DataSyn
DataSyn is a free monthly newsletter from IT for Change featuring content hosted on Bot Populi.
DataSyn provides concise and relevant analysis on all matters concerning Big Tech. In an era where Big Tech has become the epochal problem, the spirit behind DataSyn is one of cautious aspiration, critical nuance, and despite everything...a relentless optimism about the digital being a means of equitable development.
The (only somewhat) namesake of DataSyn, Project Cybersyn, was a 70s public technology initiative in Chile under Salvador Allende. Cybersyn was ahead of its time in encapsulating a powerful idea – that digital innovation could synergize the efficiencies of computing for an equitable and free society. In times when state-controlled data is prone to becoming a site of authoritarianism, the DataSyn team ironically thinks back to this short-lived, imperfect experiment to remind itself of how, even as we rightly fear the concentration of digital power in the hands of market or state, there remains the imperative to preserving a public, development oriented role for technology.
This initiative is supported under the Fair, Green and Global Alliance.
Latest Issue
The Many Lives of the Struggle for Sovereignty
October 2024
This month we bring you a series of articles pitched along different levels of single juncture: the ways in which platformization affects questions of sovereignty, from the epistemological, to the regional, and multilateral. Our first piece takes stock of the newly adopted Global Digital Compact, and what it means for the future of Civil Society advocacy. Our second piece explores the important battles currently underway for securing the autonomy of national statistics programs from Big Tech’s influence. Finally, our third piece reflects on the dangers of exploitative platforms from the Global South.
Past Issues
Cornering the Competition and the Tyranny of Code
September 2024
This month we bring you analysis and commentary from different conjunctures of the Global South’s platform economies. Our first piece chronicles how the battle between app stores and developers is playing out in the Indian context, and deliberates on some of the policy responses that have been proposed. Our second piece of the month draws on first-hand empirical research with workers in Africa, in order to shed light on the novel kinds of economic domination being engendered in algorithmically mediated labor.
The Global Digital Compact is Upon Us: What’s in Store for the 99 percent?
August 2024
This month, our first piece takes stock of the discourse of the GDC as it has evolved, critically examining the distance that has emerged between its avowed goals and the specific types of measures being put forward to achieve them. Supplementing this analysis, our second piece provides a more general picture, bringing together a series of key voices from the Global Digital Justice Forum to briefly reflect on the state of digital justice today. As a bonus, in our third piece, we explore the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ approach within the context of digital platforms.
Greed in Green: The New Garb of Climate Solutionism
July 2024
In our latest issue of DataSyn, we bring you two thoughtful reflections on the ominous consequences for human autonomy that our current technological trajectories portend. For our first piece of the month, we interview one of FIAN International’s lead investigators regarding their recent report on the dark side of ‘datafied’ green initiatives. For our second piece, we bring you a critical engagement with AI’s co-option of worker knowledge, and the political questions that this dynamic brings to the fore about digital capitalism.
The Many (Digital) Faces of the EU Vol. 2
June 2024
This month we continue our exploration of the intriguing contradictions of the EU’s digital policies. Our first piece takes a look at a year of the Digital Markets Act and what it has delivered. Our second piece probes into the inner workings of the EU Commission’s bureaucracy, drawing out some of the tensions that constrict the bloc’s ambitions to enact stronger industrial policy in the coming cycle. Last, though certainly not least, we look at the fragmented dynamics driving the EU’s standard-setting maneuvers within the tech policy space, and what they portend for the future.
The Many (Digital) Faces of the EU
May 2024
In this special EU-focused issue, we bring you three articles covering the breadth of the region’s digital politics. Our first piece tackles the growing unwieldiness of the EU’s ‘twin transitions’ and the acute contradictions that are emerging within them. Our second piece delves into the resurgence of industrial policy in the digital context and cautions against the uncritical ways it is being championed. Finally, looking at the EU’s activity from a Global South perspective, our final piece analyzes the contours of its recent ‘Global Gateway’ initiative.
2024 May Day Special Issue
April 2024
This month, to commemorate May Day, we bring you two special features! Firstly, we reached out to a set of key voices from the frontiers of research and practice around platform labor to get an insight into the AI question as it pertains to the worker’s movement. Second, the latest from our Big Tech and Society fellows, we are pleased to put out a brand-new podcast series, EcoMinassat, which puts the spotlight on the platform economy in the MENA region. In addition, in a bonus feature, we stay on the pulse of global multilateralism, with a critical review of the Global Digital Compact Zero draft.
