News from the Collective

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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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 

Interview with Guilherme Flynn Paciornik.

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 Guilherme – aka Guy – at the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers in Rio de Janeiro. He was unfortunate enough to receive one of the five physical copies of my first book that I brought to Brazil, rightfully laughing at my methodological section where I defined the research process as “serendipitous.”

When I later took a bus to São Paulo, Guy generously guided me through the largest city in Latin America—a place where wandering around on foot is not always recommended. As someone deeply embedded in the city and its social movements, he knew exactly the kind of authentic events and places that white leftist academics—myself included—tend to adore. 

We focused on the city’s musical life: several rodas de samba, a fanfarra, and a Palestinian bar. At the Fevro bar, located next to the railway tracks under a massive tree, with people sambando all around me, I witnessed a living example of amor & revolução. Behind the DJ booth, two written declarations captured the spirit of the place. One read “Declaramos Carnaval o Ano Inteiro“—a claim that the right to joy, to occupy the streets, and to suspend social hierarchies (the essence of Carnival) should not be confined to a single season but practiced as daily resistance against formal power and oppression. The other proclaimed: “Putaria é Resistência“—for which radical sexual freedom and bodily transgression are themselves political acts against a repressive system. 

Through him, I gained access to a wider network of people who supported my time in Brazil, for which I am deeply grateful. We eventually met for this interview in a gentrified café where I was working in the neighborhood of Vila Madalena, a hub for gringos—a term that in Brazil refers to almost all foreigners. Guy refused to do the interview inside, so we sat on a low wall on the sidewalk where he could smoke. In this conversation, Guy presents the vision of a proud socialist, shaped by years of grassroots practice as much as by his theoretical inclinations. 

Our meeting, and this subsequent interview, were perhaps the ultimate proof of that serendipity: a conversation that embodies his commitment to decentralized, autonomous spaces beyond the control of corporate platforms.

What is your background, and how did you become interested in digital sovereignty?

I graduated in social sciences and hold a doctorate in the sociology of technology from Campinas State University. My interest in digital sovereignty grew out of my work in public health, where I realized that the potential of digital tools was not being fully used to improve services. Since 2005, I have worked with technology at all three levels of government in Brazil. At the municipal level in São Paulo, I created and coordinated a program called Prevention at a Distance. At the state level in Acre, I worked on the Floresta Digital project, which aimed to integrate federal, state, and municipal services into a single digital platform for citizens, although its results were limited. At the federal level, with the Ministry of Culture in São Paulo, I participated in the Pontos de Cultura program, which is a Brazilian federal program that provides funding and support to community-based cultural initiatives, emphasizing local autonomy, cultural diversity, and digital inclusion.

Since 2012, I have been active in the hacker community and the free software movement, notably through the Hacker Bus project. My research has focused on how social movements create their own technological solutions in everyday struggles, developing their own philosophies of technology from lived practice rather than only from books. In this sense, I try not to create hierarchies between academic and activist knowledge, because both produce valid insights about the world and about social change. I have also been teaching for ten years in different universities.

Currently, I am a researcher and activist. My current work is a nationwide research project on the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) by internet service providers. As an activist, I am part of the coordination of the Digital Sovereignty Network, which includes about five hundred people working together to develop a national strategy for digital sovereignty and to influence government agendas. There are also public servants and academics. This year we spoke with four ministries. It is often exhausting but incredibly dynamic work: since June I have had almost ten meetings per week. Our working group is dedicated to changing public administration processes toward FOSS; one of our slogans is: Public money? Public code! 

How do you define “digital sovereignty”, and how do you see the current developments around digital sovereignty in Latin America, particularly in Brazil?

When I started studying the topic three years ago, I did not like the term, and I still think it is problematic, even if it is now widely accepted. The problem is both “digital” and “sovereignty”. People often associate “digital” with binary code, with zero and one, but what matters is not the binary nature. What matters are the affordances of the digital: the speed of transmission, the scale of what can be stored, and the miniaturization of information, which changes social space and social time.

The velocity of transmission and the size of what can be stored changes the time of politics in two directions. It can diminish time because events and information travel very fast and impact local politics. It can expand political time because digital space can store and prolong decision-making with low cost: there is not always a need to decide everything in a single in-person meeting, because you can have asynchronous meetings and decisions. 

But the digital also expands and contracts social space. It expands because more spaces and cultural artifacts become accessible at any moment, and it contracts because there is a sensation that all spaces are digitally linked and therefore closer. 

“Sovereignty” is also complicated. The traditional way of thinking about sovereignty, since Jean Bodin in the sixteenth century, refers to centralized state power and the nation-state system. But in the digital age, borders are less relevant, and classical political theory is not enough. We need to rethink sovereignty as something that can apply to different levels of collectives, communities, and sometimes even individuals, not only to nation-states. For instance, Indigenous digital sovereignty is sovereignty as a way of life rooted in specific cultures.

Rather than searching for the perfect definition, I see the concept as part of an ongoing social struggle, which is more fertile. The disputes around its meaning are political and productive. As  Bourdieu once noted this quoting Austrian philologist and literary critic Leo Spitzer, the polysemy of a word is the visible vestige of the historical social struggle for its meaning. 

Governments across Latin America are only beginning to take this seriously. In the region there are historical precedents like Chile’s Cybersyn experiment in the 1970s, or Cuba’s digital initiatives. Latin America is many different people, and we used to gather more to discuss free software than to discuss digital sovereignty, as we do now. Uruguay is often cited as a positive case: they run their data centers with free software and have comprehensive programs. But in most countries, including Brazil, the debate is still in its infancy. Many lawmakers and public servants do not really understand what personal data means or how platforms operate.

Nowadays, many think sovereignty can be achieved just by hosting data centers locally, ignoring issues like legal jurisdiction and cloud control. Besides existing hardware-level vulnerabilities, what they often forget is that the US Cloud Act allows the US government to request information from US-based companies, even if the servers or data centers are outside the United States. 

In this sense, we need political education at all levels: ministries, civil servants, and parliament. Digital sovereignty is today where environmental or gender policies were decades ago: the beginning of a long struggle. And a central point of this struggle is avoiding US platforms to be able to influence political behavior, fueling hatred, misogyny, and far-right ideologies. Young people can drift from their families’ values because of the ideological content they encounter online. Schools, leisure, and public spaces can become more reactionary under the influence of algorithmically produced culture. It is not simply a veil being lifted to reveal a society that was always the same; platforms can actively create and expand new reactionary individuals and groups.

We are trying to counteract this by forming coalitions between movements, from feminist and housing groups to rural workers, and by raising awareness of how platforms monopolize and control visibility of the social world. They decide which posts are visible and which are not. This power over visibility undermines social movements’ ability to reach their own base. Many activists still think one million views means mass outreach, but in a country of 213 million, that is tiny. We need to reconnect online mobilization with offline presence, combining digital tools with physical organization to rebuild deeper, community-based politics.

What has changed in the debate and in the movements in the last decade?

There is more interest in these topics now than there was a decade ago. The rise of misinformation and the political actions of major platform owners had the effect of making people pay attention. When moderation policies weaken, people become aware of what is at stake, including the normalization of hate speech and attacks on rights.

