The Vectors of Digital Extraction

This Month on DataSyn

In our first piece, Abhineet Nayyar and Eshani Vaidya look to map the cloud networks powering India’s digital infrastructure and identify the pitfalls of an overreliance on private actors.

In our second piece, we publish an edited transcript from Paola Ricaurte Quijano’s brilliant talk at the recent Towards Regenerative AI: Frames for Inclusive, Indigenous, and Intentional Innovation. In it, she reflects on the fatal epistemic hazards of our current technological epoch.

Editorial

Dear Reader,

It’s been an eventful month in tech politics. Indeed, it began on a promising note, with the economic strife between the US and China arriving at a - at least momentary - reprieve. The leaders of the two nations met in Korea and struck a deal that included the temporary suspension of various tariffs and embargos that had been in place over the last several months. This was a welcome surprise to many, for only a few weeks ago, it appeared that we were on the cusp of another cycle of aggression between the two superpowers. However, as commentators have noted, this truce has left key US allies - the EU in particular - in the lurch.

A recent episode exemplified this dynamic. Reportedly, as a result of trying to enforce the US’s hardline, politicians in the Netherlands tried to unilaterally seize control of a Chinese-owned semiconductor company that operates within the country. The reprisals from Beijing and the lack of any support from Washington precipitated a swift and embarrassing about-face in a matter of weeks. Moreover, as analysts note, throughout the trade war, the EU has been significantly harming its own economic prospects - especially in key tech sectors - through its continued fealty to Washington. It is hard to see how such an arrangement is sustainable in the long run.

In fact, the difficulty of its position is compelling drastic attempts to shore up its own digital industries. For instance, this month saw the unveiling of its new Digital Omnibus proposal. Presented as an exercise in ‘simplification’ and ‘streamlining’, it comprises a legislative overhaul that is intended to ease regulatory burdens in order to enhance the ‘competitiveness’ of its tech sector. Effectively, though, this amounts to a deregulation drive that will significantly rollback rights and regulatory safeguards for workers and citizens within the bloc.

Oddly enough, the EU finds itself in the kind of economic quagmire that Global South countries are only too familiar with. It would do well to learn from their experience as to the folly of its chosen policy response. As things stand, only a change in structural conditions would lay the ground for home-grown businesses to flourish. New forms of international co-operation could provide an opportunity to move in this direction, but it would mean making common cause with other parts of the world, and forging a vision for global multilateralism beyond the confines of American hegemony. Whether it will have the courage to take this leap remains to be seen.

The trouble is that these regulatory vacillations come at a time when the imperative to rein in Big Tech is at its most urgent. This month’s Cloudflare outage, which disrupted large swathes of the internet, was only the latest in a string of cloud infrastructure breakdowns we have seen this year. All of them clearly indicate the exorbitant risks of letting a few private companies be responsible for such a massive amount of our vital economic plumbing. Similarly, as increasingly erratic activity continues to occur in financial markets around AI, the hyperinflated character of asset values and the danger of a huge financial crash are now openly admitted even amongst the AI companies themselves. Yet in both cases, it appears the tech elite are banking on their status as being simply “too big to fail” and likely to receive generous bailouts in the event of a major crisis. This situation needs to change drastically if we are to retain any home for meaningful democracy.

In other news, November also saw important multilateral processes with respect to the digital economy. Firstly, the G20 summit took place under South Africa’s chairmanship, and in keeping with the last two years, the digitalization track was a central focus of the proceedings. Indeed, key pillars such as digital inclusion, the expansion of digital public infrastructures for capacity-building, and the need for more sustainable and equitable approaches to help Southern nations incorporate digital technologies and AI were all developed and reaffirmed. However, the momentum that has been generated on these issues now faces a considerable impediment. The summit concluded with the spectre of the US’s glaring absence, given that the latter had decided to boycott the event. What’s more? The chairmanship now moves to the United States of America, whose recent public stances have been anything but heartening. One should assume that the coming year’s iteration of the G20 is likely to be framed in direct opposition to the prevailing consensus, and how the other member-states navigate this dilemma will dictate whether the digital agenda outlined above has any chance of moving forward.

