Mapping Old Battles in the New Year
Dear Reader,
With Donald Trump’s dramatic return to office this month, we’ve had a first glimpse of the volatile period that we are now entering, not least with respect to the politics of digital technology. Indeed, the oligarchs of Silicon Valley all had front-row seats at the inauguration, and have been quick to offer their platforms as prime vehicles for Trump’s divisive agenda. Mark Zuckerburg has announced a ‘liberalization’ of content-moderation policies across Meta’s different outlets, appeasing the MAGA faithful; the likes of Sundar Pichai and Jeff Bezos have already made conciliatory openings. As for Elon Musk, he’s secured himself a place in the president’s inner circle and is now mobilizing his reach on X to meddle in the political affairs of other nations, showering support on the far-right in Germany and the UK. Rumor has it, even Trump’s stalling of the TikTok ban may only be to facilitate a sale to Musk himself, further consolidating a hold on the channels of contemporary political discourse. If there was ever any doubt, it should now be clear that the digital reconfiguration of our media landscapes and the growing conquests of right-wing populism go hand in hand.
The geopolitical thrust of Trump 2.0 is likely to prioritize safeguarding the American tech sector, even against its allies. To this end, Europe’s digital sovereignty ambitions seem already to have come under fire. In response to the aggressive rhetoric that has been on display in recent weeks, the EU appears to have been forced into a defensive posture. Reports indicate that it is already re-assessing its clampdown of Big Tech under the Digital Markets Act and may significantly pull back from decisive intervention. Yet, given the prolonged economic stagnation that the bloc has been suffering, such a capitulation would risk an even greater explosion of internal political tensions. Whether this danger provides an impetus for the EU to break from its fealty to US policy remains to be seen. Similarly, it is worth tracking how digital sovereignty projects across the Global South are going to be impacted in the coming years.
Meanwhile, another development that seems to have transpired around the new Trump administration is a concerted renewal of the crypto industry. With a public promise to champion the technology, Trump has already sent Bitcoin blazing to new heights and is regenerating interest in the future of blockchain. Here too, the developing world remains a key site of action. For reeling from its many scandals, that is where the industry has been incubating away from the limelight. Now, places like Indonesia have become major - and lucrative - ‘Web3’ hubs, while others like Argentina are seeing crypto initiatives prey on the vulnerable and marginalized in the midst of economic crisis.
The politics around such developments is heating up, as countries across the South become more assertive along the full spectrum of the digital-value chain. Just this month, for instance, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) initiated criminal proceedings against Apple for relying on conflict minerals; Thailand cracked down on over a thousand illicit bitcoin farming operations, and India’s competition authority introduced new restrictions on Meta’s use of personal data.
Finally, as the latest edition of the International Governance Forum wrapped up in late December, we saw debates start to gain steam for one of the major multilateral developments of 2025: the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) +20 Review. The original WSIS summit erected the framework that has shaped international cooperation around internet governance over the last two decades. The stakes are high with this year’s review, particularly for solidifying the original people-centric vision of the information society that the summit has long been heralded for. The future of multistakeholderism, the persistence of the digital divide, global governance of AI, the implementation of the Global Digital Compact, everything is on the agenda, and it will require a concerted effort to ensure that voices of the majority world figure into the outcome of this process. We shall seek to cover these issues and amplify important currents of advocacy in the months to come.
Coming back to the edition at hand, this month on DataSyn, we have a series of dispatches from different parts of the Global South. Each surveying a key facet of our contemporary digital sphere, and its excesses. Our first piece looks to adapt social reproduction theory to the platform era. Our second piece, drawing on cases from Latin America, looks at the way digital media and democracy interact in peripheral countries. Last but not least, our third piece delves into the incursions of digitalization into the Indian education system, and its acceleration of profit-driven models therein.
The DataSyn Team
EXPERIMENTS IN THEORY
The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Gig Worker: An Interview
Nandini Chami and Anuradha Ganapathy
Feminist critiques of capitalism have always foregrounded the ways in which forms of accumulation are parasitic on the unpaid, ‘reproductive’ labor of women. Yet, how does the intermediation of platforms further complicate this picture? In their new paper, Anuradha Ganapathy, Nandini Chami, and Sonakshi Agarwal creatively extend social reproduction theory to account for the subterranean gender dynamics and the political economy of gig work. We caught up with some of the authors to learn more about their findings.
Read on.
THE POLICY TABLE
The Challenges of Digitization and Democracy in Peripheral Countries
Eduardo Carrillo
With Romania’s recent annulment of national elections on the basis of mass disinformation, concerns over digital media and democracy have only deepened. Yet, the problems here - and so, also our purported design of solutions - cannot be conceived in blanket terms. As Eduardo Carrillo argues, nations in the Global South are uniquely vulnerable to the circuits of disinformation, and one needs tailored interventions to address these imbalances.
Read on.
THE BIG EXCESS
Just-in-Time Knowledge: Digital Technology and The Neoliberal Transformation of Indian Education
Avantika Tewari
The Indian education sector, still recovering from the pandemic, deeply unequal, and chronically under-resourced, now confronts the forces of platformization at their most disruptive. Avantika Tewari brings a critical lens to bear on this ongoing dynamic, drawing crucial lessons on the hazards of datafied learning, especially when placed in the service of capitalist accumulation.
Read on.
The Sins & Synergies Lounge
On the razor’s edge of a second Trump presidential term, tune into this important conversation on the future of anti-trust regulation in the US with Lina Khan, in the final days of her leadership in the FTC. With the increasingly regressive politics of social media giants on open display in the US, also stop by Jason Koebler’s compelling case for decentralized social media.
2024 saw Big Tech make ambitious promises to reduce its carbon footprint through market-based climate change responses such as carbon trading schemes. Journalist Daniel Plafker’s investigative documentary on DW’s Planet A draws attention to the impact of one such project in Kenya on the rights of indigenous, pastoral, and nomadic communities.
Exploring the wasteful corollary to Moore’s law, read Timothy Erik Ström’s thoughtful excavation of the colossal waste generated by cybernetic capitalism.
This Machine Kills Podcast's host Jathan Sadowski’s latest book The Mechanic and the Luddite, offers an accessible entry into technological capitalism. Listen to this conversation on the Tech Won’t Save Us Podcast with Sadowski on the critical tools needed to reckon with the material and moral implications of this deep relationship between technology and capitalism.
At the start of the new year, have a look at the Montreal AI Ethics Institute’s roundup of the defining moments for responsible AI in 2024.
And if you haven’t checked it out already, explore the growing repository of Better Images of AI that provides important alternative and inclusive representations of AI, sans sci-fi sensationalism!
Post-script
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