An alternative media platform dedicated to looking at all things digital from a social justice and Global South perspective.
Joined June 2019
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Read the full piece, “Trump’s ‘Agreements on Reciprocal Trade’ Threaten Equitable Access to the Internet in Developing Countries,” on Bot Populi: botpopuli.net/trumps-agreeme…
#DigitalTrade #DigitalDivide #InternetAccess #TechnologyTransfer #DigitalSovereignty #GlobalDevelopment
They also set out what trade agreements should protect instead: technology transfer, decentralized networks that use more domestic hardware, and stronger global development financing.
Rishab Bailey and Prapasiri “Nan” Suttisome unpack how a supplier clause in these deals could slow the rollout of the networks these countries need, and why both Chinese and Western funding come with strings attached.
The US has signed Agreements on Reciprocal Trade with 10 countries, most of which are developing nations already facing significant digital divides.
➡️ Rishabh Bailey and Prapasiri Suttisome on how Trump's "reciprocal trade" carry clauses could block developing countries from choosing their own internet infrastructure.
botpopuli.net/trumps-agreeme…
Participants weigh in on why the WHO must move from deploying digital health technology to sharing its value equitably.
botpopuli.net/a-peoples-stra…
In this month’s issue, we have:
➡️ Shivangi Rai collating some key takeaways from the online panel discussion titled ‘A People’s Strategy for digital health: Why the WHO Must Move from Technology Deployment to Equitable Value Sharing’.
We also look at the mounting backlash against data center infrastructure worldwide and Meta's $18 billion settlement over the design of its algorithms, which allegedly caused significant harm to users.
In this month's editorial, we trace a chaotic month for AI: an Anthropic whistleblower's warning of existential risk, Dario Amodei's surprise call for a slowdown, the skepticism it drew, and Trump's insistence on "winning on AI" at any cost.
botpopuli.net/editorial-sept…
September saw the Global South assert itself as a strong voice for multilateralism, with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS, and the UN General Assembly summits all drawing significant attention in quick succession.
Bot Populi retweeted
Adoption of opaque governance AI-agents by peripheral governments enables new forms of on-shoring governance by central govts. They can be a key vector for the emergence of new empires.
An essay I published @PopuliBot in Feb cautioning about this trend-> botpopuli.net/digital-govern…
Interface power -> Governments are entering the grayzone...and aren't disclosing how the LLM processing is developed or by whom.
More on the figure in a recent paper co-authored with Manuel Castells-> journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.…
➡️ Abhineet Nayyar considers what the growing fragmentation of the global AI landscape means for the Global South — and how this moment could create openings to pursue more autonomous pathways.
botpopuli.net/the-road-not-t…
Read the full issue here: datasyn.substack.com/p/the-r…
➡️ Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn looks at the uneasy alliance between the crypto industry and the Trump administration, and how political volatility, corruption, and fraud could expose contradictions within the industry itself.
botpopuli.net/trump-for-one-…
In this issue, we explore these shifts and the tensions beneath them:
➡️ Joan Lopez Solano examines the use of algorithmic systems in migration and border control.
botpopuli.net/relocating-alg…
— raising deeper questions about technological dependence, economic sovereignty, and the future of the Global South. Against this backdrop, growing skepticism toward the dominant AI narrative is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
Meanwhile, the IMF and World Bank continue to promote AI as a pathway to economic growth and advise developing countries to adapt existing technologies rather than build their own
The shutting down of Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) signals the end of an era. AMT pioneered home-based data annotation & other micro-tasks, providing the labor force that ultimately made AI systems possible. Yet, it is these systems that are now rendering such work obsolete.
