Its very pleasing to see the huge swell of interest now amongst academics and those in tech journalism on the debates in Digital Sovereignty. Ive been talking about technological and digital sovereignty for at least 2 years, and the kinds of technosocial contracts we need to have between geopolitical territories (aka nation states or federated unions, eg the EU) and the global bigtech monopolies that operate in them. Until we understand that we MUST have social contracts with each global operator (Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple etc) in order for them to be granted access to the billions of data points they generate, farm and harvest for vast profit, we will not be able to create any fair system.
This is not unrealistic, it is a normal arrangement that at least some places are already enacting to a greater or lesser extent. Eg Brazil and X recently, or the Barcelona Open Data city policies. We need to ask BigTech to give back, to build open education platforms, to fund school and university socmed apps and servers independent of mainstream platforms, to build and fund digital libraries open to all. We must ACT, not mumble and pay lip service, and do nothing.
If we think this would never work, is impossible or is unjust to private enterprise, then we need to re-examine ... whether we want the ... colonialist hardcore extractive capitalism (of) these companies, or ... we want to have the will to change that. We ... have the numbers, the power is ... on our side.
I shared this on FB but wanted to post here too. Prompted by ppl like Paris Marx recent posts.
Technosocial contracts could gate #bigtech access, and mitigate the unsustainable stealing of open web knowledge by extractive #BigAI for vast profit.
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[Original post on mastodon.social]