In Brazil, the Digital Sovereignty Network was almost inactive after the last elections, but it is alive again. We thought a small meeting in Brasilia would attract twenty people, but one hundred and twenty came. Movements that were not previously linked to digital sovereignty joined, alongside initiatives such as the Internet Legal campaign. Major actors, including the CUT union in Sao Paulo and the World Women’s March, showed up. The government itself was surprised.

External pressure also matters. When US politics signals protection of big tech and increased trade conflicts, it can push the movement to grow, because people feel the dominance and the need for alternatives. What we are trying to do is connect social movements and the government to create a National Plan on digital sovereignty. It is tiring work and often unpaid, but there is genuine momentum now.

How do you connect digital sovereignty to Web 3.0 and alternative social media, like the ones you build and research?

Extending the idea of sovereignty to collectives and Indigenous communities links directly to alternative technologies. For over twenty years, people talked about “the internet” without really engaging with how software is made and what it enables. I never liked mainstream social media, and I closed my accounts.

The Fediverse, short for Federated Universe, is built in Free and Open Source Software and is federated and distributed. Different types of social media platforms are connected by the ActivityPub protocol. For microblogging there is Mastodon; for macroblogging there are platforms such as Friendica; for image sharing there is Pixelfed; for video hosting there is PeerTube; for discussion groups there is Lemmy; for audio sharing there is Funkwhale, and so on.

All of these are software you can install on a server to start a community. One installation is called an instance. The community decides the features of the instance, such as character limits, and whether there will be custom emojis. Most importantly, communities decide who they federate with and who they do not.

From one account you can see the federated network, across many servers, without a single center and without a few companies deciding who sees what and when. In general there are no advertisements, and feeds are chronological. The principle is communication between people, not turning people into data for profit.

We create and host our own instances of the Fediverse, like Organica.Social on Mastodon, where communities can set their own rules, moderation systems, and features. For example, you can prioritize public health and science above misinformation and conspiracy theories.

The main difference with corporate platforms is that communities decide what interactions are possible. Big tech’s real job is often to hide parts of the world: Gaza disappears, Cuba disappears. They show you only what you already like, and that destroys informational diversity. In our networks, you can build local instances tied to neighborhoods or topics, creating real, plural public spaces.

We are also experimenting with ultra-slow and non feed-based social media. For example, Miga, Make Internet Great Again, is blockchain-based, and you can only post one meme per week, one idea per week, one piece of gossip per week, and one book per month. It is a way to reject the addictive logic of continuous feeds.

People often know the problems of big tech, so a question emerges: why do they not move to alternative social media? One hypothesis is cognitive dissonance: people know, but they stay. Another approach is to think in terms of damage reduction, a term used in public health for heavy drug use. In that sense, the Fediverse can be a step down the ladder, away from the most harmful dynamics.

There is always a question of scale. Decentralized networks can grow, but growth is cultural more than technical. When unions, movements, and influencers understand the collective logic, they bring their people with them.

Big tech is trying to invade this space too. BlueSky and Threads now use federated protocols, but under venture capital logic, which reproduces many of the same problems. I am also concerned with age verification, and with bots and automated profiles invading Fediverse communities, and with developing tools that help human moderation identify racist, misogynistic, and fascist content.

What role do you see for the state in building digital public infrastructure and decentralized media?

We are used to a centralized way of thinking: either something is state owned, or privately owned. The Fediverse does not work like that. At the same time, we are struggling with the government to change how we communicate. Take Bolsa Famillia, which provides money to families that meet certain criteria. We argue that information should not be distributed via WhatsApp, but through a Mastodon instance or another open-source platform.

To be clear, the state can have its own instances to distribute information, reports, and news. This helps public visibility and growth of the Fediverse without removing the power of community instances, because everything is federated.

There are already examples. Ibram, the Brazilian Institute of Museums, oversees more than one thousand museums, and about two hundred of them use Tainacan. It is a WordPress plugin that can connect to the Fediverse, which means WordPress blogs can become part of the federated ecosystem.

At the same time, it would be a nightmare to have only state-owned social media. In many contexts, that would make it difficult to criticize the government and would threaten freedom of expression. In the Fediverse you can have both: state instances and community instances, connected but independently moderated.

Because it is Free and Open Source Software, you can study and change the code for your needs. It can also be georeferenced, so people can connect to what happens in their neighborhood: a show on the street, an exercise program for older people, or a road closure because pipes are being renewed. We call this campaign FediGov.br: bringing the government into the Fediverse in a decentralized way.

Speaking of infrastructure, what about Brazil’s public fintech, PIX? Can it be considered an advancement in digital sovereignty?

It is quite remarkable. While other electronic payment methods in Brazil incur fees, PIX operates with zero tariffs and no taxation for individuals. Consider that American card companies like Visa, American Express, and Mastercard hold a large share of the market. With PIX, businesses of all sizes can avoid paying fees per transaction to these companies, and this keeps money inside the country.

PIX enables direct financial transactions between individuals through a cryptographic and secure system. This has frustrated North American companies, which had sought to implement a payment system via WhatsApp and later abandoned that project. Now WhatsApp has integrated PIX without fees, recognizing that adoption would otherwise be limited.

PIX is a positive step, but digital sovereignty is not only about payments. It is about the broader technological ecosystem and who controls it.

Let’s talk about the imaginaries of digital sovereignty. What kind of future do you envision for the next twenty years?

Some philosophers distinguish between the future, meaning everything you can imagine, and what you actually build given concrete circumstances. We do have a vision. I am a socialist, against the exploitation of men and women by men and women. We already have the technology to live well and to live happily.

Digital technologies can help connect the richness of the world’s cultures, and also the cultures that exist in each neighborhood. But the digital is not the central issue in itself. It is part of the struggle, a set of tools that can make some things easier.

The main idea is that we should work less. We could have different gender relations, different race relations, and different relations among cultures and ethnicities. People could have real self-determination, and at the same time access broad culture, not only what an algorithm recommends.

Marx said a person could do productive work in the morning and be a critic or an artist in the afternoon. Digital tools make that kind of life more possible. But capital can respond by creating “digital drugs” that addict people and reduce the possibility of real communication and collective organization.

Regulation is possible. China’s platform regulation is an interesting example: they have rules limiting addictive algorithmic design, such as infinite scroll. China is not a model or a dream for us, but it shows that strong regulation can happen, even if one does not agree with their broader political project.

I agree, the role of digital technologies should be giving everybody time to be wise – that’s the really revolutionary point of communism. Finally, what pragmatic steps can Latin American countries take in the coming years?

We need to build alternatives, each country following its own path but with shared goals. It is not only about governments or leaders. It is about daily work by social movements, educators, and activists. We must challenge the regimes of visibility and attention imposed by global platforms.

If I had to choose only one priority, I would focus on building alternative social media even before building public data infrastructure, because control over visibility is now central to the political struggle. This is ultimately a politics of care: care for people, technologies, and other species. It requires new concepts, new languages, and our own philosophical tools, not only those inherited from Europe. As Brecht said: “Don’t accept the habitual as a natural thing. In times of disorder, of organized confusion, of dehumanized humanity, nothing should seem natural. Nothing should seem impossible to change.” The future is not written yet, and we are going to fulfill our part in this chore. The future is free.