Meanwhile, the COP30 summit was also unfolding in Brazil, again with the US refusing to send any top-level representation. Indeed, Trump has been vocal in his climate change denial, and seeing the shifting tides, it appears that Silicon Valley is also beginning to reposition itself around the issue. Case in point, Bill Gates’ stunning recent comments. After decades of advocacy for the cause, he now claims that climate change has become too central to our global discourse and that the heightened rhetoric needs to be toned down to make room for other pressing issues. Fortunately, many experts were quick to point out how absurd this was as a characterization of recent climate discourse, and clearly a cynical attempt to secure the interests of a privileged community. To be sure, it has not escaped anyone that this shift in tone coincides with the skyrocketing energy demands that have come with the AI boom, and which seriously hamper current efforts to calibrate our economic activity to ecological constraints.

Given the stark display of irresponsibility from these quarters, it is heartening to see leaders of the Global South taking up the mantle for tackling the one truly global crises of our age. According to reports, talks almost broke down completely in Brazil, with the US’s absence emboldening petrostates to hold any agreement hostage. However, tactful diplomacy prevailed, and a substantive agreement was reached. One of the hallmarks of this being a ‘Just Transition Mechanism’ committed to ensuring that the move towards a green economy incorporates the needs and well-being of communities displaced by the transition, including workers and indigenous people. Moreover, while concessions on fossil fuels had to be made, Brazil and over 90 other countries have resolved to build a roadmap to entirely phase out these energy sources outside the UN framework. In the midst of today’s pervasive cynicism, such efforts evince a rare spark of solidarity, and they alone seek to muster the collective strength needed to properly confront the historical moment.

The Datasyn Team

THE BIG EXCESS

Who owns the digital rails? - Early Insights into Privatization Trends in India’s E-governance Infrastructure

Abhineet Nayyar and Eshani Vaidya

As the geopolitics of digital technology becomes increasingly salient to understanding how the sector will evolve, private-sector dependencies have become an important topic for policy-makers to consider. Using publicly available metadata, Abhineet Nayyar and Eshani Vaidya begin to map how India’s e-governance infrastructure is distributed amongst different cloud networks, and what potential issues this could raise in the future.

Read on.

EXPERIMENTS IN THEORY

Pluriversality of Knowledge in the Age of AI

Paola Ricaurte Quijano

An edited transcript of Paola Ricaurte Quijano’s presentation from the recently concluded conference, Towards Regenerative AI: Frames for Inclusive, Indigenous, and Intentional Innovation. She reflects on what the emerging epoch of AI means for fundamental questions about indigenous knowledge, the resistance to racial capitalism, and ecological vitality.

Read on.

The Sins & Synergies Lounge

• Don’t miss Cory Doctorow in conversation with Lina Khan on his latest book ‘Enshittification’, which elaborates on the concept famously associated with him into a sharp and panoramic diagnosis of the state of the digital world today.

• Check out this invaluable resource on Big Tech’s lobbying efforts with an investigation covering 13 countries with a focus on the Global South.

• Tune into Alexander Avilla’s riveting video essay narrating the history, philosophies, and Silicon Valley biographies of our current techno-fascist moment.

• Check out this insightful paper on the distinct interpretations of informational privacy by governmental authorities since the Indian Supreme Court’s declaration of privacy as a fundamental right, and how policy interventions materialize these interpretations.

• Looking to the future, read Kathleen Siminyu’s account of possible futures for our oral histories.

• Explore CIGI’s latest essay series, ‘Role of Governance in Unleashing the Value of Data’, which considers aspects of data governance and the value of data to reveal the complicated governance background that lies behind more technical discussions on how to measure the value of data.

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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