SoLiXG:Digital Non-sovereignty
Digital Non-Sovereignty
A conversation is missing to address the brokenness of our infrastructural imaginaries. This entry describes an imaginary concept which, in contrast to it’s antonym ‘Digital Sovereignty’, is unlikely to be found in policy papers, political analyses or European decrees. No results found. Digital Non-Sovereignty is an invitation to approach[1] the digital sphere from and with it’s economic relations, interconnected networks, dependencies on resources and supply chains, but also from and with the historical responsibility for violent acts of colonialism. Generation Lumière, an international solidarity movement that campaigns for the diasporas to have the power to resist ecocide, states the obvious: “Digital technology is not just a ‘virtual’ world. Through its infrastructure, it generates other realities that are very concrete. The first of these realities is its growing need for minerals, the extraction and production of which have disastrous environmental and societal consequences.”[2] How to stay with the concrete realities that interconnect the lives of collectives and individuals, lands and bodies, the phone that is warming your pocket and the disastrous extraction of cobalt in the Republic of the Congo? It is here that “non-sovereignty”, a concept proposed by queer theory scholar Lauren Berlant, offers a way to approach the vulnerability which results from everything being in open relation to each other. As they write, “What emerges are other ways to process inconvenience, the evidence that you were never sovereign — evidence the world forces you to face and a fact about which much genuine and confusing ambivalence ensues.”[3] Brought into the digital sphere, the concept of non-sovereignty provokes an infrastructural imaginary that refuses to bring the interrelations to other lives and lands in as an afterthought, an inconvenience in the way of obtaining Digital Sovereignty. Importantly, Digital Non-Sovereignty differs from the arranging of interstate relations that is gestured at in “Strategic Autonomy”. In the context of Brexit and cooling relations between Europe and the US, Strategic Autonomy had an upsurge and pointed at the aspiration of the European Union to “promote peace and security within and beyond its borders.” The concept does some thinking through dependencies, but it’s end-game is finding the optimal trade-off between security and openness in a struggle for control among violent battles for global hegemony.[4] In the words of Nathalie Tocci, architect of A Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign And Security Policy in which the concept prominently figures, “The two sides of the same coin are protection and promotion”[5] — Strategic Autonomy as just another gesture of Fortress Europe. Why is it unimaginable to address historical harms first, before jumping into the creation of yet other ones? Rather than shifting billions into the scaffolding of aspirational AI infrastructures in an attempt to attain Digital Sovereignty, Digital Non-Sovereignty would mean to begin with the damage already done and to take on caring for the implications of ever expanding digitisation from the start. Here we start to see the limits of Digital non-sovereignty as a concept that could help us to divest from the all-consuming mirage of Digital Sovereignty; it’s antagonistic orientation might distract us from the urgent work to also hold on to, in the words of Berlant, “attachments, motives, and interests from within the lived space of an ongoingness that we want both to shred and maintain something of.”[6] To continue a conversation on the brokenness of our infrastructural imaginations, a next entry might need to think with Digital So-and-sovereignty for example[7]. This ambiguous concept invites a non-binary approach to past, present and future infrastructurings, a necessary ambivalence for figuring out how to move away from the reactionary accelerationism which replicates and expands a harmful extractive economic model that is increasing the injust distribution of wealth, devastating the planet and actively undoing institutions, welfare, and governance in the process.
- ↑ An invitation to both imagine and practice digital infrastructures otherwise, i.e. TITiPI’s experiments with day-to-day institutional infrastructures https://titipi.org/wiki/index.php/Infra_colophon ; Traversal Feminist Servers at ATNOFS or inside-out locality with Splinter
- ↑ https://generationlumiere.fr/campagne-contre-lextractivisme/
- ↑ Berlant, Lauren. On the Inconvenience of Other People. London: Duke University Press, 2022. p151
- ↑ “Unthinking Digital Sovereignty: A Critical Reflection on Origins, Objectives, and Practices.” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/poi3.437. (introduction)
- ↑ https://euscream.com/europe-on-a-power-trip-transcript/
- ↑ Berlant, Lauren. On the Inconvenience of Other People. London: Duke University Press, 2022. p151
- ↑ The concept “So-and-sovereignty” was made up in conversation with Martino Morandi in the context of Networks with an attitude, a worksession organised by Constant, Brussels in 2018.