The following interview needs a longer introduction to properly contextualize the Brazilian social movements background. I first met Pedro Burity, a graduate student and researcher at the University of Brasilia, at the Association of internet Research conference, this October in Rio de Janeiro. Pedro researches sociot-echnical arrangements and imaginaries for social movements in Brazil. He works with civic tech, designing digital participatory processes and public services for governments. 

In Sao Paolo, we attended the launch of a book of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (MTST), the Homeless Workers’ Movement, who projected the figure of Guilherme Boulos (a former activist, today a minister of Lula’s government). The MTST derived from the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement founded in 1984, is, which successfully organizes landless peasants through direct action (land occupations) and long-term organization, helping hundreds of thousands of families gain land access, establish cooperatives, and influence agrarian reform policies.

After the interview, which took place in Sao Paolo in a extremely crowded parque Ibirapuera, we quickly became friends, and I ended up spending a week at his house in Brasilia, where we continued our conversation and visited the various places of resistance of the city, such as Casa Comun – a shared space in Brasília dedicated to civil society organizations, movements and collectives that want to do political advocacy and incidency – the Ocupa Mercado Sul, and the University of Brasilia.

I enjoyed Brasilia’s campus, big and sunny, with brutalist architecture, many plants, a tragic history of brutal murders during the military dictatorship, which includes a designed place for socialization, conversation, and petting name beijódromo. The university, which welcomed us with students dancing to a concert of forrò on the roof during the lunch break on a Friday, seemed to me the best part of the city which otherwise is the result of a poor high-modernist architecture and planning ideal, one that signed a Faustian pact, trading legibility for good conditions of living (see for instance J.C. Scott’s masterful critique of the shortcomings of centralized planning, which uses the city as a case study). A city built for cars that still has a lot of traffic; where human activities are zoned – there is a pharmacy neighbour, a hospital neighboor, etc; a city that, how Pedro explains, has ended up internalizing the bureaucracy in the way of thinking of people. 

We also visited Ocupa Mercado Sul (Mercado Sul Vive), a concrete experiment in popular digital sovereignty in Brazil: an occupation and a lively space of popular culture, with music, theatre, cinema, popular education and the monthly Ecofeira in the old public market of Taguatinga. The Ocupa, which emerged as a response to real estate speculation and to reclaim an empty, degraded area based on the right to the city and the social function of property, is shown to use by Angel, a formidable activist and free software advocate. When we arrived, he welcomed us in space by counter-recording my interview with its own Iphone, narrating that the Ocupa is part of a larger network, the Rede Mocambos, a solidarity network connecting quilombolas, the Afro‑Brazilian communities formed by descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped captivity, with Indigenous and popular communities, artists, and artisans to build a “world shaped by their own territories, memories and struggles”. Most relevantly, he continued, Rede Mocambos combines cultural and political organisation with the development of community‑controlled digital infrastructure, with tools like Baobáxia, and community data centres that enables communities to store, manage and share their own audio‑visual archives and documents without depending on Big Tech or constant internet access. The network seeks to build autonomous “digital territories” that mirror and protect physical territories. 

After that, together with another friend, Rafael, we visited the Chapada dos Veadeiros, a national park with long hikes and stunning waterfalls, and during those days I learned the word gambiarra, which would prove useful for the rest of my trip, that refers to a clever, often makeshift, improvised solution or repair using limited resources, something like a “jury‑rig”. A bolsonarista hairdresser in Salvador later confirmed the concept in practice: in Brazil, everything is gambiarra.

In the interview, Pedro discusses the concept of popular digital sovereignty and the centrality of social movements in political change. Brazil may not be a utopia realized, but it has impressive base of popular self-organization that came to elect Boulos – the ministro do povo (ministry of the people) as someone screamed at the samba after the book launch – which highlight the link between popular movements, political imagination and state‑level change. It also has Central Bank which developed the first successful public Fintech in the world, o PIX, a public payment infrastructure that quickly and radically transformed daily life of millions of Brasilians, especially poor. As Pedro once told me: “Pix saved us from WhatsApp.”

***

I’d like to start with a terminological clarification. What are we talking about when we talk about digital sovereignty, and what do social movements mean by popular digital sovereignty? 

When we talk about digital sovereignty, we can refer to different traditions and different strands of thought. In my research, when we speak of sovereignty, we try to bring the perspective of people’s self‑determination within a given territory. I try to think of this idea in a way that is not only tied to the State, which is usually what happens when we talk about sovereignty. We try to bring in more of a popular perspective, linked to autonomy. And, when we talk about Latin America, we have a long tradition of struggles for sovereignty and autonomy, from different perspectives. It’s in this sense that we try to work with sovereignty as a form of self‑determination.

From there, we move into the digital dimension. The digital part is a bit more complex because we are talking about a structure, about a reality that involves very powerful actors. It’s hard to even imagine what digital sovereignty would actually be. We have been facing this difficulty of imagination, of the imaginary, of the ability to create different worlds. Digital sovereignty comes in precisely in this sense: how a people, how a society, manages to self‑determine in different ways, to create its own alternative worlds within the technology we already know and within what we don’t yet know, what remains to be invented.

The entrance to the university of Brasilia.

Don’t the weaknesses of the concept of “the people” in the democratic tradition risk being repeated when we talk about popular digital sovereignty?

The notion of “the people” really does come a lot from Rousseau’s perspective, from the general will, but it has also been heavily transformed over time, not only in theory but also in practice, especially when we talk about “popular” and all the contradictions that the popular brings with it. A perspective that seems very interesting to me is that of Antonio Negri. It’s a perspective that has inspired many revolutionary movements in Latin America. Hugo Chávez himself used to say that the entire Venezuelan revolution draws its theoretical inspiration from Negri’s idea of constituent power, and that it is from this constituent power that sovereignty is born.

The difference from the Rousseauian perspective is that this general will becomes much more a matter of emancipation of people, not in the sense of a general will of single, homogeneous people, but of a diverse, diffuse people, povos, in which the general will means the inclusion of all these peopl within an emancipatory horizon. It is a much more class‑based perspective, which fuels several movements and revolutions in Latin America and helps to build what the people actually are, with all their contradictions, difficulties, and problems, but from a place that is different from the rest of the world. The Global South, or at least Latin America, has a different perspective on what “the people”, el pueblo, is. If we look at the many union leaders and revolutionary leaders we have had, that fits into this logic.

How does this history of struggle and colonialism help us understand what you’re calling popular digital sovereignty?

The history of Latin America is a history of struggle. Since the very beginning of colonisation, we’ve been dealing with different technologies and tools of oppression against our peoples. Digital colonialism is just one more form of this. Big Tech is bringing in ever more sophisticated technologies of oppression, surveillance, and colonialism. But we, as Latin Americans, have always managed to find a way out. It’s very striking how creative Latin American people are. There are similarities in the ways different peoples have dealt with colonisation historically, but it’s interesting to see that all of them managed to build their own tools of struggle from their own territories, cultures, and specificities.

It’s no different when it comes to digital technology. The Brazilian example is very powerful as a real possibility of building other worlds. And, within Latin America, we also have equally transformative initiatives, like FACTTIC, a large organization of autonomous cooperatives very closely tied to the feminist and autonomous tradition. If we look back, we can remember the Zapatista uprisings and revolutions: already back then, they were building liberating radios, community radios. In Brazil, we had hijackings of radio frequencies to broadcast communist messages during the military dictatorship. Latin America, with all its different people, each has its own way of building its digital sovereignty. And of course we will always stand together, as neighboring and solidarity‑based countries, in building the possibility of new technology that is more independent and emancipated from the technologies of the Global North, especially Silicon Valley.

Let’s move to the Brazilian case. What do you see as the interesting developments in the last few years? What has changed compared to some years ago?

I’m going to go back a bit to the idea of the State and talk a bit more about the difficulties of theorizing this “people” and of how we actually talk about digital sovereignty in practice. Today, digital sovereignty is a very hot topic, addressed by many countries, leaders, States and companies. It’s a contested concept. Part of that dispute comes from the companies, from Big Tech. On one side you have the States. On the other, this diffuse, confused, hard‑to‑pin‑down people we’ve been talking about.  In the Brazilian context, the issue of digital sovereignty has become a crucial point. Under Lula’s government, it appears in the way the government has been positioning itself ideologically on what sovereignty is, what it means to have control over one’s own resources, over one’s data. From there, we begin to talk about data, and this has become a very strong narrative, especially in the debate around regulating Big Tech, which is one of Lula’s major priorities today: regulation of Meta, of social media in general.