 

In his new book, Forty-Four Esolangs (MIT Press), Daniel Temkin challenges conventional definitions of language, code, and computer, showing the potential of esolangs—or esoteric programming languages—as pure idea art. The languages in this volume ask programmers to write code in the form of prayer to the Greek gods, or as a pattern of empty folders, or to type code in tandem with another programmer, each with one hand on the keyboard, their rhythm and synchrony signifying computer action. Temkin includes languages written over the past fifteen years, along with some designed especially for this book. Other pieces are left as prompts for the reader to simply consider or perhaps to implement on their own.

Esolangs are a collaborative form. Each language is a complete world of thought, where esoprogrammers build on the work of esolangers to make new discoveries. The language Velato, for instance, asks programmers to write music as code; while the language creates constraints for the programmer, each programmer brings their own coding and musical sensibility to the language. Other pieces are pure poetic suggestion in the legacy of Yoko Ono’s event scores. These ask the programmer to, for example, follow the paths of the clouds over a single day and construct a language in response that uses those movements as code. Just as Ben Vautier claimed everything is art, this book blurs the lines between computation and everything else.

Temkin will share this project in the context of thirty plus years of esolangs. As Douglas Coupland puts it: “Every new spread in the book makes a reader feel like they’re discovering new territory with a worthy explorer who’s there for the joy of it.”

The book launch will be moderated by Dr. David Gauthier and is supported by the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON).

Daniel Temkin makes photographic and computational art exploring logic and human irrationality. He began interviewing other esolangers and code artists in 2011, creating the blog esoteric.codes. ZKM exhibited the blog and commissioned videos of Temkin explaining esolang history for their Open Codes show in 2018–19. Esoteric.codes earned an Arts Writer grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation and a residency at New Museum’s NEW INC, the first museum-led cultural incubator. Temkin has written about esolangs for Hyperallergic and Leonardo, and his aesthetic theory of the form was published by Digital Humanities Quarterly. His work was recently shown in solo exhibitions at Museum of the Moving Image and Higher Pictures. You can see more at danieltemkin.com.

Date: 4 February 2026
Time: 16:00 – 17:00
Location: University of Utrecht, Grote Zaal, Muntstraat 2A, 3512EV Utrecht

▷ https://transmissioninmotion.sites.uu.nl/recommended-event-book-launch-forty-four-esolangs-the-art-of-esoteric-code-with-daniel-temkin/

I met Kenzo Soares through an online call, as he is currently a Resident Fellow at the Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School. Kenzo is a carioca—a son of Rio de Janeiro—who has worked extensively on platform workers’ rights. He is also deeply knowledgeable about the political economy of Latin America from a Marxist perspective. During the call, which I took from the Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo, we ended up passionately discussing platformization in Latin America, shifting from the intimate to the technological and the geopolitical.

In our conversation, digital sovereignty takes on a heavy, industrial form. We discussed Petrobras, the state-owned giant operating the most powerful supercomputers in the Global South, yet whose strategic oil data remains hosted on North American servers. This reality informs Kenzo’s concept of “survival infrastructures”: digital public infrastructures like Pix are not mere conveniences, but necessities for banking the poor and providing “white label” alternatives to the predatory gig economy.

Yet, a darker thread emerges regarding internal colonialism and the “black box” of the state. Kenzo acknowledges that Brazil is not just a victim of the North, but a regional hegemony that surveils its neighbors. He notes the deep-seated distrust of the demos, for whom the state is often a predator; here, the push for sovereignty is frequently met with the fear that public platforms are simply more efficient tools for taxation and control. How often happens with academics – to the degree that it is now a meme – we decided to write a paper together. 

***

What is your background and why are you interested in digital sovereignty? Was there a moment or a project that shifted your view?

You told me that you are interviewing activists, scholars and public officers. That is interesting, because I think at some point in my life I have been all three. For many years I was part of the Socialism and Freedom Party in Brazil as an activist. Then I spent ten years as a parliamentary adviser to a congressman, Marcel Freixo, first in the municipal council of Rio de Janeiro, then in the state congress, and finally in the national congress. This year I was in the Ministry of Science and Technology in Brazil for six months before I came here to Yale. At the same time, when I was still working in congress and later at the ministry, I was also doing my academic career: pursuing my master’s, then as a PhD candidate and finally as a lecturer at the school of communication of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

I started by studying the political economy of platforms and digital ecosystems in general. But as I was in these policymaking environments, I was always concerned with the question: how can we go beyond the critique of capitalism? It is really important to understand these new ways in which capitalism is organizing new relations of production, all the debates around surveillance, and how we update historical and structural relations of power. But how can we go beyond criticism and start to build a program, to update the left’s program for society? I was at congress all the time trying to give answers to civil society. My work was to do this dialogue between civil society, NGOs, social movements and policymaking.

One thing that I think is really interesting in Brazil is that, outside the European Union, the Brazilian state is right now one of the main states that is struggling with big tech, especially big tech from the global North. If you think about disinformation and hate speech, and how to regulate that, Brazil is a good example. We even banned Twitter/X for some days to force Elon Musk to enforce Brazilian law about hate speech. I think it is natural for me to start thinking about digital sovereignty, considering where I am from. People always say that countries like the United States do not have to think much about digital sovereignty, because they have the platforms. For them it is natural that they exercise power all around the world. But for us, from a dependent country in the majority world, in a public university where we do our research, I was always thinking about how our meetings and our systems depend on big tech from the global North.

We are talking about Alphabet/Google, or Microsoft. Even in the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology, all the meetings and internal communication were done through Microsoft Teams. Now we have some public alternatives for calls like that, but still, the systems that we use every day are Microsoft products. We are talking about the ministry that supports the development of key technologies for Brazil. We are talking about the ministry that deals with nuclear energy, satellites, with projects of public cloud, and also very sensitive information for Brazilian sovereignty in general. All this goes through meetings, emails and documents that are hosted by Microsoft services.

I also interviewed some tech workers for my thesis. They were data scientists and software engineers, and some of them work for Brazilian state owned companies like Petrobras, the most important and biggest company in Brazil. They said to me: we have a specific API to access OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But at the same time, we use Microsoft Teams to exchange information between different departments. We are talking about a goldmine of strategic data, because we are talking about oil. That was a concern that I was able to map through my fieldwork. So I think that is my background and why digital sovereignty became such an interesting and obvious topic for research.

What do we talk about when we talk about digital sovereignty? How has the discourse evolved over the last years in South America and Brazil? Does Brazil have a privileged position, and why do you think that is the case?

I have some disagreements with other scholars, maybe even with people you are going to interview. I really think Brazil is not a complete digital colony in the same way as other countries in the global South. Of course we are dependent on the main layers of internet infrastructure: the domain name system, which the United States still controls through the State Department; and all the infrastructures from AWS, Amazon Cloud and so on. We know this. But at the same time, unlike almost every country in Africa, and unlike most Latin American countries, we are in better shape in some respects. In some specific fields we are even more developed than India, for example when we are talking about computational power, about tech workers, knowledge, and scholarly production.

