News from the Collective

Interview with Jader Gama. 

The introduction of Digital Tribulations, a series of intellectual interviews on the developments of digital sovereignty in Latin America, can be read here.

As I write these words of introduction, I cannot help but feel a profound saudade for my time in the Amazon with Gama. I arrived in Belém the week after COP30 had ended, just as prices were returning to normal. I have always been drawn to places not yet uniformed by the dictates of capital and consumer culture—like rural India—and the Amazon is one of them. Stripped of the myths and exotic fantasies that so often reach the Global North, I found a place that felt radically different, yet deeply welcoming and unexpectedly familiar.

Let’s begin with the food. A variety of long, white-fleshed fish I had never heard of, pulled from river waters sixty meters deep. And then açaí, the fruit of a local palm with extraordinary antioxidant properties, which has long been the staple of the regional diet. Because it spoils so quickly, it is usually exported as frozen pulp for ice cream; here, however, it is eaten fresh in a bowl. It looks like thick purple yogurt but tastes earthy and bitter, and it is served with sugar and small pearls of tapioca. Life, it seems, revolves around açaí: you quickly become addicted to it, as it accompanies literally any meal. In the morning, you must buy it early before it runs out, and you learn to look for the grossa (beware of vendors who dilute it with water!). If a restaurant runs out of it, people react with the stunned gaze one reserves for when a basic human right is missing.

After spending a few days in a hostel in Belém and then on the island of Cotijuba, a tropical paradise with a painful history as a former site of incarceration and slavery, I went to visit Gama at his home on the island of São João do Outeiro (Ilha de Caratateua). I had received his contact from Flynn, a friend in São Paulo. From the very first moment, Gama was extraordinarily kind. He invited me to lunch with his family—fried tucunaré and açaí—and I gave him a copy of my book. I spent the night at his place, browsing his library and resting in a hammock, an essential fixture of Amazonian life.

One evening, we attended the inauguration of a terreiro of the Candomblé religion, a vibrant Afro-Brazilian faith, the result of a syncretism between various African traditions and Catholicism. For a long time, it was marginalized and persecuted; before the landmark law proposed by the writer Jorge Amado in 1946, which guaranteed religious freedom, its practices were often criminalized and dismissed as sorcery. 

Later, after spending 5 days going up the Amazon river on a boat while sleeping on a hammock, I reached Santarém, where I met Gama’s sister, Judith. She was equally generous and welcoming. We spoke at length about the myth of the boto, the pink Amazonian dolphin. In local folklore, the boto is a shapeshifter who transforms into a handsome, well-dressed man in a white hat to seduce women, often leaving them pregnant. Beyond its mystical allure, the myth has historically served as a social narrative to explain pregnancies outside of marriage or to protect the identity of fathers in the riverine society.

I unfortunately missed the Yemanjá celebration—the great festival for the Queen of the Sea—on the beach, but we walked along the shore until we reached the astonishing Sumaúma tree, the symbol of the island. At low tide, its massive roots, the sapopemas, are exposed, creating the surreal spectacle of a giant tree that appears to float above the sand. The health of the Sumaúma depends on the richness of the soil beneath it; in a way, it embodies the very idea of terra preta, the fertile black earth created through ancestral technique, which later reappears in Gama’s project of cultivating a sovereign digital territory. 

Before the interview, Gama confided in me that he enjoys taking video calls with Europe from the beach, intentionally turning on his camera at the end to provoke a little envy. He also showed me a large building on the Praia do Amor that he hopes to acquire and transform into a center for the projects we discuss in this interview. We had planned to record the interview on the sand after a swim, but the wind was too strong for proper audio. Instead, we sat at his table and began discussing indigenous digital sovereignty and the digital citizenship initiatives he is involved in. 

What I found particularly intriguing throughout our conversations is how counter-colonial and indigenous thinkers like Nego Bispo, with notions such as the colonization of the imaginary, intersect with continental philosophy of technology. Concepts like technical alienation, which Gama mobilizes in dialogue with Paulo Freire and Álvaro Vieira Pinto, are integrated with Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation and technical objects. Here the struggle for digital sovereignty, from being framed as a technical or infrastructural problem, becomes cultural, epistemic, and ontological: a question of how to cultivate a digital territory rooted in ancestral knowledge while engaging critically with global technological systems.

It is from that table, with the sound of the wind still echoing in the background and the sea only a few metres away, that the interview begins.

***

What is your trajectory and why are you interested in digital sovereignty?

I was always raised near the river. I was born in a city called Santarém, which is a city located halfway between Belém and Manaus. I like to say it is the oldest city in the Amazon, which even before colonization was a great center of culture and economy in the region. A crossroads of rivers: three great rivers meet there, the Arapiuns, the Tapajós, and the Amazonas. Arapiun and Tapajó are names of indigenous peoples, and Amazonas is a colonized name they gave to this river that cuts through the entire great Pindoramic basin, today called the Amazonian basin.

I have always studied in public schools. I did my undergraduate degree at a public university in data processing and a specialization in technologies in education. My training is grounded in the construction of critical thinking. When I arrived at the university, I began to encounter technology and started thinking about it as: for what and for whom? I ended up seeking an interdisciplinary path because I saw that just the digital technology part, the engineering, did not answer social or economic problems. Later, I went to study development planning. My master’s degree was at the Núcleo de Altos Estudos Amazônicos [Center for Advanced Amazonian Studies] of the UFPA, here in Belém.

My doctorate was also at this same center. However, I changed my research line: I went to study economy and regional development. While in my master’s I studied public transparency, social participation, and electronic government, I then went on to study surveillance capitalism, data colonialism, and the knowledge economy. Now I am doing a post-doctorate that mixes a bit of all this, from the perspective of a project for territorial governance oriented toward data and traditional wisdom. It is a step toward that.

Digital sovereignty is a contested word: what is the best sense, the sense that you use?

I have debated this concept of sovereignty for a long time, from a perspective of autonomy and, primarily, counter-colonization. Sovereignty is very much a term from political science. It is a term of world geopolitics. For a country to be sovereign, it must have territory, people, and the power of command—the power to use violence to maintain peace. There are many problems regarding this because, as much as it is said that Brazil is a sovereign country, Brazil is a country trapped in a dependency on the Global North. Now it is somewhat seeking, from the perspective of this multipolarity, a path toward China. But even so, from my point of view, it is a process of dependency.

But, as an Amazonian inhabitant and having contact with comunidades ribeirinhas [riverside communities], quilombolas [descendants of escaped enslaved people], indigenous and ancestral peoples, I seek to think of sovereignty starting from a technical autonomy grounded in the territory. So, the peoples I mentioned to you just now—the Tupaiu people, who are from the Tapajós community, the Arapiuns people—they have sovereignty in their territory because they are the local populations. Even though they are under the Brazilian State, they are populations and have sovereignty over their territory. So much so that when you demarcate an indigenous area, you are giving power to those people to self-determine in that territory. For me, this issue of sovereignty is closely linked to the capacity that peoples and ancestral communities have to self-determine in the territory where they act. It is this perspective that I seek to be inspired by.

For me, this issue is very important because while my colleagues speak of an origin of technology with the arrival of computers, the internet, and data processing, I prefer to think from the perspective of the origin of técnica [technique/craft], of how the populations that lived here developed techniques adapted to their cultures to solve their daily problems. This issue of inspiration in ancestral technique, for us to think about the digital today, leads me to think of a perspective of a digital sovereignty situated and grounded in the territory.

What projects are being developed here in this sense?