There are many contradictions in this discourse coming from the State, because the State is made up of many players, many figures and interests. The same contradictions that exist in the concept of sovereignty are present within state institutions. Today we have very important actors whose discourse is not very aligned with what actually happens in government. While digital sovereignty is being defended at the level of discourse, the government follows a different logic in practice, bringing large foreign data centres here, offering every kind of tax exemption. The systems the government uses today are Microsoft systems, Big Tech systems. So today, if these companies wanted to, Brazil would grind to a halt. That’s a very serious contradiction we face at the level of the State.

You mentioned that you think digital sovereignty on different levels. What do you mean? 

That’s where the popular perspective comes in. What is actually in the interest of these people? I tend to think from a more class‑based perspective. Is it in the people’s interest to have their data controlled by a large corporation, or to have the possibility of determining what will be done with the data they produce? Is it in their interest to be able to understand what they’re doing on their phone, to understand their smartphone, how their data are being used and what technology actually is? Part of what I understand as popular digital sovereignty is trying to break with this technical alienation we live with today, simply accepting what we use, of having an uncritical view of the tools we rely on. It’s about building the possibility of understanding and having autonomy—bringing these two concepts together—to choose the technologies we would like to use as Brazilians and as Latin Americans.

I usually think of sovereignty on three levels. On a more individual level, it’s about having the autonomy to choose whether you’re going to use WhatsApp, or another means of communication, whether you’re going to join certain platforms or not, and doing so with awareness of what’s at stake. On the community level, it’s about having control within a territory, within a community: running a small database, an infrastructure that enables independent communication, that allows that territory to have its own technological means. At the level of the State, it is above all about ensuring, through public policy, support for everything I’ve been talking about: support for this possibility of self‑determination. The importance of the State, in this role, is precisely to provide backing for these bottom‑up initiatives, to provide infrastructure and financial resources via public policy. That, for me, is the State’s main function in promoting sovereignty in the digital realm.

The entrance to the Ocupa Mercado Sul.

I tend to think that Big Tech platforms are, above all, infrastructures, with a few novelties. For example, they change more quickly, they allow third‑party services to be built on top of their infrastructure. But the history of infrastructures shows that there is little room for autonomy and self‑determination once these infrastructures – think of roads, or electricity – are already in place. How was PIX possible?

In terms of infrastructure, we’re talking about Brazil, a country of continental proportions. Brazil has a public higher‑education infrastructure that is free and of very high quality. Being a country in the Global South, Brazil built Petrobras, a company that operates in oil exploration, production, refining, sale and transport, which today competes with big multinationals like Shell, among others. All of this was built here, with local technology, labour and brains—sovereign technology. Today we’re in a complicated scenario, in which Big Tech’s dominance in technological terms is so strong that it’s hard for us to picture other scenarios. But we do have the conditions—in terms of education, people, territory and, I believe, imagination—to build an infrastructure that allows us to achieve this sovereignty, this self‑determination over how we’re going to develop our technology, as happened with PIX. 

PIX was born out of efforts to think a technology that would be unimaginable in the United States, for example. The way the US treats PIX shows this: they often see it as an unfair competitor to their credit card companies. But the key point is that PIX is not a commercial competitor in that sense. PIX is a public payment infrastructure. This perspective of the commons, of the public, is something we built and that today threatens the hegemony of US payment systems, for example. And here the popular aspect appears again. PIX is the result of the work of public servants. Where did these public servants come from? From public universities. Today, public universities are, for the most part, made up of women and, increasingly, of Black, brown and Indigenous people. These are increasingly diverse communities of students and researchers who embody Brazil’s cultural and technological richness. And when I talk about technology, I don’t mean only in the narrow sense of high‑end digital tech, but also in terms of social technologies, of how we organise ourselves as a community. From these social technologies, mixed with technique, with scientific and technological development, we are able to create marvels like PIX.

This ranges from small platforms for specific communities all the way up to the level at which these popular sectors manage to reach the State, influence public policy, bring in diversity. Even with all the difficulties and in what is often a catastrophic‑looking scenario, we manage to imagine a new world in which we can truly be digitally sovereign. 

Angel and a local film maker at the Ocupa.

 What are the specific conditions in Brazil that allow the transition from social movements to the government, and what does this tell us about the current relevance of social movements in transforming reality?

There’s a very powerful phrase that comes from social movements: “Only struggle changes life.” I think social movements are responsible for radical changes in how we largely see and build the world. These are movements that position themselves as actors who really imagine new scenarios, who are there in pursuit of social change. It’s from social movements that ideas and possibilities for different worlds are born. The case of the MTST is emblematic. One of the movement’s initiatives—outside the strictly digital universe but squarely in the realm of social technologies—is the Cozinhas Solidárias , “Solidarity Kitchens”, created to feed unhoused people in the cold nights of São Paulo. It started as an initiative feeding about 200 people a day in a public square and, little by little, with organization, work and these social technologies, it gained momentum and became an increasingly popular idea, a good idea. Today, roughly four years after the initiative began, the Cozinhas Solidárias have become public policy, and there are already thousands of kitchens around Brazil, feeding thousands of people every day. This is born from a small initiative within a social movement. We often underestimate the potential of a small, transformative idea. When we talk about the technology hub, we’re talking about Ocupa Lab, a social laboratory for technological innovation. It starts as a small lab, a 10‑square‑metre room in an occupation on the outskirts of São Paulo. There, people who often don’t have basic reading and text‑comprehension skills are taught how to use a mobile phone, how to deal with basic technological functionalities, placing people from these communities into the job market as programmers and software developers, and bringing a new worldview into this tech universe, which today is so skewed by the ideals propagated by Silicon Valley.

The potential of this initiative is enormous. By bringing in people with a different mindset, who think about technology in terms of how it can and should be, the sky is the limit. The movement’s idea is that these initiatives—from the tech school, which offers free courses, to “Contrate Quem Luta” (“Hire Those Who Struggle”), a digital solidarity‑economy platform that connects workers from the movement to people interested in hiring them, to clients—will become public policies, involving public infrastructure, public resources provided by the State, ever‑growing participation and ever‑greater technological development of these platforms, so that we can envisage an emancipatory, different, sovereign technology.

Popular digital sovereignty really is born from below, from those at the bottom. It’s initiatives are like those of the MTST itself, with its struggle for housing and territory, which today necessarily runs through technology. We have the MTST; we have initiatives that follow more autonomous currents, like MariaLab, which seeks to build secure infrastructures to protect the privacy of social movements, of individuals, of feminist groups. We have initiatives like data_labe (Datalab), which creates everyday tools to make life easier for people living in the peripheries, which is where the people are. 

In Latin America, we have networks like FACTTIC, an organization of independent, autonomous cooperatives, very closely connected to the feminist and autonomous tradition, which shows that it is possible to build technological‑production networks outside the traditional corporate logic. It’s these initiatives that will provide the possibility of building a new kind of technology, of imagining a world without Big Techs, a world in which we can truly have autonomy over what kind of technology we’re going to use and can determine ourselves as a technological power capable, above all, of caring for its own population. 

Pedro and Rafael at the faculty of political sciences in Brasilia.

Do you think there are some practical steps that, over the next five years, Brazil or other Latin American countries can take to curb or at least reshape the penetration of Big Techs?

Absolutely. We’ve talked a lot about the popular, but I believe the State has a fundamental role here. Popular initiatives already exist; they need support. From the State’s point of view, there are a number of challenges in terms of platform regulation. Brazil has been experimenting with innovative and important initiatives in this field, but at the same time there are constant struggles in domestic politics, because the lobbying efforts of these companies are very strong. Regulation is, in my view, the first step: regulation of social media and, now, of artificial intelligence as well, built with the participation of social movements, civil society and the broader third sector.

Then comes investment. We have a large public higher‑education structure that is free and of high quality. It needs investment, labs—including social labs—resources. It needs state incentives to create new things. There is also the issue of creating our own data centres, rather than simply importing Amazon data centres because we have clean, abundant energy. We are capable of building our own data infrastructures, without importing infrastructures from abroad or bringing in foreign data centres that pollute what we have and keep our data under the control of US companies. We need to have our own data infrastructure so we can have greater control, hold the key to that vault which is currently in US hands. Today, a large part of our government data and citizens’ data is stored in databases abroad. Changing that is a fundamental step.

In the end, you speak not only of technological sovereignty but also of epistemic sovereignty. What does that mean concretely, for instance in the debate on artificial intelligence?

It’s not enough to try to compete in this technological landscape purely within the logic of the “artificial intelligence race”. That’s not sufficient. I don’t think we should enter this race in the same way it is framed today. Our role, as the Global South, as Brazil, as a people, is to think about the possibility of actually building new technologies, to imagine an artificial intelligence different from what we have today, or even to rethink what “artificial intelligence” means to us. Sovereignty is also about that: sovereignty of thought, of episteme. Technological sovereignty is deeply tied to epistemic sovereignty, to the production of knowledge and of meanings attached to that knowledge.

