DataSyn took seed six years ago. Scattered across cities and time zones, as the second wave of the pandemic moved through the world, a few of us began imagining a media product that could take on the biggest questions of the digital economy.

The problem was not that people weren’t talking about tech, or even that they weren’t talking about it critically.

The problem was not that people weren’t talking about tech, or even that they weren’t talking about it critically. The research field was by then established and growing fast, drawing considerable intellectual energy from economics, law, the social sciences, and media studies. In the wider public sphere, the idea of platforms as a power structure unto themselves had travelled from niche observation to global anxiety and debate. The pandemic had laid bare how infrastructural Big Tech had become to our social and economic fabric.

What interested us was what those conversations kept missing.

What interested us was what those conversations kept missing. They lacked a Southern lens on the assemblages of the digital economy. They lacked a line tracing Big Tech’s power back to the trade agreements and geoeconomic arrangements that underwrite it. And they lacked a vision of alternatives that did not flinch from questions of the state, of sovereignty in its many understandings, and of public goods. We believed there was room to fill these gaps. We also believed there was an appetite for this kind of knowledge among movements that had fought long, hard battles for food security, labor rights, health and public provisioning, and now found the terrain changing underfoot.

We believed right.

DataSyn’s inaugural issue came out in October 2021. It carried a spirited analysis of China’s efforts to rein in its digital giants, and of what, if anything, could be learnt from the experiment. By its second anniversary, it had published a hundred authors from thirty countries, and it has only grown since.

By its second anniversary, it had published a hundred authors from thirty countries, and it has only grown since.

It has unpacked the defining economic questions of these years: antitrust in the age of data monopolies, the hype cycles of fintech and crypto, the short-lived promises of Web3, the machinations of corporate power, and the ever-churning fictions and fumes that keep Silicon Valley’s engines running in bubble or bust mode. It has stayed on the pulse of the digital landscape without losing sight of regional and multilateral policy. It has covered milestone negotiations from the Global Digital Compact to digital taxation and WSIS+20. And it was among the first voices to truly grapple with the warp and weft of digital trade agreements and industrial policy, subjects once relegated to footnotes and now foregrounded in public discourse.

Through all of it, DataSyn has strived to serve the needs of movements, keeping a steady spotlight on labor rights and protections and on environmental and ecological fallout.

Through all of it, DataSyn has strived to serve the needs of movements, keeping a steady spotlight on labor rights and protections and on environmental and ecological fallout. It has never dropped the question of development and distributive justice; its annual May Day issue has become a hallmark of the newsletter. It has done this by examining the digital economy not from its epicentres of power but from the geographies and communities where its impacts are most felt: data workers in Africa, gig workers in Latin America, food security activists in South and Southeast Asia. This triangulation of foci and this diversity of regional voices undergird DataSyn’s vision. They make it a distinct and much-needed voice in the clamor surrounding the digital economy and justice.

From FAANG to MANGO: Why DataSyn is more relevant than ever

In the years DataSyn has spent finding its footing and its voice, GenAI has taken up all the oxygen in the proverbial room. There is no talking about tech without talking about AI, and no talking about AI without talking about tech. New power players have entered the ever-changing alphabet soup that makes up the who’s who of the Big Techverse.

Privately held companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have gone, in remarkably short order, from vassal startups to veritable giants.

Privately held companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have gone, in remarkably short order, from vassal startups to veritable giants. In doing so they have upended the first-mover advantage of incumbents, who have pivoted swiftly and are scrambling to keep pace. Even as both companies prepare for much-awaited trillion-dollar IPOs and push out model upgrades at breakneck speed, they have also sounded clarion calls about the need to slow down.

Meanwhile, a fast-inflating debt crisis around AI investment is giving bankers and markets pause, as returns remain elusive. Anthropic’s draft IPO filing reportedly shows a staggering loss of over $80 billion for the first half of this year, most of it accounting charges on the convertible notes it issued to raise capital. AI-related debt issuance is closing in on half a trillion dollars in 2026 alone, as companies move from cash reserves to heavily leveraged spending.

October has been awash with alarm over a neocloud wipe-out. AI infrastructure companies have faced harsh depreciation and stock sell-offs, and they have struggled for working capital even as demand for their services keeps growing at a frenzied pace. This is but one example. Europe has grown jittery about how much of its sovereign wealth and public pension money is being funnelled into financing AI debt, as tech investors turn to euro corporate bond markets to raise capital. Financialization being as interwoven as it is, we are, as always, staring down the face of global financial contagion.

The financial risks lurking behind the AI boom are but the tip of the iceberg.

The financial risks lurking behind the AI boom are but the tip of the iceberg. AI’s ceaseless thirst for planetary resources is proving unprecedented, and complex in ways that outrun the measures and tools available to us. In its 2026 report, the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) moves beyond a carbon-only lens. It quantifies the carbon, water and land footprints of the electricity used to train, deploy and operate AI systems. And even in a climate where environmental gains have slid back and lost political support, data centers have improbably become battleground issues across partisan lines.

There are longer-term social and human questions that are only beginning to be asked, let alone answered. Consider, for instance, an entire generation’s descent into ‘cognitive atrophy’ through over-reliance on agents for education, communication and information. It is the same generation poised to be most at risk of being erased from the labor market.

There are longer-term social and human questions that are only beginning to be asked, let alone answered.

It is my full faith and earnest hope that DataSyn will remain at the forefront of these questions and more. I hope it stays always slightly ahead of the curve, bringing incisive analysis and underrepresented viewpoints, and making the critical connections between the spheres of the market and those of policy. For someone who was part of its inception team, it has been deeply affirming to watch it grow.

DataSyn was named, only half-seriously, after Project Cybersyn: Salvador Allende’s attempt in the early 1970s to put computing to work for an equitable economy. It was a room of chairs and screens and telex lines, built to let a public plan its own future. It lasted barely two years before the coup ended it. In our namesake, we saw both irony and inspiration. It was imperfect, and it was brief, but the idea outlived the room: that technology can be public and developmental, and ours. DataSyn set out with cautious aspiration and relentless optimism about the digital as a means of equitable development.

Five years of issues have earned the caution. The optimism stays, as always.

Click here to subscribe to the newsletter today.