First, I want to tell you about the context, because that is where the projects begin for me. I started this whole story back in Santarém; I am one of the founders of a collective called Puraqué. The puraquê is an electric fish from the Amazon, an eel, a one-and-a-half-meter eel capable of knocking down an ox, paralyzing an alligator, or killing a person. According to biologists, it is a kind of environmental thermometer. Where the ecosystem is preserved, it inhabits. When this system begins to suffer environmental impacts, it is one of the first animals to disappear, to go elsewhere.

I participated in a group called GAEPA, which is the Grupo de Adolescentes Estudando o Pará [Group of Adolescents Studying Pará]. It was formed within the ideological, philosophical, and religious principles of base ecclesial communities, which worked from what became known as Liberation Theology. I was raised within this environment of popular organization. I participated in children’s groups, adolescent groups, and youth groups. I was mentored by a religious woman named Eunice Sena and a religious man named Leon Kenneth Bruni, an American. It was with them that I began to have access to reading, to learn what geopolitics, capitalism, communism, and socialism are. I began to study the life of Jesus Christ and see how there would only be an opportunity to transform my reality through unity in the territory where I lived.

We did many projects at that time. The issue of Eco 92 was very strong. Just as this COP 30 thing is present now, at the time of Eco 92 we gave lectures in schools, and one of the emblematic things we did was an environmental preservation campaign for a lake near the community where we lived. This woman and this priest were among the first people to have electronic typewriters. The first notebook I saw in my life was at their house. They had an office for project development and research typing called Puraqué.

One of my friends who participated in this group died in childbirth. The daughter survived, but she had eclampsia and passed away. That was a profound shock to our community. Her brother, who is a very close friend of mine, decided to return from Manaus to Santarém and was trying to find a new direction. It was in this context of grief and collective reorganization that the idea arose to transform our indignation into action. I said to him: “Let’s do a digital citizenship and digital inclusion project here in the neighborhood.” We lived in a territory marked by conflicts between adolescents, gangs, and violent disputes. The proposal was to create a space for training and belonging. We started assembling meta-recycled computers, true Frankensteins made from reused parts, and structuring computer rooms in the early 2000s. There, a process of digital literacy and digital culture was born that was, at the same time, technological re-appropriation and community reconstruction.

The Puraqué project became very well known in the city. We started spreading it to other cities in the Lower Amazon: Alenquer, Óbidos, Oriximiná. We began taking these initiatives to those places. When Gilberto Gil became Minister of Culture, he created a project called Digital Culture Action. I had a friend from Santarém who was married to the current Minister of Health of Brazil, Alexandre Padilha. She was very well-connected and said: “There’s going to be a meeting in Belém, a meeting of free knowledge, and I want you to come to meet people from a new project that is starting.” I went to this meeting, Tarcísio and I—this friend with whom we created Puraqué. When we arrived here, those people who were in the national debate experienced a recognition between us: what they were doing, we were also doing in some way back in Santarém. But it was something very endogenous because there was no internet like there is today. So we created our own êmicos emic, internal concepts regarding digital culture.

We didn’t call it a telecenter or an infocenter. We called it a lake, a “digital lake,” which was where the puraquês, the fish, were. And we worked with meta-recycling and environmental issues. There was a project called Reciclique as well, where people did selective waste collection. I gave an interview at this meeting. The meeting had workshops on shared management, audio-video editing, electronic publishing, and installing operating systems, all with free software. In this interview, the person who interviewed me needed to make a presentation to the Minister of Culture, evaluating the first semester of the project. He put together a 15-minute video and included a clip of me speaking for about a minute. I only spoke for a minute, but I said a lot. In the end, Gilberto Gil liked it very much and said: “And that boy from the Amazon, is he on our team yet?” The coordinator, Cláudio Prado, replied: “Not yet, but he will be.” A few days later he called me. We spent about four hours on the phone, with him wanting me to work with them. I asked: “Yes, Cláudio, but effectively, what do you want me to do?” And he said: “I want you to keep doing what you’re doing. Only now I’m going to pay you.” And so I joined the Ação Cultura Digital.

I started organizing free knowledge meetings here in the Amazon. But people from the South and Southeast were coming to do the workshops here in the Amazon. A friend of mine who coordinated the Ação Cultura Digital, named Chico Caminatti, got into a master’s program and had to leave the coordination. The team came to me and said they wanted me to coordinate the action here in the Amazon. I replied that I needed to assemble my own team, with people from here. Because it makes no sense for us to keep spending money bringing people from São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, or Rio de Janeiro here to do the training if the people here were already qualified to do it too.

I took all the people from Puraqué who worked with me and we formed the team; there were about eight people. We started doing these trainings in the Amazon, and we became the main reference in the Amazon for this thing of hacktivism, digital culture, and free software. Today, Puraqué no longer has the effectiveness it once had because, during the Dilma government, we realized there would no longer be government funding for these actions. We thought that the only place where people like us would thrive would be in universities. So we all went to do master’s and doctorates. In fact, from that group, there are three doctors and four masters. Everyone did their undergraduate degrees. Today we are somewhat like this: we meet to think about strategies and things, but Puraqué no longer effectively exists as a physical collective. But it is on the platform.

What is happening now here is a project called Terra Preta Digital [Digital Black Soil]. Terra Preta Digital is an initiative I thought in partnership with Guilherme Gitahy, and today it conducts digital citizenship training in the states of Amazonas, Roraima, Amapá, and Pará. These meetings are spaces for animation, mobilization, and training, and are part of a methodology built by many hands, with important contributions from partners like Luiz Sanches, especially in structuring the ecosystem of digital platforms, and Nara Pessoa, who plays a fundamental role in the digital citizenship meetings linked to Infovia 02. We developed a methodology based on virtual welcoming meetings, face-to-face meetings, and remote training, articulating technology, community organization, and popular education.

In this project, we created the Ecossistema Terra Preta [Terra Preta Ecosystem], inspired by the ancestral technique of cultivating what anthropologists and archaeologists call Indian black earth, a millenary technique created by the peoples who lived in this territory for soil enrichment and forest cultivation. This black earth does not occur only naturally: it is a direct result of the interaction between humans and the environment. Where there was intense and careful human action, a very rich black soil emerged which, according to biologists, houses some of the highest biodiversity indices on the planet.

This work also dialogues with the implementation of the programa Norte Conectado [Connected North program], conducted by the EAF—the state company responsible for installing sub-fluvial fiber optic cables that will bring high-speed internet to 92 cities along the Amazon riverbed. From my point of view, it is currently the main digital sovereignty project underway in Latin America, as it creates the material infrastructure necessary for local technological autonomy initiatives to flourish.

Inspired by the thought of Nego Bispo, a philosopher from here, regarding the category he created of counter-coloniality and the perspective of counter-colonization of the imaginary, we thought: just as our ancestors, thousands of years ago, created a technique to cultivate the territory, to organize the territory, we are in a historical moment where we need, in defense of our autonomy and the sovereignty of our bodies and our territory, to also cultivate our own digital territory. The way we are finding to cultivate this digital territory in a sovereign and interdependent way—because free software is that, participating in a global community—is to cultivate platforms for the organization of popular movements in the Amazon.

We have a PeerTube, called tvterrapreta.org.br. We have a WordPress that creates sites for organizations, terrapreta.org. We have an audio streaming system for setting up web radios, radio.terrapreta.org, where today we have 10 web radios in the Amazon, and our idea is to increase that. We are also starting a space called viveiro.terrapreta.org.br, which is a Nextcloud, a “drive” to organize our information, files, and the information flow of the project, so that each person on the team knows what everyone else is doing.

Additionally, we have a partnership with the Coletivo Digital from São Paulo, where we use a Jitsi instance called rede.sasikse.jitsi/terrapreta, which is our videoconferencing tool for virtual meetings.

Are digital platforms being developed here?

