Title: Shifting the Axes: Technological Alternatives, Human Rights, and Civil Society at the Beginning of the 21st Century.
Period: 2022.
Funding source: Oxfam and Barcelona City Council.
Project coordinator: Antonio Calleja-Lopez.
Participants in the project: Ekaitz Cancela and Marta Cambronero.
Summary: This report offers a global and updated overview of initiatives and struggles for human rights in relation to digital technologies, collecting 225 cases from 64 countries and covering the last 20 years. In order to situate these initiatives and struggles, the report first briefly analyzes the three hegemonic digitalization frameworks (currently defined by the US, China, and the European Union), attending to the geopolitical, economic, and technical factors that, from a historical perspective, account for many of the particularities of each model.
Subsequently, an analysis is offered regarding the implications and tensions originated by the deployment of these models in territories and subjects of the Global South, as well as some historical responses to said deployments. Later, in the central section of the report, an account is provided of current cases and alternatives to digital capitalism and colonialism stemming from civil society, grassroots communities, and social movements. Today, these initiatives constitute a fertile substrate for the collective and “from below” defense of both classic human rights, translated or affected today by digitalization (e.g., non-discrimination, freedom of expression, the right to political participation…), and emerging digital rights in the information society (e.g., the right to a neutral internet, to data control…).
Finally, the report presents some uncertainties and future horizons on the political, economic, and ecological levels. Without being an exhaustive compilation of cases and rights (it by no means exhausts the active experiences worldwide nor the lists of human rights), this document provides a broad and original collection that contributes to the urgent task of delineating emancipatory horizons in the face of the multiple crises confronting digital societies.
Project Activities:
The report can be downloaded here.