Renewing the Promise of Platform Cooperativism
March 2024
In this edition of DataSyn, we present two timely features that delve into the dynamic interplay of burgeoning opportunities and concerning power dynamics within digital realms. Our first piece serves as a synthesis and overview of the landmark ‘Roots of Resilience’ conference that sought to reinvigorate platform cooperativism for the Global South. Our second piece serves as the sequel to our coverage of Africa’s Fintech landscape, this time offering a deep dive into Big Tech’s machinations within the space.
The WTO and Digitalization: Where Do We Go from Here?
February 2024
This month on DataSyn we bring a series of short pieces designed to contextualize and reflect on the digital trade landscape against the backdrop of WTO MC13. Our first piece takes a critical look at the US’ dramatic reversal of its stance on key issues, probing into the motivations and consequences of this development. Our second piece ties the historical conflicts around digital trade to the cutting-edge issues around AI regulation. Finally, our third piece takes a step back, providing a helpful overview of the neo-colonial tendencies that have plagued the digital trade arena in recent years.
Co-ops, Corporate Elites and Crypto
January 2024
This month in DataSyn, a series of digital labor scholars from the Global South come together to review a new vision statement on the platform cooperatives movement. In addition, we present two gems from our archives. As this year’s Davos meeting comes to an end, we bring you a prescient critique of its flailing politics that we published in 2022. We also revisit this piece on the cryptosphere and Web 3.0 that cautions against the perils of corporatized innovation narratives.
On Platforms v. Publishers, and the Fight for the Right to Repair
December 2023
In our last issue for the year, we bring you two pieces that engage with some recent debates in the tech space. Our first piece takes a look at the perils of electronic waste and the corporate behavior and political backdrop that aggravates its fallout. Our second piece, riding on the momentum of the recent Canadian Online News Act, engages critically with the news content-digital platform conjuncture, using India as a case study to unpack the growing strife and regulatory concerns therein.
Undersea Escapades and Courtroom Drama
November 2023
This issue brings 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.
DataSyn Turns Two: 100 Authors, 30 Countries and Going Strong!
October 2023
This month, as DataSyn completes two years, we revisit some of our milestone essays and features from the year past. These pieces take on 2023’s significant developments as well as reflect the key tenets of our editorial focus. From the in-depth reporting of our Big Tech and Media fellows, to our engagement with different facets of the Generative AI craze, coverage of important multilateral politics, vital feminist analysis of digitality, and worker rights, this issue covers the full range of our recent work.
AI: No Savior for the Global South
September 2023
This month on DataSyn, as we continue to focus on AI, we delve into the promises and limitations of this ostensibly epoch-defining technology. Our first piece takes up the claims of AI as a tool for development in regions like Africa, while our second piece challenges the prevailing obscurantism around AI and how it works. Additionally, our bonus third feature tracks recent developments in the digitalization of agriculture, and the complex politics around the datasets that are generated from our food systems.
Charting the Scramble for Africa
August 2023
This issue of DataSyn, sheds light on different facets of Africa’s burgeoning digital economy. Our first piece looks at the complex relationships that have been engendered by China’s role in Africa’s digital infrastructure. Our second piece critically examines the current state of the fintech industry in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the many problems it continues to pose. Additionally, in continuation of our artificial intelligence (AI) series, our third piece takes a look at how dominant framings of AI regulatory discourse often obfuscate the political stakes involved, and what needs to be done to recenter these. .
The Struggle to Control AI Rages On
July 2023
In an ongoing series at DataSyn, we hone in on the political economy of AI and the GenAI conjuncture. This month, we start by examining Big Tech’s capture of GenAI and the business models it is employing to consolidate this power. Our second article explores the many dangers of this technology’s proliferation in education. In a bonus feature, we take stock of India’s digital public infrastructure and its discontents.
Hits and Misses: On Corporate Responsibility, Gate Keepers and Common Code
June 2023
This month on DataSyn, we analyze the update to the OECD’s Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct and critically assess how it extends (or doesn’t) itself to a digitalized business environment. Our essays also look at the potentials and pitfalls for gatekeeper regulation in India, and deep dive into the state of Kerala’s vibrant and long-standing open-source initiatives in education.
From Synthetic Data to Virtual Influencers: Digital Make Believe is a Real Thing
May 2023
In this issue, DataSyn zeroes in on some of the potentially transformative developments taking place in the tech sector that have escaped the limelight. Our essays assess how synthetic data can be key to recalibrating the data and AI landscape; deep dive into the geopolitical implications of Latin America’s rapid integration into China’s digital value chains; examine the rising trend of virtual influencers; and much more.