Yes, because these actions are organized within a space of collaborative governance, a common good that was also developed by us, not in this project, but in the previous project, called Plantaformas.org. Plantaformas is a platform for popular organization, aimed at movements, collectives, organizations, research groups, and also government organizations, as a space for the exchange of collectives, the sharing of experiences, the construction of common projects, and the organization of the work of these entities.

You can organize your meetings, encounters, conduct polls, research, and account for projects. The platform, I would say, is the communicative backbone of these initiatives, and it is similar to Decidim in Barcelona. Today, our main project underway is this. From Terra Preta, we held a meeting here on the Ilha de Caratateua, which was the 4th Digital Citizenship Meeting. From the meeting of forty-some organizations from this territory, a Forum for Innovation, Technology, and Culture of the insular region emerged.

I am also doing work on articulation and fundraising because our idea is to create a technological pole here on the island. Today it is basically that. Beyond my activism and my academic life, I also have a company, Nomade Tecnologias, specialized in the implementation of these platforms. Our focus is really on Decidim and Liane, which is another digital marketing tool that uses Meta’s API for data collection and organization of information, campaigns, and political mobilization movements.

Are there specificities of Big Tech colonization here in the Amazon? Is it different from the rest of Brazil?

I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s different from Brazil, or Europe, or anywhere in the world, because, from the point of view of domination, we are all in a process of colonization. Now, here there is a specific aspect. And I won’t even talk about digital addiction or gambling addiction. I won’t even talk about an aspect that everyone knows: that we are under a system, a business that is based on capturing people’s attention and data.

But the impact it has here in the Amazon is, for me, from the perspective of environmental colonization. This is a differentiating point that occurs in the Pan-Amazon and also in Africa, because of the dispute over critical minerals, rare earths, but mainly lithium—lithium in Bolivia and gold in the Amazon. Gold is also at the base of the world’s technology chain.

Another aspect that draws attention, regarding the actions of Big Techs in the Amazon, is the use of digital infrastructures that end up being appropriated by networks linked to environmental crimes—illegal miners, loggers, land grabbers—who use, for example, low-orbit satellites to communicate and organize their strategies.

There is also the process of cognitive plunder related to the biological data of the beings of the Amazon. There is a very well-constructed process of plundering biological data and knowledge from the Amazon, often camouflaged in the form of “international cooperation.” The amount of projects here collecting data on the plant and animal life of the Amazon is very large. This resource that comes from these Big Techs, which comes from the Global North, is very rooted in the higher education institutions of the Amazon. So it is the same process of manipulation, modulation, technical alienation, and cognitive and data plundering that is normally used anywhere else in the world, but here it has a special aggravating factor. Why? This data should be safeguarded.

This information, this knowledge, this saber about the Amazon, has the safeguard of ancestral peoples. And you see a process of biological data plundering and cognitive plunder without any benefit for these populations. This is also a differentiator of this face of data colonialism, of Big Techs acting here in the Amazon. At COP30 you saw this in a very blatant way.

What did you think of the COP30?

A space for political, economic, and geopolitical lobbying. A space where there was little structured listening to Amazonian voices. But I think it was good because many people came here, mainly from Latin America, but at COP30 itself, we had a very limited, very small impact. For me, the Peoples’ Summit was much more interesting, where I had an active role, met many people, managed to make articulations, and I think it strengthened our network as a network of people who think, just like our ancestors, in technical systems of life generation, and not death generation.

The terra preta of the indigenous peoples was a technical system of life generation. The technique from the Global North that arrives here, which also works on the issue of productivity and food production, is a technique guided by a productivist logic that ignores life cycles, necropolitics, that will use pesticides, chemical products, genetic manipulation—in short, all that you already know, technique used for an enhancement that, as Nego Bispo would say, is synthetic.

Who is Nego Bispo?

He is a philosopher, a quilombola sage who wrote several books showing how colonialism, monoculture, and also Christianity are elements of colonization of our imaginary and end up taking away our capacity for self-determination and uprooting us from our territories. In this place where you are sitting, Nego Bispo has already sat eating piracuí, a kind of dehydrated fish flour, an ancestral technique of the peoples who lived here. Nego Bispo is one of the founding thoughts of what I told you, because he leads us to understand that, to counter-colonize our imaginary, we need to engage in a war of denominations. And what is the war of denominations? It is calling things by the name that we have, that we give. That is what I have been telling you from the beginning.

Today, Big Techs determine all relationships, including the relationships of social movements. Social movements have lost their capacity, their technical autonomy to organize, communicate, and mobilize, because today they have to adapt to the standards of Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

This also depends on the fact that when social networks arrived, which became famous in 2010, there was the whole narrative of emancipation—such as the Arab Spring, against powers—and decentralization, which turned out to be completely false.

A Trojan horse, right? Nego Bispo always placed himself in this position. It is a position very linked to other thinkers, like Paulo Freire, or Álvaro Vieira Pinto, who is a Brazilian philosopher of technology. He, along with Paulo Freire, created the term naive consciousness. I articulate this with the war of denominations, Nego Bispo’s counter-colonial movement, and the thought of Gilbert Simondon, where one of the categories I use most is that of technical alienation.

When you join technical alienation with naive consciousness, that is exactly what happens: the social movement, starting from this technical alienation, builds a naive consciousness and does not realize that it hands over the entire strategy, the entire form of political articulation and training of its bases to these corporations. People think this is natural. I see it as if we were in the dictatorship, with a training and study group, and an undercover Army agent came, stayed here talking to us, and captured all the information of what we are discussing.

For me, when I arrive at the debate with social movements, popular organizations, and NGOs interested in this subject, I don’t start by talking about digital sovereignty. I start by talking about information security, about information organization, about self-determination regarding data. Any serious company today does not put its knowledge inside these infrastructures. No matter how expensive it is, they pay to have sovereignty over their data. I think this is a fundamental point, and I perceive that this will, more and more, create an environment of criticality regarding digital technologies, because people are starting to become aware that there is data plundering, the sickening of the population, issues related to addictions, and how the design of these platforms determines people’s behavior.

This is my work today: through digital citizenship, digital literacy, and digital sovereignty, to lead people to understand that information is important, that the data generating this information is important, and that this information, when worked on, generates knowledge. And that this knowledge, from this collected data, can help think about improving the quality of life in the territories where we inhabit.

From my point of view, this action of critical digital literacy strengthens even community processes and democracy in local environments. I know there are many criticisms of democratic processes here in Brazil. It is terrible to see our Congress today, represented by conservative sectors strongly linked to specific economic interests. Most are clientelist and self-serving deputies who are there working for themselves and not for the people. However, I think that democracy is still the best path we can have. And only from a formation, a popular education in the territories, can we lead people to have critical thinking regarding their experience. This critical thinking can lead to the strengthening of democracy and the organization of civic movements, where we can have other types of candidates—male, female, and non-binary—who lead to political diversity in our country. As you must have noticed, we live in an environment of extremely high polarization in Brazil, as in every part of the world.

Concretely, how can platforms like Plantaformas help in popular organization?

I think the main contribution is the understanding of spaces like these as common goods. You take responsibility for that digital territory. Just like the physical territory, the digital territory demands responsibility. Another point is that these tools are more appropriate for popular organization. Today I see, for example, large-scale movements in Brazil that organize within WhatsApp groups. This tends to generate more noise than structured organization. There is a perspective of a design that helps in the organization of information, in the promotion of more direct participation, where people can send proposals, vote, document meetings, and visualize maps of their actions. I think that is a real contribution.

The other is the process of technical de-alienation. Because it needs people who understand computational infrastructure, systems analysis, software development, communication, community animation, community management, event organization, data science—it needs a large amount of saberes and knowledge. When you have this in a shared digital environment, you end up creating a culture of collaboration.

