Solutionism for the Many, Regulation for the Few: How Online Media Bundles the Policies on the Future of Work in Indonesia

The future of work (FoW), that is, how new technologies from automation to artificial intelligence affect the workplace, has become such a salient topic that its framing matters for the evolution of important policy areas from social protection to market and labor regulation. However, we still know relatively little about how problems arising from FoW are framed into policies. Indonesia is an interesting case study in this respect, as an informal coalition of government and tech companies pushes digitalization. We conjecture that this context also matters for the framing of significant policy reforms. Looking at the output of several news agencies, we find that, overall, positive sentiments are most salient, showing a solutionist mindset, that is, technology is a technocratic solution to big social problems. Government-related sources (Antara) follow this mindset, in contrast to some of the private sources. For the government, we only found one exception, which is the need to regulate e-commerce. Thus, the Indonesian case shows how a pro-technology government frames FoW and how this eventually includes and excludes important areas of policymaking, such as investment, regulation, and compensation. This gives us crucial insights also for other instances of policy change, where the field is somewhat complex and usually bundles together several policy areas.