The Sprawling Webs of Algorithms and Power
Dear Reader,
It has been another tumultuous month as the world adapts to the disruptive reconfiguration of geo-politics unleashed by Donald Trump. It now appears that the hegemon's allies have finally recovered from the shock of being attacked, and are now organizing themselves to respond. Within the tech space, the EU has been especially proactive. The European Commission initiated enforcement action against both Google and Apple this month, for breaches of its Digital Markets Act framework. This could result in billions of dollars in fines, and new restrictions on their business practices within the jurisdiction. There are also signs that the European private sector is also being roused into action. A cohort of over 90 tech companies are already lobbying for a sovereign wealth fund. One that would invest in domestic infrastructural capabilities, and work to overcome dependencies on foreign companies, particularly the US’s digital behemoths.
Will this new posture by the EU also open up the possibility of alternative multilateral alliances? One hopes so, for there is a remarkable opportunity to come to common cause with forces in the Global South that have long mobilized against the tyranny of Big Tech and Silicon Valley. Indeed, any significant resistance Europe can muster on the international stage may prove decisive against America’s time-honored approach of divide-and-rule.
Speaking of the Global South, the Brazilian supreme court judge who famously banned X last year is now being sued by Trump’s media company in the US, for supposedly infringing the free speech rights of a Brazilian influencer. Parallelly as Musk negotiates with the Indian officials towards the rolling out of Tesla and Starlink in the Indian subcontinent, his social media platform has initiated legal proceedings accusing the union government of imposing an illegal censorship regime. While not as aggressive as other initiatives that the Musk/Trump duo have been enacting off late, this targeted bullying does fit into a recognizable pattern. The objective is extortion, and all available channels of power and influence are likely to be weaponized to enforce compliance. How these countries will react will be important to track going forward.
In other news, this month saw crypto return to the forefront. The announcement of an American ‘strategic reserve’ of cryptocurrencies heralding a new milestone in attempts to legitimize the industry. While some have dismissed this development as simply a form of corrupt profiteering by vested interests in the Trump administration, there are also signs that it could amount to something much more ominous. As this astute commentary lays out, one can trace the rationale for this maneuver in Trump’s larger economic strategy of revaluing the American dollar, and through this, reconfiguring the flows of global trade. Yet, as the analysis argues, such a strategy risks installing a ‘time bomb’ at the heart of the global financial system, predicating its future stability on the behavior of private actors operating in the most unregulated of financial waters. Indeed, with the persistence of volatility in prices, and a surge of fraudulent and criminal activity in the space, this may well turn into a devil’s bargain.
This month also saw Alphabet secure the largest acquisition in its entire history, having cleared its purchase of Wiz, a leading Israeli cybersecurity firm. This news should be read in conjunction with the stalemate that continues to bog down multilateral dialogue. This was evident in the penultimate session of the UN Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) on Information Security, which took place in late February. Reporting from the proceedings indicate that there is still no consensus on global norms, standards and legally binding resolutions around cybersecurity, despite the process nearing its conclusion. In this regulatory vacuum, it appears that Alphabet’s strategic calculations are well-founded. With the ubiquity of cloud computing and the rapid growth of AI tools, cybersecurity is fast becoming a key layer in the digital value chain. Thus, given that it operates across multiple cloud networks, ownership of Wiz now provides Google the levers to shape the cybersecurity landscape and the capacity to extract economic rents from the dependencies of other companies.
Finally, in March, we saw some burgeoning signs of stress within the exuberant Generative AI industry. After the blow of Deep Seek’s arrival on the scene, the turbulence of Trump’s economic policy has had a dampening effect on the stock markets. Moreover, a recent report also courted controversy, for it openly shed light on something that is closely linked to the anxieties of an AI ‘bubble’. According to the report, more than 70% of leading AI researchers no longer believe that current, machine-learning modes of development can achieve ‘general purpose artificial intelligence’. While this goal has often been presented as simply a problem of scale, one that enough data and computation power will be able to overcome, many in the industry now believe this strategy has reached a plateau. In fact, reports indicate that even the Big Tech giants themselves are feeling the need to recalibrate, with both Microsoft and Google scaling back their data center investments and raising costs for their AI services. While these companies still clearly believe that AI is going to be a major part of their future, they seem to recognize that the financial activity around the technology does have the character of a speculative bubble and one that is facing a period of volatility.