Projects have already been registered on the platform, meetings have already been held. I still don’t have a way to measure this with precision, but I am sure that, in projects alone, in these three years, at least 10 million reais have already passed through the Plantaformas, among the people who joined. For example, today we were meeting with the Irmãs da Horta [Sisters of the Garden], with the people from Slow Food, which is an international network. Plantaformas was the locus of this meeting, and whoever was absent will be able to view them. It is documented. I think that to generate trust, transparency is necessary, and the platform is a place for that.

And at the government level, what do you think of the development of public digital infrastructure in Brazil and the discourse of digital sovereignty?

Honestly speaking, either there is a structural technical alienation, or there are economic interests that hinder this debate. Because, for me, these contracts with Big Techs compromise the informational sovereignty of the country. Besides handing over the personal data of Brazilian citizens to these infrastructures, we pay billionaire contracts. This resource could be being invested in Brazil, in Brazilian companies, generating work here and, mainly, in the network of universities and federal institutes—there are more than 500 institutions, counting universities and institutes, not to mention the state ones.

There would be conditions in Brazil, even, to create a sovereign and federated network that would provide support for Latin America, because Brazil has the largest infrastructure. This network of universities would have to reinvent itself, because today the university is technically alienated, cultivating a naive consciousness regarding the knowledge economy.

In the government, in the same way. If you follow the international geopolitical debate in the last six months, the word President Lula spoke most was sovereignty. Do you know how many times he spoke about digital sovereignty? Very few. Because the theme still does not occupy the centrality it should in the government’s strategic advisory, or because there is a very heavy lobby that prevents this debate from coming to the agenda.

But this debate will come to the agenda, especially from the perspective of digital citizenship and the organization of information in the territories. I don’t believe in any other model than from the bottom up. If we can’t organize this at the base, it won’t ascend to the central infrastructure of the government, because there is no space to debate it. We have in Brazil a front for digital sovereignty. But we haven’t managed to have an impact on the federal government because the contracts are already made.

But is Pix a path to improve the situation?

Certainly, certainly. I make a point of using Pix for everything. For me, that is counter-colonial policy. But it is not seen that way: it is seen as a technical solution, not as a techno-political solution. I’ll give you an example: when you don’t politicize public policies, you end up alienating the people. There are Black people against the quota policy of federal universities, and these people graduated because they studied thanks to the quotas. When you don’t politicize public policies—when you don’t say “people, Pix is this”; when you don’t say “quotas are a historical reparation for a historical debt that this country has”—you end up creating people who form their consciousness from meritocratic thinking, believing they won in life on their own.

For me, digital policies should be politicized. Have a debate with the population, say: “People, Pix exists because American Big Techs, with every purchase you make, capture a fraction of that payment; now imagine what that represents when we are talking about billions of transactions per year. With Pix, we are going to free ourselves from part of this economic drain.” This fight between the United States and Brazil has, yes, a part of raw material plundering, cognitive plundering, biological plundering, but also the maintenance of these colonial resource suckers, like credit card corporations.

It was very good that you said that whenever a new technology comes, it appears disguised as salvation. It is fundamental to understand the intentionality of each technology because they all have interests. I think Pix is a great example that countries in the Global South have the conditions, human and technological, to create instruments of self-determination and economic and digital sovereignty, as is the case with Pix.

What are the pragmatic steps in the coming years to develop digital sovereignty? 

For me, it is about taking the debate to popular classes. It is taking advantage of the public policy of digital literacy, the computational thinking that is being implemented throughout the country, and bringing critical digital literacy to teachers. This is the main path, so that in the next 5, 10 years, we begin to change this positioning. Why? The dominant thought of the colonizer tells us, and especially the teachers, that there is only one way to do things. That is a big lie. There are other ways to do people’s digital training. There are even “unplugged” techniques, where you teach the digital without a computer and without a cell phone.

I think it is fundamental to think of strategies that bring critical thinking regarding technology to the population. Today, my neighbors here are being run over by these platforms, especially by what they call, for marketing purposes, “artificial intelligence.” They are going to be run over by this technology and won’t even know what happened because they are outside the possibility of thinking critically about the use of information technology. So, this point is fundamental to be done. Pragmatically, it is training.

 

 

Welcome to our Annual Report!

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.

---

Global Geographical Statistics & Annual Readership by Measure Report

Global Geographical Readership Statistics

We collect and display detailed readership statistics—also known as usage data or metrics—on each book’s home page. There, you can see how often a book has been downloaded or read online across multiple platforms, including our website, the OAPEN Library, and Google Books. Some geographical data is also available, showing where books have been accessed. Further down this page, you can find more information on how we collect and aggregate this data for each title.

Below are our global readership statistics for 2025, highlighting engagement with our titles across countries, states, and territories worldwide—a testament to the truly global reach of our publications.

In 2025, readership was distributed across continents as follows:

• North America: 41.17%
• Europe: 30.95%
• Asia: 17.91%
• Africa: 6.06%
• Latin America and the Caribbean: 2%
• Oceania: 1.90%

Annual Readership by Measure Report

This year, our books have been accessed 3,984,028 times across various platforms. Below are the top 10 countries by readership:

• United States of America 51.52%
• United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland 7.82%
• Singapore 3.96%
• Italy 3.51%
• China 3.40%
• Spain 2.35%
• Germany 2.31%
• France 2.14%
• India 2.09%
• Brazil 1.55%
• Others 19.35%

Please note that access to our books in HTML format was tracked only until July 2023, as the platform previously used is no longer available. Our developers at OBP are actively working on new solutions. We continue to record usage across some platforms, tracking metrics such as:

• Access frequency and format
• Geographic distribution (where available)
• Specific domains (helpful for Library Members monitoring student and staff engagement)

These data are partial. Many hosting platforms do not provide usage information, and geographic data may be limited by platform restrictions or user privacy settings. Once a file is downloaded, we cannot track its further use or sharing—similar to print or ebook sales figures.

For more information on how we collect and process readership statistics, please visit Our Reach.

Thank you for reading, sharing, and supporting our publications. With the help of our readers, member libraries, and authors, we continue working toward a fairer and more accessible publishing landscape.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

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.

On February 10, 2026, I took part in an event at Spui25 that explored digital culture and the self through the lens of Alexander Douglas’ book Against Identity. The book takes on the ‘uncomfortable’ topic of identity and decides to play against it, drawing on the philosophies of three very different figures: Zhuangzi, Benedict de Spinoza, and René Girard. Douglas argues that we, as humans, have no true identity that comes from within, yet we act as if we did. This is because we have all fallen victim to the romantic lie: that you can become yourself ex nihilo. Obsessed with finding our identities, we look to external models and begin unconsciously imitating them. But of course, this does not fill the identity void; we find that we still feel empty and keep reaching for more models. This constant identity-chasing loop leads to rivalry, violence, and, essentially, the fall of humanity. The three philosophers, whose voices Douglas attempts to speak through, all show that identity is a hoax. Instead, their philosophies offer ways in which we can keep becoming, unselfing, and living against identity.

For the Amsterdam book event, Douglas’ philosophy was placed in a different context: the Australian philosopher, with a background in music, film, and engineering, took on the New Media program of the University of Amsterdam’s Media Studies department. As respondents, Jernej Markelj and I were asked to react to Douglas’ book from the perspective of digital researchers. Practicing the digital-researcher gaze is usually a bit goofy: jumping between memes, self-deprecating humor, and Theory with a capital T. Either way, we confronted Douglas with some web-embedded ways of selfing and unselfing, in order to consider the position of identity within our platform era.