To think about epistemic sovereignty is to ask who defines what “intelligence” is, which data matter, which problems deserve to be prioritised by these technologies. It is to be able to say, starting from our Latin American experience, what the urgencies are that we want technology to address: hunger, housing, transport, police violence, environmental destruction. And, from there, to produce knowledge, data, methods and tools that respond to these issues, without simply importing ready‑made models from the Global North. In short, it’s not only about saying “we’re going to build our own technology,” but also about asserting: we are going to decide what counts as relevant technology, what counts as intelligence, what counts as progress, on the basis of our own criteria and needs.

The entrance to the Casa Comum.

The book launch of at the MTST in Sao Paulo.

Welcome to our December Newsletter!

We hope this newsletter finds you well as the festive month of December begins. We write with a big announcement about our new individual membership programme, news of recent publications, and a review of some of the highlights of our year.

Support OBP: new membership programme!

We’re excited to share that our new individual membership programme is now live on Patreon—and we’d love for you to join us! Making high-quality, peer-reviewed academic research freely available has never mattered more. This year alone, we’ve released more than sixty open access books without charging authors mandatory fees.

If you’d like to support our work, you can now join one of our five new monthly membership tiers—ranging from £1 to £50. Members enjoy great perks: including free EPUBs of our latest books, discounts on print editions, access to our annual online conference, updates on open access developments, and invitations to exclusive conversations with our publishing team.

Most importantly, you’ll be helping to fuel our open access mission—just like the libraries in our library membership programme—making high-quality scholarly research freely available to readers everywhere.

Find out more and join our individual membership programme.

Here's what happened this year:

Sixty-four new books this year, including TEN in November:

Grammar of Etulo: A Niger-Congo (Idomoid) Language by Chikelu I. Ezenwafor-Afuecheta (the first title in our new series in partnership with the Philological Society).

Hylo Narrans: Echoes of Material Marronage by Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn.

Performance Research Methods: Interdisciplinary Methods for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies by Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink & Laura Karreman.

Xouth, The Ape: A Tale of Manners by Iakovos Pitsipios & Neo G. Christodoulides.

Allocation, Distribution, and Policy: Notes, Problems, and Solutions in Microeconomics by Samuel Bowles & Weikai Chen.

The Intertwined World of the Oral and Written Transmission of Sacred Traditions in the Middle East by Alba Fedeli, Geoffrey Khan & Johan Lundberg.

A Portrait of Samuel Hartlib: In Search of Universal Betterment by Charles Webster.

A Place of Dreams: Desire, Deception and a Wartime Coming of Age by Alison Twells.

Joyce’s Choices: New Textual Parallels in James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, and ‘Ulysses' by R. H. Winnick.

Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt by Linda Herrera.

And we have continued this activity in December, publishing several new titles:

Solidarity in Contingency: Rorty's Constructive Project edited by Elin D. Huckerby and Marianne Janack

More with More: Investing in the Energy Transition ― 2025 European Public Investment Outlook edited by Floriana Cerniglia and Francesco Saraceno.

Broken: Illness and Disability in Antônio Francisco Lisboa, Camilo Castelo Branco, Clarice Lispector, Victor Willing, Paula Rego and Ana Palma by Maria Manuel Lisboa.

All of our titles are free to read and download; we invite you to explore our complete catalogue.

Thank you: to our peer reviewers and our volunteers

Every year, our publications are made possible thanks to the committed and generous work of the referees who review the manuscripts we receive. This includes those manuscripts we ultimately do not publish, as well as those whose release is announced in these newsletters. This year, an incredible 150 experts peer-reviewed our book manuscripts, and we thank all of our referees for their invaluable contributions. Some of our referees choose to be named, and we then share their names with the relevant author and include them in the published book. Since May of this year, we have begun recording their names on our website and you can view them there.

We also sincerely thank the five volunteers who have helped us with a range of editorial, production and marketing tasks in 2025: Hannah Bergin, Sophia Bursey; Tricia De Souza; Lila Fierek; and Elisabeth Pitts. We are very grateful to them for their work. You can view their names on our website along with those of volunteers from previous years.

Warm thanks to them all!

Three new series partnerships!

The recently published Grammar of Etulo: A Niger-Congo (Idomoid) Language by Chikelu I. Ezenwafor-Afuecheta is the first book in our Publications of the Philological Society series, published in partnership with the Philological Society (PhilSoc), the oldest learned society in Great Britain devoted to the scholarly study of language and languages.

This is one of three new series partnerships we announced this year: the other two are Papers of the British School at Rome in partnership with the British School at Rome, which will showcase original research and creative work on Italy from prehistory to the present; and Politics & Fiction in partnership with the CAPONEU Consortium, a multilingual series that will explore what ‘politics’ and the ‘political’ mean in relation to fictions as found in literature, theatre, performance, poetry, film and visual art, and cultural production as a whole.

We are immensely proud to begin bringing this work to a global audience via open access. If you want to know more about partnering with us to publish a series, you can find out more on our website or contact our Managing Director, Dr Alessandra Tosi.

Prize awards & nominations for our books

Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould were awarded the 2025 Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize for their chapter, 'The Translatability of Love: The Romance Genre and the Prismatic Reception of Jane Eyre in Twentieth-Century Iran' in Prismatic Jane Eyre, edited by Matthew Reynolds, which shows how Iranian readers incorporated Bronte's novel into their understandings of love.

This year, three of our authors were shortlisted for the ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards in the Environmental Humanities and Literary Studies categories. They were:

Kathryn M. Rudy, Image, Knife, and Gluepot: Early Assemblage in Manuscript and Print traces the birth, life and afterlife of a Netherlandish book of hours made in 1500, dismembered in the nineteenth century & now reconstructed via Rudy's research.

Joanna Page, Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art shows how contemporary artists in Latin America reinvent older methods of collecting and displaying nature to create new aesthetic and political perspectives.

Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity, a 6-volume study exploring a single, electrifying story from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem to its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Michael Hughes was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Biography prize for his book, Feliks Volkhovskii: A Revolutionary Life, a biography of a hitherto neglected Russian revolutionary figure.

Luke Clossey received an honourable mention from the judges of the Phyllis Goodheart Gordon book prize for the best book in Renaissance Studies for his work, Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520, a sweeping and unconventional investigation of Jesus across one hundred forty years of social, cultural, and intellectual history.

And finally Sandra Abegglen and her co-editors were nominated for an OEGlobal Open Education Award for Stories of Hope: Reimagining Education, a collection of essays that challenge the status quo and offer glimpses of a more humane and inspiring educational future.

Enormous congratulations to these authors for this recognition of their fine research and writing. We are proud to publish and celebrate their work, and we are also delighted that through these awards and nominations we could fly the flag for independent open access presses: we are honoured to represent this growing community.

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Building open access networks & infrastructures in 2025

Highlights from the Open Access Books Network (OABN), which we coordinate in partnership with OAPEN, Sparc Europe and OPERAS, included:

• The OABN published an FAQ and blog post based on an expert webinar that focused on including third-party materials in open access books;
• Three authors who received ERC grants shared their experiences of publishing open access books and series;
• The OABN held an expert webinar on good metadata practice for open access publishers;
• It held two events focused on policymaking for open access books, including services for policymaking and a community event on contributing to the PALOMERA Knowledge Base.

Highlights from the Copim Open Book Futures project, building non-commercial infrastructure to develop open access book publishing, included:

• Thoth Open Metadata was nominated for the 2025 ALPSP Innovation Award and is set to release a significant upgrade early next year;
• Copim's Accessibility work package released its accessibility guide for open access book publishers, including a section on accessibility for librarians;
• Copim Compass was released, drawing together a comprehensive suite of resources to support open access book publishing;
• Copim is planning a conference on 26-27 February to explore: What's next for community-led open access book publishing? Sign up for free in person or online.

Other highlights:

• Our Co-Director Rupert Gatti wrote 'Beyond "No Fee": Why Diamond Open Access Is Much More Than Just a Business Model' with Pierre Mounier and Johan Rooryck in Current Trends in Open Science: Will Open Science Change the World? (Ledzioni LediPublishing, 2025);
• Our senior editor and outreach coordinator Lucy Barnes wrote 'How Should Diamond Open Access Work for Books?' with Iva Melinščak Zlodi, Vanessa Proudman, Ursula Rabar and Niels Stern, published in Katina;
• We published important blog posts on the topics of academic freedom—including a contribution from author Ash Lierman—and open licensing;
• Our series editor Geoffrey Khan has released a case study about publishing the Semitic Languages and Cultures series in open access;
• We have also given various talks this year, on topics including AI in open access publishing and fostering a culture of open access book publishing beyond mandates.

*Image credit: Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash *

Open Book Publishers is now on Instagram! Follow us!

