What would it take to build economic infrastructure that doesn’t reproduce the value capture we’ve all been trying to escape? A concept paper from Holo Ventures.
The Authoritarian Stack: Mapping Big Tech’s Capture of State Power - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung
A new project exposes the infrastructure of techno-oligarchic control — and why Europe must act
Smart infrastructure, techno-authoritarianism, and the threat to democracy in Brazil
This commentary examines how Brazil's smart city agenda enables techno-authoritarianism, drawing on eight years of fieldwork and policy and legal analysis. It focuses on the use of surveillance technologies and the influence of foreign and local tech companies in shaping urban governance through opaque, corporate-led policymaking. It discusses how smart infrastructures are deployed under the guise of innovation, often bypassing democratic processes and civic participation. These developments reflect a broader global trend of “technosolutionist urbanism,” where digital infrastructure is used to monitor, control, and commodify residents. The Brazilian case underscores the urgent need for a justice-based, transparent, and participatory framework for smart infrastructure governance, centering human rights and democratic accountability in the face of rising techno-authoritarianism.
Independent Media has an Infrastructural Problem
We need to roll out infrastructures that foster public values and the common good over the market imperatives, writes Agustin Ferrari Braun.
The Authoritarian Stack
How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next
The Authoritarian Stack
How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next
Supermodular — The Collective Intelligence Project
There are many situations where it is cheaper to provide a benefit to many people all at once, rather than providing them to one person at a time. Examples range from shipping networks to public health to digital infrastructure to scientific research. As technological development accelerates, more and more goods fall into this category, incentivizing economic actors to provide goods in a massively “wholesale”, rather than retail way. This points toward greater efficiency, but also deeper economic and social vulnerabilities. It results in more and more vital infrastructure that is open to private capture and monopoly. And AI accelerates these dynamics to an unprecedented degree.
Decentralization: Worth The Wait — Open Tech Strategies | Blog
Ethan Zuckerman has a piece in Wired that says building decentralization tools is a sucker's bet. He and his coauthors, Chelsea Barabas and Neha Narula, mention the FreedomBox, which I helped lead, as an example of how difficult this stuff is. They point to a list of things that make decentralized efforts prone to failure and conclude:
Choosing a path for wealth redistribution | willowbl00
We’re all suffering under capitalism. There are lots of efforts out there to shift the world to a better place. And yet, it doesn’t yet feel like enough, at least to me. So I want to start logging what I’m seeing out there in the world, so far as fighting back. I know it’s there. Hell, I know a lot of people doing the actual work. I take small steps in my own life to help create a more just world. But I truly feel like we’re on the cusp of something different. As Saul Williams opened with when I saw him last year, we are the death doulas of empire.
How Infrastructure Works: Transforming our shared systems for a changing world
'Pulsing with wisdom and humanity... a masterpiece' ED YONG'A hopeful, lyrical - even beautiful - hymn to the systems of mutual aid we embed in our material world' CORY DOCTOROW'An extraordinary book' MARK MIODOWNIK'You won't see the world the same after reading this book!' AUSTIN KLEONEvery day, we are granted the power to travel at high speeds, fly, see in the dark, summon water from distant mountains and electricity from the sun. The systems that run our world are invisible to us until they fail.Infrastructure enables lives of astounding ease and freedom that would have been unimaginable just a century ago. These technological systems - the most complex and vast ever created by humans - have allowed us to work collectively for the public good. But these systems are now beginning to fail us.Engineering professor Deb Chachra takes readers on a fascinating tour of these essential utilities, revealing how they work, what it takes to keep them running, and just how much they shape our lives - but also the price they extract, who pays it and in what ways, as well as the threats to our infrastructure in a changing world.From Snowdonia's Electric Mountain to a solar plant in southern India, Chachra shows how we can rebuild our shared infrastructure to be not just functional but also equitable, resilient, and sustainable. We need to learn how to see these systems and to transform them, together, because the cost of not being able to rely on them is unthinkably high.
Whitepaper — The Collective Intelligence Project
I. Capitalist Acceleration: Sacrificing safety for progressII. Authoritarian Technocracy: Sacrificing participation for safetyIII. Shared Stagnation: Sacrificing progress for participation
people and governance
researching power and contestation in transnational media infrastructures
Public & Social Investments | Windfall Policy Atlas
How should governments allocate resources to maintain economic stability and ensure broad access to essential services during the AI transition?
Beyond AI: Infrastructuring the Common Good
Rather than taking AI as a central focus, this paper treats it as diagnostic of deeper contradictions. AI intensifies extractivism while being unable to deliver on its promises, and its rampant scaling of energy and resource demands heralds a form of ‘total mobilisation’. This paper proposes decomputing as a programme for pushing back against such technocratic nihilism. Decomputing adopts a degrowth framework and advocates for reclaiming agency through deautomatisation and people’s councils, in order to develop convivial alternatives that centre an ethics of care. It is a philosophical and tactical response to the wider crisis of care induced by the collapse of existing systems. Decomputing proposes a prefigurative praxis for those experiencing ruptures in the infrastructures of everyday life, while minimising the opening for an authoritarian turn or war economy. Rather than capitulating to an increasingly fascistic world order, decomputing advocates a shift in the idea of order itself, one that means challenging the idea that ever more advanced tech is synonymous with progress. The paper argues that reclaiming critical infrastructures can be decoupled from the collapse of the general technopolitical regime, and makes a plausibility argument informed by destituent power and largely forgotten British cybernetics. Where the Luddite call was to ‘put down all machinery hurtful to the Commonality’, the goal of decomputing is the infrastructuring of the common good.
Binding Chaos: Mass Collaboration on a Global Scale
The world is long overdue for a completely new system of governance. If there was ever a need for political representation or a paternalistic and opaque authority, it has been removed by technology. Every political system we have tried has proven incapable of protecting human rights and dignity. Every political system we have tried has devolved into oligarchy. To effect the change we require immediately, to give individuals control and responsibility, to bring regional systems under regional governance, allow global collaboration and protect the heritage of future generations, we need a new political model.