As Douglas pointed out in his talk, the internet brought about certain promises:

1. To discover who we are
2. To invent who we are

He omitted another central promise: anonymity and with it, the possibility to be no one at all. The first phase of the internet was marked by frivolity and play; we went online to cosplay a little. That was quickly shattered when anonymity became equated with danger under Web 2.0 (heavily influenced by the post-9/11 paradigm shift). Your personal information now had to correspond perfectly to your profile, and everything quickly became personalized. The internet was turned into a highly disciplined and centralized space under the guise of improving user experience and getting rid of all the fakers and scammers So what about the right to identity or to its absence in today’s web? Moderator Geert Lovink pointed out that soon we may need to get through a ten-step authentication procedure requiring us to show our passports when trying to enter any online service. The situation seems doomed.

Identity holds less and less promises for meaningful action or solidarity and instead seems to only trigger visions of tightened control and governability. I’m wondering then, if going against identity can really bring about radical change in today’s power? How central an issue is it in the current reality? The idea of a stable self seems to matter less and less in a political climate where truth and fact are outdated concepts. Will having a true identity matter in fifty years? Or will we all become more similar to chatbots that speak through an interconnected, scattered hyper-brain? Is identity truly our main opponent?

It increasingly feels as though it no longer matters what or who we are, and perhaps we no longer truly believe in being one thing. It’s about vibes, not truths. It’s about momentary dopamine kicks, not a harmonious self. To keep up with the algorithm, to keep up with the platform, we must change constantly—take up different trends, looks, political stances—based on what is trending right now. Nothing really sticks anymore: politicians make outrageous statements only to contradict themselves moments later; those who were canceled in 2019 are SO back; last month’s viral moment is next month’s history. Thus, while we are still definitely engaging in mimetic desire, those desires operate at an ever-accelerating pace, interrupted before they can even run their course, replaced by the next trend, the next signal, the next model.

This made me think of modes of being suited to this hyper-mediated, brain-rot, NPC-forward, AI-slop, kawaii environment. My question for Alexander Douglas had to be, inevitably, about the Girl. This is what I read during my response:

Douglas proposes that, to pull away from our toxic mode of identity, to go against it, we should move toward communion in a shared identitylessness. I wanted to explore another tactic against identity, one not grounded in the male philosopher, but in the figure of the girl. When I say ‘girl’, I am not talking about people with a specific physical body, but about all those participating in a set of cultural, mostly online, trends.

In recent years, the internet has become girlified. We’ve seen an explosion of girl memes (girl dinner, girl math, girl brain) alongside a broader affective desire: to be baby. These memes should be read as symptoms of a larger cultural condition.

 

 

We are living through extreme political and economic precarity. Stable incomes are harder to come by, home ownership is out of reach for the young generations, and everything that once was tangible is now a subscription. Nothing is owned; everything is rented, streamed, or stored in the cloud. You are always aspiring, but never quite able to actualise desire. Such is the capitalist design; always chasing, never reaching, stuck in an infinite libido loop that is never allowed to run its course. When being a financially stable, authentic, secure adult becomes increasingly impossible, it makes sense that online we pose as cute animals or silly girls.

Throughout the book, Douglas shows us that identity is never born out of a true self, but from an unconscious mimesis of the models around us. At one point, he notes that imitation itself is not necessarily the problem, but rather the fact that it happens unconsciously. What we can see happening online is a conscious and tactical play with models of identity. The girls take the external model they are meant to comply with, that of gender, and play into it as an identity tactic. The patriarchy has deemed girls passive, innocent, and not capable of anything at all, and so the girls have started weaponizing this presumed incompetence. They perform the ridiculousness of essentialist notions of girlhood in order to show that these models are inherently ridiculous.

This is what is going on online. We can see it as a certain identity tactic used against identity. But can we push our analysis of the girl even further and consider her a mode of identitylessness?

Girlhood scholars suggest understanding girlhood as a state of mobility preceding the fixity of womanhood, implying an unfinished process of personal development. It is a state defined by unfinishedness and unfixity.

The French writing collective, Tiqqun, already theorised this condition in the 1990s through the figure of the Young-Girl. For them, this late capitalist creation, the young-girl, is not always young and increasingly not always a girl but rather “the figure of total integration into a disintegrating social whole.” She is simultaneously consumer and commodity: optimised, easily manipulated, endlessly transformable, and without (yet) a stable sense of self. When placed in the virtual sphere, this becomes even clearer.

As Alex Quicho argues, we are all girls online. Online participation requires the flattening and emptying of the self. We maneuver ourselves as images, constantly recalibrating how we show up, each day flooded by a sea of new trends, news, and viral hashtags. To keep up with this environment, we must remain adaptable and moldable. The platform does not want a strong notion of an innate self; it wants a flexible, changeable subject. The ongoing becoming and unfixity that mark girlhood make it the perfect condition for interacting with the platform.

Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic, in Cute Accelerationism, connect the girl’s malleability to that of the cute object. The girl becomes and unbecomes through cuteness. Cuteness demands a giving-in: de-subjectivizing, becoming blobby, soft, collective. A cute object cannot be cute on its own; it becomes cute through interaction with its surroundings, inviting squeezing, hugging, or sighs of awwwww. For Ireland and Kronic, cuteness aspires toward meltdown into the egg: a state open to all forms and possibilities, requiring constant rebirth into something other. Cuteness as a process of the self shatters any possibility of fixed interiority, as it always grows outward and never reaches a climax.

These examples show how the girl can function as a mode of identitylessness, one that makes no claim to any true identity, has no self to lose, but instead flows through a continuous becoming that never reaches a final form.

What I’m interested in is how Douglas’ project relates to modes of identitylessness that we can see online, as shown here through the condition of the girl.  When identitylessness is already being lived and monetised online, how do we prevent the move against identity from collapsing into a condition that capitalism and platforms actively require? One thing is certain: accelerating into the total girl would definitely put an end to this male-coded need for a true self. Girls are everything and nothing all at once, they are fans of following the Dao.

Interview with Sergio Amadeu. 

The introduction of Digital Tribulations, a series of intellectual interviews on the developments of digital sovereignty in Latin America, can be read here. 

I met Sergio Amadeu, a legend of the Brazilian free software movement, at a launch event hosted by the MTST [Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto / Homeless Workers’ Movement] in São Paulo in November 2025. I attended the event with a fellow researcher from Finland, my friend Darina. We initially struggled to find the venue, as the address was not clearly marked on Google Maps. When I asked for directions, a friendly woman opened a door to what looked like a refugee camp—something we hadn’t expected: a cluster of precarious small houses and tents built with aluminum. Though the camp seemed quiet when we arrived, it was clearly a living community, complete with shared kitchens, a vegetable garden, and other communal spaces.

Walking toward the edge of the site, we headed up a street and discovered a telecentro—a community computer lab designed for digital inclusion where residents of the periphery can access essential services, study, and learn technology. On the walls were quotes from Paulo Freire— the Brazilian pedagogue who famously said that “reading the world precedes reading the word.” Here, the slogan had been adapted to the digital struggle: “the reading of the world precedes the reading of the code.”

Nearby, a group of people had gathered for a conference set up under the shade of a tree. As the only non-Brazilians there, both blondes, we stood out; I overheard amused whispers from the crowd: “Olha, agora temos gringos!” (Look, we even have foreigners now!). We sat down and listened to the book presentation. Sergio spoke with charisma and intensity. When I approached him afterward, he graciously agreed to meet me later at a café on Avenida Paulista, in the heart of São Paulo.

What struck me most after my arrival in Brazil was the country’s staggering rate of digitalization. In many ways, it is far more digitized than Europe, though not always for the better. WhatsApp is not just a messaging app here; it is the primary interface for every person and every business. This is likely because free services offered in countries facing structural economic uncertainty quickly transform into essential infrastructure.