Returning to our issue at hand, this month on DataSyn, we bring you a series of critical investigations into AI and the different forms it’s taking across our rapidly shifting economic terrain. Our first piece takes a deep dive into how the current state of AI and great-power rivalry has redefined the politics of digital infrastructures. Our second piece examines the extractive political economy that digital technology has brought to the music industry. Our third feature tracks the incursion of algorithms and platforms in the healthcare sector and the ways in which this process rewrites the implicit norms of our social contract. Last, but certainly not least, our fourth piece takes a step back from today’s tangled geo-political status quo and articulates a vision for an alternative, people-centric AI paradigm.
The Datasyn Team
THE POLICY TABLE
Navigating Digital Sovereignty in the Era of Great Power Rivalry
Sreekanth Mukku
It is now clear that AI and the digital economy are deeply enmeshed in the geo-political skirmishes raging today. What does this portend for the promising experiments with Digital Public Infrastructures (DPI) that had begun to gain steam? Sreekanth Mukku takes stock of the different digital sovereignty projects that were pitched around the DPI framework, and their likely fate today.
Read on.
THE NEW DIVERGENCE
The Work of Music in the Age of Platformization
Sadhana Sanjay
While the panic around piracy and the proliferation of free media once dominated discussions of the internet, particularly from the likes of record labels and movie producers, their nightmare scenarios never came to pass. Instead, the platformization of these media sectors recreated the problems of centralization and monopoly in tortuous new forms. Sadhana Sanjay reflects on this reversal, and unpacks the digitalization of the music industry; tracking how the political economy and structure of this new paradigm has shortchanged both artists and listeners.
Read on.
EXPERIMENTS IN THEORY
Platform Capitalism in Emergency Healthcare: BlinkIt and the fetishization of efficiency
Avantika Tewari
How can the incursion of algorithms and AI change the ways we perceive the health industry? How does it alter implicit presuppositions of our social contract, and what does it imply for the politics of care in our communal lives? Avantika Tewari peers into the on-going platformization of Indian healthcare to examine the ideological rumblings of this fraught process.
Read on.
DIGITAL DISSENT
Beyond Big Tech Geopolitics: Moving towards local and people-centered artificial intelligence
Kai-Hsin Hung
With the trajectory we’re on, techno-nationalism could lead to an AI Iron Curtain, splitting the world into geopolitical blocs dominated by Big Tech powers of different stripes. Yet, what might we need to change course? Kai Hsin Hung argues that locally driven, people-centered AI initiatives can help move us beyond the stifling grip of geo-political turmoil.
Read on.
The Sins & Synergies Lounge
Watch this critical discussion organized by the Transnational Institute on how emerging corporate elites are influencing global governance and multilateral frameworks in an era of geopolitical instability.
For mythologies befitting our technological present, check out Nguyen Thi Thanh Tra’s ‘Chronicles of the Cyber Village: Colonialism and Advertising in the Age of AI’ for some thought-provoking speculative fiction, told in the timeless voice of a village elder.
Tune in to this Sunday Show podcast taking stock of the first year since the EU’s Digital Markets Act took effect with an excellent roster of experts.
For one of the most lucid articulations of the link between the eugenicist predictive techniques of the past and our current regimes of big data, add Predatory Data by Anita Say Chan to your reading list. Also, mark your calendars for what promises to be a riveting discussion of the book on 10 April 2025 with the author joining Emile P. Torres and Timnit Gebru for a discussion of the 21st-century eugenics revival in Big Tech and how to resist it.
Also check out this report by Jess Reia, Rachel Leach, and Sophie Li, which reimagines digital rights for gender-diverse communities through a ‘Trans Digital Rights’ framework, based on a two-year transnational study of data, AI, and platform regulation challenges.
Post-script
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