We have scientists in Brazil who are doing research that is part of the state of the art of AI research in the whole world, in scientific research and in the volume of papers published. Petrobras has the biggest supercomputer in the whole global South that is entirely dedicated to AI development. It is bigger than what some European countries have. In that sense Brazil is in better conditions than Spain or Portugal. They are not main superpowers, but they are part of the global North. So I think, especially our tech workers and our tech community have the knowledge and the conditions to develop state of the art systems.

What Brazil does not have is capital. Even if we think that in Latin America almost all investment in information technology in general, and also in AI, is concentrated in Brazil, it is nothing compared to the United States and China. We do not have capital, especially venture capital. We have some Japanese funds, like SoftBank’s Vision Fund, investing in Brazil, but it is not comparable to China or the United States. Second, unfortunately, our national state does not have the kind of policies that other developing countries like India, China and even Russia have. We do not have data localization enforcement in Brazil. We do not have many public platforms. We do have a payment system, Pix, which was an advancement. I think Brazil is still dependent on global North infrastructures and most platforms.

I think Brazil also has some asymmetric relations in the digital field with its neighbors and with other countries from the global South. Most of the big platforms in Latin America are headquartered in Brazil. The big exceptions are Mercado Libre, the Argentinian marketplace, and Rappi, the Colombian delivery app. With these two exceptions, almost 70 per cent of the main platforms that are unicorns – valued at more than one billion dollars – are headquartered in Brazil, and these platforms are expanding to other Latin American countries. I always need to emphasize that Brazil is not competing like China to overthrow the United States. We do have specific power relations in our immediate field of influence, in our traditional and historical area of influence in Latin America.

How do you understand digital sovereignty as a concept? From which side do you approach it?

If you read the literature, digital sovereignty in general is still more a political claim than a concept that you can easily evaluate and measure. It emerges first in public discourse before it becomes a scholarly or theoretical concept.

Brazil certainly does not have the mechanisms to enforce its sovereignty in digital ecosystems that other developing countries have. It has less sovereignty than Russia and China for sure, and probably also less than India. But I think it has more potential to quickly develop these conditions. This is mainly a political issue in Brazil: whether the national state will take steps in terms of public policies, regulation, legal frameworks and public funding, because we already have the socio-technical conditions to quickly develop these solutions.

This is different from a country that does not have any local tech community, does not have public universities, does not have public IT companies. At the same time, Brazil does not fully have digital sovereignty when we consider its relations of dependence with the global market and the global North. But there is another question: is Brazil really respecting and helping the digital sovereignty of its neighbors? We just had a scandal of Brazilian surveillance over Paraguay, where Brazilian intelligence agents, equivalent to the NSA, were spying on Paraguayan officers through their digital devices. This was connected to the bilateral agreement that we have on energy generation. We have a binational hydroelectric plant on the frontier between Brazil and Paraguay, and we are renegotiating tariffs.

It is really interesting because Brazil was spying on Paraguay to have more information and a better position in tariff negotiations, at the same time that we are fighting against US tariffs that affect Brazil. That is why I say Brazil is not just a victim of the global North. It also exerts power, and it does not always help the sovereignty of its neighbors. It is not all roses and flowers between Latin American countries.

So do you see more unity or more fragmentation in Latin America regarding digital sovereignty?

I think Latin American political integration as a state agenda was stronger during Lula’s previous administrations. We had initiatives to create a continental parliament, inspired by the European Parliament. We had an expansion of the economic bloc Mercosur. In the current administration, Brazil is more enthusiastic about BRICS initiatives. I think Brazil should indeed develop connections with BRICS, but it should bring Latin America as a bloc to the negotiations. Otherwise, BRICS risks becoming just China’s area of influence. Then it is not real multipolarity; it is only a shift in which power is hegemonic, the United States or China. BRICS is basically a state process of integration through bureaucracies. We have no real public space for movements. This is different from twenty years ago, when integration between Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela and Uruguay under leftist governments like Chávez and Lula was a process of integration through the state but also through social movements from below.

There is another important thing: we need to think about digital sovereignty beyond the state. Our discussions of sovereignty in general are deeply connected to states, since the Westphalian paradigm became the normality of international relations. But one thing that I emphasize in my research is the idea of popular or grassroots digital sovereignty. I studied some movements in Brazil that bring this debate. I was recently at the launch of a book that argues that if states are not promoting integration, then social movements and workers should articulate Latin American solidarity relations and some kind of workers’ organization on a continental scale. That is one thing.

For sure, Brazil has a responsibility, as the biggest economy on the continent, to support its neighbors with technology transfer, infrastructure sharing, a pool of resources. And not only with Latin America, but also with Africa. A real historical challenge that maybe can explain why Brazil does not have a stronger connection with Latin America is that, in the past, Brazil was more connected to Africa than to its Latin American neighbors. Unfortunately, that was largely because of the slave trade, but not only because of that. Brazil was more of a transatlantic community. I am from Rio de Janeiro. The elites and intellectuals from Rio de Janeiro were more connected to Luanda, to Angola, to Mozambique, than they were to Asunción or La Paz. Buenos Aires was an exception because of the River Plate, but not so much to other Latin American capitals. So I think Brazil can also help to develop digital solidarity relations with at least the Portuguese speaking countries in Africa.

I was thinking that BRICS is mainly a geopolitical and economic attempt to bring states together, but it is lacking the element of the demos, that shared cultural component which is so important for democracy. In Europe we keep referring to an idealized European essence. It is a myth, but it kinda works. But I wanted to ask about Pix, the best example of digital public infrastructure from Brazil.  I think it is a scandal that we do not have that in Europe.

Pix is a really interesting example. I think it is an example of digital public infrastructure, maybe not a completely comprehensive one yet, but it is powerful. And it is going to be extended to other Latin American countries, which is also important. It is also an interesting example of why the European Union probably does not have a similar system. Technically Pix is one hundred per cent Brazilian technology: Brazilian technicians and tech workers developed the system. But it was inspired by the Indian model, and the Indian model was inspired by Russia. Russia needed such systems because of sanctions. When the credit card duopoly, Mastercard and Visa, stopped operating in Russia because of sanctions, Russia needed to develop its own payment system. Since the 1990s, Russia and China had been pushing a cyber sovereignty agenda, but it was the sanctions that really made them develop their own payment systems. India was inspired by that, and then Brazil learned from India. We actually sent technical people on mission to India before developing Pix.

I think this is a good example that BRICS is not just speeches, but in this case there was real cooperation. If not a full technological transfer, it was at least shared inspiration from the global South. I would say that the European Union does not need or does not have such a system because it has never been cut off from the international payment system. There was no similar pressure. I think Pix is revolutionary. One example that we always give: Brazil is a very poor and unequal country. The first time ever in Brazilian history when most of the population was part of the financial or banking system was after Pix. The pandemic also really helped, and so did all the Brazilian programs of cash transfers from the state. But Pix was the moment when most of our population started using banking systems, and not only online banking but banking in general.