I was also struck by the lack of a widespread data protection culture. Personal data is collected aggressively by everyone, often unnecessarily. I once tried to use a laundromat, where the registration process was guided by the avatar of a black woman, but the system demanded so much personal information that I eventually gave up. Furthermore, biometric access is now standard for entering buildings in major cities. Without a CPF [Cadastro de Pessoas Físicas], the Brazilian individual taxpayer ID, life becomes incredibly difficult, from booking tickets online to accessing basic governmental services.

In this interview, we discuss the legacies of free software in Brazil and the competing visions and programs of digital sovereignty. We explore the challenges facing a country torn between the compromises of leftist governments and the looming risk of the far-right regaining power to use these very technologies for surveillance—a trend already visible in the policies of several Brazilian state governors.

***

What is your trajectory, and why are you interested in digital sovereignty?

I have been researching the internet since the last decade of the 20th century. I did my master’s on internet control and regulation and defended it in 2000. My background is in Social Sciences and Public Policy. I believe that public policy does not exist without consolidation into norms, rules, decrees, and ordinances. I have followed digital networks for a long time, both as a researcher and as an activist in the free software movement. From being a user, I became a contributor in open-source communities in 2003. I then coordinated the first free software implementation committee in the federal government during the first Lula administration. 

At that time, there were many clashes with large companies, especially Microsoft. The government was divided. Part of the government was interested in forging alliances with what we now call Big Techs. I advocated for the drafting of a presidential decree for the implementation of free software in the federal public administration, but this was not possible because it displeased a portion of the government, including ministers Palocci and Furlan.

I left the government, returned to academia, and continued researching digital networks. Currently, I research what is called artificial intelligence—which I prefer to call “actually existing artificial intelligence,” because there is a lot of mystification. By discussing the relevance of data for artificial intelligence, I began to frame the issue of digital sovereignty starting from data sovereignty. My relationship with the theme is as a researcher and as someone who comes from the open technology community, and who considers that technologies concentrate hierarchical, political, and economic determinations. 

When we talk about digital sovereignty, what are we talking about? Brazil has a privileged position in the discourse. How has this debate evolved in recent years?

The term digital sovereignty is under dispute. When I defend digital sovereignty, I bring it close to the idea of food sovereignty, a concept developed by popular movements, especially the peasant movement: the community has the right to choose what to plant and what to eat. By using the concept of digital sovereignty, we affirm the need for a minimum level of technological autonomy to define which technologies to develop and use, on what basis, and for what purpose. When we use only platforms and technologies from large North American corporations, we lose the ability to define basic elements of the development and use of these technologies. To be sovereign, technology needs to be appropriated by collectives—by national, local, and community collective intelligence.

And digital sovereignty involves data sovereignty. Data has high value in the digital economy and is a fundamental input for artificial intelligence. Our society should define which data will be created, its purposes, and, once created, how it should be used. When data goes to Big Tech data centers, the possibility of making decisions about that data is lost. Hence the term data sovereignty.

Looking at the trajectory of free software and open source, what worked and what failed? What can we learn, especially with the arrival of the smartphone?

There was a change in the technological landscape that made the use and development of free software more difficult. Mobile phones created devices that prevent you from using just any software. You are stuck with a certain hardware that requires a specific type of software. Very few people can remove what comes pre-installed and install other free software, and these often do not communicate with telecommunications operators. On the mobile front, this became complicated. Google, to face Apple, used Linux to create Android. It’s even a joke: the most used operating system in the mobile world is no longer free, because it is under Google’s control, even though it was born from free software and the Linux kernel licensed under the General Public License (GPL).

Another change occurred in the computer world: the computing paradigm migrated to the cloud. There was a massive outsourcing of infrastructure from governments, companies, and individuals to data centers controlled by large companies. You lose autonomy over the software because many systems are now used in the cloud. Curiously, clouds use free software. Most of AWS’s infrastructure runs on Linux; today, a large part of the services of Microsoft, which is the second-largest cloud provider in the world, does too. But all of this was captured by large companies. Despite having free licenses on the servers, they are under the control of corporations that transform collective work into private profit. It is necessary to liberate free software from big techs.

The lesson is that we need to act on several levels to build digital sovereignty. In Brazil, neoliberalism became the doctrine and logic of public managers, including part of the current government. It is not a minimal state; it is a state at the service of companies. To implement sovereign digital infrastructures, it must be done gradually, and free software is fundamental. Free software returns to the field of dispute allied with the struggle for digital sovereignty. It is no use saying we are going to remove all Big Techs from the game in public administration. There is no immediate alternative. We need to build concrete alternatives, which involves expensive infrastructure, technology policy, and the use of the state’s purchasing power in favor of digital and data sovereignty.

Large corporations know the strength of this agenda and launched the “Sovereign Cloud” product. They promise a “sovereign cloud,” but in practice, they install data centers in Brazil while maintaining control of the data, operation, and revenue. It is argued that, at least, the data would be safe in Brazil. It is not. The North American legal apparatus gives primacy to the U.S. state to control machines even outside Brazilian territory. In June 2025, the French Senate called Microsoft’s legal consultant and asked if the software and data running on the company’s computers in France would be subject only to French authorities. The Microsoft representative said: no! The Cloud Act obliges North American companies to comply with U.S. decisions wherever they are. If it is like this in France, it is no different in Brazil. Therefore, the “sovereign clouds” of the big tech companies and the products of Serpro and Dataprev that use Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle do not offer actual sovereignty.

What do you think of what the Federal government is doing to develop digital sovereignty?

The current government succeeded an administration full of neo-fascists who were destroying democracy—I am talking about the government of Jair Bolsonaro. The Lula government found an administration in a state of “scorched earth.” This created great difficulty. However, for the first time, federal government technology documents brought up the term digital sovereignty. But there is still more discourse than concrete projects. At the same time, Serpro operates as a broker, a reseller for Amazon, Oracle, and Microsoft. The discourse seems good, but the practice is the same as before. This needs to be changed. It is difficult to replace suppliers without concrete projects. Since they don’t launch projects, they fall into the neoliberal trap that everything has to be in real-time and requires immediate solutions: “let’s take everything off Amazon, and now what?” Now it is necessary to build free and sovereign infrastructures and management solutions here. Since they don’t build them, they stay trapped by the real-time requirement.

Ok, but I think also the idea of the Soviet Union projects or how Cybersyn worked was to improve planning with the use of real-time data.

Cybersyn began to be implemented by Allende in Chile. Brazil has something that Chile and Argentina do not: state-owned public data companies, which have now been distorted and have started to function as dealers for big techs. But we could reverse this with a new management policy. The current government could have made this inversion if it had this clarity, but it doesn’t. Most managers and leaders of the current government do not understand that technology is also a geopolitical apparatus.

I speak from a perspective I call data colonialism. We use not only the anti-colonial struggle of Fanon but also the vision of decoloniality from Latin American sociology—for example, Aníbal Quijano, a Peruvian sociologist who stated the following: colonialism, as a political structure, no longer exists. Brazil is sovereign. But coloniality remains in the epistemes, in the way of thinking, in the culture. Many left-wing managers are subjected to coloniality; they identify with the colonizer.

Decolonizing the imaginary?

That’s it, liberating the imaginary. There is no single way to make automated systems, called artificial intelligence. There are several others, but we are subordinated to an exclusive type of thought and approach. Even those who do not agree with the concept of decoloniality could think from Marx and observe the profound alienation that operates around technology. There is a strong alienation between managers and political leadership. They discuss philosophy, politics, geopolitics, cooking, fashion, sports. But when it comes to technology, they buy whatever works, as if technology were neutral.

It is necessary to break this idea and reposition technology in the field of economy and culture. Technology is one of the greatest cultural pressures on a society. It is not external; it is not just technical. Technique expresses ways of facing problems that society has. The economic power of big techs derives from technological dominance. North American economic-military power does too. There is no racial superiority; that is a colonizing invention that remains in the imaginary.