May Day: As Tech’s Fortunes Sink, Will Labor Pay the Price?
April 2023
This May Day, we bring to you a special issue of DataSyn, where we track platform workers’ struggles from Europe to South Korea, examine the fall-out of the recent tech layoffs, analyze important legislative developments, take an inside look at a pioneering platform cooperative, and much more!
The Persistence of Magical Thinking: Techno-speculation Goes After the Global South
March 2023
This month, our issue focuses on wild digital gambles being carried out in the Global South and their local implications. Our first piece analyzes the investor push to give crypto a second lease of life by targeting political, social, and economic vulnerabilities in Africa. In our second piece, we engage with the specter of the largely defunct smart city narrative and the complex politics of digitalization, urbanism, and displacement in Kolkata.
A Global Agenda for Feminist Digitality: Critical Reflections on CSW67
February 2023
In the backdrop of UN CSW67, our pieces in this issue address the question of gender-just digitality through various angles: our first piece takes aim at the limited scope of the CSW’s proposed field of discussion and proposes the tenets of more substantive framing. Seeking to critically engage with another key multilateral forum on the horizon, our second piece affirms a charter of feminist demands for the Global Digital Compact. In another essay, we trace the development of the ‘Feminist Digital Justice Declaration for Generation Equality'. We also bring to you a throwback feature for this edition, culling key insights from debates around gendered violence on social media.
On Food, Fintech, and Folly in the Metaverse
January 2023
This month on DataSyn, we explore 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.
There's no guessing at Big Tech's fortune in 2023
December 2022
In this year-end issue, we spotlight key areas and debates that need our attention as we commence 2023. Reflecting on the need to move beyond privacy as we fight Big Tech’s encroachment into healthcare, carefully unpacking the tensions and synergies between environmental and digital justice, and tracing the contours of a novel ‘digital Taylorism’, our essays deliver a wealth of critical analysis to keep you engaged through the holiday season.
It's never been a better time to talk about corporate accountability
November 2022
As we come to the end-line of 2022, an unflattering picture of Big Tech is emerging, one in which mass layoffs, dampened earnings, and plunging stock prices have become the face of Silicon Valley. As these crises play out, the need for strong regulatory intervention becomes more urgent than ever. These are the key moments for progressive thought leadership to step up and double down on the push for binding and effective corporate governance. In this issue, we bring you two pieces that respond to this imperative, working to shape the discourse in real time.
DataSyn turns one!
October 2022
To mark one year of our newsletter this month, we bring you a retrospective collection from the DataSyn vault. We celebrate the articles that have been the most popular amongst our subscribers, as well as a couple of hidden gems, that presciently explored subjects that had not received the attention they warranted. We also turn the spotlight momentarily back on our special issue from May 2021, on the inspiring labor struggles currently being waged against Big Tech. The pieces curated for our one-year anniversary remain strikingly contemporary in their analysis, and capture the kind of incisive perspective we strive for in our coverage. We also hope this serves as an occasion for them to find newer readers.
What makes a people’s (e)-commerce possible?
September 2022
Digital Public Goods (DPGs) – referring to digital products, services, and infrastructure that are publicly owned/managed – have become a buzzword in digital policy circles. But as with all good ideas, the need for proper checks and balances stands, without which, such endeavors are always at the risk of co-option. This month on DataSyn, we deep dive into the promise and perils of Digital Public Goods through an exploration of India’s Open Network for Digital Commerce. Our second piece, an oldie but goodie from our archives, serves as an apt companion to this discussion. We unpack the gilded promise of digital commerce for women’s empowerment and argue for the need to rethink the politics of international trade to actualize this possibility.
Belling Big Tech: Policymakers lock horns with Big Tech’s power?
August 2022
This month on DataSyn, we critically engage with the policy initiatives attempting to ‘fix’ the platform economy's monopoly problem. We study their underlying frameworks, gauge their potential for substantive change, and identify persisting blind spots and obstacles. Our first piece reflects on recent regulatory moves being made by the EU through the Digital Markets Act and other efforts being pursued by the US and other major economies. Our second piece reconsiders development in the digital age and analyzes efforts by the Global South to assert sovereignty within the digital policy space with a view to challenge the dominant EU-US approaches. Of course, these are still early times and the immediate years ahead will tell us how policy processes are faring to keep pace with (if not, ahead of) digital markets.
Big Tech abandons growth-first at last?
July 2022
This month on DataSyn, we try to make some sense of the present financial moment and ponder about its significance for the future of the digital economy. In our first piece, we examine how the recent crash in equities and speculative assets is shifting the terrain of the platform ecosystem and the ripple effects it may have going forward. Through an engaging interview, we also contemplate what it might mean to have a digital life that wasn’t subject to data grabbing and the constant rush to enact one’s presence within the endless stream of current digital cultures.