I know that because I interviewed a tech worker who worked in a Brazilian startup whose business model, before Pix was launched, was to try to make the poorest part of the Brazilian population use banks. It was a fintech. They failed. The startup closed because Pix solved the problem. So it was a public solution. That is an example of national sovereignty, and it can also be the basis for mechanisms of international solidarity. Pix also shows the contradictions when we talk about sovereignty and we do not distinguish between the state and the people. One of the biggest political defeats of this Lula administration was when the government tried to expand the powers of the tax authority. The federal government published a normative instruction that lowered the limit over which Pix transactions started to be monitored for fiscal reasons, especially income tax. There was a huge popular revolt. The far right tried to capture this popular uprising against the government.

The government’s argument was: why are you fighting against having more data about your financial transactions if the idea is to fight organized crime and black markets? But the thing is that, for people, they love Pix, but it is a black box. They do not know what the state does with their data. For very poor workers, the idea is that if the state wants to have more data about them, it is because it is going to raise their taxes. So I think this is an example of how Pix is controversial. People thought that more data in the hands of the state was not necessarily a protective move from their point of view. They consider the state an enemy. And that is the contradiction of every capitalist state.

Sometimes legal scholars distinguish between internal and external sovereignty. That is also related to the United States.  Digital platforms act as the long arm of US foreign policy abroad, but internally they are also forms of government that can oppose the state. People sometimes prefer to be subjected to platforms, like Apple’s encrypted data, than to the state. Historically, the state is at the same time a driver of interstate competition that produces inequalities and, in some places, a welfare state that tries to reduce the very inequalities this system produces. It is very contradictory. This is also the legacy of Cybersyn: digital public infrastructure needs good government, otherwise it turns into a totalitarian nightmare. Is relation between platforms and the state is always ambivalent?

Yes, because we are fighting a neoliberal agenda that says: open markets, privatize all your state-owned companies. We keep saying: we need public clouds, in the sense of state-owned infrastructures; we need public servers; we need public data centers; we need public platforms. Now I am researching Brazilian state policies for platform cooperativism. Brazil is developing a white-label platform for platform cooperatives. A public university, Santa Catarina Federal University, is developing this platform with funding from the federal government, and the idea is that each cooperative can use the platform for free.

But the question is: who is going to access this data? Will society in general have access? Will it be an open platform? Or will only the state have access to this data? Next year we have elections, and the far right can become the administration. We are talking about putting all the data from these workers and workers’ organizations in the hands of the state. That is the contradiction.

Here in the United States we have a similar discussion. I attended a presentation about how the First Amendment makes it difficult for the US state to regulate hate speech, and how alternative models could be developed, for example by enforcing European law. The conclusion was that we should look to European style regulation. But the thing is: when we are talking about Nazis, of course we want to control hate speech. However, when there is a Trump administration, do we really want to abolish, or seriously restrict, the First Amendment? Who is going to define what hate speech is?

Let us return to platform labour. One question about the imaginaries of platform workers that you worked on: what did you find? Are they different from what we see in other continents? Have you seen some Latin American specificities of the organization of work?

You know dependency theory. I had a paper that tries to connect dependency theory to platform labour. The thesis is that Latin America has a structural overexploitation of labour. You have structural conditions that make labour cheap and vulnerable, and that creates natural conditions for platform labour to grow.  The data shows that Brazil, for instance, has some of the worst conditions for platform labour in the whole world. Every year the Fairwork reports show Brazil at the bottom, competing with some countries in Asia.

You can actually see it in the street. It is not only the prices of deliveries, which are absurdly low, but also working time and intensity. I have this joke. I had an Italian girlfriend and she had just arrived in Brazil. It was kind of late at night, around one or two in the morning, and she said: “I am hungry, but I do not want pizza.” I said: “Let us order something.” She replied: “But it is two in the morning. I do not want pizza.” And I said: “We can have anything.” She asked me what I meant. For me it was so natural that I could order anything at 2 a.m. in Rio de Janeiro. When I was in Europe, I realized that you cannot. Why? Because even the immigrants in Europe do not work twenty four hours a day for delivery platforms to the same extent and intensity that people work in Brazil.

I was also thinking about the permeation of Uber in Latin America. In most places in Europe we do not rely on Uber in the same way. We use public transport or our own car, while here it is all about using Uber, because Uber becomes part of the infrastructure of safety. So there are already existing structural conditions of inequality. Then the platforms come and “save” people in some way, and they benefit from these inequalities that capitalism has produced. But moving to the theoretical part, What is your position on techno-feudalism and on the idea that we moved beyond neoliberalism?

I come from media studies, where the way capital permanently accelerates social life also affects academic production. Twenty years ago we were talking about the “wealth of networks”: “network” was the keyword. Then it became “surveillance”. Then it became “platforms”. Now it is “AI” and “techno-feudalism”. So what is the difference between platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism and techno-feudalism? These are interesting concepts that focus on and illuminate specific dimensions of our contemporary society. But I think sometimes people feel the need to launch huge new paradigms because, as intellectual workers in the attention economy, they need to make noise. There is a political economy of critical studies. We are in the business of producing ideas.

I do not think the basic conditions that we call capitalist have been erased. Most of the social wealth is still produced by the process of people working in exchange for salaries. You know the argument that we live in a postindustrial society? In fact, we have more industrial workers on the planet now than at any other moment in human history. The problem is that most factories are now in Southeast Asia. We are not talking only about robots. We are talking about people who work in conditions very similar to those in Manchester when Engels was writing about the English working class. We still have people working in mines for rare earth minerals in Africa. We cannot make iPhones, or Nvidia GPUs, without kids working in almost slave-like conditions in Africa.

My position is that we are not just in a rent economy. You can say that platforms specifically work largely through rent: that is the way capital associated with platforms takes its share of global wealth. But this is not the majority of the global economy. People confuse the financial valuation of companies with the mass of value actually produced. We criticize this by calling it fictitious capital. People say: these are the biggest companies in the world. Yes, in market valuation. But if you think about the mass of value, it is still produced by labour.

Even within platforms, if we talk about platform labour: iFood alone has almost 200,000 workers in more than 1,100 cities. That is just one Brazilian labour platform. How many workers does Uber have globally? And these are classical capital–labour relationships. Of course you have this new dimension of data extraction, but the economic exploitation is the same. So I think techno-feudalism may end up being the same thing that “cognitive capitalism” was ten or fifteen years ago: an attempt to describe changes inside capitalism that sometimes overstates the rupture. What these concepts are trying to capture, and where they have a point, is the growing power of private companies compared to national states, especially in the United States. This is the story where Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg appear to have more power than Trump in some domains. But the military-industrial complex always had this kind of power, so I am a bit skeptical.

Of course we have new regimes of production. That is not the same as a new society. For most of capitalism’s history, most people were engaged in farming. The moment when most of the global population started living in cities is right now. This happened in the last ten years. Until fifteen years ago, most humans still lived in the countryside. This transition is largely because of China. But even this huge transformation did not mean that capitalism as a system changed into something else.

With the rise of ubiquitous computation, I think one difference is the combination of the platform way of organizing people, money and services in space and time: capitalism always relied on monopolies, but platforms now have new ways of maintaining monopolies.