If you are too, please follow us there! We'll be sharing information about new books, conversations with authors, and glimpses 'behind the curtain' at the publishing process...

OBP is a 'Top 100 UK social enterprise' for the fifth year in a row!

We are thrilled to announce that we are once again on this year's SE100 list! For more information, and to see the other excellent organisations who have been selected, see this webpage.

That's all for this month ― and year! We wish you a peaceful holiday and a happy and healthy new year when it arrives.

See you in 2026!

(introduction to this series of interviews can be read here)

I met James Gorgen, a public functionary at the Brazilian Ministry of Development and Industry, over an online call I did from Rio de Janeiro while he was connecting from Argentina where he currently lives. James has long been a thoughtful commentator on digital developments and continues to curate an intellectually stimulating presence on LinkedIn, X, and especially on his personal blog.

Our conversation took place the day after the publication of an important article on how Big Tech has transformed sovereignty into a product—a topic explored in depth in Rafael Grohmann’s excellent piece, “Sovereignty-as-a-service: How big tech companies co-opt and redefines digital sovereignty.” Like many other Brazilians I have spoken with, James highlights a core contradiction at the heart of Brazil’s digital sovereignty agenda, itself the outcome of compromises within the leftist government: given the existence of public telecommunications companies, why is the state contracting U.S.-based platforms to build and operate its data centers?

What do you mean when you talk about “digital sovereignty”? What is the meaning of the word in today’s debate? 

Before we start, a quick clarification. I’m speaking as a public servant and practitioner, but I’m not representing the Ministry of Development and Industry. Everything I say is my personal opinion. On the digital sovereignty as a concept, I think that the entire world is still searching for the best definition.  We have national sovereignty, with a long historical journey around this type of concept. For me it’s very related to self-determination: the adoption and use of technologies to have autonomy, and some control over data and infrastructure. But beyond this, the central point is that we need to build national capacity to manage all these things. The main three pillars are: data, infrastructure, and algorithms. 

I think we have a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about the concept, in South America, Europe, and other regions. At the same time, companies have developed marketing approaches and narratives about “digital sovereignty”. Firstly, they were applied to the cloud, and now to artificial intelligence. They offer solutions for cloud, for example, and governments accept them without questioning or critically assessing these options. We first need to clarify what we are talking about. It’s an important discussion in South America but also in Europe and Asia, which are entering very quickly into this debate against the market approach. We need to debate and reflect on it.

We don’t have too many people writing about this in South America. I am not an academic scholar, but I consider myself an evangelist of this topic because I’m trying to create more literacy about digital sovereignty. Around the world, I follow Marietje Schaake. Francesca Bria is also interesting, more of a practitioner, and Cecilia Rikap is the best for me, very concerned about digital sovereignty and cloud sovereignty. I am working on this concept that I call “digital diplomacy”. To me, the success of Big Tech narratives is because they have corporate diplomacy: not just lobbying, but political diplomacy across institutions and channels. It’s a new lens we can use.

At the same time, Big Techs are under pressure: digital sovereignty narratives and alternatives are emerging. They’re losing a bit of space, and they are very concerned about this. In the first leftist government we had in Brazil, we never talked about digital sovereignty. Even the Trump-era dynamics helped accelerate this against their propaganda. I wrote about the new digital geopolitics. We need to enjoy this moment to write and lead projects. Brazil is in a very good position: we’re not a small republic; we’re among the top markets in social media adoption, we are the fifth market in terms of streaming adoption. We are early adopters of most digital services, around 85% of the people connected. As a democratic statesman, President Lula has a different view and leadership in terms of digital speech, and he has been talking about this in the UN General Assembly and in BRICS and Mercosur. We support a lot of things related to digital sovereignty, AI, and misinformation. 

For me, the other side of the coin of digital sovereignty is digital public infrastructure (DPI) – another keyword that’s increasingly being used. Are they related?

Yes and no. This is another problem with these concepts. For me, if you discuss digital public infrastructure but do not discuss the physical infrastructure, it’s a trap. You give the physical infrastructure to private companies and focus only on apps and platforms, in terms of identity, payments, data interoperability, but you lose autonomy and self-determination. By physical infrastructure I mean what’s behind the cloud: the cables, the hardware, the chips that allow for connectivity, processing and storage. We need to discuss the two things together, and almost nobody is doing this. India started with this concept in the G20, and after that there has been a lot of interest around these projects, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Microsoft, and other financial institutions and companies are creating some consensus around the DPI concept. To me, this is a trap if it ignores the physical layer. 

I understand, however the other day I was on the boat from Niterói to Rio de Janeiro when a deaf man asked for money and gave me a little paper. In the paper there was his Pix number. For me PIX is a very concrete and pervasive example of digital public infrastructure from Brazil. What do you think about PIX?

In Brazil we had a very low access to banks before that. Now we have a lot of people using fintechs and also Pix. This is obviously a progress. But the problem is that, for example, recently there was outage of Amazon Web Services, and Pix experienced issues related to this, because the physical and processing infrastructure is under Amazon and other international players. To me PIX it’s not complete. If you accept it without critical thinking, you can enter this boat and have misunderstandings, because you show the population a good thing but lack control of the infrastructure and data. Don’t get me wrong, I also think it is a good thing, but the problem is what we have below this. For policymakers and lawmakers, we need to know everything, not only have an enchantment for technology. I’m not Luddite, but I’m also not integrated uncritically into the market.

What do you think about what the Brazilian government has been doing? Is it really buying “sovereignty as a service”? And can you tell us something about the efforts underway?

My personal view is that the Brazilian government is working on two levels. On one side, we are incorporating physical and processing infrastructure using what the market offers. It is a very pragmatic approach. Unfortunately, we have chosen this path; this is one thing we are doing, and to me it’s an error for the future and the long term because of legacy, lock-in, and path dependency.

At the same time, Casa Civil, which is Brazil’s powerful presidential chief of staff office, coordinating governmental and strategic policy, is trying to clean the field, engaging our own state tech and telecom companies: Serpro, Dataprev, and Telebras that run core government IT, data, and network infrastructure, including hosting the Gov.br DPI. They are purchasing and contracting services from Big Tech, but at the same time, civil servants are trying to convince them and the ministries involved to create alternatives, so we can avoid lock-in and dependency in the future, in the medium and long term. I think we have an ambiguous relationship with these companies.

President Lula is talking everywhere about digital sovereignty, and I think he strongly believes in this concept. But below that level, there is misunderstanding or misinterpretation of what he is talking about. I don’t know if it’s deliberate, or a matter of awareness, or capture. It’s not clear what some public servants are doing, because they are purchasing solutions from all the Big Techs, even the Chinese ones, like Huawei. I don’t know what the strategic goal is.

What are the trade-offs Brazil is facing? What possible pragmatic moves can South America make for the next five years?

It’s a difficult question. We have path dependency, lock-in, and security problems about data control and control of physical infrastructure. This is the heritage we risk leaving for the future, and it’s the same across countries around us. To try to escape this, we need regional alliances to create another trail. We need to try to build this. Unfortunately, this depends on a lot of things: semiconductors, GPUs that we need to import, and cloud capacity. But we need to create capacity here, maybe with the help and support of BRICS members and other countries. But even China has similar objectives to U.S. Big Tech, so that’s a risk; even so, we should try to do something.

We can try to do something in Mercosur, which is the South American trade bloc including Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and others, and it is now under our presidency, as it is with the BRICS until December.  We can try to restart initiatives as sovereign data centers. Even with LLMs, we can build models in our languages, and develop national models. But this is very embryonic. For example, Chile has taken steps back on data center policy, leading to Big Tech domination, both around the narrative and the infrastructure itself. In Colombia there are similar issues. Argentina is receiving a lot of money from the U.S., and I think Milei will do everything the U.S. wants even in this area. OpenAI is starting a Stargate’s arm here. We don’t have Argentina as an ally. But with Colombia, with Mexico, maybe with Russia and Indonesia, we can start something. Here in Brazil, we have a private national cloud service, Magalu, and we’re trying to talk with them to create a data center ecosystem for a sovereign cloud.

When you say sovereign cloud, I guess your idea goes beyond data localization and towards something more like a public-utility model, where national companies in strategic sectors provide services and control infrastructure. Is that what you imagine, or more public–private partnerships?

We need both. For strategic data and public assets, for instance about security and defense data, we need to build infrastructure totally owned by the state. We’ll still need to import components—cards, processors, semiconductors—and have servers, but under total state control. For example, base-income programs like Bolsa Família, a program that provides income support to low-income families, and the Cadastro Único, the unified registry that identifies and enrolls low-income households for social programs, should be under state infrastructure. 

But we also need to develop national infrastructure and an ecosystem to compete with Big Techs. We’re not talking about expelling Big Tech from Brazil, but we need competitors and coordination to create what I call a Brazilian digital ecosystem. We have a bit of this already, but without political or institutional coordination, and that is a risk. 

