| Become a member or subscribe to receive our monthly newsletter. We are back from our summer break with research/stories/podcasts that caught our attention. |
| Academic Publications |
| Dancing with Anklets: Digital Rural Governance with Big Data in China A recent paper in the journal Big Data & Society shows how big data and digital platforms are used for governance in rural China. Focusing on a case study from a national pilot site for the Digital Village Strategy, the article argues that this digital governance often functions as a symbolic performance of administrative achievement, which constrains and restricts the autonomy of local officials. Read more Lessons From the Margins: Hacking Generative AI in the Global South This publication in the Harvard Data Science Review explores the Global South’s role in the highly unequal and extractive global political economy of Generative AI (Gen AI). The analysis reveals how these regions are strategic sites for resource exploitation and digital labor outsourcing. However, it highlights the innovative work of practitioners who are actively developing counterhegemonic responses, adapting, hacking, and reimagining Gen AI technologies to prioritize public interest, fundamental rights, and cultural preservation. Read the paper Google’s Hidden Empire: Antitrust Failures and Vertical Power This ArXiv paper presents striking new data on the scale of Google’s corporate empire, revealing an unexpected network of over 6,000 companies that it has acquired, supported, or invested in, which is currently bypassing regulatory attention. The authors argue that Google’s power over digital market infrastructure is greater than previously documented, tracing the regulatory failure to a narrow approach in antitrust that has obscured harms from vertical and conglomerate concentrations of market power. The analysis suggests that this network is creating a “massive herd of Trojan horses” and provides lessons for addressing future acquisitions, such as the proposed Google/Wiz deal. Read the paper Authoritarianism in the Digital Age A collection of commentaries in the journal Dialogues on Digital Society explores how authoritarianism is being reshaped and facilitated by diverse digital technologies and infrastructures. The papers describe a contemporary reality where smart state systems, social media, and biometric datafied surveillance are weaponized against populations, recasting human rights and social relations globally. Read Surveillance in the Majority World’s director’s commentary on “Big Tech Authoritarianism” and the editorial. |
| Reports |
| UNDP’s New Governance Framework for Inclusive Data Exchange The UNDP has launched the Governance Assessment Framework for Data Exchange Systems to assist countries in designing inclusive, rights-based, and interoperable data ecosystems. The framework, developed by the UNDP and the Digital, AI, and Innovation Hub, places trust, integrity, and equity at its core, enabling nations to assess their data systems’ effectiveness in supporting inclusive public service delivery and, crucially, mitigating risks of misuse. Read the framework No Room to Protest: How AI Surveillance is Shutting Down Freedom of Assembly in West Asia and North Africa A new analysis by Skyline International for Human Rights (SIHR) details how governments across the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region are leveraging advanced AI surveillance to eradicate the right to peaceful assembly. Authorities are rapidly deploying opaque, high-tech systems like drones, facial recognition, and predictive policing to turn public spaces into zones of constant monitoring and control. The blog provides snapshots from Tunisia, Morocco, Bahrain, and Iran to show how this technological acceleration is shrinking civic space and threatening the right to protest and other fundamental rights. Read the analysis |
| News & Commentaries |
| Brazil Calls for Global Public Digital Infrastructure to Speed Up Climate Action At the request of the COP30 Presidency, a groundbreaking proposal for a Global Public Digital Infrastructure for Climate (Climate DPI) has been presented. Envisioned as an “operating system for climate action,” the system aims to interconnect data, finance, and digital intelligence on a planetary scale to overcome the fragmentation of climate initiatives. The proposal features a modular architecture called ClimateStack, which includes layers for digital identification, payments, and open data, seeking to enable real-time monitoring of emissions and deforestation and to ensure global coverage of climate alerts by 2035. Read the full document Hong Kong Plans Massive AI-Powered Surveillance Expansion Hong Kong’s security chief has announced a plan to drastically intensify surveillance, increasing the city’s network from 4,000 to 60,000 cameras by 2028. This major expansion will incorporate advanced AI facial-recognition software to track criminal suspects and potentially dissidents, mirroring surveillance efforts in mainland Chinese cities. Critics warn the expanded network will exacerbate privacy concerns and allow the government to more easily target dissent, pointing to the history of activists defacing cameras during the 2019 protests. Read the article |
| Conferences |
| Call for Papers: Critical Perspectives on Technology and Prison Researchers, practitioners, and scholars are invited to submit abstracts for this international conference exploring technological innovations in prisons across Global North and South contexts. The conference will be held April 17-18, 2026, at the Faculty of Social and Juridical Sciences at the National University of Litoral, Argentina. Abstract submission deadline is December 31, 2025. More on the conference >>> |