Of course. But when was capitalism not based on monopolies? The idea of pure competition is a fiction. All the infrastructure of communication has basically been monopolistic. In Europe, historically, how many television channels did you have? In Italy, RAI; in the United Kingdom, the BBC; in Brazil, Globo as a de facto national monopoly; in the United States, three big networks. Now we have Meta and Alphabet as a duopoly of attention on a global scale. This is a case where quantitative change becomes qualitative, for sure. It has huge impacts. My father is eighty years old. He was born in the 1940s in the countryside of Brazil, and now he watches South Korean soap operas. Of course this is different.

At the same time, I do not know if this configuration is going to be permanent, because the Chinese model of the internet, or “internet with Chinese characteristics”, is expanding. Many countries in Africa are buying digital sovereignty as a service from China instead of from the United States. The servers are from Huawei. What backdoors the Chinese state may or may not have into servers in Nigeria, I have no idea. People are afraid of the NSA, and now they give control to Huawei. We also have to ask how many countries in Africa do not access Netflix but do access WeChat or Chinese platforms. I do not know the exact numbers, but they are expanding a lot.

Let us end with this last question. What steps could Latin American countries, or Brazil in particular, take to enhance digital sovereignty in the next five years?

I think Brazil, and maybe other Latin American countries, have some advantages compared to the United States. I mentioned that we are developing and funding, through the federal government, public platforms for workers. I am from Rio de Janeiro, a city that has a state owned platform for taxi drivers, with more than 15,000 taxi drivers and more than one million users every year. In the United States it is almost impossible to even talk about state owned digital infrastructures for workers. So I think one thing is to develop public infrastructure and public platforms to offer workers an alternative to private digital monopolies. This is a way to make people have real sovereignty, because they have alternatives.

In a paper that we just submitted, we are calling them “survival infrastructures”. People need them. My sovereignty as an individual cannot be only a checkbox on a website as it is in the GDPR model, when I have no alternative, like Margaret Thatcher enjoyed to say, to accept the Platform Data Regime. If I have a public platform that has a better data regime, this means that I actually can deny Google access to my data, because I am going to use the public platform instead. To have an alternative offered by the state is a fundamental dimension to reinforce rights for our population and citizens. Of course this demands that the state has a data regime that is different from private companies. It means enforcing privacy. At the same time, we need to calculate the tradeoff between individual rights to privacy and what I call the social function of data.

For example, I have a smartwatch. I know Samsung is going to access all my biometric data. But if I want to share this with the Brazilian public health system, I cannot. If I had public software or a public app in my smartwatch, I think the Brazilian state should have access to its population’s health data, of course with the consent of citizens. So I think another dimension is to balance privacy with the wealth and public knowledge that we can create with an open data future, if we start having public platforms.

We also need to have public funding to develop our own AI solutions. I think there is an AI bubble. I think the world economy is going to go into a huge depression in the next years because the AI bubble is going to collapse. But anyway, beyond all the hype, technology is important. We have to develop our own models based on our own languages. We must develop a really strong regulation to ensure data localization and to ensure access for public universities to data. We need to do this as a bloc, to have more power to fight against the huge pressure, the lobbying, and the technological dependence on companies from the global North.

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Drawing by Carlotta Artioli, @charl.art.

By Babak Ahteshamipour

Since Donald Trump’s re-manifestation through his 2025 presidential election it feels as if we are no longer living in a simulation, rather we are being simulated within new “Dark Ages”—especially with the ongoing militarization of Europe and Trump’s imperialist tendencies. Their technofeudal allies such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg roleplay as monarchs, with their barons operating under vassalic contracts, while the rest of us roleplay as feminist knights, anarchist sorcerers, and environmentalist druids, oscillating between resistance, reenactment and aestheticized escapism. As technocapitalism mutates into technofeudalism, medieval aesthetics and politics re-emerge as a contested terrain: instrumentalized by oligarchs who desire to refashion worldbuilding into empire-building, mainstreamed as escape, and yet weaponized by countercultural collectives for insurgent world-co-building. But can there be true insurgency when our roles descend from heavily scripted aesthetics? Are we merely peasants fed with pre-technocapitalist fantasy content, or self-mythologizing dissidents performing rituals that ultimately reinforce the power distributions we seek to resist?

In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2023), Yanis Varoufakis—and previously Cédric Durand, in Techno-féodalisme: Critique de l’économie numérique (2020)—declared that capitalism is being replaced by technofeudalism; a new map of political economy where the market is ruled by oligarchs via platforms[1]. Within technofeudalism, companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft do not simply compete in markets; their dominion extends further through networks of dependency, where smaller companies survive only as clients or subcontractors. This layered structure resembles a neo-vassalage: platforms grant access and protection in exchange for tribute, ensuring that innovation itself remains tethered to technofeudal lords, with assets endlessly recycled and resold in closed circuit accumulations.

In the 2020 article Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism? (2020), Jodi Dean, picks up from McKenzie Wark’s Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (2019), and claims that “Capitalism is turning itself into neofeudalism”, while stressing out how neofeudalism is being born out of the ashes of platform capitalism. Platform capitalism—coined by Nick Srnicek (2017)—refers to how big tech companies orchestrate transactions and user interactions to capture data and extract value for profitability.[2] However when this extraction is done without any true competition, it leads into technofeudalism. Another side effect of this is that users are caught in a web of tech company terms and conditions, while already being entangled within state law and bureaucracy, just like how individuals owed allegiance to multiple feudal lords and institutions in the Middle Ages.[3]

As we can see, the phenomena of power consolidation in the hands of technofeudal lords has been going around for a while, but a more unmasked shift is been perceived since the COVID-19 pandemic where the technofeudal logic intensified due to accelerated digitalization of the market and services, as discussed in COVID-19 and digitalization: The great acceleration (2021) by Joseph Amankwah-Amoah, Zaheer Khan, Geoffrey Wood and Gary Knight: 

“One likely consequence of COVID-19 is the accelerated trend towards digitalization of business models coupled with the shift of commercial activities from predominantly offline and brick-and-mortar outlets to online outlets.”

During COVID-19 consumerism itself mutated under this new order in a disaster-capitalist fashion. With physical shops shuttered, Amazon and its peers did not merely provide convenience, they absorbed the markets entirely, eliminating smaller companies and independent brands by making them vassals within their digital kingdoms. Streaming platforms such as Netflix thrived as cultural monopolies, feeding the lockdown attention economy through endless content, while the video game industry saw unprecedented profits as digital escapism became the new social infrastructure.

This shift was accompanied by the darker dimensions of platform rule: algorithmic surveillance normalized under the guise of “contact tracing,” massive data-harvesting disguised as “public health infrastructure”, and the increased use of policing systems to manage the digital commons. During that period, the data-collecting software company Palantir built a COVID tracking tool for the Trump administration. The company’s name is named after the crystal balls Palantír from J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic-fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings, devices used for predictions, surveillance, and communication.