In the EU, changing the infrastructural power faces the challenge of existing competition rules and free movement rules; we used to be the colonizer, now we are completely colonized. How do you see the EU approach?

We have academic authors in Brazil, including former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, writing about dependency theory in South America and Latin America. The European Union is now doing something similar. In my view, it is a historical error. Since around 2016, Europe started to walk in the direction of regulation as the only alternative to avoid Big Tech domination. That’s one path, but they forgot industrial policy and trade policy. Now they’re trying to restart or retrieve these.

Brazil is trying to do both at the same time. Lula sent to Congress draft bills related to economic regulation, protection of kids and teenagers online, and tariff regimes to import infrastructure and components for data centers. We also have Nova Industria Brasil, the industrial policy working with digital transformation, and we are trying to create, around data centers, a value chain under this umbrella—building something more complete. Under the Casa Civil there is the CIT-Digital, initiative and a Digital Economy Chamber that is starting to build things related to infrastructure and a national policy for data economy. We will start a public consultation about this last topic. To me, this completes the package: regulation together with infrastructure, industrial and development policies, and data. The problem is, of course, the implementation. We have different views, we need more public coordination, and the state needs to put resources into leading this. But I think this stack is the best solution now to avoid Big Tech power and control over our digital infrastructures.

(first, introduction posting of this series can be read here)

I met Oscar D’Alva, a researcher at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), at  a bar in Botafogo during the pre-conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) that took place in Rio de Janeiro in mid-October 2025. Oscar’s PhD thesis, entitled “Estatísticas oficiais e capitalismo de plataforma: a transição para um regime de dataficação no Brasil” has received multiple major  social sciences awards in the region, including a prize from CAPES, Brazil’s federal agency for  graduate education and research, ANPOCS, the national association of advanced studies in social  sciences, and AoIR. When Oscar realized that the conference was (modestly) funded by Microsoft – as it has been for the past twenty years – he decided to turn down the latter prize, sparking a debate inside a conference held for the first time on the Global South and whose main topic was anti-colonialist perspective on digital sovereignty. The interview took place at a dim, wood-lined bar  behind Praia do Flamengo in Rio. 

What is your trajectory and how did you get interested in statistics and platform capitalism? 

I have been working at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistic (Instituto Brasileiro de  Geografia e Estatística, IBGE) for the past fifteen years. Official statistics is a very traditional exercise: we use structured methodologies and established research practices, and we carry a public service ethos. After a decade or so in that world, I began to notice how new technologies and new data  sources were creeping into our routines: mobile phone data, satellite imagery, data from connected  sensors… I wanted to understand whether these new sources and methods truly demanded a transformation in what we do. 

That curiosity took me to a PhD in sociology on official statistics and platform capitalism. It let  me examine the meeting point between a long-standing public field and a newer, corporate-driven  data ecosystem. My earlier path had taken me somewhere else. I did a master’s in geography on  carnaúba palm extractivism in Ceará, where I am from, after years working with social movements  and an NGO focused on rural development. It sounds far from statistics, but it taught me to watch  how states and markets refashion old practices under new regimes. I studied an old activity, palm  extractivism, which goes back to the colonial period, and looked at how the state tried to manage  it through policy and how it fit into capitalist development and waves of change. With official  statistics you can tell a similar story. It is an old activity tied to the emergence and centralization of  modern states. What interests me is how the production of information changes over time and  whether we are entering a new regime of quantification. 

What your thesis is about, and what was your interest in that topic? 

The research is about official statistics in platform capitalism. Empirically, I focused on IBGE and  on the implementation in Brazil of a project initiated at the UN Statistical Commission, the UN  Big Data project. The plan envisioned four regional hubs in the Global South: Brazil for Latin  America; Rwanda for Africa; the United Arab Emirates for the Middle East; Indonesia for Asia.  The goal was to ‘modernize’ official statistics by introducing big data and AI into national statistical  offices. The hubs gave me an entry point into the present, where old methods and new infrastructures overlap and collide.

To make sense of this I used the work of Pierre Bordieau, and its concepts of field, habitus, and  capital. My hypothesis is that big data and machine learning created an intersection, often a  collision, between two fields of practice. On one side is the statistical field, historically linked to  nation states, with its public service orientation, the census, the autonomization of the state, and  the work of centralizing informational capital. Then it takes also the Foucauldian of biopolitics and  how statistics are important for the organization of the state. But this is a field with its own codes,  structures, and ethos. The ‘state statistician’ is the symbol of this profession that was embodied on this field; it was oriented by an epistemology of statistics which is the frequentist epistemology.  

On the other side is what I call the algorithmic field, linked primarily to private corporations, especially  big tech but not only them, because it is the whole chain of activities, spanning data extraction,  management, and analysis. It is where data science appears as a hybrid of statistics and computer  science. These fields come from different genealogies and values. Where they overlap, we find a  transition toward a new regime of quantification, that I call the datafication regime. 

What do you mean by frequentist, and how does Bayesian thinking fit into this? 

In statistics there are mainly two branches: frequentist and Bayesian. It helps to consider how each  field treats probability and evidence. Frequentist statistics, dominant in official statistics of the 20th,  understands probability as something real and objective: the long-run frequency of events in a well defined population. Its strength is structured data, designed samples, and clear frames. Bayesian  reasoning treats probability as a degree of belief that is updated with new evidence. 

In Bayesian statics there is a kind of inversion. You still talk about events that you observe, but you  don’t know the cause. It is often more comfortable with prediction, unstructured data, and contexts  where the population is not well defined in advance. When you have new pieces of information  you can add them. Those are conditions that are common in big data and AI. The growing use of  model-based inference with data that were not designed for representation is a key part of the  intersection I am describing. The Bayeasian ideas are very important to this kind of method.  

You develop a historical account of quantification regimes. Could you outline it? 

Before the current datification regime, there were earlier statistical regimes. Building on Alain  Desrosières’s work in the sociology of quantification, I argue that as the state’s actions—and the  ideas and theories about the economy and society that inspire them—change over time, so do the  statistical tools it uses. I also take the ideas of the French Regulation Schools, which points out that  capitalism has its periods and crisis, and the latter are good moments to understand changes and  capital accumulation patterns.  

In period of crisis, the statistical regimes is always demanded to give answers. I trace five regimes. First, a pre-statist regime of accounting, where numbers serve monarchical finance and remain largely  secret. With the rise of nation states and the bourgeois revolution in the nineteenth century, we  enter the enumeration regime, when censuses and descriptive statistics make populations legible within  territories. Since political tools are always combined with epistemological tools, the census here is  the tool, and the idea is to create a Bernulli earn that was equal to the state. 

The grid to see the reality.  

Yes, but you have to enumerate everything, we are talking about descriptive but not yet inferential  statistics, which is the fourth regime. After the 1929 crash, in the 1930s and 1940s, inferential  statistics and sampling theory became central as states tried to manage economies and society at  scale. They needed to intervene quickly. I call this the precision regime, consolidated after World War II alongside the creation of the UN, and two years after the Statistical Commission, which gather  all the representative. You also have the modernization of statistical offices, the use of computers,  and nation accounts. The system of official statistics was built in this period, which is the period of  managed capitalism and Keynesian macroeconomics.  

The crises of the 1970s and 1980s – oil, petrodollar, etc. – with the emergence of neoliberalism I  understand this to create a new regime with the influence of financialization on all aspects of life.  With finance as a driver of capitalism, you have this idea that everything needs to be quantified.  There is a new politics of indicators that are used for everything. 

Up until the OECD which tells poor countries which indicators need to be used. 

Yes, and the indicators that go into people’s lives and work. This is what I call the commensuration regime. The 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the mirror of this  commensuration regime: the idea that you can solve big political problems by quantificating  everything. We have measures for every single social problem. It’s interesting that this technocratic  ideal can be traced back to the political creation of the statistical field in the mid-19th century by  Adolphe Quetelet, who is the father of this kind of statistics. With the international statistical  conference in the beginning of the 1830s, the idea was very similar to SDGs, that we can unite all  statisticians from the world and create technocratic government by measuring everything. It was a  big failure. Finally, after the 2008–2011 crisis, we see the transition to a datafication regime: large scale data infrastructures, AI/ML methods, and platformization. The UN Big Data Project  presented as a “data revolution for sustainable development” is an important player for its  diffusion. 

And how did the UN Big Data Project play out in practice? 

After 2008 the UN became more dependent on private funding and corporate money. Big tech,  especially Microsoft but also Google and Meta, gained influence in statistical initiatives. At the UN,  the data revolution narrative argued that national statistical offices were not prepared to measure  the SDGs and therefore needed help from private corporations in order to use the whole potential  of big data. The platformization agenda proposes to bring state statisticians together with corporate  data scientists, often through public and private partnerships (PPPs), aiming to create new data  markets in a field that historically manages data as public goods. But PPPs often produce conflicts  of interests on activities that are based on trust. 

