Talk: Who’s who in the digital era? Dependency, sovereignty, and progress

Cities have historically been spaces of struggle and defense of people’s rights. In the era of digital capitalism, the battle to protect digital rights also takes place at the municipal level, a privileged arena for mobilizations in defense of open and democratic technologies against the interests of large international corporations.

This is a key question that Cecilia Rikap addresses in the book recently published by Caja Negra. How can we read a world in which a group of U.S. megacorporations (and even fewer from China) control the production and use of the technologies that define contemporary capitalism, and how does this affect digital peripheries such as Latin America, Africa, and even Europe?

Those who accumulate the benefits are not entire countries but Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and a handful of other companies. They are the new center of global capitalism. Dependency relations cannot be described through the binary oppositions of imperial power and colony, or feudal lord and serfs, as suggested by concepts like “digital colonialism” and “techno-feudalism.”

Today, dependency instead means a web of complicities, tensions, and hierarchies. Who are the local accomplices of digital dependency? If attempts to build digital sovereignty often fail in the face of these corporations’ scale and power, what roadmap can communities and organizations adopt to ensure that digitalization in Barcelona is fair, equitable, and sustainable?

This debate allows us to delve deeper into the action lines defined in the Pact for Digital Rights and Democratic Technologies, which aims to establish Barcelona as a leading municipality in defending the United Nations Open Source Principles.

Organized by: Canòdrom.
In collaboration with: Caja Negra.