Governable Stacks against Digital Colonialism

Eaten by the Internet

This book makes internet infrastructure visible as a force of political power, which is transforming the social world, from the bottom up—through fifteen chapters contributed by a global set of researchers, activists, and techies. We are living a unique moment: internet technologies are the default infrastructure for society, not just how we communicate but also how we organise our social life, politics, and economy, all the way down to our material environments, like cities. Our world is eaten by the internet. This means that those who control the internet control the bounds of public speech, economic production, social cohesion, and politics, making its infrastructure a core political terrain in the networked age. The book’s chapters cover a wide set of topics, spanning from the global politics of content moderation by internet infrastructure to the colonialism inherent in the race to plug the moon, from the harms wrought by blockchain companies in rural America to the particularities of online censorship across Asia. The chapters take on thorny topics, discussing power consolidation in the advertisement and cloud industry, the role of internet infrastructure in the war in Ukraine, and tech’s environmental impact—amongst others. In doing so, this book roots contemporary technology debates in the politics of internet infrastructure and urges us to ask how can we ensure our infrastructures sustain us, rather than consume us?

Interoperable Sovereignty: The Democratic Alternative to Digital Authoritarianism

A Democratic Architecture for the Digital Age Digital sovereignty has become a central concern for governments worldwide, yet its meaning remains contested. Too often it is framed as...

'It's digital colonialism': how Facebook's free internet service has failed its users

Free Basics, built for developing markets, focuses on ‘western corporate content’ and violates net neutrality principles, researchers say

Historical pragmatism and the internet

This article argues that the literature describing the internet revolution in the 1990s was characterized by the rhetoric of the technological sublime. This rhetoric suffered from three fatal flaws: (1) it was not sufficiently grounded in the historical development of technology; (2) it viewed the internet in isolation, failing to consider the wider technological context; and (3) it failed to examine the internet in view of the social, economic, religious and political circumstances of its users. Several examples from history are cited, demonstrating that changes in various systems for the production, dissemination and preservation of cultural information both border and deborder the world. The article suggests that if internet researchers take a pragmatic, historically grounded approach, they will discover that the introduction of internet technology can be seen to have similar consequences. While the technology overcomes many boundaries (of space and time, politics and economics), other social borders may be created at the same time. It is easier to see old boundaries coming down than to see new ones being erected. Rather than being swept by utopian or dystopian enthusiasms, the article insists that the really interesting discoveries are to be made in locating the subtle social shifts taking place, relatively unnoticed, as a consequence of technological change.

Fast Capitalism | Mavs Open Press Open Access Journals | University of Texas at Arlington

Fast Capitalism is an academic journal aimed at describing the current moment of capitalism. We publish peer reviewed scholarship and essays about the impact of rapid information and communication technologies on self, society and culture in the 21st century. Our authors examine how heretofore distinct social institutions, such as work and family, education and entertainment, have blurred to the point of near identity in an accelerated, post-Fordist stage of capitalism. This makes it difficult for people to shield themselves from subordination and surveillance. The working day has expanded; there is little down time anymore. People can 'office' anywhere, using laptops and cells to stay in touch. But these invasive technologies that tether us to capital and control can also help us resist these tendencies. People use the Internet as a public sphere in which they express and enlighten themselves and organize others; information technologies afford connection, mitigate isolation, and even make way for social movements. We are convinced that the best way to study an accelerated media culture and its various political economies and existential meanings is dialectically, with nuance, avoiding sheer condemnation and ebullient celebration. We seek to shape these new technologies and social structures in democratic ways. We look at technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI), global flows, political economy, culture and cultural studies, social theory, political theory, intersectionality, and the envionrment.

Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality

The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending

The Case for Open Sovereignty in a Fragmenting Internet

Once, the Internet promised to dissolve borders. It was humanity’s great experiment in connection — a place where ideas, innovation, and communities could move freely, unburdened by geography or...

Power in the Age of the Feudal Internet - CoLab

PROPOSITION

Digital Sovereignty

Digital sovereignty has a bad reputation. In internet governance circles, sovereignty is considered awkward enough to be referred to by as the "s-word." It is often associated with misguided attempts at returning to the era of national champions, like building a French search engine or a European Google, or worse with the eternal boogeyman that is the "splinternet." It doesn't have to be this way!