Unsurprisingly enough Peter Thiel—Palantir’s co-founder—has several other companies named after Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, such as the capital firms Mithril Capital and Valar Ventures, named after the fictitious precious metal Mithril and the god-like immortal spirits Valars, and the defense technology company Anduril Industries, named after Aragon’s sword, Andúril. Thiel’s mythic naming aestheticizes power through medieval fantasy—a pattern not limited to him alone, just like Musk naming his son after Aragorn (Strider Sekhar) and his daughter Azure after the most powerful spell in Elden Ring. Following this power-driven fascination with medieval fantasy Jeff Bezos himself also funded Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series (2022—present), as if seeking to forge his own “rings of power.”

Yet parallel to this oligarchic worldbuilding, neo-medievalism is flourishing across fashion, the red carpet, celebrities and influencer culture, presented sometimes as a feminist response to the “Dark Ages”, while other times collapsing into consumable spectacle. Back in 2020 Balenciaga adopted “knightcore” through armor-style boots worn by Cardi B, while more recently Natalie Portman wore a chainmail Dior dress to the Deauville Film Festival. With Joan of Arc being revived as a contemporary feminist icon, many celebrities and designers are inspired and reinterpret the medieval story through their work as seen with Dilara Findigoklu’s A/W 2023 collection inspired by Mahsa Amini protests in Iran as a response to “medieval practices around policing women’s bodies”, and Chappel Roan’s appearance and performance at the 2024 MTV Music Video Awards. This spectatorial revival extends to social-media feeds and moodboards being shaped with “bardcore” or “medievalcore” aesthetics featuring velvet capes, medieval-inspired prints, and DIY chainmail headpieces or armor dresses as everyday streetwear.

Within this equation appears mainstream gaming of course: having always fed gamers with medieval-fantasy action role-playing games, major game titles have remastered and released games which feature medieval-fantasy settings and gameplay such as the first-person shooter (FPS) Doom: The Dark Ages (2025), the role-playing game Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023), and the action role-playing game (ARPG) Elden Ring (2022)—and its spin-off Elden Ring Nightreign (2025).

Among remastered games is the ARPG The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered (2025)—with the original game being released in 2006—, but at the same time the recreation of the 2006 version of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft Classic (2019) which restore the game’s early slow-paced world which contains castles, plague-ridden forests, alchemy, and gear rooted in melee weapons and plate.

Interestingly enough, Amazon has begun establishing its own game development studios, while Netflix acquired game studios to carve its path within the gaming industry, and Samsung has been building clouding and streaming platforms to host games, signifying an evolving desire to control worldbuilding. Even major publishers like Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft rely on Google Cloud infrastructure to host and distribute their games, embedding them further into technofeudal ecosystems.

But beneath this glossy, mass-market revival lies a parallel strain of neo-medievalism operating outside technofeudal circuits, one that refuses depoliticized nostalgia. Within the indie game scene, there is similarly a revival of retro first person role-playing dungeon crawler games that draw from early-PC grit and tabletop sensibilities while channeling DIY world-co-building, by using free and open-source softwares, but also relying on online community building with gamers, fans and creators supporting each other. Such examples could be traced back to the 2018 medieval dark fantasy FPS game Amid Evil, or the first-person wizard simulator Hand of Doom (2023). Another akin title is Hands of Necromancy (2022)—and its sequel Hands of Necromancy II (2024)—which shares aesthetic similarities to  the 1996 ARPG The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall and was recreated within the Unity engine by Daggerfall Workshop (2023), supported by a rich modding community that elevates the game into contemporary standards. Other similar upcoming indie games include Necrofane (2026), Tenebyss (in development), Prison of Husks (in development), and Queen’s Domain (in development).

Many of these games incorporate dark ambient and electronic soundtracks that share many resemblances with dungeon synth music—a 90s subgenre of electronic music originated from Black metal characterized by medieval fantasy themes and lo-fi aesthetics—with a few exceptions where metal music can be perceived to be blended with electronics as well such as in Doom: The Dark Ages and Hand of Doom. 

In recent years dungeon synth  is being revived—especially in the UK—and there’s also an emergence of a new wave of black metal that traces back to the 2010s, as well as the blending of metal with electronics. What’s the most important aspect of these are the politics: these new directions are driven by musicians and artists, among whom identify as queer, non-binary, transgender and feminist, and labels  and platforms that follow an anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist and degrowth stance. This direction produces an insurgent neo-medievalism that openly counters technofeudal bros and their adaptation of the white, heterosexual, cisgendered, and ablebodied, dominant medieval aesthetic canon that historically renders the other as generic, anonymous and expendable. Robert Houghton remarks in The Middle Ages in Computer Games: Ludic Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism (2024) that medieval worlds “almost always focus on heterosexual and cisgender men”:

“Where queer options exist in games, heterosexuality is usually the assumed norm: although a growing range of games permit homosexual relationships, including a notable range of pseudo-medieval fantasy roleplaying games, these are typically token efforts or resort to stereotypes. Non-binary identities and gender fluidity are almost inevitably ignored. These trends are particularly pronounced within historical games where women are frequently marginalized or erased, and where player spaces are often dominated by misogyny and homophobia to an even more extreme degree.”[4]

On the electronic music side of the spectrum examples include independent artists such as Ada Rook, Fire-Toolz, Cocojoey, Trust Fund Ozu, Drumcorps, and Lauren Bousfield who heavily combine black metal screams and blast beats with a wide range of electronics and ambiences. Some rely more on metal compositions executed with electronic flares, while others focus on electronics with metal elements introduced as passages or layers. These kinds of artists can be found on labels that specialize in experimental, and electronic releases—often reminiscent of video game music—such as Orange Milk Records, Hausu Mountain or Ingrown Records.

On the other side of the spectrum lies the new wave of black metal that features atmospheric and avant-garde compositions informed by other genres. Notable examples include Liturgy, formed by the transgender composer and musician Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the “queer antifascist black metal/doom duo” Ragana, the ecstatic black metal band Agriculture, and the feminist anti-fascist black metal band Feminazgûl founded by the transgender anarchist author Margaret Killjoy. Although such artists and bands mostly release on labels that do not necessarily identify as feminist, antifascist or vegan, such as The Flenser, Prosthetic Records and 20 Buck Spin, but there also are labels that do such as the An Out Recordings, Grime Stone Records LLC, and Fiadh Productions.

Staying within their adventurous and unconventional outfits, many of these artists and labels often equip memes and internet imagery for communication as seen with examples of Doom Trip Records and Fire-Toolz, promoting their releases via memes. On the other hand labels such as Crime Stone Records and Fiadh Productions have been wearing their cosplay outfits to match their musical releases in the forms of artworks that emphasize on medieval illustrations, gothic designs and fonts. Furthermore, Fiadh Productions’ Instagram profile is filled with cute animals wearing medieval armor—among other medieval feminist posts—with overlaying phrases reading “born to dilly daily, forced to fight fascists”, or “embracing the quest (rejecting bigotry)”, sharing resemblances with other pages that are solely dedicated to this kind of content—but less political—like @golden_frog_inn and @the_frog_mage, or @the_brainrot fairy which features queered version of knights doused in glitter, and caring phrases.

