iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

➡️ Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn looks at the uneasy alliance between the crypto industry and the Trump administration, and how political volatility, corruption, and fraud could expose contradictions within the industry itself. botpopuli.net/trump-for-on...

botpopuli.net

Trump for (One) Crypto; All Crypto for Trump?

As strategic Bitcoin reserves are being established in the United States and the cryptocurrency industry gears up to fund candidates for another American...

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

In this issue, we explore these shifts and the tensions beneath them: ➡️ Joan Lopez Solano examines the use of algorithmic systems in migration and border control, asking whether technical fixes can address harms rooted in deeper institutional and political failures. botpopuli.net/relocating-a...

botpopuli.net

Relocating Algorithmic Harm

In 2018, it was revealed that the European Union was funding the development and testing of a machine learning tool that read facial expressions and assi...

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Against this backdrop, growing skepticism toward the dominant AI narrative is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Meanwhile, the IMF and World Bank continue to promote AI as a pathway to economic growth and advise developing countries to adapt existing technologies rather than build their own — raising deeper questions about technological dependence, economic sovereignty, and the future of the Global South.

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

The shutting down of Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) signals the end of an era. AMT pioneered home-based data annotation and other micro-tasks, providing the labor force that ultimately made today’s AI systems possible. Yet, it is these systems that are now rendering such work obsolete.

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

In a new piece for Bot Populi, Kate Lappin examines the Convention’s promise—and its limits—and argues that digital justice movements and unions must work together to challenge algorithmic management and corporate power.

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Platforms must inform workers and their representatives when automated systems are used to monitor, evaluate or make decisions about their work, while workers have a right to explanations for decisions such as suspension, deactivation or termination.

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Convention 193 takes an important step toward changing this. It gives workers and their representatives a right to information about automated systems.

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

For years, platform workers have been subject to opaque systems that determine how they are paid, allocated work, monitored, and even deactivated—often with little insight into how these decisions are made.

110

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

botpopuli.net

Can the new ILO Convention on Decent Work in the Platform Economy advance Digital Justice?

The 2026 International Labour Conference (ILC) adopted a hard-fought and historic new international convention — a binding international labor standard...

001

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

101

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

It asks what becomes visible when we understand today’s digital order from the perspective of the Global South — and what gets obscured when we frame it as a return to feudalism. Read the full article by @rudrakshlakra.bsky.social on Bot Populi: botpopuli.net/capitalism-r...

botpopuli.net

Capitalism Rewired: A Global South Critique of Technofeudal Narratives

Over the past years, some commentators have argued that global capitalism has evolved to take new forms. Probably the loudest of these voices, Yanis Varo...

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Has capitalism really given way to “technofeudalism”? Looking beyond the dominant narratives from the Global North, our latest article examines how digital platforms are embedded in longer histories of imperialism, unequal exchange, labor exploitation, and data extraction.

100

Reposted by BotPopuli

The Syllabus @the-syllabus.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Is Big Tech creating a new feudal order, or intensifying capitalism? Taking a Global South perspective, our essay of the week argues that the technofeudalism thesis misreads the imperial hierarchies produced by platform power. By Rudraksh Lakra in @botpopuli.bsky.social buff.ly/TT4eNgv

012

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

under the AI, Culture and Intellectual Property Subgroup of the UNESCO Global Civil Society Organizations (CSO) and Academic Network on AI Ethics and Policy. New article every Wednesday!

010

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

This series brings together expert voices and was commissioned to inform the development of the issue brief by IT for Change, ‘Governing AI for the Cultural Commons: Beyond Intellectual Property’,

110

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

This week’s intervention is from Swaraj Paul Barooah, Senior Expert at SpicyIP, who asks what a workable redistribution mechanism that accounts for AI's large-scale value extraction would actually look like.

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Fresh off the press for 'Knowledge Futures' on Bot Populi. A series that asks what it means to govern Artificial Intelligence for the cultural commons beyond intellectual property.

111

Reposted by BotPopuli

Open Future @openfuture.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Who pays for the commons? Generative AI was built on the open web, but little value has flowed back. @paul.eurosky.social’s latest at @botpopuli.bsky.social argues copyright can't fix this on its own — and makes the case for a levy on commercial AI deployment. Read it: botpopuli.net/who-pays-for...

botpopuli.net

Who Pays for the Commons?

Three and a half years after the emergence of generative AI as a new technology paradigm, there is broad agreement that AI companies have extracted enorm...