Which was more or less the Gramscian concept of hegemony. And how do you evaluate the results of popular movements like the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (MTST)? Are there Latin American specificities in the struggle for the commons?

Brazil has many popular movements. The MTST [Homeless Workers’ Movement] is one of them. Another is the MST, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra [Landless Workers’ Movement], which has great strength in the countryside and a strong technology sector. They have a sovereignty agenda and are now advancing in the defense of digital sovereignty. Together with the MTST, they defend “popular digital sovereignty” to differentiate it from the false idea of digital sovereignty from Big Techs. Technologies need to be appropriated and validated by the communities.

The technology group of the MTST decided to use available technologies and attract young developers, UX designers, system administrators, and data scientists. They were successful. They are starting to discuss the adoption of free software. They don’t use it fully yet, but they are moving in that direction and want to bring more people into the free software community. Free software communities in Brazil are numerous. There is, for example, the Casa de Cultura Tainã, which digitally articulated a network of Quilombos. Quilombos were communities formed by escaped enslaved people in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, and their remnants exist to this day. In Brazil, for a long time, the ideology of racial democracy prevailed, which denied racism. For years the Black movement said there was racism in Brazil. Rede Globo, the main TV network in Brazil, said there was no racism in Brazil. Academia did not recognize racism in Brazil. But the struggle of the Black movement changed that reality.

And then what happened? The internet helped connect these quilombola communities. The Rede Mocambos, with quilombola leadership in Campinas, built a network using free software a long time ago. Many quilombos use free software. They coordinate with groups like the Coletivo Digital. São Paulo had the largest network of telecenters with free software on the planet: 400 free internet access units in the peripheries, all with free software. Coletivo Digital is a non-governmental organization that was born from this experience of free telecenters in the city of São Paulo.

What are the specificities of the city and to what extent has it become platformized? Is it a smart city?

There are groups that defend smart cities. We are critical. In practice, a smart city becomes a set of sensors and cameras to watch the population and interconnect some services. There are movements like Tire meu rosto da sua mira [Get my face out of your sights], against biometrics and facial recognition. This is an intense dispute. There are state governments linked to the PT [Workers’ Party], such as Ceará and Bahia, which, through political alliances, handed over the security area to the right and adopted biometrics and facial recognition a long time ago. Except facial recognition does not reduce crime. They claim arrests of people with warrants, but this does not increase security. What is seen is more fear and the possibility of mapping people and controlling unwanted movements, mapping favelas and peripheries.

The issue of privacy here is very important because of the bias and the context of police violence. I’ll give an example. I live in Sumaré, a middle-class neighborhood. If a camera gives a false positive, a lot of police will come, but being an older, white man in the local context, probably nothing will happen. In the periphery, the outcome can be fatal. The police kill many Black people every day in Brazil.

When I leave home, I pass several totems with cameras. They can control my steps through the city. It is a society of distributed, totalitarian surveillance, unacceptable in any democratic regime. I don’t want to be watched by enemies who might be in power. Here in Brazil, there are dangerous groups like Bolsonaristas, the extreme right, and neo-fascists. The government of São Paulo belongs to Tarcísio, aligned with Bolsonarismo. In general, they link up with evangelical sectors to get votes and want cameras in schools. 

In Paraná, the governor says that teachers are untrustworthy people. He implemented an app—which should be a worldwide scandal—that forces teachers to take photos of children for attendance records via facial biometrics. Biometrics is sensitive data. Instead of a roll call, the system recognizes who was present. This reveals an authoritarian and technocratic vision. Neo-fascism is not just a regime; it is a process. And in Brazil, there is a junction of ruralism and financial capital behind it; although they present themselves as “against the system,” they are the worst of the system.

Let’s go to a more positive example: PIX. Do you see PIX as a virtuous case of public infrastructure? Why did PIX happen in Brazil?

PIX was already being studied, but the decision to launch it accelerated due to a specific context. And my doubt was always why the bankers agreed to PIX, since they earned from transfer transactions between banks. It’s because something very interesting existed in Brazil. Brazil is perhaps the first or second in the relative number of WhatsApp users. This is due, among other factors, to zero-rating. What is that? Most poor Brazilians do not have monthly paid phone plans. They have prepaid plans; they buy 20, 30, 50 reais of connection. Facebook made deals with operators so that the use of WhatsApp would not consume the data allowance/cap of prepaid users. Facebook pays for you.

WhatsApp is omnipresent: more than 90% of Brazilians use it. If you want to hire a house painter or service worker, you do it through WhatsApp; everyone gives you their WhatsApp. Thus, the Meta Group, owner of WhatsApp, thought: now that I have all the small businesses in my hand, I’m going to dominate the currency. The tendency was for WhatsApp to integrate payments and currency within the app. But the Central Bank launched PIX.

So it was against WhatsApp?

Actually, this is not talked about. But this is a hypothesis. WhatsApp was about to launch its own means of payment, and then the bankers who were studying PIX accepted it. The bankers accepted PIX also because traditional bank transfers were less used by poorer people. Still, many people today use PIX for large transfers, which impacts revenues. Who was most annoyed by PIX? It wasn’t Visa or Mastercard, but the Meta group, which went to ask Trump to attack PIX because Zuckerberg lost the goose that lays the golden eggs here.

But the idea of PIX was not born inside the banks; it was born in the Central Bank to speed up transactions, and this time it got off the drawing board. PIX became public infrastructure, widely adopted. It is unthinkable to reverse it. Lula would not end PIX; on the contrary, Lula’s decided support for PIX in the face of Trump increased the popularity of the Brazilian government.

What pragmatic steps can Latin America take in the next five years?

It is necessary to bring together structures, entities, movements, and democratically elected governments to build sovereign public digital infrastructures, starting with the universities. Brazilian and Latin American universities have their data in Big Techs. We need to start at the beginning: create sovereign digital public infrastructures, support community providers, and technological arrangements between public entities, not just federal ones, to develop regional solutions. This is possible despite the political instability of the region. 

Today, for example, under the government of Javier Milei in Argentina, there is great difficulty in participating in collective projects, as public infrastructure is being destroyed. This ideological project of the extreme right, inspired by authors like Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin, aims to implode the State from within and replace it with a privatized techno-management, with no space for democracy. They want an entrepreneurial monarch, a CEO, and the State should be a share of stock as a company is. In this context, regional cooperation in South America is shaken by the advance of the extreme right, but this cooperation is fundamental for us to build collaborative, shared, distributed, federated, free, and independent technological infrastructures from Big Techs.

Minor Compositions Season 2 Episode 1: In girum imus nocteet consumimur igni Season 2 opens with a conversation with Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson – filmmakers, artists, and co-founders of Firefly Frequencies – reflecting on radio as a collective, political, and affective medium. Moving between the history of autonomous radio, projects such as Lullabies for […]

From Blues To Beyoncé: A Century of Black Women’s Generational Sonic Rhetorics (SUNY Press, 2024) by Alexis McGee explores Black women’s creative labor and cultural production. The book offers a searing critique of both record industry exploitation and sound studies’ white gaze. By focusing on quotidian engagement with sound, McGee speaks simultaneously to linguists, rhetoricians, and ethnomusicologists, demonstrating how each discipline has overlooked Black women’s fundamental contributions to our understanding of language and cultural expression. This is not merely an additive project seeking inclusion within existing frameworks, but rather a fundamental reconceptualization of how we study Black women’s sounds.

