A Web of Crises: Taking Stock of the Struggle
Dear Reader,
While the theoretical conjectures of so-called ‘technofeudalism’ remain controversial in scholarly circles, the pictures that contemporary events put before us seem mischievously drawn to this moniker. This month was exemplary in this regard. Case in point, the CEO of Apple at the Oval Office, bearing a solid brick of gold as tribute to the American president, in exchange for his favor. Alternatively, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang paid a million dollars for an audience with Trump to secure a deal where the US will pocket a portion of profits while the company is allowed to circumvent export controls. While, of course, such crony capitalism is hardly new, the brazen publicity of these dealings does seem unique to our current moment, and points to an ongoing revision in the unwritten rules of power.
The background for both of these transactions was the AI arms race, which continues to be at the forefront of Big Tech’s internal rivalries, as well as of the geopolitical tensions between China and the US. Recent weeks have seen both nations face off on the issue of international AI governance, with each putting forward its own vision for hegemony within the space. The White House AI Action Plan proposed a clear strategy—push for a regime of deregulation to remove obstacles for its tech giants, and shift to an open-source approach in order to maximize users within the ecosystem. A number of Big Tech representatives have endorsed this vision already, with accompanying announcements for tailoring their business strategies to this end. Meanwhile, China put out its own ‘Action Plan for AI Global Governance’. This also focused on the importance of open innovation, but in a striking contrast, stressed the importance of multilateralism, global cooperation, and consensus building on regulation frameworks and international standards for the future of AI.
In parallel, another frontier of this race has come to revolve around ‘AI for Good’ projects in parts of the Global South. As recent reporting spells out, Big Tech has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the post-pandemic era in Africa, pushing local AI use-cases for philanthropy, ranging across sectors from healthcare and agriculture to disaster relief projects. However, as many concerned researchers point out, this flurry of investment has led to a spate of for-profit companies becoming active in the space. These critics claim that such initiatives harbor all the dangerous failings of older development paradigms, with little accountability and skewed incentives that prioritize data and revenue capture over local needs and ground realities.
Yet, as these skirmishes continue to rage, with hundreds of billions of dollars at play, the most immediate danger may simply be failing to deliver on the hype. In a major sign of this, an MIT study released this month claims that 95% of the AI pilots surveyed have failed to generate the productivity gains and revenue bumps that they were deployed towards. What’s more? There is a growing consensus that the scaling of large language models has reached a plateau, with much lower performance improvements despite staggeringly large increases in model size and computation power. This was in evidence with the widespread disappointment that greeted the new GPT-5 model that OpenAI unveiled in August. Such developments have created something of a sobering effect on the stock market, with AI and tech shares seeing a significant wobble of late. A more serious bursting of the financial bubble, however, could be hugely disruptive. According to one estimate, nearly 40% of the US’s GDP growth over the last couple of years can be attributed to AI-related investments. This provides a perfect illustration of the stark dependencies on Big Tech that continue to proliferate and endanger any meaningful democratic oversight.
Stepping away from the AI front, it is worth noting the alarming deterioration of cybersecurity that recent months have witnessed. Not only have crypto hacks cost the industry $3.1 billion this year, but 2025 has also been a flurry of high-profile cyberattacks on corporations like M&S, Co-op UK, and Louis Vuitton, with massive data breaches and financial losses. What is even more astonishing is the sheer scale of this activity. According to some estimates, cybercrime is responsible for the illicit flows of over $1 trillion annually, a number bigger than the Gross Domestic Product of most of the world’s nations. What makes the situation even more complex is that many of these attacks are linked to geopolitical conflicts and are state-backed, as recent examples from Russia, China, and the US all indicate. This intensification of cyberwarfare is making the internet even more prone to exploitation from criminal elements, because it forestalls the international cooperation necessary to mitigate the vulnerabilities of our network security.
Finally, turning to a topic that does not get the attention it deserves, a recently released investigation delved into the way the internet was affecting young people’s personalities through survey data sets going back the last ten years. It showed a significant decline in the self-reported capacity for orderly, goal-oriented action and a rapid expansion in the experience of compulsive behavior. Such research corroborates relevant studies that have looked at the dire mental health consequences of today’s prevailing algorithmically boosted social media addictions. For those of us still committed to recovering alternative and emancipatory digital futures, reckoning with this erosion of the very fabric of our democratic sociality needs to be a key part of the agenda.
Bringing things back to our current edition, this month on DataSyn, we have for you two interventions that productively engage with the cascading crises of the digital economy and begin to lay down an inkling of the way forward. Our first piece carries on from last month, offering a thoughtful policy framework for regulating platform work internationally. Our second piece reflects on a year of digital multilateralism and takes stock of where we are in the struggle for digital justice.
The Datasyn Team
PROLETARIAT MATTERS
The Present of the Cross-Border Platform Economy and the Future of Workers - Part Two
Shobhit S.
In this second part of the report, Shobhit S. follows up with a detailed excavation of the political economy of platform work with a framework for mitigating the injustices therein. As the ILO’s efforts to secure an agreement on standards for platform labor, the suggestions outlined here serve to mark out an ambitious set of goals that advocacy efforts ought to mobilize towards.
Read on.
DIGITAL DISSENT
Claiming the Zone of Productive Discomfort
Susan Sreemala in conversation with Nandini Chami
Extending our explorations from last month, the aftermath of this year’s WSIS+20 High-Level Event is an opportune moment to reflect on a year that has seen significant developments in multilateral dialogue around the digital economy. Susan Sreemala caught up with Nandini Chami for a substantive debrief on WSIS, the GDC, and the future of digital justice on the international stage.
Read on.
The Sins & Synergies Lounge
This August saw the release of GPT-5 by OpenAI. Check out Brian Merchant’s commentary that sets up the stakes of this moment of clarity for the AI industry.
Also, check out this timely article that locates tech hype as a political phenomenon and the exceptional hype studies project that informs it.
This month also saw a surprising revelation from Google on the energy consumed by an AI prompt, the first time a Big Tech firm has offered such a peek behind the curtains. Read this thoughtful analysis by Casey Crownheart on what this report offers, what it willfully omits, and the pressing need for a standardized AI energy score.
Don’t miss this lucid piece by Emile P. Torres on Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s project of digital eugenics and its anti-humanist ideological underpinnings.
Tune into the ‘Tech Won’t Save Us’ podcast in conversation with Dan McQuillan on decomputing and the need for a different social imagination of a different technological future.
Finally, don’t miss Geert Lovink’s engaging review of The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto, on the elusive imagination of the origins of Bitcoin.
Post-script
DataSyn is a free monthly newsletter from the Center for Global Digital Justice, featuring content hosted by Bot Populi. DataSyn is supported through the Fair, Green and Global Alliance.
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