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Joyojeet Pal and Omolade Adunbi of the University of Michigan are organizing a symposium on social media influencers in South Asia and Africa on April 7-8, 2022.

Social media influencer activity on platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn are now pivotal to social influence in societies around the world, as the ecology of the public sphere gets increasingly crafted, amplified, or negated by what happens online. This is as true, or more so in the Global South, where social media has often served as the gateway for entry into the online realm for millions of technology users with little or no prior experience. The resulting world is one in which the boundaries between the physical and the virtual has fundamentally reshaped power equations between the citizens and the state, their culture, and their communities.

This symposium at the University of Michigan is focused on social media influencers, and brings a host of leaders, artistes, journalists, activists, commentators, and scholars from two of the fastest growing Internet-using regions of the world to discuss how they interact online, what drives their activities and success, and how being public figures online impacts their lives and work.

Online participation in the symposium is possible after registration.

For the Transnational Institute and ROAR Magazine, Michael Kwet outlines the latest stage of the U.S. empire: digital colonialism.

We live in a world where digital colonialism now risks becoming as significant and far-reaching a threat to the Global South as classic colonialism was in previous centuries. Sharp increases in inequality, the rise of state-corporate surveillance, and sophisticated police and military technologies are just a few of the consequences of this new world order. The phenomenon may sound new to some, but over the course of the past decades, it has become entrenched in the global status quo. Without a considerably strong counter-power movement, the situation will get much worse.

In his Platformer newsletter, Casey Newton shares notes on the role of platforms in wartime — and asks whether they may have a role to play in preserving democracy in Ukraine.

Over the past decade, the biggest tech companies came to feel less like traditional corporations and more like quasi-states: borderless empires whose decisions increasingly had geopolitical consequences, to the growing frustration of the nation states in which they operate. … [I]t has been striking, watching the horrific invasion of Ukraine that Vladimir Putin’s Russia began on Thursday, the degree to which social networks have been used in efforts to preserve democracy.

A new report from Community Justice Exchange.

"From Data Criminalization to Prison Abolition" is a report, glossary of data systems, and tools for organizers that describe migrant surveillance practices and articulate prison-industrial-complex abolitionist perspectives on data and criminalization. Data has long been used by the criminal legal system to justify the need for and legitimacy of the criminal legal system. As corporations and governments become increasingly enamored with prediction tools and biometric capture, we see data criminalization strategies used for immigrant and traveler stalking creep further into currently non-criminalized spaces, expanding the pools of whom are subject to surveillance and control.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork in server farms, Steven Gonzalez Monserrate explores multiple entry points into the materiality of "the Cloud" and its environmental impacts.

To get at the matter of the Cloud we must unravel the coils of coaxial cables, fiber optic tubes, cellular towers, air conditioners, power distribution units, transformers, water pipes, computer servers, and more. We must attend to its material flows of electricity, water, air, heat, metals, minerals, and rare earth elements that undergird our digital lives. In this way, the Cloud is not only material, but is also an ecological force. As it continues to expand, its environmental impact increases, even as the engineers, technicians, and executives behind its infrastructures strive to balance profitability with sustainability. Nowhere is this dilemma more visible than in the walls of the infrastructures where the content of the Cloud lives: the factory-libraries where data is stored and computational power is pooled to keep our cloud applications afloat.

In Le Monde diplomatique, Evgeny Morozov analyzes the contradictory geopolitics of chip manufacturing.

Today’s crisis isn’t exceptional. This time, however, it has come amidst wider anxiety about globalisation, the decline of western industrial activity, and politicisation of advanced technology such as AI, now a strategic domain in the US/China standoff. This explains how a boring technical issue, which ten years ago would have had little impact outside the directly affected industries, has become a massive headache for governments.

Abubakar Idris reports in Rest of World:

As a tech reporter, I’ve had a front-row seat to the explosion of digital services in Nigeria. I’ve seen gig work companies expand rapidly over the last decade, to take advantage of the country’s population — the largest on the continent. But it’s not just about the big numbers: it’s in the stories of individual people who’ve had their lives changed that I’ve seen how transformative this shift has been.

In the Tech Workers Coalition newsletter, an organizer for the South Bay Mutual Aid project shares insights into how cybernetic analysis can support mutual aid efforts in times of emergency.

I observed common tendencies and structural problems, including burnout and power consolidation, across various mutual aid efforts. Promising efforts can slide backwards and revert to top-down, unaccountable models, which is why organizers need to think about these efforts systemically. To make mutual aid sustainable, we need systems that empower as many people as possible to get involved and do the work, share the load, and grow the effort at scale.

In Slate, Diami Virgilio warns against drawing too many parallels between the much-hyped metaverse and Second Life:

But to dismiss the metaverse … as the reincarnation of Second Life is to miss something crucial. Second Life’s scope and scale has always been considerably narrower than the current hype for a metaverse. Where Second Life proposed an alternative reality for its users, the metaverse is a road map to enclose both the virtual and actual worlds.

In Overland, Scott Robinson writes about the whitewashing of fraud and harm under financial capitalism:

Businesses like Theranos—a Silicon Valley medical technology startup—are routinely celebrated for their disruptive destruction of the ordinary order. As the company began to attract investment, up to almost US$10 billion before it was closed, the financial press cheered it on. The Financial Times opined that ‘the US healthcare market is ripe for disruption’ even as questions were being raised by journalists at the Wall Street Journal. Even as the full extent of Theranos’ mismanagement was being exposed, Holmes defended herself against critics she cast ‘as part of the old-fashioned medical elite, scared of the changes she promises.’