McGee, currently Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Journalism, Writing, and Media, mobilizes her training in linguistics, rhetoric, and composition to analyze everyday communicative practices and generational knowledge systems passed down between Black women. McGee joins other recent texts such as Earl Brooks’s On Rhetoric and Black Music (2024) in critical conversations around “sonic rhetoric.” In From Blues to Beyoncé, McGee theorizes sonic rhetoric as a collection of cultural technologies for storytelling that “act as methods of communicating knowledge that can be used to persuade or inform (younger) generations about topics like survival, liberation, and care” (6). Examining artists from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries through personal experience, archival material, biographies, interviews, and popular media, McGee demonstrates the critical necessity of taking seriously the generational cultural knowledge embedded in Black women’s creative practices within an anti-Black and misogynist world.

At its core, the book introduces “sonic sharecropping” as a term that illuminates the lopsided relationship between Black women creatives (tenants), their sonic and musical creations (crops), and wealthier, more powerful recording industry players (landlords, music labels, copyright holders). The sharecropping metaphor reveals how the music industry extracts value from Black women’s cultural labor while denying them ownership and fair compensation. McGee further develops the concept of “audibility of advice” to name the intergenerational mentorship and fugitive pedagogy that Black women practice as they navigate this exploitative system—showing how even the transmission of survival knowledge between generations becomes entangled in the same structures designed to profit from Black women’s creative work.

The book’s chapters traverse an impressive range of cultural moments. Opening with Cardi B’s attempted trademark of “okurrr,” McGee demonstrates how legal and social structures systematically prevent Black women from securing intellectual property rights over cultural innovations that white industry executives appropriate without restriction.

This contemporary case illuminates sonic sharecropping: Black women are expected to create cultural property that record labels then own and sell back to them. McGee then traces these dynamics historically, analyzing business practices of major labels like Atlantic Records. By drawing parallels between sharecropping contracts and recording agreements, the analysis reveals how the music industry has historically relied on discretionary ethical conduct by executives rather than equitable contractual structures, perpetuating exploitative relationships reminiscent of post-Reconstruction economic arrangements.

In what is perhaps the book’s most compelling chapter, McGee examines successive performances of “Strange Fruit,” tracing how Nina Simone and later artists like Missy Elliott and Janelle Monáe have reinterpreted Billie Holiday’s haunting meditation on lynching.

McGee builds on Amiri Baraka’s concept of the “changing same”, to show that antiblackness persists throughout time though it changes form. McGee demonstrates how Black women performers resist being treated as interchangeable vessels for Black cultural expression. Rather than presenting generic renditions, each artist asserts her distinctive voice and perspective that reiterates the enduring violence perpetuated against Black bodies.

Each performance carries its own rhetorical power while participating in “sankofarration,” a neologism from artist, writer, and media studies professor John Jennings that combines “sankofa” (a West African concept symbolizing learning from the past to move forward) with “narration” to describe a rhetorical worldview premised on understanding time as cyclical rather than linear. Sankofarration positions past and future as interconnected forces that actively shape the present. Crucially, McGee connects Lawrence Beitler’s commercial sale of lynching photographs (depicting the hanged bodies of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith) to the visual and sonic rhetorical devices in these musical works. Through this framework, Black women artists transform historical trauma into ongoing political commentary and visions for future liberation. Black women’s creative work, she argues, consistently foregrounds documented histories of racial violence alongside the willful ignorance that upholds white supremacy and patriarchy. By listening critically to Black women’s sonic rhetorics, we can access pathways toward collective liberation.

Despite the book’s title, McGee’s engagement with Beyoncé focuses narrowly on the lemon-to-lemonade metaphor in the album, Lemonade. Her analysis of other Black women artists, however, anticipated critiques later directed at Cowboy Carter, highlighting a double standard: as a Black woman, Beyoncé faces moral scrutiny for engaging with country music—positioned as both capitalist enterprise and white cultural property—while white and male artists have participated in the same commercial structures for centuries without comparable ethical condemnation.

This defense raises the book’s most provocative question, one McGee gestures toward but leaves unresolved: if the inequitable standards applied to Black women artists are symptoms of a fundamentally exploitative system, what would liberation from that system actually entail? Does it require dismantling existing structures of cultural ownership and profit, or can it be achieved through expanded access and recognition within them?

While McGee does not directly engage Matthew Morrison’s recent work Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States, her analysis clearly converses with his examination of how Black cultural products have been reproduced for white consumption, particularly through the ongoing afterlives of blackface minstrelsy. McGee’s focus on Black women specifically adds crucial gender analysis to ongoing scholarly conversations about racial capitalism and cultural appropriation.

McGee acknowledges that capitalism itself, rather than Black women’s participation in it, constitutes the fundamental problem. However, the analysis stops short of fully theorizing alternatives to existing structures of Western sound production and commodification. Readers familiar with Sylvia Wynter’s insistence on distinguishing the map from the territory, or Audre Lorde’s warning that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,”  may desire more sustained engagement with radical alternatives and additional tool building necessary for Black liberation from existing antiblack social and political structures. What might Black women’s sonic practices look like in anticapitalist frameworks of collective ownership and exchange? How might Black femme and queer performances expand or complicate these intergenerational transmissions of knowledge? How might Black women’s intergenerational knowledge systems point toward alternative epistemologies that refuse the terms of racial capitalism altogether?

This theoretical restraint appears strategic rather than accidental. From Blues to Beyoncé navigates carefully between colleagues unfamiliar with Black feminist and womanist theory, who require accessible entry points, and specialists seeking new takes on traversing multiple disciplines at once. In threading this needle, McGee prioritizes disciplinary bridge-building before radical dismantling of capitalist structures and academic knowledge production systems.

These limitations notwithstanding, the book represents an essential contribution to multiple fields. It insists that scholars of sound studies, rhetoric, and Black feminist thought must engage one another—that these conversations can no longer proceed in isolation. Methodologically, it offers both theoretical sophistication and practical analytical tools, making it intellectually substantive for non-specialists while providing specialists a compelling model for interdisciplinary synthesis. Most importantly, McGee demonstrates that we cannot understand American culture, sound, or rhetoric without recognizing Black women’s voices as foundational rather than supplementary.

This book transforms its disciplines by interrogating their foundational assumptions, asking us not simply to include Black women in sound studies, but to recognize how their systematic exclusion has rendered the entire field epistemologically incomplete. In raising these questions, even without fully resolving them, McGee provides both rigorous foundation and invitation to continue the work.

—

Featured Image: Janelle Monae on the Dirty Computer Tour at Madison Square Garden in 2018 by Flickr User Raph_PH. License: CC BY 2.0

—

Joe Zavaan Johnson (he/they) is a multi-instrumentalist, arts educator, and Black music researcher. Currently an Ethnomusicology Ph.D. Candidate at Indiana University-Bloomington, he examines the Black banjo renaissance through Black studies, human geography, folklore, and ethnomusicology. Johnson frequently collaborates with grassroots organizations focused on coalition building, community healing, and cultural reparations, bridging scholarship with community-engaged practice. His forthcoming dissertation, Black Banjo Bodylands: Recovering an African American Instrument, explores the relationship between Black people, lands, and banjos as ancestral technology.

—

REWIND!…If you liked this post, check out:

SO! Reads: Marisol Negrón’s Made in NuYoRico: Fania Records, Latin Music, and Salsa’s Nuyorican Meanings –Vanessa Valdés

SO! Reads: Justin Eckstein’s Sound Tactics: Auditory Power in Political Protests––Jonathan Stone

“I’m on my New York s**t”: Jean Grae’s Sonic Claims on the City--Liana Silva

Love and Hip Hop: (Re)Gendering The Debate Over Hip Hop Studies--Travis Gosa

My Music and My Message is Powerful: It Shouldn’t Be Florence Price or “Nothing”-Samantha Ege

I Been On: BaddieBey and Beyoncé’s Sonic Masculinity — Regina Bradley

Cardi B: Bringing the Cold and Sexy to Hip Hop–Ashley Luthers