







Information derived from primary and secondary sources contains bias, and as a corollary, the systems that emerge from that information replicate it. The digital world and AI are no exception. We will convene a conversation between Anisa Abeytia (C& Advisory Board member, AI governance specialist at the UNHCR and the Center for AI and Digital Policy) and Nan Collymore (C& Head of Business Development, writer and curator), on the significance of building digital and analog datasets that make cultural knowledge more accessible, representative, and accountable.
Reframing our relation to our data | Ronen Tamari
From data as digital exhaust to data as digital trails to collective wisdom.
Digital Labor Platforms as Infrastructure of Extractivism
This chapter examines how digital platforms, as infrastructures of extractivism in contemporary artificial intelligence, enable corporations to appropriate data and labour while concentrating value in core regions such as Silicon Valley. It proposes platform extractivism as a framework linking commodification, epistemic dominance, and reproduction through territory. Drawing on digital labour studies, Latin American critical thought, and mixed-methods research with Venezuelan and Colombian data workers, the chapter discusses how AI depends on precarious platform labour to produce, clean, annotate, and maintain data. It further shows how annotation systems normalize culturally specific categories, especially US norms, as universal knowledge, reproducing colonial hierarchies. Finally, it highlights how data work is sustained by unpaid reproductive labour, community networks, and material conditions that make workers available for platform labour. Platform extractivism thus reveals AI as a labour-intensive and territorially embedded political-economic system under capitalism that perpetuates legacies of coloniality.



Treating data like land — data sovereignty in the AI age - ICT
Artificial intelligence front and center at North America’s largest Indigenous tech conference

Beyond Digital Exhaust: Reclaiming Agency in the Context Economy - A MozFest Discussion on Personal Context Infrastructure and the Future of AI
At this year's MozFest in Barcelona, we convened an urgent conversation about what may be the defining struggle of our digital future: who will control the vast
Can data collectives help strengthen vulnerable cultures in the face of AI?
"Data collectives and cooperatives, which let creators control the collection and distribution of their data, are emerging as preferred alternatives to big tech companies."
A Collectivist, Economic Perspective on AI
Information technology is in the midst of a revolution in which omnipresent data collection and machine learning are impacting the human world as never before. The word ``intelligence'' is being...

Living in Data: A Citizen's Guide to a Better Information Future (Paperback)
Jer Thorp’s analysis of the word “data” in 10,325 New York Times stories written between 1984 and 2018 shows a distinct trend: among the words most closely associated with “data,” we find not only its classic companions “information” and “digital,” but also a variety of new neighbors—from “scandal” and “misinformation” to “ethics,” “friends,” and “play.”To live in data in the twenty-first century

What matters in the age of AI is taste
the case for why a curated personal knowledge base has never mattered more

The First Person Project: Redefining Digital Identity in an AI-Dominated World
Over the past days, a highly motivated community of digital experts gathered in sweltering Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss requirements and…

Data Streaming for AI: From Extractive Training to Sovereign Infrastructure DWeb Camp 2026
AI systems are consuming the world's content without compensating its creators. This session explores data streaming as a new paradigm — where content flows to AI in real time, with built-in rights management, usage tracking, and fair compensation — and asks what it would take to make this infrastructure decentralized, sovereign, and governed by the communities it serves.

Archive Argues With Itself: public AI over Democracy's Library
Public AI over the Internet Archive's Democracy's Library. It reads the Canadian government's own public-health record, cites every answer to the scanned page, and refuses when the record is silent. Open source.

The New Generation of Online Culture Curators
In a digital landscape overrun by algorithms and A.I., we need human guides to help us decide what’s worth paying attention to.

The Consensus Trap: Dissecting Subjectivity and the “Ground Truth” Illusion in Data Annotation
As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available in the Premium Edition. Click here to learn more.