The UN has created a platform, controlled by an NGO called Global Partnership for Sustainable  Development Data created in the USA and linked to the UN Foundation created by Ted Turner,  founder of CNN, which comprises a lot of big corporations that both do donations and lobby  within the UN. The global partnership is the manager of the platform that comprises the four regional hubs in the Global South. 

Can it get more colonial than that?  

It actually can. I did an interview with the person responsible for this idea. He was saying that they  use cutting-edge tools and experts from the Global North and from big tech, within a federated  cloud so agencies in the Global South can upload data and benefit from analysis. In return,  corporations and Northern institutions build APIs, products, and legitimacy for institutions around  that data. It is an alluring vision, but it produces conflicts of interest in a domain where public trust  is foundational. 

Are you pointing out a case of corporate capture? 

They are trying to do that, but the process is only beginning. This also happened in the first wave  of neoliberalism, when companies tried to do that but there were reactions. But I see two main  obstacles to this transition to the datification regimes. The first is ontological, what data is. In  official statistics, data collected from people and firms to produce public information is treated as  a public good. In the algorithmic field, data is a commodity to be extracted, traded, and optimized  for private value, whether advertising, product development, or market advantage. When these  ontologies collide, tensions and practical problems multiply. 

The second is epistemological, how knowledge is produced. Official statistics proceeds deductively,  from societal questions to carefully designed data collections that represent populations. Much of  data science proceeds inductively, feeding models with large, often non-representative data and  inferring patterns, reconstructing representation after the fact by modeling. When statisticians and  data scientists work side by side, they bring different logics, methods, and purposes, and the friction  is political as well as technical.  

Are there counter-movements to this commodification? 

Following Karl Polanyi, I would say that commodification tends to trigger protective counter movements. In Europe, early enthusiasm for public–private experiments with big data around  2014–2017 gave way to the realization that such pilots go nowhere without access to what is now  called “privately held data” rather than big data. The European Statistical System has since pushed  for a regulatory route—recognizing certain privately held data as public-interest data to which  statistical authorities can have access under clear legal bases and with strong safeguards. The Data  Act has a provision that goes in this direction. It’s imperfect and contested, but it signals a path  that does not simply subordinate public statistics to market logic.  

In Brazil, I also found internal resistance within IBGE: a preference for regulatory solutions—say,  to access mobile phone data—and for developing in-house capabilities, rather than relying  primarily on corporate partnerships. 

This introduces the topic of statistical sovereignty. How does it relate to digital sovereignty, especially in Latin  America? 

I am developing the concept now. The thesis touches on sovereignty as state capacity to produce  public information, but the concept itself needs elaboration. In Latin America, with our histories  of state-building and national development, the public character of official information carries a  different weight than in many European debates, which often emphasize limiting state power in  the name of civil liberties. My starting point is people’s sovereignty. Citizens are squeezed between  governmental power and market power. Statistical information should be a right, high-quality,  reliable public information about the economy, society, and the impacts of platforms on work and  life, so that people can understand and govern their collective existence. If we lose a trusted public  provider, or if access becomes priced, fragmented, or corporately captured, people’s sovereignty is  diminished. Statistical sovereignty, understood as a right to public knowledge about our collective  life, is a necessary strand within broader digital sovereignty. 

Now, the debate on digital sovereignty has become much more concrete. It is clearer where  corporations stand, that they align with the USA government that can use this data infrastructure  as a tool of power. You can close the server, and you don’t have access to your data anymore. This  is a huge thing. With Trump’s government, it became crucial that governments build their own digital infrastructure. 

But for instance, what we are seeing in Brazil is the whole speech of sovereignty from the  government which is being captured by the corporations again. We have a project of “sovereignty  cloud” with SERPRO, the national server of technology. It is a federate cloud, very similar to the  project of the UN, aggregating providers such as AWS, Azure, and Google, Huawei. The new  president of IBGE is signing a contract to move large datasets, census microdata, survey files,  economic statistics, from secure in-house data centers into this “sovereignty cloud”. If public data  is migrated into big tech infrastructures under a sovereignty label, we should acknowledge the  contradiction and debate it. 

So when we say digital sovereignty, what do we mean? Keeping data within a certain territory?  Legal guarantees of safety and access? Public infrastructures? Trustworthy use of international  infrastructure under strong regulation? The answers vary and must be clarified, otherwise  sovereignty becomes a slogan that anyone can appropriate. 

In Europe we tried something similar to a sovereign could with Gaia-x, which was quite a failure. Finally, what do  you think are practical steps a country can take in the next five years? 

We have already missed opportunities. In Brazil, public universities had their own data centers and  moved rapidly to corporate clouds, accelerated by the pandemic, without a coordinated public  strategy. It solved short-term constraints but created long-term dependency. You had an  opportunity to build a network of public services, but you need incentives. If you leave the decision  to a single IT responsible for a university, it is easier to go to Google.  

That is also because platforms thrive by offering easy solutions where capitalism has already created structural  problems and a lack of resources.  

Yes, and in this case, we have lost opportunities. Now it is also happening in health. We should  have a public policy that at least understands the strategic statecraft areas that are important to  protect: defense, official statistics, health, education. I think that is why I decided not to receive the  AoIR prize: the goal of big tech is to anticipate critical thinking, and we need to work to avoid that.

—

See also Statistical Sovereignty, Democracy and Big Tech: Challenges of Datafication for National States, Evaluating the impact of trajectories of digitalization in official statistics on statistical sovereignty in the Global South by Oscar Arruda d’Alva and Edemilson Paraná.

”Those who challenge the capitalist order tend to be publicly labelled as criminals generally falling into the terrorist category.” Steve Kurtz (World-InfoCon Brussels (2000): An Annotated Report)

In memory of Steve Kurtz [1958-2025]

Steve Kurtz was an American artist, professor and co-founder of the pioneering art collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). Formed in 1987, CAE is a collective of tactical media practitioners of various specializations including computer graphics and web design, film/video, photography, text art, book art, and performance.

Kurtz was caught in the post-9/11 gears. He fell into the crack between security and paranoia — a crack that widened after planes hit the Twin Towers.

In the fall of 2018 I contacted Steve Kurtz, founding member of Critical Art Ensemble, to ask him for permission to translate The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology in the Public Sphere, a chapter taken from Molecular Invasion published in 2002, a transgressive book that developed biotechnology as a contestational tool for the expansion of Flesh Machine Control; after all the kind guidance and approval, I mentioned that the book is a key anchor to track the hell Steve had to go through from 2004 to 2008. Years later the answer Kurtz unravelled about CAE being targeted by the FBI didn’t disappoint.

Every time I revisit Critical Art Ensemble’s work, I immediately remember the footage that circulated in news outlets in 2004 of the FBI, specifically the Joint Task Force on Terrorism wearing hazmat suits, making effective a search warrant, purposefully turned into a media spectacle of fear.

The Kafkaesque nightmare as described by Kevin Jon Heller, started in May 11th 2004, when Steve called 911 to report the sudden death of his wife, Hope Kurtz, editor, writer, and member of CAE. As The Erie County Medical Examiner’s Office clearly stated, Hope died of natural causes, heart failure at the age of 45. As soon as the paramedics arrived and found petri dishes, lab equipment and bacteria samples for an upcoming exhibition, not convinced with Kurtz’ explanation, they decided to contact the Buffalo Police Department to investigate further, which led them to call the FBI. What followed cemented the real intentions of the FBI to justify a baseless prosecution: illegal detentions, dubious allegations and a search warrant.

With the seal search warrant approved, the FBI had full access Steve’s personal belongings, computers, lab equipment, documents, passports, books, networks, notes and CAE’s archives, enough material to elaborate a profile that fulfilled the Department of Justice’s agenda. The case had international media exposure, with some media outlets eating federal agents suspicion of Kurtz and Dr. Bob Ferrell as a potential bioterrorists.

Even though the charges evolved into mail and wire fraud under the PATRIOT Act, these early accusations targeting Kurtz worked perfectly for the launch of a post 9/11 era of surveillance and punishment, his case was unprecedented and weaponized as a public effort to intimidate and criminalize Critical Art Ensemble’s practice and the communities attached to it. The message was clear and loud, anybody who holds “anti-American sentiments” and everything that doesn’t fit into the white cube gallery model, will become the primer example of the what to NOT to do, of what NOT to say, the enemy. As Steve shared in a phone call in May of this year talking about the subject: “They can bring ridiculous charges and still make your life miserable, even if at the end the charges are dismissed.”

