DRAPAC26 brought together advocates, technologists, researchers, and civil society leaders from across Asia-Pacific. The conference took place from 8–10 June 2026 in Bonifacio Global City, Metro Manila.
Attending DRAPAC for the first time, one provocation from the opening panel stayed with me:
We’re not patient zero in the narrative of technological advancement.
We’re forced to adapt, rapidly. Technology—especially AI—is often framed as a zero-sum game. Take it, or be left behind.
But this framing ignores a more important question: who gets to shape these technologies in the first place? Our digital infrastructure does not emerge naturally. It is built by people, institutions, and companies with power. If we only discuss adaptation, we miss the politics embedded in its design, governance, and deployment.
So it’s important for us first to understand this dynamic. This is echoed by one of the speakers in Plot Twist session, Carl Joe, who asked how well we understood technology and AI in the first place. And he didn’t mean only the binaries or algorithmic elements. He also meant these seemingly invisible hands that somehow have imposed these technologies upon us.
In Re:Gain’s Generating Lexicon of AI, we explored how language shapes our understanding of AI, and how we can probe further questions on it. This enables us not to fall into a single monolithic lens when viewing AI and other technologies.
During one ideation workshop, my group discussed the use of AI in hospitals. The obvious reasoning by the hospital management was all about efficiency, cost reduction, and accuracy. But what happens to patient confidentiality when sensitive health information enters networked AI systems? Confidentiality is already fragile under existing manual procedures. Through this exercise, we recognized that these technologies require continuous political and ethical negotiation.
Seen this way, AI does not introduce entirely new problems. More often, it reproduces existing ones through new facades. Capitalistic exploitation, authoritarian governance, and impunity culture remain the underlying patterns. Technology gives them new interfaces, new efficiencies, and new legitimacy.
So the next homework for any storyteller and filmmaker is the million-dollar question:
How do we make the invisible dynamic and abstract question visible on screen?
Of course, we’re not going to film cables, screens, or animate electrons in circuits, are we? The challenge is not to visualize machines and hardware, but to reveal what they produce and reinforce in our society: through stories of people.
And people are inherently interesting. Why focus on cables and data centers while we can shift the lens to the data workers and moderators organizing for better working conditions?
It’s also not just a collection of woes. It’s also where resistance has happened, and a seed of hope has sprouted. We could explore more stories of how K-pop fandoms transform digital communities into spaces of political organizing, from directly influencing their bias to stop endorsing boycotted products, to actively joining mass protests on the streets.
We could see how migrant communities build their own digital infrastructure to tackle issues the government couldn’t: from finding ethical job recruitment agencies to supporting collective healing.
These are all technology stories. Yet their images are familiar documentary images: people resisting, negotiating, caring for one another, and building collective power. The struggles around technology are never confined to the digital. They always spill into material life: who gets excluded, who gets exploited, who gets organized, and who gets to imagine different futures.
If we’re not patient zero, then we can also actively shape the technology itself. Imagining democratic technological futures, therefore, cannot stop at adaptation. It also requires participation, negotiation, and the collective power to shape the systems we live with—not simply accept the ones handed to us.
