We Are All Federal Workers: Fighting the Expansion of AI, Precarity, and Disenfranchisement in Higher Education

Join us for this day-long conference co-sponsored by the American Association of University Professors and the MIC Center in collaboration with Rutgers' Power and Inequality Working Group.

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We are living through an unprecedented time. 

Data-driven technology is intertwined with the most urgent crises of our time, from climate change to the immiseration of workers, ongoing public health emergencies, a poisoned information sphere, and rising authoritarianism. The Trump administration’s second term has been underwritten by tech CEOs and venture capitalists who have received appointments and have set to work dismantling the government, the economy, and undermining rights. In the first month of the administration, techno feudalism, deregulation, and immiseration has begun with a new fervor and rapidity. 

This convening is a response to this moment, as it brings forward connective framing, tendencies toward, and snapshots of labor, material struggle, visions of possibility, and people-centered organizing around technology and institutions to explore how bottom-up practices from regular workers, community members, activists, organizations, and people can meaningfully confront market-driven barbarism.

Across the themes of our day-long event, we call together activists, scholars, and workers to ask: What is the relationship among the many attacks we see today? How can we effectively fight and dismantle these attacks? What are the problems and possibilities of the current technological ecosystem as we organize to build an effective movement of movements? 

We convene this event at an important time for movements to deepen their connections with each other and articulate a positive vision of society. This event aims both to understand the moment while forging possible pathways towards our collective future.

 

Agenda

9:00 - 9:45 AM | Breakfast

10:00 - 11:00 AM | Panel 1 - We are All Federal Workers 

The last 3 months have seen devastating dismantling of the federal government and attacks on science, diversity, equity, accessibility, immigrants, transgender people and medicine meant to defund, discredit, and demolish higher education institutions. The recent attacks on the federal government and higher education have been brought by and facilitated by the tech industry, which has brought the crisis of technology to center stage in this country. This panel lays the groundwork for understanding that nearly everyone in America – and especially those in higher education – can be considered a Federal Worker as much of what we do is closely tied with the function of the federal government.

• Todd Wolfson, President of the American Association of University Professors
• Patrick Kigongo, 18F Employee
• Erie Meyer, US Digital Service Organizer

11:00 AM -12:00 PM | Panel 2 - AI in Higher Ed

This panel highlights working conditions in higher education as they relate to AI. In particular, we explore how institutions adopt technology and AI solutions, what the problem areas are, and what should be done to improve working conditions in this area. While technology isn’t necessarily bad itself, many of these AI applications and partnerships are unproven, do not improve student or worker outcomes, and—in many instances—their use harms students, as well as instructors, researchers, and staff. This panel speaks to the grounded experiences of those in higher ed and the possibility of AI and technology more broadly being used as a weapon to further dismantle already-gutted institutions. This panel speaks to the current moment and highlights the importance of fostering solidaristic strategies across education, white collar, and industrial sectors, as well as across civil society and grassroots organizations fighting on many fronts to establish bottom-up policy around AI. 

• Elma Harjic, Arizona State University Researcher on Institutional Technology Policy
• Britt Paris, Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science and AAUP Member
• Eric Rader, President of the Henry Ford Community College Federation of Teachers

12:00 - 1:00 PM | Lunch

1:00 - 3:00 PM | Panel 3 - Politicizing AI: A Weapon of Precarity and Disenfranchisement

This panel politicizes technology - AI in particular. We all know technology is a tool. But though persistent deregulation and enormous subventions of taxpayer money, it has become a tool of the wealthy that is increasingly used against everyone else. Tech CEOs and venture capitalists who make billions of dollars from monopolized technologies have been ingratiated at the highest levels of government, as both Silicon Valley and, now the executive branch of the federal government has doubled down on a growth-at-all costs mantra for AI and related technologies. This happens as Elon Musk has named a government agency after his cryptocurrency meme coin that has been dismantling the federal administrative state. Large universities with clean and expansive datasets are partnering with OpenAI. Google has reneged on its earlier mantra of “do no evil” and dropped its pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance activities. In this context, the government is pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into a technology that, if it works, will disenfranchise workers and be used to control and surveil everyone, with the added benefit to these billionaires of potentially tanking the economy. In any case, these moves toward making more powerful technologies of prediction, surveillance, and precarity will drench the Internet with slop, propaganda, entrench immiseration, and cultivate a “survival of the fittest” mindset beyond what already existed. 

This after-lunch workshop is led by organizers focused on connecting fights among groups to build strategies and demands to change the social production of technology. The session leaders will present a bit about how they see the landscape and what needs done, then we will have break-out sessions creating power maps and possible strategies, as well as how to connect the many fronts we are fighting on at present. This workshop is intended to be generative so that attendees leave with more contacts and skills to prepare themselves for the fights ahead. 

• Cynthia Conti Cook, Technology Fellow at the Ford Foundation’s Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice Team
• Brian Merchant, Reporter in Residence at the AI Now Institute
• Michelle Miller, Director of Innovation for the Harvard Law School's Center for Labor and a Just Economy

3:00 - 3:30 PM | Break

3:30 - 4:30 PM | Reflections and New Directions

The keynote is intended to wrap up the convening by offering a sweeping vision of the crisis landscape we find ourselves in and a definition of the stakes of organizing and movement building in the moment. What do we want for the future and how do we get there?

• Sarah Myers West, Co-Executive Director of the AI Now Institute