186

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

In her latest essay for Bot Populi, Bama Athreya draws a sharp line between today's AI adoption push and older colonial patterns: cultural conversion, dependency, and the quiet erasure of inconvenient knowledge.

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Here's what caught our attention this month. 📩 This edition's Sins & Synergies Lounge includes critical essays, investigative reporting, podcasts, and research unpacking the infrastructures of AI, the politics of digital sovereignty, platform labor, and the concentration of Big Tech power.

000

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

As AI becomes more deeply embedded in decisions about hiring, firing, and workplace surveillance, the real question is: who gets held accountable when livelihoods are destroyed? A timely read on algorithmic power, labour precarity, and why we must re-center human accountability in the AI economy.

botpopuli.net

Algorithms Don’t Fire Workers, Employers Do

Sheetal is a 42-year-old beauty gig worker who lives with her husband, two children, and parents-in-law in Dharavi, Mumbai. As a teenager, she learnt bea...

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

This piece unpacks how AI-mediated management creates opacity by design: changing performance thresholds without consultation, withholding how ratings are calculated, and giving workers impossible timelines to recover.

botpopuli.net

Algorithms Don’t Fire Workers, Employers Do

Sheetal is a 42-year-old beauty gig worker who lives with her husband, two children, and parents-in-law in Dharavi, Mumbai. As a teenager, she learnt bea...

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

In this article, Isha Bhallamudi, Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, discusses how women gig workers are pushed out not by a neutral system, but by deliberate managerial choices hidden behind code.

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

When gig workers’ accounts are “deactivated,” platforms often point to the algorithm. But algorithms don’t fire workers — employers do.

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

It traces five years of pioneering official recognition of platform cooperativism by the Brazilian state and presents a detailed action plan for overcoming the current policy bottlenecks. Read here: botpopuli.net/can-public-p...

botpopuli.net

Can Public Platforms Beat Uber?

At the opening of the United Nations General Assembly in 2023, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, declared that “platforms should not ab...

000

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

Kenzo Soares Seto, Associate Research Scholar at Yale Law School, shares insights from his new report from the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy (ICDE), ‘Platform Cooperativism and the State: Lessons from Brazil’s Public Policies (2023–2026)’.

110

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

under the AI, Culture and Intellectual Property Subgroup of the UNESCO Global Civil Society Organizations (CSO) and Academic Network on AI Ethics and Policy. New article every Wednesday! Read here: botpopuli.net/llm-extracti...

botpopuli.net

LLM Extractivism and the Politics of the Knowledge Commons

Contemporary debates often frame disputes around the training data of large language models (LLMs) as questions of copyright law and the rights of indivi...

000

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

The series brings together expert voices and was commissioned to inform the development of the issue brief by IT for Change, ‘Governing AI for the Cultural Commons: Beyond Intellectual Property’,

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Examining the political economy through which knowledge, culture, and value live within AI systems, she argues for treating shared knowledge resources as infrastructure to be stewarded collectively rather than extracted for private gain.

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Adding to this debate is Rohini Lakshané, a technologist, interdisciplinary researcher, and Wikimedian, weighing in on what she considers the greatest challenge for cultural rights and development justice in the scramble for training data.

110

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Read 'Knowledge Futures' on Bot Populi. A series that asks what it means to govern Artificial Intelligence for the cultural commons beyond intellectual property.

110

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

This month’s editorial sheds light on the anticlimactic character of the Trump-Xi Summit and the potential impact of the widely anticipated IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic.

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

➡️ Norbert Bollow weighs in on why the expiration of the ‘E-commerce Moratorium’ signals the beginning of a new era in digital trade politics botpopuli.net/the-wto-e-co...

botpopuli.net

The WTO E-Commerce Moratorium

Most news media are full of very superficial reports, most of which concern events that will almost certainly have no importance in the long run. In the ...

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

In this context, our latest issue brings you insights on public platform development in Brazil, the lack of consensus on the e-commerce moratorium within the WTO, and the experiences of workplace injustice faced by beauty workers in India.

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

that countries in the Global South must ensure they play an active role in shaping both the emerging technological paradigm and the regulatory order developing around it.

100

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

#NewsletterAlert From the BRICS Ministers of Foreign Affairs and International Relations meeting in New Delhi to the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, there is a broad consensus...

open.substack.com

The Multiple Scales of Resistance

Editorial

120

BotPopuli @botpopuli.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

The experiences of ASHAs show a complex algorithmic control embedded in the public sector and welfare work, especially where women work from the margins of formal recognition.

100