAI images explored here, the normate is ideal with real material and social impacts, yet, it is distinct from embodied reality.

From the patterns identified in the dataset, we see mechanisms of refusal to display different aspects of the prompts in relation to fatness and disability. The results help to enrich current understandings of genAI’s biases in an intersectional manner, that is, by examining the compounding impacts of various identity categories on representation.

Drawing on the validity of disabled and fat knowledge, the second part of the paper questions what it means to be disabled or fat in the age of AI, and how GenAI images mediate the social realities of disabled and fat people. In response, this presentation constructs and utilizes the analytic of ‘cripfat technoscience’ to focus on how genAI images uphold a certain notion of normalcy, with emphasis on what these platforms refuse to show. We then draw from disability and fat justice to pose questions about resistance and data solidarity in the face of genAI’s growing omnipresence, centered around refusal on our terms.