[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are it behooves you. This HR Reader is about the creeping dangers we are exposed to and about building a backbone for a resilient digital rights movement. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
1. Importantly, data justice should be understood as a political and ongoing process –a site of contestation over the infrastructure, the power imbalances and the meaning of existing communication systems. Advancing this agenda demands the articulation of well-founded critiques, of solid technical analyses and of matching redressal proposals together with an ethical and political commitment to change through community mobilization to place the needed demands. Within this context, the ethico-political digital ecosystem is not merely a conceptual model –it is a strategic tool and an invitation to co-design public policies grounded in care, equity, and democratic participation.
2. The following are some of the key challenges that must be addressed:
- Persistent power asymmetries between states, corporations, and civil society in data governance;
- opaque multistakeholder arrangements that bypass democratic control and
accountability;
- absence of redistributive mechanisms to ensure digital innovations serve historically marginalized populations;
- technological dependency in the countries rendered poor that reinforces neo-colonial dynamics and limits local autonomy;
- techno-solutionist narratives that obscure structural inequalities and displace
community-based alternatives;
- limited institutional capacity and digital literacy within public systems, particularly in parliaments, local governments, and line ministries;
- the ecological footprint of digital technologies –especially AI and large-scale data systems– that contribute to environmental degradation and climate impacts disproportionately affecting marginalized communities in both the poor and the rich countries. (Joyce Souza Maldonado, et al)
3. The ongoing political and cultural battles in the social media do not yet create a large enough force among the working classes to bring about change. They often either radicalize or paralyze workers and can lead them down unproductive paths. To stand still given this state of affairs is to lose: the social media simply have to become more of a winning battleground for social change! (Alvaro Garcia Linera)
4. Acts of resistance against oppression are increasingly enacted in the internet, but only “by bytes isolatedly dancing in the social media” across the world. The powers–that–be have understood this, so far, as not yet being a threatening scenario for them, but they are actively trying to control it before ‘it gets out of hand’. The social movements’ ability to offer a coordinated defense of human rights (HR) is hampered by those who control “the fiber and copper cables that circle the globe”. Public interest civil society organizations in the Global Majority face myriad challenges as they try to protect the digital ecosystem upon which many of our HR have come to depend.*
*: Not to forget: “Everyone has the right, individually and in association with others, to develop and discuss new human rights ideas and principles and to advocate their acceptance…” (Article 7, UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders).
Building a backbone for a resilient digital rights movement requires the patient development of connections, both personal and professional
5. Beyond traditional approaches, such as creating long-term endowments, the field of digital rights needs to develop mechanisms to create a footprint that better matches that of the multinational companies it seeks to challenge and matches the climate crisis it seeks to avert, as well as the spread of fascism it seeks to counteract. This approach implies setting up time for convening and promoting shared learning platforms, as well as committing to trust-building processes that enable diverse claim holders to function as a coherent whole rather than a collection of uncoordinated (or even competing) entities.
6. We must create conditions that enable organizations to support one another, share knowledge, and develop collective strategic capacity. Without this coalition-centered approach, the digital rights movement will continue to fragment, leaving critical public interests vulnerable to corporate capture** and authoritarian overreach. (Claudio Ruiz)
**: Through the cropping of data, a small number of very wealthy corporations accumulate vast quantities of capital by virtue of their control of platforms in which they enjoy a near-monopoly position in their respective domains, as well as exercising the capacity of both accumulating capital and influencing the behavior of users through their deployment of data gathering algorithms.
7. As one more pillage of what the people’s common ought to be, data are now controlled by Digital Capitalism. Actually, data are more valuable than oil. It is thus fair to consider AI as an extractivist technology! We, therefore, need to organize our work against this corporatization of information and data systems.***
***: The idea that we are entering an era of Techno-feudalism that will be worse than Capitalism is chilling and controversial. (Yanis Varoufakis in his book ‘Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism’).
Will the human rights field reclaim the driver’s seat in the social media? (Juan Ortiz Freuler)
8. Authoritarianism is rising at a time of rapid digital innovation. Technology is reshaping the world economy to the point where tech CEOs act like pharaohs. Over the past decades, tech companies have patently downgraded the HR discourse. The future has been captured by tech giants that, in their attempt to organize their cash flow, are moving from predicting the future to organizing the future! Algorithms curate content and organize their deployment specifically to trigger addiction mechanisms that reorganize your free online time only for it to be sold to advertisers.
9. Meanwhile, the daily decisions regarding technological development are in the hands of an ever-shrinking number of billionaires. The decision-making processes are thus increasingly opaque. Public interest actors, including universities and regulatory agencies are retreating allowing this opacity to worsen and to become normalized.
10. The HR field has spent decades studying and understanding human nature. Now, it must show that it can and will offer more. Human rights activists must take back the narrative of the future from those tech billionaires who believe that building the future is part of their legitimate and sustainable business model.
Bottom line
A doomsday scenario: humanity’s quiet extinction?
11. We are sleepwalking into our species obsolescence, not only through a climate catastrophe, but also through our digital connections —as social media rewires our deepest biological drives. The second fertility transition is dropping birth rates below replacement levels globally. This creates a future where shrinking populations of aging humans will depend and be sustained by AI imposing on them a collective intelligence rather than allowing individual genius to thrive and prevail. While we will rely on access to humanity’s accumulated wisdom through large algorithmic models, we will simultaneously lose the capacity for individual heroics and creative breakthroughs that once defined human progress. The posthuman age is not arriving through dramatic technological singularity, but through the quiet dissolution of what made us human, i.e., our drive to create new life, think independently and act as individuals rather than nodes in a digital hive mind. (Noahpinion)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
Postscript/Marginalia
– A piece of trivia: 57% of US teenagers want to be influencers. …100% want to take dozens of selfies of themselves/day. (How groovy!)