On Food, Fintech, and Folly in the Metaverse
Dear Reader,
Here’s an interesting fact about mazes - with but a small design modification to the base terrain, one can dramatically change the potential solutions to the maze, as well as the difficulty level involved in navigating it.
Digitality works in much the same way.
With the introduction of a new dimension to the basic structure of our economic and social activity, we give rise to a host of new dynamics that may not only intensify existing inequalities and power relations but also heighten challenges for governance.
This month on DataSyn, we explore this terrain - of new layers to older forms of inequity and injustice. Our pieces span multiple instantiations, from how an assemblage of fintech payment apps exploit worker precarity in crisis-ridden Venezuela, and how the metaverse escalates online gendered violence, to how clauses that enable data extractivism are being smuggled through a progressive face lift within multilateral fora. Each of these essays takes a stab at untangling the complex politics of our increasingly digitalized institutions.
The Datasyn Team
THE NEW DIVERGENCE
Gender-based Abuse on the Metaverse: The New Internet is Being Coded on a Toxic Palimpsest
Merrin Muhammed Ashraf
Trigger Warning – Deals with issues of sexual assault.
For all the investment and hype that has surrounded the ‘metaverse’, little if any reflection seems to have gone into the dark fact that modes of virtual and augmented reality harbor new and dangerous potential for gendered online hate. With women already subject to extreme levels of abuse and harrasment on the internet, the metaverse is only poised to make things worse. Merrin Muhammed Ashraf analyzes if the future of the internet will be one that takes women along afterall.
Read on.
THE BIG EXCESS
Platforms and the Risk of Precarity
Julian Posada
Chronicling the double-edged nature of digital platforms in crisis-ridden Venezuela, Julian Posada vividly details how novel opportunities for cross-border digital work and remuneration offer escape and livelihood opportunities for desperate workers in a broken local economy while also entrenching them in new and deeply precarious dependencies.
Read on.
THE POLICY TABLE
Harnessing the Data Revolution for World Food Security: Is a Global Public Good Approach Good Enough?
Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami
As digitalization starts to re-configure sectors, new discussions are unfodling in international bodies that have a strong bearing on how the benefits and burdens of this technological revolution will be distributed. Recent developments around the UN Committee on Food Security’s Open-Ended Working Group on Data are a case in point and raise a number of important questions. What is at stake in leveraging data to transform our food systems? What are the ways in which data inequities figure into the discussion? Are Digital Public Goods the answer, and can they be effective without a more robust reconfiguration of current intellectual property regimes? Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami tackle these questions head on, as they critically reflect on these developments.
Read on.
The Sins & Synergies Lounge
The disintegration of Twitter’s goodwill resulted in a massive spike in Mastodon’s popularity, ushering in a wave of new, unfamiliar users. Schneider & Hasinoff’s article in Noema Magazine introduces us to Mastodon’s “fediverse” model, and how users can unlearn the ways of ‘Big Social’.
As venture capital-driven fintech expands rapidly in the Global South, several small cooperative banks have been forced to shut shop. But there are also interesting models of resistance emerging in this space. Read the Transnational Institute’s report on a Brazillian community bank’s unique decision to implement a fintech-driven welfare program in partnership with the local Brazilian municipality, revealing the transformational power of community-governed technology.
ChatGPT has collectively gripped the imagination of internet users worldwide with its remarkable conversational abilities. In the Ezra Klein Show podcast, Gary Marcus, disrupts the utopic narratives surrounding ChatGPT, arguing that human-like is not synonymous with truthfulness, while emphasizing the need to build trustworthy AI.
Climate finance – backed by various governments and multilateral bodies – is a fast-growing industry, with investments from several tech giants. ETC’s three-country case study sheds light on the dubious nature of “green” financial instruments that are used as a justification for the agricultural digitalization of the Global South, often driven by the extractive practices of data colonialism.
Post-script
DataSyn is a free monthly newsletter from IT for Change, featuring content hosted by
Bot Populi. DataSyn is supported through the Fair, Green, and Global Alliance.
Liked what you read? To have such concise and relevant analysis on all things Big Tech delivered to your inbox every month, subscribe to DataSyn!