This case also showed how communities can overcome control and authoritarian  amage, CAE Defence Fund emerged as a definitive collective force that allowed Kurtz to get financial, legal support and proper media exposure, Strange Culture (2008), the documentary directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson helped to defy the narrative the FBI tried to impose in the press, audiences understood the obscene amounts of tax money wasted to prosecute Kurtz and Ferrell, and most importantly, this created a chain effect regarding the alarming threats towards freedom of expression in cultural, scientific and academic institutions in the USA under the Bush Administration.

Yes, Steve was cleared of all charges by the DoJ in 2008, finally vindicated, but the four years taken from his life never returned, the press release was painful to digest:

“I don’t have a statement, but I do have questions. As an innocent man, where do I go to get back the four years the Department of Justice stole from me? As a taxpayer, where do I go to get back the millions of dollars the FBI and Justice Department wasted persecuting me? And as a citizen, what must I do to have a Justice Department free of partisan corruption so profound it has turned on those it is sworn to protect?”

Not allowing Steve Kurtz to mourn Hope Kurtz as any of us  eserve, all the stress, the abuses, the pressure, the public scrutiny, his private life, health and anonymity compromised…

Twenty years later after, I often wonder:Who got more resources?
Who got handsomely rewarded?
Who got promoted?

THE FBI OWES STEVE KURTZ AN APOLOGY

José López / H C-(M)

Sources:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080914150359/http://caedefensefund.org/releases/cleared_6_11_08.html
http://critical-art.net/defense/press/BuffNews_BigBrother.pdf
http://critical-art.net/defense/press/BuffNews_Dabkowski.pdf
http://critical-art.net/defense/press.html
https://opiniojuris.org/2008/05/25/the-collapse-of-the-bioterror-case-against-dr-steven-kurtz/
https://www.lightresearch.net/interviews/kurtz/kurtz.pdf
https://www.wired.com/2004/06/twisted-tale-of-art-death-dna/
https://fnewsmagazine.com/2004/09/steve-kurtz-artist-patriotfelon-2/

Theory on Demand #59

Paritance: A Philosophical Investigation Behind Cognition and Simulation

By Henry Warwick

This work advances the idea of Paritance—the acceptance of parity—as a funda­mental operation of human cognition and culture. Warwick argues that the capacity to recognize a copy, model, or simulation as ontologically sufficient to its referent underlies cultural practices, such as simply hearing a recording as music up to the plausibility of artificial intelligence. Far from being a merely technical phenomenon, this acceptance reveals deep continuities between modern technologies of reproduction and premodern metaphysical and occult practices.

Through a critical and sometimes deeply personal genealogy spanning medieval necromancy, ritual evocation, and demonology, the book demonstrates how contem­porary uses of computers recapitulate occult logics of animation, invocation, and resurrection. In this framing, AI appears less as an unprecedented rupture than as an uncanny rearticulation of an ancient aspiration: the conjuration and “resurrection” of a dead god in machinic digital form.

Grounded in both philosophical analysis and experiential insight derived from Zen training and decades of musical practice, Paritance situates cognition and simulation within a transhistorical discussion on thought, representation, and creativity. It accesses a wide variety of disciplines including philosophy of mind, media theory, occult studies, and critical technology studies, offering an original account of the hidden logics that structure contemporary human invention.

Henry Warwick is an Associate Professor in the RTA School of Media at Toronto Metropolitan University where he teaches media theory and sound synthesis. His research often focuses on media infrastructures, information politics, and the cultural history of electronic sound. He is the author of The Radical Tactics of the Offline Library (INC, 2014). Alongside his scholarship, he has released more than twenty albums of ambient and avant-garde electronic music, maintaining a practice that bridges theory and sound.

Edited by: Tripta Chandola

Cover Design: Katja van Stiphout

Design and EPUB development: Klaudia Orczykowska

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2025

ISBN: 978-90-83520-98-8

Contact:
Institute of Network Cultures
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA)
Email: info@networkcultures.org
Web: www.networkcultures.org

Order a copy or download this publication for free at: www.networkcultures.org/publications

This publication is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommerical ShareAlike 4.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit www.creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-sa/4.0./

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I have always found it quite reasonable to think that the large-scale use of do-it-all machines produces collective value that deserves to be fairly distributed. In my cyborg anthropology, citizens, now emancipated thanks to the reprogrammable infrastructures that they always carry with them, are economically supported by the state to be able to contribute to the management of public affairs. Constantly reeducated by the informational reverb they feed on, like arendtian Greek aristocrats they move into action to fulfill themselves in the public sphere. At the same time, they contribute to the real-time emergence of the volonté générale in a perfect synthesis between direct and representative democracy. The good news is that this redistributive universal basic income already exists. In Italy, it takes the perverse forms of early retirements, permanent positions with an extremely low productivity rate, and in my case, of modest unemployment benefits for precarious university researchers. Having now reached the age of Our Lord and guided by a well-established antiwork faith, faced with the devastating idea of spending yet another winter in northeastern Italy, with the fog and particulate levels far above the legal limit, I remind myself that the scraps of the sweet welfare state are urging me to travel abroad to affordable destinations. That little bit of extra passive income helps; all that remains for me is to organize a local network of people. I chose the South American continent for linguistic, cultural, and geopolitical reasons. The big question the native asks Jared Diamond — why does Europe have so much cargo? — is explained by Cortés’s competitive advantage: the conquistadores arrive in the Americas with steel weapons and immunity to disease thanks to livestock domestication. Fascinating geographical determinism. South America, a vast and messy continent, ends up looking sufficiently uniform to European eyes. Go to South America, thus my friend Jordi, and you’ll see what capitalism without a welfare state looks like. A modern Chatwin with a smartphone and the fear of having it stolen, I tell myself as I pedal over the cobblestones of the limited traffic zone in a former Renaissance city. In search of the Milodon and on the threshold of the breakdown of the United States’ accumulation cycle. Empires in decline have always fought tooth and nail, thus Fidel Castro to Allende who, faithful to democratic principles, sacrificed his life to fascists backed by the CIA, I tell myself as I sit at lunch at my aunt’s, an excellent menu unchanged for generations: tagliatelle, sides simmering in pots, Merlot. Yes, researching the trajectories of digital sovereignty in the region has many advantages; it’s a good story, captivating, marketable. Understanding its struggles, its spaces of resistance and emancipation, the stories of those who live in it from a pharmacological perspective. Even better, its tribulations, I tell myself, a special word when pronounced in Veneto dialect by my creationist grandmother with Parkinson’s: no sta farme tribolar – where, because of the tremor, the sentence seemed to emanate not from her mouth but from her hands. A phrase later taken up by my mother: te ghe trent’ani e anca adesso te mantengo; par mi te sì na preocupassion; te me fa tribolar. (You’re thirty and I still have to provide for you; you’re a burden on my mind; you make me struggle). A word present in Revelation 7:14, where the Great Tribulation is the period our Lord speaks of to indicate the time of the end. Which I read as the end of the suffering arising from the concern of having to sustain oneself financially, from the specter of having to stay soto paròn (under a boss) in a region where the too rapid shift from a peasant society to wealth, the Catholic inheritance, and the land consumption of a choke-chain progress have led to immense disasters. There is no real work without suffering. It’s better to think of a Plan B.

There is something obvious with our obsession with computation. With the invention of the wheel, humans began to imagine the entire world as a spinning wheel, an endless cycle of seasons, lives, and realms. In Indian cosmology there is samsara, the continuous cycle of birth, death, and rebirth through which living beings pass. With the invention of writing, the whole world becomes a book. In Judaism, God is the Author of Being and inscribes our names in the Book of Life. Saint Augustine speaks of the Liber mundi as the incarnation of the divine word, with human beings as sentences running between margins already drawn. The parchment medium becomes the message: in the beginning was the logos. With the invention of the engine, a gear turning on other gears, the entire world becomes mechanical. God is the Divine Watchmaker, the planets revolve along predetermined trajectories, and the universe is reduced to a precision machine. Leibniz imagines the cosmos itself as a calculating machine. It is no accident, then, that we now ask what computation means for the organization of society, what are the consequences of computation, and that we are inclined to think of the world as simulacrum. Truth be told, it took very little for us to fall in love with digital technologies in the name of efficiency. In North America, in 1964, during the Berkeley protests, Mario Savio still used the metaphor of the bureaucratic and military machine in a negative sense, calling on people to throw their bodies upon the gears to stop it. But only a few years later, the computer had become a tool of emancipation and community-building, celebrated by the counterculture of experimentation. In the Soviet Union, computers moved, starting in the 1950s, from being dismissed as a product of American pseudoscience to being hailed as machines of communism. Nowadays’ calculation, central both to centralized planning processes and to the market economy, operates at planetary scale and at the speed of electrical immediacy. And Stafford Beer’s early‑1970s insight remains unsurpassed: to use computation only to optimize and streamline firms is a great waste. It must be collectivized to rethink the bases of sociality and to guarantee freedom that is effective and computable. A project naturally implemented by the malign genius of capital through advertising in a formidable process of self‑renewal that has made both users and state forms dependent on digital rentiers. In this journey, digital tribulations name the lived struggles created by platforms whose business is to arbitrage human time, certain states’ attempts to redirect platformization – the quest for digital sovereignty – and popular organization that seeks to reclaim time and autonomy.

