Undersea Escapades and Courtroom Drama
Dear Reader,
We can’t talk about this month in tech without addressing the chaos that has engulfed OpenAI over the last few days, with the ouster of co-founder CEO, Sam Altman, the subsequent mutiny by the company’s employees and senior leadership in response, Microsoft’s attempt to poach the talent, and Altman’s eventual reinstatement into OpenAI along with a new board. Most ‘what-happened’ accounts seem to trace the ultimate cause to a tension between OpenAI’s nonprofit board, and the increasingly market-centric logic that has been shaping the company's operations off late. Indeed, it is even a little heartening to see such tangible contestation between the impulse to move slowly and responsibly with this new technology and the capitalist urge to aggressively innovate and monetize. Unfortunately, the fall out of these events makes it clear that Big Tech insiders are determined to hold fealty to the profit motive.
We see the same tension manifest itself in legislative efforts. This month, US President Joe Biden finally issued an executive order to regulate AI within the US. Seeking to appease everyone, from social critics to Silicon Valley CEOs, the content of this order was widely seen as convoluted, with severe limitations to what it can achieve. How it will be implemented will reveal where the consensus really lies amongst American policymakers. On the other side of the world, China too announced a global AI governance initiative that would seek to help developing countries build vital AI capacities whilst also ensuring that we move towards a ‘people-centered AI’ for the benefit of human progress. Here again, China sought to strike a balance between boosting its own industry and influence in the sector, whilst also setting guardrails on how the technology evolves. Indeed, this tension is perhaps most acute for the nations of the Global South, who must also contend with the important question of sovereignty, while also negotiating the challenges of potentially being left behind in a crucial technological paradigm shift. Likely responding to such pressure, Thailand has just announced a partnership with Microsoft to shape its digital transformation and AI-powered development. In the continued absence of more equitable avenues to pursue, it is likely that other countries too will soon be seeking the favor of Big Tech giants in order to keep abreast of the AI revolution.
Finally, in other news, this month saw Argentina’s platform workers receive a strong boost, as the country’s Federal Public Revenue Administration penalized dominant platforms for denying workers their due. This resulted in significant fines for the companies and a potential follow-up ruling asserting that nearly 300,000 delivery drivers ought to be considered as formal employees.
Moving to our current issue, this month on DataSyn, we bring you two pieces that probe into the current juncture of Big Tech power from different vantage points. Our first piece takes stock of Meta’s 2Africa undersea cable, and the less-than-philanthropic agenda that lurks beneath its efforts to expand connectivity across the African continent. Our second piece contextualizes the recent antitrust cases filed against Google, Amazon, and Microsoft by analyzing the evolution of litigation against Big Tech and the lessons it holds for the current moment.
The DataSyn Team
THE BIG EXCESS
Decoding Meta’s Infrastructural Turn in Africa: Access with Strings
Guy Hoskins
What are the new power relations and dependencies that emerge when private actors build and own key undersea cable networks providing access and connectivity for future generations of internet users in a continent like Africa? Guy Hoskins unpacks the difficult trade-offs and complicated prospects of these developments.
Read on.
THE POLICY TABLE
The Evolution of Big Tech Litigation
Shreeja Sen & Eshani Vaidya
As the current wave of litigation challenging Big Tech power heats up, it is an opportunity to contextualize how new developments figure into the larger history of litigation attempts and what’s different about the current moment. Sheeja Sen and Eshani Vaidya do just that, as they chart this history from the late 1990s to today.
Read on.
The Sins & Synergies Lounge
With the proliferation of AI and digital technologies, the exorbitant resource costs of expansion are already posing difficult questions about sustainability. This has come to the fore of public discussion in Latin America, where investments in huge water-hungry data centers are running parallel to devastating droughts. Check out this article from Mongabay, that tracks these public disputes as they play out in Uruguay and Chile.
As we reckon with the wider ecological balance that the digital economy is embedded in, the need of the hour is a deep reflection on how it can be remodeled to better address the balance with the natural world. To this end, have a look at Surisendo’s report exploring practices of ‘digital communality’, which seeks an approach to the digital technology life cycle that can be articulated with the precepts of permaculture and communality.
The recent trial and sentencing of Sam Bankman-Fried marks a culminating point in the staggering implosion of the crypto-sphere over the last couple of years. Tune in to this episode of the ‘Tech Won’t Save Us’ podcast, where Paris Marx and Jacob Silverman dissect the trial, the death of crypto, and important lessons to draw for future hype cycles in Silicon Valley.
The struggle for digital sovereignty within today’s deeply monopolized tech space is nearly ubiquitous. Indeed, a good way to glean the extent of the problem is to observe the ways in which even regions like the EU are having to grapple with it. Read this essay, where Filippo Gualtiero Blancato critically analyzes the strategies that Europe has deployed in seeking independence within the field of cloud computing.
Online gendered violence is increasingly — and rightfully — becoming an important subject of deliberation within courtrooms across the world. However, given the incipient legal discourse around it, there are scarce resources for judges, lawyers, and researchers who lack familiarity with the contours of the problem to be able to engage with it comprehensively. As a step towards changing this, check out IT for Change’s ‘Judicial Resource Guide on Forging a Survivor-Centric Approach to Online Gender-Based Violence’.
Post-script
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