My task here is made somewhat easier by the four contributions that preceded mine, as I speak from the experience of popular organisations and movements in the Global South, specifically in Brazil. We have come to understand, with ever greater clarity, the challenge of building a consistent, solid, and broad-based political agenda around artificial intelligence and what we call popular digital sovereignty in Brazil.
To share something of our process of political construction, it is important to recall that in our countries, those who belong to popular movements often have no means of internet access other than a mobile phone running exclusively on the free data provided by Facebook and other corporations. We are therefore dealing with this question under very unfavourable conditions. Artificial intelligence, as this panel has shown, is one of the central contests of our times. In the current conjuncture, it cannot be treated as a technology somehow detached from contemporary geopolitical struggle, nor reduced to the world of chatbots, in which one enters, poses a question or issues a prompt, and receives a response that may be useful, accurate, or an entirely statistically grounded hallucination.
Both the empire and China understand that what is at stake in this contest is the capacity to direct the development and course of humanity. The truth is that only because China is a subject in this contest with the United States, and has the conditions to win it, can we in the Global South begin to conceive of artificial intelligence as something that might come to serve our peoples. The Chinese experience points to how this is possible, making clear that AI must genuinely be understood as part of the new quality of the productive forces. It not only accelerates existing productive processes but carries the potential to qualitatively transform social relations, the way we interact with one another, with our labour, and with the instruments and processes of work that produce the conditions of life.
Two weeks ago, we convened in Brazil with comrades from the World March of Women, a movement of which I am a member, from the MST (LandlessWorkers' Movement), and from Baobab (International Association for People's Cooperation), as part of a process of popular education and the construction of an artificial intelligence tool for agrarian reform and agroecology, called IARRA. This forms part of a strategy for the mass diffusion of agroecology in Brazil, and marks the beginning of a recognition within our organisations that it is also necessary to bring artificial intelligence to the masses, placing our needs and our people at the centre of its development.
This is possible only because we understand that artificial intelligence is contested between two historical possibilities. On one side lies the progressive potential for the transformation of human capacities and social relations, as demonstrated by the Chinese experience of integrating AI into the whole of society, from planning and innovation in the productive chain to the organisation of cities, the countryside, agriculture, and even the care of the elderly in the context of demographic transition. China does all of this with regulation, planning, open source, and sovereignty. On the other side stands the concrete risk of the artificial intelligence project driven by the Big Tech corporations of US imperialism in its decadent and dangerous stage. In this project, AI has the reach of weapons of mass destruction, forming part of the military-industrial complex, of which Silicon Valley's Big Tech companies are now active constituents. AI carries this dual-use character. John Pang has already spoken to this: use by the people and use by the military. We see the example of the genocide of the Palestinian people perpetrated by Israel, in which Google participates in an AI programme that directs attacks in an automated fashion against the homes of the Palestinian people, producing mass assassination.
For us in Brazil and the Global South, the possibility of entering this battle and building digital sovereignty necessarily requires the recognition that we are not operating from a position of strength. With the alliance between Big Tech and the Trump administration, we have faced pressure against national legislation attempting to regulate and protect data. We have suffered threats and tariffs when we attempt to regulate platforms in even a minimally autonomous manner, whether on the question of digital labour platforms or on restricting the political use of data by social media platforms, given how they modulate behaviour and interfere in the electoral processes of our country, where we confront the far right on every front, every day.
Brazil is more structurally dependent on foreign technologies than it should be, and lacks a national strategic project, not only in the digital sphere. We have not invested in our own digital infrastructure and have contracted Big Tech companies for everything. It is estimated conservatively that in the past year the Brazilian state paid 10 billion reais in software licences, cloud solutions, and security applications to foreign corporations such as Microsoft, Google, and Red Hat. At the same time, the Brazilian Artificial Intelligence Plan proposes to invest twice that amount, 23 billion reais, over the course of four years. This is derisory, and the plan has not even left the drawing board.
The case of Brazilian public health is exemplary of this dependence. The public health system has undergone a digital transformation in which access to services takes place via a government-developed digital application, generating the mass collection of population data, all health data, past and present, of the Brazilian population. Yet this data is stored in Amazon's cloud, a service for which we pay dearly. Amazon in turn uses this data to train its models and develop its AI systems, which are then sold back to Brazil and to the South. Once again, we are left acquiring ready-made technologies, renouncing the capacity and potential to develop our own science and technology: a situation already theorised in the 1980s by Marxist dependency theorists. We have surrendered the very imagination of the possibility of entering this contest effectively.
Beyond being exporters of minerals and data, we are seeking to understand how the countries of the South are subordinated to and dependent upon North American Big Tech corporations across the eight layers of digital infrastructure: the four layers of physical infrastructure (energy, telecommunications, hardware and equipment, and data centres) and the four logical layers (software, systems development, databases, and AI). In Brazil, we have identified the dominance of transnational corporations headquartered in the Global North across all of these layers, the result of the privatisation of physical infrastructures in the 1990s and the insufficient investment in research and development of the logical layers in Brazil.
Digital sovereignty cannot therefore treat 'digital' as a mere adjective; it must be articulated within a project of national and popular sovereignty, encompassing necessarily energy sovereignty, mineral sovereignty, technological sovereignty, and food sovereignty. We cannot reproduce territories of high technology set against territories of extraction of common goods such as energy. Digital sovereignty is a contested concept. The Big Tech companies, principally Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, sell 'sovereignty as a service', focusing solely on data localisation, or so-called sovereign cloud: a trap into which Brazil has already fallen. This path is enabled by the European Union's conception of digital sovereignty, which focuses on individual privacy while ignoring data as a factor of production. In the Chinese framework, which guides our thinking, data is a crucial factor of production for the new quality of the productive forces, and as a factor of production it has a singularity: it can be used simultaneously by multiple actors and agents, its value increases with scale, and it carries the generative capacity to produce new realities, knowledge, and possibilities.
In defending control over data, we are defending the whole of life, of territories, of modes of production, and the possibility of a shared future for humanity. In keeping with the proposal elaborated within the framework of the BRICS Civil Council, we identify that popular digital sovereignty does not reduce sovereignty to a juridical status to be conquered, but affirms sovereignty as a continuous exercise of popular power. Just as in Latin America we defend regional integration, digital sovereignty demands solidarity, reciprocity, and complementarity within processes of regional integration and South–South cooperation. These are impulses towards our sovereignty, conditions of possibility, for we will not emerge from this situation of subordination and dependence alone, or within a single country starting from scratch today. The sharing of networks and infrastructure must be treated as a political question, not merely a technical one.
We situate this agenda within the struggles we are already waging: we affirm technodiversity and resist the uniformisation and homogenisation of ways of life; we assert that peoples must be subjects of technological development, not merely users of ready-made technological packages; we affirm that public funding for research and innovation in AI and digital technologies in general must be oriented towards the development of free and open-source technologies, effectively under state and popular control. We also defend the necessity of mass formation through popular digital education, and the elaboration of just transition policies in the face of automation, to be developed by the organisations of the working class.
In closing, we reflect that this battle will not be won by expert discourse or good arguments alone. We must take this agenda into every space, into every corner of the streets, the peripheries, and the countryside, integrating it into the political agenda of popular movements and left organisations. Only in this way will we be in a position to shift the correlation of forces and, together with China as part of the Global South, affirm socialism and definitively defeat the empire.
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