There is something mesmerizing about the artworks currently exhibited at POST Arnhem. In the exhibition ‘Embodied Encryption’ you will find weirdly morphing videos of deepfake drag performances, abstract closeup visualizations of motherhood based on poetic scripts, and gender non-binary portraits generated from archive paintings of the Qajar dynasty. However, the exhibition in general does not come across as conceptually complex or abstract as this may sound. The overall decor is simple and the atmosphere at POST is rather serene. What stands out is the intriguing visual quality of the topical work, still on display until mid-December. 

Like with previous POST exhibition in Nijmegen, I think the particular relevance of this exhibition should be emphasized. We currently live in a time of strict image regimes that confine and police how we see ourselves and others. Patrick Nathan described this in his book Image Control and points at the current resurgence of fascist aesthetics. In the brochure of the exhibition, Lieke Wouters uses the example of a 2024 twitter post by Geert Wilders with an AI generated false ‘epitome’ of the traditional white family. The post coincided with a government’s agreement on the most restrictive asylum procedures ever. The AI system can as such becomes an extrapolation and feedback loop for oppressive worldviews. We definitely need creative interruptions to counter invasive and politically fraught images and specific image environments. Better flagging generated content or further improving the existing regulations and data moderation is not enough. We have to be more inquisitive and experiment with creative resistance that actual deals with underlying structural political issues and systemic injustice. How can we take artistic experimentation with encryption and glitching towards reimagining political alternatives? The presented artworks can be seen as preliminary artistic answers to this question, and that is exactly what makes the POST exhibition so intriguing. Especially as the works seem to revive interesting lineages of performative experimentation and artistic interventionism for current algorithmic society.

A clear example is the work ‘in transitu’: by posting bare chest photos on Instagram while transitioning Ada Ada Ada probes the interpretation of gender by algorithmic platforms. The work combines brave and vulnerable experimentation with generative models and critical investigation of platform categorizations. Also the work of Jake Elwes called The Zizi Show is a case in point, involving the London drag scene to create a new datasets of specific movements form drag performances. Elwes’ exhibited life size videos were produced with mutual consent, drag kings and queens were synthesized through deepfakes, exploring ‘what AI can teach us about drag, and what drag can teach us about AI’. It activates performative queer art in relation to current generative AI and algorithmic platforms. It unemphatically and cleverly interrupts binary notions and uses glitches and generated visuals to oppose reductive technological imaginations.

Cut outs from The Zizi Show by Jake Elwes.

Still, if these artworks merely offer critical perspectives or stimulate discussion, this would be rather unsatisfying. The reference of Legacy Russels ‘glitch feminism’ in the catalogue helps to set the tone for a more clear political stance, but Russels manifesto risks encompassing too vague and somewhat fragmented notions like ghostly, cosmic, shady, virus like, refusal. The reception of the exhibited work could benefit, I think, from emphasizing more concrete lineages of creative resistance and more explicit political ambitions. 

As Dominique Routhier suggests in With and Against, “our own spectacular moment in time – where automation discourse is yet again a defining feature – has a history, and, more importantly, a history of contestation”. He traces such history from the surrealists to Tiqqun’s The Cybernetic Hypothesis with a specific focus on the work of the Situationist International. Recent forms of glitch art or engagement with technical failures indeed also can be understood as deriving from this ‘avant-garde’ history (even if they were working in analogue media then) as Michael Betancourt stresses in his book Glitch Theory. Part of this history is also the work of the surrealist women recently described as Militant Muses which are especially important in relation to the exhibited work at POST. Specifically, the work of Claude Cahun which consists of shifting portraits also with a mesmerizing and haunting quality, that resolutely intervened in the imagination and ideologies of the time. During fascist oppression, through secrecy and dangerous subordinations, Cahun and others created false documents and ‘paper bullets’ and experimented with performative identities, intriguing depictions, and indirect action. Cahun’s work and life interrupted codes and identities, and “reveled in ambiguity and sought disruption”, writes Gavin James Bower, as “a way to reconceptualize society”.

Collage of work from Claude Cahun.

The strategic interruption of codes and identities to reconceptualize society, related to what José Estoban Muñoz calls disidentification, is different from the more limited pleas for more visibility for queer and marginalized groups or calls to expand rich data sets for more inclusion. The latter would mean further adaptation and cooptation into what still will be a “heteronormatively constructed and oppressive social system” as the Queer AI introduction of the seminal Queer reflections on AI book phrases it. According to these reflections, artistic experimentation should rather be a “notion of refusal that articulates itself against binaries of all kinds”. Or more positively framed, like in Shabbar’s project Queer-Alt-Delete, art can interlace “algorithmic uncertainty with subjectivity in ways that facilitate an experimentation with new political becomings”. 

This can push the works in the exhibition even more fascinating directions. Like the abstract visual narratives with evocative and visceral images of motherhood that Beverley Hood presents. The work becomes especially poignant when it helps to redefine what counts as motherhood and actively opposes naïve and regressive imaginations of what a mother is and should be. Just like the surrealist militant muses that already used different tropes to fight restrictive labels put on women, and countered prejudices around childcare and stereotypical women work, as surrealist covens summarized. We could see reimaginations of motherhood then having everyday implications and constitute more profound personal and political consequences. Maybe this could be further provoked by imagining radical alternatives like the “queer polymaternalism” proposed by Sophie Lewis, that speaks to “all those comradely gestators, midwives, and other sundry interveners in the more slippery moments of social reproduction”. 

Or as a final example, this could push Rodell Warner’s Artificial Archive, also part of the POST exhibition, to even more firmly engagement with anticolonial work. Historical colonial databases that Warner works with often reaffirm stereotypical aesthetics of spectacular, exotic, otherworldly views and landscapes that await exploitation and subjugation. The exhibited work imagines what could have existed outside this extractive gaze. Taking a queer and surprising turn in relation to for example Albuquerque Paula’s work with colonial archives included in the just published Slow Technology reader, it use a similar more slow and deliberating approach, remediating inherent bias and stereotypes, resulting in the type of ideation that also the AIxDesign festival On Slow AI seemed to praise. Just like Moreshin Allahyari’s generated portraits of ‘moon faces’ it is a shame if this lacks any more substantial idea of what invokes ‘genderless’ spiritual experiences or abstains from the political implications of more firm anticolonialism. Surrealists ‘scorning of white supremacy, patriotism, religion, colonialism’ that Franklin Rosemont & Robin D.G. Kelley highlight, can be a reminder to work towards more elaborate and politically solid but still seductive and enchanting creative resistance. 

Examples from Artificial Archive by Rodell Warner.

As I already proposed during EsArts in Barcelona, expanding on surrealist experiments of symbolic sabotage and war on work we might furthermore subvert the creative industries’ rush towards enhancing commercial creative work with algorithmic technologies. Artistic experimentation to exist otherwise  and readapting the surrealist look for today’s algorithmically mediated world can counter image recognition and surveillance of the eye of the master. The radical surrealist dreams that already resurfaced in later cultural countermovements and riots of the 60s and 70s, as Abigail Susik and Elliot H. King argue in their beautiful recent book, could resurface again as part of current radical investigations and creative disruptions of today’s high-tech world. And for opposing the fascist resurgence within the current pervasive image regimes, we can benefit from surrealists creative legacy of resistance and persistent antifascism, central to the late Lenbachhaus exhibition impressively documented in the companying anthology.

Future artistic experimentation thus should, I think, embrace the impulse of militant muses to develop a firmer embodied antifascist and anticolonial queer and poetic resistance. Maybe not all the artists presented at POST are willing to engage in such a thing. Maybe some of the works now fail to live up to such promise. But if it fails, let it be a queer art of failure (taking Jack Halberstams famous assertion somewhat out of context). Especially in exhibitions like this, far removed from the more usual pretentious immersive and hyped experiential places like NXT Amsterdam and more intimate then the spacious artworks currently on display for Gogbot x RMT at Rijksmuseum Twente, this inconclusive experimentation can be sympathetically pushed and possibly further politicized. This should certainly not become yet another (oppositional) image spectacle. The attentive, accessible, but still gripping and glitchy moving visuals at POST might just one of the gateways towards future bold imaginations and generated visualizations for what could end up as embodied radical political alternatives.