Researcher Ekaitz Cancela (Basque Country, 31 years old) says that the debate around technology is much more “powerful” in Argentina than in Europe, where less interesting things are being done. He landed in this southern cone country three months ago with his latest book, Digital Utopiasand the cooperative publishing house where it is published, Verse Books (twinned with the Anglo-Saxon Verso Books), which is beginning to be distributed in the rest of the countries of the continent, including Mexico, where he has just presented his text. With this new label, he says, they are trying to break the north-south focus and serve as a meeting and coordination point for many critical people who are now dispersed. “We want to enter into the debates that are taking place in Latin America,” he says.
In the book he gives some revealing data such as this one: “Before 2012, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon barely exploited 10% of the world’s submarine optical fibre. Now, this figure is 66%.” Or this other one: “Two data centres consume 525 cubic metres of drinking water per hour, the equivalent of 28,000 four-person households.” Faced with this model, which is highly costly in terms of energy and very unequal in economic terms, he says, an alternative future can be built where infrastructures, codes and algorithms are at the service of the common good. With this in mind, Cancela goes through in detail the experiences of the last century across the globe, and finds in them examples to follow and models to reject.
Ask. We are living through a decade of great repoliticization, but technology has been left out of the discussion. What has happened?
Answer. It was quite curious how we got here. Both in the [movimiento] In 15M, as in the previous moments, technology and the hacker movement played a central role. There were blogs hosted on infrastructures that did not belong to Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, and I think that the 2008 crisis put all that to hell. All the people who were organizing to create a different internet went straight to stopping evictions, because our most immediate concerns are maintaining housing and a decent life. And this happens in parallel with the great change of 2008: bankers fall, Silicon Valley CEOs arrive. Finance leaves, technology enters. Capitalism is renewed.
P. Have these hackers not reoccupied these spaces? Has the fertile ground been lost?
R. They still exist, they are in university departments organizing with mathematicians or data scientists to create artificial intelligence models that solve specific problems, but they are still very marginal. That army of hackers is now older, has families and has other concerns beyond hacking the system. They have somehow left the imaginary of 21st century social movements, and I think that is a big mistake.
P. The first part of the book focuses heavily on the material question. Have we fallen into the trap of thinking of technology as an abstract thing, rather than something deeply tied to concrete companies and materials?
R. It is part of the cultural hegemony of Silicon Valley, which has managed to identify all technological progress with its private technologies. There is always a materiality behind the cloud, and artificial intelligence has an enormous cost for the planet. What will happen when a good part of the States require these models? What will be the water and energy consumption? Perhaps we have to think about developing another type of technology, with degrowth in mind, where not everything is about controlling users or giving artificial intelligence to a person to do their homework.
P. How do we educate about the need for technological degrowth in a hyperconnected society?
R. The path is made by walking. I think the most important thing is that States begin to lead fair transformation strategies based on technological sovereignty. We have to create simple technologies that allow people, as they did in Barcelona, to make decisions about their budgets. States, in alliance with civil society, have to build alternatives: for example, how do we give infrastructure to housing unions instead of Airbnb. When you allow people to use technologies in their daily lives and they see that it helps them do what they like most, the pedagogy takes care of itself.
P. It gives a predominant role to civil organizations compared to the State, which acts more as a facilitator. Is this realistic, given the size of the technology companies they compete with?
R. This is where states need to implement decisive technological policies and not do so alone, but as a whole. Latin America is a good example. Imagine if Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Colombia agreed to create a law that would make the big tech companies pay for their citizens’ data. After all, they are building their services and making huge amounts of money with data from people who voted for them.
Or you can put policies in place so that every time a US or Chinese company mines data in a territory, it leaves a copy there so that territory, which has no money or data, can use it to create infrastructure for movements. When states realize that they have a central role in deciding about the digital economy, they can design all kinds of policies to enhance the power of civil society.
P. It would be necessary to combine a global community in terms of the flow of knowledge, then, and local and self-sufficient communities in terms of their applications.
R. Yes, it is a good metaphor. We must understand that others can develop technology, that it is not necessary for a CEO in a garage in Palo Alto to bring us technological applications, which is an almost extremely colonial vision. In Argentina, in the 70s, university students from the Faculty of Exact Sciences at the UBA created a calculation model to improve the processes that were taking place at the economic level. That is an example and it already happened in the 70s, when there was not even the computer development that there is now.
P. In addition to Argentina, the book mentions experiments in Brazil and Chile. Will the alternative future come from the Global South? What is the role of Latin America?
R. I believe that Latin America is the only country that, through collaborative action in the technological field, can make global common sense evolve. Precisely because they have been outside the capitalist framework – they have been there because their underdevelopment was essential for the development of the Centre – we have to take up those experiences that have not assumed, like many European countries, that the only alternative is Silicon Valley.
I think they can turn European countries around, which are already drifting like India or China with their models, which are extremely authoritarian. The fact that there are regional alternatives to Silicon Valley makes Latin America a block of avant-garde and democratic innovation, which is what Europe should be.
P. What would have to happen for that to be possible or why has this type of regional collaboration on technology not yet occurred?
R. I think it is not happening because a good part of the political leaders of these countries are unable to convey or have strategic visions. One country that was very well positioned for this is Argentina, which even had a research department within the Presidency, but its political priorities have not been technological. Mexico has a bit more vision. I can sense that it will launch, with the new president, some of the most interesting initiatives that can be seen in terms of technological sovereignty, but the fact that there are certain alliances with other countries in the south is a diplomatic issue of the highest level.
P. What kind of initiatives do you think Sheinbaum will launch?
R. I think that he will understand the potential that certain infrastructures, such as satellites, have in improving connectivity, and that he will also understand that certain platforms are necessary at the service of the State, for example, to help digitalise health systems in a way that promotes their public nature and not their privatisation. I am not sure that he will be able to understand the potential of technologies as cultural devices.
If one of López Obrador’s successes was to raise awareness, I think we need to start thinking about what infrastructures exist so that young people can participate not only in politics but in public life: so that musicians, artists and engineers can get involved in national development processes. If the government is ambitious, it will be in a good position to send a message to Latin America and the rest of the world.
P. If the Sheinbaum government were to consider addressing all these technological challenges, what would be, in your opinion, the first policy it should implement?
R. The first thing I would do would be to propose a different artificial intelligence model, not trained with large amounts of data from all over the planet and requiring enormous energy and water costs, but rather one that is much more artisanal and sophisticated, trained with very high-quality data that allows universities like UNAM, which is one of the great public universities in the world, to have an alternative to Google Scholar. Demonstrate that national platforms can be established so that universities are the agents of innovation and not just the company. And that this serves as a slippery slope to problematize other policies.
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