Even though many of these artists and labels maintain a potent online political presence, posting about trans rights, being vocal about animal abuse, the ongoing genocides and ecocides, while focusing on multicultural community building and tactical resistance, not everyone online is invested in weaponization; some just want to escape. The internet is saturated with magical and occultist content drawing inspiration from medieval-fantasy, functioning as templates for users to express their frustration with the hyper-capitalist turned technofeudalist mixed-extended and augmented cybertronic meatspace. Examples like the POV Holding Sword and Cigarette or This Is Where I Post From memes, and the Tiny Green Mall Wizard / Wizard Gnome character or tulpamancy embody this desire to step sideways from this gruesome material reality as a defense mechanism, as underlined by Valentina Tanni in Exit Reality: Vaporwave, Backrooms, Weirdcore, and Other Landscapes Beyond the Threshold (2024):

“The vast, multifaceted world of spiritual and magical trends online is usually interpreted as a form of escapism. This draws on the glaring, increasingly undeniable fact that, above all among the younger generations, increasingly extreme strategies of evading reality are emerging as a form of defense against a world on the brink of collapse.”[5]

Being chronically online can be overstimulating especially when bombarded with conspiracy theories, A.I. slop, and echo chambers, that cultivate the feeling as if “the truth” is constantly withheld. Within this context everything is subject to questioning and science slips into an occulted esoteric domain. Users drift into magical frameworks: studying sigils and magical circles, sharing occult memes, or fetishizing state-of-the-art scientific research as quasi-religious cults in an attempt to intuit the hidden machinery of technofeudal layout.

These practices within this game-like domain overlap with the game studies term “magic circle,” which originates from Johan Huizinga (1949), and describes games as temporary worlds we step into that are simultaneously real and imaginary[6]. Eugene Thacker, in In the Dust of This Planet (2011) claims that magical circles connect us with the concealed, occulted world when analyzing the Outer Limits episode The Borderland (1963), in which scientists attempt to open an interdimensional gateway while reciting instructions with ritualistic cadence. As Thacker writes, “If the lab is the circle, then the lab experiment is the magical ritual” and bleeding-edge science is “the new occultism.”[7]

Even though contemporary science hasn’t yet opened any “gateways to the fourth dimension,” esoteric scientific achievement news such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider successful transmutation of lead into gold, the creation of a Holographic Wormhole by a team of physicists in Harvard University or the successful quantum teleportation by scientists in China have been headlining around the internet empowering this escapist hype even further while dangerously mythologizing technocrats as contemporary medieval tech alchemists.

This romanticized imaginative tendency deliberately evades the realities of medieval historicity: rigid class stratification, extractive economies, religious fanaticism, and the gatekeeping of knowledge. In the actual Middle Ages, power was not an ambient atmosphere but a material regime: land-bound peasants tethered to lords, rents enforced through inherited jurisdiction, mobility restricted by custom and decree[8]. The late Middle Ages also saw the rise of proto-global colonial ventures and early bureaucratic institutions that tracked subjects through ledgers, censuses (feudal taxes), and tithes. Everyday life was highly militarized, from fortified towns to compulsory levies, while marginalized communities experienced varying manifestations of violence through regulations, surveillance and even expulsion depending on shifting political and religious agendas.[9]

What circulates within online and mainstream discourse instead is what Andrew B. R. Elliot calls as synchronism[10]; a free-floating amalgamation of “medieval aesthetics” that do not constitute a coherent historical style: Gothic verticality, Crusader militarism, and early Renaissance ornamentation, filtered through nineteenth-century Romanticism and revived again by Arthurian fantasy, Tolkienisms, and Dungeon & Dragons tropes. Such medieval aesthetics “periodically burst through the surface of modernity” not as history but as affect, functioning as an atmospheric style rather than a material memory.

Additionally, this Western European Middle Ages imaginary overshadows Eastern European medievalism, shaped by Byzantine and Orthodox iconography, and hybrid Islamic exchanges[11], but also subsumes West Asian histories under orientalist fantasy as underlined by Helen Young regarding Tolkien’s racialised depictions:

“Many peoples comprise Sauron’s armies in addition to the non-human trolls and orcs: “Easterlings with axes, and Variags of Kharad, Southrons in scarlet, and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues” all come to the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. They are effectively undifferentiated under the one – tellingly black – banner of evil, servants of Sauron, collected together within the single Othering category of non-European, non-White.”[12]

It furthermore gives little space of reference to any Eastern Asian Middle Ages such as the Chinese imperial dynasties, the Japanese feudalism, or the Mongol Empire, reinforcing Europe as the predominant historical and aesthetic reference point for the Middle Ages. Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen write in Defining the Global Middle Ages (2015):

“[…] conventional European periodisation markers, such as the ›Renaissance‹ and ›medieval‹, clearly do not travel well or easily into other cultures, such as those in China, the Islamic world or India.”[13]

Once medievalism is emptied of historical realism and reduced to a Disneyfied fantasy aesthetic, it becomes frictionlessly interoperable with the logics of platform rule: circulating as content, identity, and ambience that slide into a low-fi cyber-action role-playing doomscrolling game that mirrors the top to down technofeudal architecture itself.

Only when neo-medieval aesthetics reconnect with their material and global historicities can they fully challenge the technofeudal hive mind and its Disneyfied, Western-centric fantasy canon. However, the insurgent neo-medievalisms emerging from queer, anti-authoritarian, and independent scenes point to a different possibility: rather than recovering historical realism, they deliberately weaponize fantasy itself, producing counter-mythologies that disrupt the monopolized Western narratives of medievalism from within and expose their entanglements with the emerging “Dark Ages”.

References:

[1]. Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 2023, Penguin Random House, UK, p. 181.

[2]. Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 2017, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, p. 35.

[3]. https://ethicalspace.pubpub.org/pub/wuj8exjl/release/1

[4]. Robert Houghton, The Middle Ages in Computer Games: Ludic Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism, 2024, D. S. Brewer, Cambridge, UK, p. 20.

[5]. Valentina Tanni, Exit Reality: Vaporwave, Backrooms, Weirdcore, and Other Landscapes Beyond the Threshold, first published in Italian in 2023, first English edition: May 2024, translated by Anna Carruthers, Ljubljana, Aksioma, Rome: Nero, p. 197.

[6]. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, 1949, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, London, UK, p.10.

[7]. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, 2011, Zero Books, John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach, Alresford, Hants, SO24 9JH, UK Cambridge, UK, p. 64.

[8]. Norman Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages, 1991, William Morrow and Company Inc, New York, p. 22.

[9]. Ibid p. 265.

[10]. B. R. Elliot, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century, 2017, D. S. Brewer, Cambridge, UK, p. 14.

[11]. Maria Alessia Rossi and Alice Isabella Sullivan, Eclecticism in Late Medieval Visual Culture at the Crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic Traditions, 2022, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston, p. 50-51.

[12]. Helen Victoria Young, Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness, 2016, Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN, UK, p. 23.

[13]. Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen, Defining the Global Middle Ages, Medieval Worlds: Approaches to Comparison in Medieval Studies, 2015/06/30, p. 111.

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All illustrations are designed by the author. Here is the numogram: