Dear Reader,
As global affairs continue to churn, this month saw sparks of popular resistance come to the fore. On the streets, major protests erupted across Europe and India, reflecting widespread discontent with the existing order. At the ballot box, too, Serbia’s student movement succeeded in ousting long-standing leader Aleksandar Vučić after a two-year struggle, while Lula da Silva secured a historic fourth presidential term in Brazil, defeating his far-right challenger.
With a series of major elections set to take place over the next six months, these developments offer a ray of hope, suggesting that people at large remain eager to affirm alternative visions for the future. Crucially for us here, and as Lula’s case makes clear, these alternatives extend to tech, encompassing visions of a more just and equitable technological future.
Such a course correction is urgently needed. Few developments illustrate this more clearly than the spate of cybersecurity incidents witnessed in recent weeks. Dubbed ‘Black October’ by cybersecurity experts in light of the severity of the breaches, the episode saw AI tools uncover critical vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language, with details of these vulnerabilities subsequently leaked to the public ahead of their planned disclosure. This triggered a scramble to contain the fallout, as automated attempts to exploit the vulnerabilities surged and institutions around the world raced to secure their digital infrastructure. The scale of the problem is considerable. Nearly 70% of websites use PHP, and the attacks threatened a wide range of institutions and services, including private companies, government portals, cloud providers and digital service providers.
While the immediate threat appears to have been contained, it comes amid a broader deterioration in internet security. Earlier this month, a cyberattack targeting refrigeration systems at hundreds of French supermarkets overrode temperature settings, causing widespread food spoilage and losses potentially running into tens of millions of euros. Meanwhile, as wars continue to rage in West Asia and Ukraine, cyber threats are becoming increasingly entangled with geopolitical conflict. Most recently, Iran announced plans to target undersea communications cables in the Gulf in the event of renewed US and Israeli attacks, potentially disrupting regional internet access and digital services. Together, these developments underscore how the internet’s underlying infrastructure — both hardware and software — is increasingly exposed to disruption and attack. Introducing the dangerous new capabilities of frontier AI models into this already volatile landscape risks compounding these vulnerabilities, further highlighting the irresponsibility of an AI industry that continues to blindly chase scale without adequately reckoning with the consequences of doing so.
Recent reporting shows this same irresponsibility is increasingly evident on both the financial and environmental fronts. Indeed, growing concerns over a speculative AI bubble have fueled a sell-off in technology stocks, while reports of AI hardware sitting idle amid shortages of electricity and data center capacity expose the growing disconnect between investment and infrastructure. Adding to this, in the latest of a series of such studies, a leading private equity firm released findings this month noting that AI has ‘provided zero measurable productivity gains outside the technology sector’
On the environmental front, new investigations paint an equally bleak picture. The power demands of the large-scale data center buildout are enormous, while water consumption and electronic waste pose cascading challenges. These pressures are particularly acute in the Global South, where resources and infrastructure are already strained. In his new book, Paris Marx examines how data center expansion is affecting local ecosystems across Latin America, with deleterious consequences. In India, new research from WRI India finds that more than half of the country’s data centers are located in water-stressed regions, potentially making an already difficult situation unmanageable. This problem is not confined to poorer countries: a major cross-border investigation by Lighthouse Reports reveals how EU rules have kept key data on individual data centres’ environmental impacts confidential, shielding the industry from public scrutiny and prompting a legal challenge over transparency.
With so much coming to light, the silver lining is that the case for greater public scrutiny and accountability is stronger than ever. The major obstacle, however, is geopolitical. So long as AI remains caught in the logic of a global arms race, governments and corporations will have powerful incentives to prioritize speed and strategic advantage over caution and collective wellbeing. Unless we can break out of this cycle, it will be difficult to reverse a trajectory that risks ending in catastrophe.
In other news, a series of WTO meetings in October has exposed renewed friction across the North–South divide. The US and its allies are pushing to reform the organization’s rules to facilitate plurilateral negotiations among groups of members, building on initiatives such as the Agreement on Electronic Commerce. In contrast, many countries of the Global South continue to resist these moves, fearing they could weaken consensus-based decision-making, marginalize non-participating countries and entrench existing power imbalances. Recent reporting by Third World Network documents the deepening divisions over these proposals, while analysis by the International Institute for Sustainable Development highlights what is at stake for developing countries’ policy space. This is an important issue to track, given its far-reaching implications and the limited attention it has received. As many civil society organizations in the Global South have long argued, the digital trade rules being advanced at the WTO risk constraining countries’ ability to regulate digital markets, nurture domestic industries and pursue autonomous paths to digital industrialization.
It is important to recognize that this push by Western countries comes at a time when much of the Majority World has already begun embracing the lessons of digital sovereignty and taking steps towards its realization. According to recent estimates, more than 100 countries have implemented major digital infrastructure projects of some form. Just this month, a series of Digital ID systems and National Cloud networks were announced across Africa. Crucially, the pathways and policy frameworks for digital sovereignty are also expanding beyond data localization. A new study by Omdia finds that governments are increasingly looking to secure greater control over computing infrastructure, AI training datasets, and model governance. A complementary study of sovereign AI in the developing Global South examines efforts to develop open-source chip architectures, locally grounded datasets, indigenous AI models, and applications tailored to national and regional priorities.
Of course, a significant gap remains between these initiatives and their successful implementation at a scale that would allow countries to achieve genuine independence from the competing technology spheres dominated by the US and China. The recent moves at the WTO, alongside the many fraught bilateral trade negotiations of recent months, must be understood in this context: as attempts to preserve existing asymmetries. It is therefore vital that all those committed to an emancipatory technological paradigm — one rooted in the needs of people and planet — come together to challenge these efforts.
The Sins & Synergies Lounge: DS Retrospective Special Edition
While the landscape of digital justice might keep changing, we dug into the archive for some pieces that we still go back to for their insight. Here are the team’s picks from the DataSyn archive:
Beyond being an incredibly sharp consolidation of the Nth Room crisis, this piece by Esther Lee really sat with me as a reminder of how little our actual responses to Technology-Facilitated Gender Based Violence (TFGBV), or the shifts we hoped would come from those conversations, have progressed. It brought home just how deeply entrenched the architecture of networked misogyny has become.
By separating copyright from labor rights, this piece reignites a school of thought that has been marginalized since the popularization of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Akshat Agarwal’s straightforward and accessible framing of a relatively technical subject makes it possible to reconsider the place we afford Intellectual Property in discussions about AI’s displacement of creative labor.
With the AI story taking center stage in the media, the politics of other important tech frontiers have receded from view. These are exactly the conditions in which Global South countries become the laboratory for the most dangerous forms of experimentation. Olivier Jutel lucidly captures this dynamic with respect to the cryptosphere and its deep infiltration into Africa’s development narrative.
We no longer need more evidence to establish the harms of Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV), but unfortunately, advocacy and policy recommendations struggle to get past this. This article brings into sharp focus what these recommendations gloss over: the political economy of online spaces and ‘misogyny-by-design’ of digital systems cannot be solved by measures that consider technology as neutral. Bama Athreya’s call to build a femisphere of content to counter the manosphere is radical, but it is the only way if we are to challenge the exclusionary and violent logics that underpin dominant digital platforms and AI systems.
Even as we celebrate and keep our sights on the many frontiers of struggle against Big Tech from the Global South, I keep returning to Kenzo Soares’ article that reminds us that not all technology development in the South is decolonial or emancipatory. Drawing on the experiences of Latin America and the insights of dependency theory, this piece offers a critical vantage point to make sense of various projects of digital sovereignty from across the Global South.
