MTC

AI & Labor Monitor

A MoreThanCode.org research tool — AI impact on workers worldwide

Narrative approaches to AI & labor

A portfolio of methods activists, researchers, and labor movements use to understand and reshape how AI’s impact on work is told—in media, on platforms, and in public space.

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Each block below describes one narrative strategy and a case study drawn from global digital-rights and labor organizing. Use these as models when designing your own campaigns, exhibits, or research.

Collective listening & exhibit

Listen together to map AI narrative conditions

Use collective-listening practices to understand how AI is talked about in communities, then translate those insights into a public exhibit on AI's impact on labor.

  • Run place-based or portable audio walks as shared listening sessions.
  • Document recurring frames, fears, and hopes about AI and work.
  • Co-design an exhibit that centers workers' stories over tech-industry hype.

Case study

Alharaca — From place-based audio walks to a portable collective-listening interactive experience: prototyping Ciudad Perdida across Latin America and Germany.

Alharaca — Ciudad Perdida collective-listening prototype

Counter-narrative analysis

Decode platform narratives to strengthen labor messaging

Synthesize social media discourse on labor rights, then identify narrative patterns that help craft messaging to counter dominant “big tech” frames.

  • Collect posts and comments across platforms where labor stories circulate.
  • Tag authoritarian, corporate, and solidarity-oriented narrative devices.
  • Test counter-messages that resonate with local digital-rights contexts.

Case study

Tunisia Digital Democracy Partnership — Decoding Authoritarian Narratives in the Algorithmic Age.

TDDP — Decoding Authoritarian Narratives in the Algorithmic Age

Activist campaigns

Campaign against poor labor practices on social media

Activists craft clear messaging and social media campaigns that name harmful labor practices and offer actionable solidarity—not abstract AI panic.

  • Anchor posts in concrete harms: wages, safety, surveillance, dismissal.
  • Use serial storytelling (e.g. comic or episodic formats) to sustain attention.
  • Pair calls to action with offline organizing and mutual aid.

Case study

IIRESODH — The Eternaut Effect — narrative toolkit for labor and social justice campaigns.

IIRESODH — The Eternaut Effect & Toolkit

Human-centered labor messaging

Minimize jargon; narrate resistance in human terms

Labor movements can strip algorithmic jargon from public messaging and foreground human rights, dignity, and lived experience—especially under surveillance-heavy working conditions.

  • Replace “model,” “pipeline,” and “optimization” with plain language about control.
  • Highlight who profits and who bears risk when AI is deployed at work.
  • Coordinate multi-platform campaigns with consistent human-rights framing.

Case study

Derechos Digitales — Narrating Resistance: social media campaigns on surveillance and human rights in Latin America (with accompanying slide deck).

Derechos Digitales — Narrating Resistance (Latin America) & slide deck

Community guardrail: Narrative work should be accountable to the workers and communities whose stories are told—co-design methods, not extractive storytelling.