Why Web 3.0 can be a hard pill to swallow
June 2022
This month on DataSyn, we engage with the Web 3.0 discourse and unpack how the narratives of subversion and alternatives have been coopted to brand and promote highly speculative but ultimately status-quoist ventures. How do we rescue and revitalize the genuine promise of people-centered alternatives? Experiments in community-based data-stewardship from Latin America provide a cautious pathway of hope.
The tech takeover isn’t coming, it’s already here
May 2022
As the forces of data, artificial intelligence, and rapidly proliferating frontier technology are moving swiftly to reorganize the foundations of our socio-economic life, the struggle to secure democratic control, equity, and public value within the emergent digitized landscape grow apace. This month, DataSyn brings you two pieces pitched on the frontiers of this struggle: first, an exploration of Big Tech ownership structures lending context to the recent commotion around the twitter takeover, and second, a critical engagement with the worrying trends in the digitalization of our food systems.
May Day: Labor's moment is here!
April 2022
Commemorating the hard-fought struggles of workers in the platform economy, in this MayDay special issue, Datasyn brings you a confluence of key voices from around the world to analyze the wider politico-economic conjunctures of labor in the digital economy, as well as a reflection - drawing on our own past work, and insights from comrades - on the prevailing faultlines and issues within the movement.
The Murky Truth About Fintech Panaceas
March 2022
As investors and global development organizations continue to sing its praises, this month in Datasyn, we explore the undercurrents of the rising fintech wave. We examine up close the regulatory blind spots that have allowed some of the sector’s most predatory avatars to flourish. We also probe the concerning modes of governmentality and developmental solutionism, within which key financial infrastructure in welfare is being surrendered to the hands of private actors, at great risks to citizen rights.
Can Competition Law Call Out the Monopoly's New Clothes?
February 2022
In this issue of DataSyn, we explore the realm of competition law, and the complex challenges surrounding its application in an economic landscape that is a far cry from the industrial-era materiality within which its original principles were conceived. For our first piece, Shreeja Sen explores, if and how competition frameworks can move beyond market efficiency considerations to truly grapple with Big Tech’s data power and center the goal of market fairness. The issue also includes Burcu Kilic’s reflection on last year’s infamous move by Facebook in Turkey to enforce data sharing with messaging platform, WhatsApp, and the unexpected way in which it propelled effective antitrust action.
The Davos 2022 Roundup
January 2022
In this special issue of DataSyn, we analyze the recently concluded World Economic Forum (WEF) taking into account its historical influence, emerging schemas in the Davos agenda, and alternative imaginaries that help reclaim our collective digital futures. This includes a historical and critical perspective of the multistakeholderism model that has come to define economic relations and contemporary digital discourse by Anita Gurumurthy. For our second piece, Kean Birch unravels the profound human cost of the assetization of daily life in the service of global capital, for the urgency of political will to stop the juggernaut in its tracks "because it's about who gets to own the future and how they do so." For our final piece, the DataSyn team spent the week tracking Davos to bring you a sharp and timely rejoinder to the clamor of unchecked corporate power.
2021 versus Big Tech: A Year in Review
December 2021
For this special year-end issue, the DataSyn Team reached out to 21 powerful voices from around the world, across domains of research, activism, and advocacy to capture the pulse of change in the battle against Big Tech. Reflecting on the year that was, the team put together an illustrative essay chronicling stories of resistance against Big Tech over the past year. The issue also includes a fun smorgasbord of reading and media recommendations on technology, hand-picked by our experts that you can peruse through and savor for weeks.
From sea to cloud, a cartography of Big Tech control
November 2021
This month, DataSyn features a piece by Tanay Mahindru exposing Big Tech's appropriation of the material infrastructure of the internet, and the attendant policy implications such wholesale capture entails. It also carries Bama Athreya's article examining the challenges of organizing in the platform economy, and how women workers are meeting the challenge under a new regime of the Deleuzian society of control dictated by dominant platforms.
Will Chinese Medicine Cure Big Tech Excess?
October 2021
The debut issue of DataSyn breaks ground with two analytical essays. In the first piece, Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami trace the response of the Chinese state to homegrown Big Tech, drawing lessons for how to go beyond the Westphalian regulatory playbook. The second, by Satyavrat Krishnakumar and Amay Korjan, analyzes worker-led platform initiatives and takes a reality check on the pathway for alternatives.