Implicit Feudalism — Rushkoff Archive

Too many of us think it doesn’t matter when a platform like X/Twitter has a single, all-powerful owner. Most of our online worlds are simply run by what we hope are benevolent dictators. After all, we figure, if we don’t like what they’re doing or allowing, we can just leave, right? But in most cases we’re just jumping from one rich dude’s idea for how the world should be to another rich dude’s idea for how the world should be.

Thoughts on Cyberpositionality: The Construction of Digital Communities in Digital Spaces, Damien Patrick Williams

I found Rebecca Monteleone, Martin Perez Comisso, and Elma Hajric’s “Cyberpositionality: Sociotechnical Location in the Digital Age” (2024) to be an extremely timely and important article which can…

Fractured reality

The report examines the evolving impact of digital technologies on European democracy. In an era of a global struggle to control the information space, this report offers critical insights into the fracturing of perceived realities, the rise of the ‘fantasy-industrial complex’, and the systemic risks posed by the attention economy. It exposes how platforms algorithmically prioritise engagement over accuracy, reinforcing ideological echo chambers and amplifying mis- and disinformation that erode democratic resilience. The report highlights how structural incentives and foreign control of the most important players in the information space undermine information integrity, collective knowledge and civic discourse. In response, the report presents a number of recommendations from fostering alternative public spaces and crowd-sourced knowledge systems to reforming business models, restoring user agency, and advancing EU digital sovereignty through decentralised infrastructure

Sovereignty and Landscape | Simon Wardley | 15 comments

X : What is digital sovereignty? Me : I was asked that question by some friends within Government at the beginning of this month. I know some have been working on the idea, which is very encouraging, but I gave my tuppence worth of a definition. "Digital sovereignty is a country's ability to make its own decisions about the technology it uses, the data it creates, and how digital systems work in service of its people rather than being forced to accept choices made by other entities. This requires continuous situational awareness of the economic and technological landscape to anticipate changes, maintain strategic advantage, and shape international digital norms. Digital sovereignty is achieved through strategic control over critical digital assets and relationships, extending from public sector systems to the broader digital ecosystem affecting citizens and economic interests." The key is choice. You are sovereign if you retain the ability to make your own decisions rather than being forced to accept the decisions of others. This doesn't mean you need to own the entire tech stack, or all the data but you do need to maintain control over critical assets and relationships. This can be achieved by many means not just by conflict with others but through co-operation and collaboration (i.e. all the forms of competition matter). You also can consciously compromise, accepting some loss of sovereignty in one space to gain sovereignty in another. Anyway, I quite like the Mike Bracken description https://lnkd.in/eFjzcAdr "Digital sovereignty is the agency and capacity of any organisation to make intelligent, informed choices to shape its digital future by design". I used to do a lot of work on sovereignty many years ago, so if you want to know more about my view and how to achieve this, well I have a series of hopefully useful but somewhat introductory posts. Sovereignty and Landscape https://lnkd.in/eku2X_Ea Societal versus Market benefit https://lnkd.in/eXxkCv-K Whose interests are you serving? https://lnkd.in/eAgHS5wc | 15 comments on LinkedIn

Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities

Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies--juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few--are not in the feature-sets of the software most community platforms use. Drawing on the paradigm of Institutional Analysis and Development, this paper proposes a strategy for addressing this lapse by specifying basic features of a generalizable paradigm for online governance called Modular Politics. Whereas classical governance typologies tend to present a choice among wholesale ideologies, such as democracy or oligarchy, Modular Politics would enable platform operators and their users to build bottom-up governance processes from computational components that are modular and composable, highly versatile in their expressiveness, portable from one context to another, and interoperable across platforms. This kind of approach could implement pre-digital governance systems as well as accelerate innovation in uniquely digital techniques. As diverse communities share and connect their components and data, governance could occur through a ubiquitous network layer. To that end, this paper proposes the development of an open standard for networked governance.

Rewilding the internet with ATProto

So far, many of the projects in the ATProtocol ecosystem have focused on bringing parity—making projects that replicate our existing tools and platforms, but with the affordances of the protocol instead. That's cool and we need to do that, but I think we can go much farther, and take this opportunity to challenge some of the biggest assumptions of what the modern internet is for, who builds it, and how we interact with it. This talk is in conversation with several of the talks from last year, and in I'll argue that we'll never get away from skeuomorphism until we've fundamentally changed the definition of what "the social internet" means in the first place.