As the pandemic laid bare the excesses of digital capitalism and the attendant regulatory deficits that entrench the status quo, a notable discursive shift has occurred in the public consciousness. The consensus is that Big Tech simply can’t be allowed to get away any longer. In this regard, a growing wave of regulation that seeks to make corporations more accountable is only a welcome first step. What is missing from this conversation, and indeed, rendered invisible, is the ever-increasing influence of the private sector in rule-making in the digital space. This has the disastrous consequence of eroding public interest and undercutting economic justice.

The need of the hour is to take on the question of what kind of governance can set right this hollowing out of publicness. This is why our research and advocacy focus on driving a stake through the heart of unchecked market power by unraveling the assetization of data — a priceless social resource of our time. We have gone on to bat for distributive justice in the digital economy, calling out the reversal of labor gains and the need for updated standards for decent work.

Our consistent call for platform accountability on online sexism and misogyny is gathering global momentum.

Our joint submission with InternetLab was the only civil society submission cited by the UN Special Rapporteur (SR) on the Right to Freedom of Speech and Expression in her July 2021 report to point to the failure of social media behemoths to address online misogyny and cultures of gender-based violence with “the urgency, seriousness and resources it requires”.

We co-organized a panel with the UN SR’s office at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), December 2021, bringing to the table representatives from the Government of Mexico, the Council of Europe, and the public policy wing of Meta, for a dialogue on the duty of care vested in platform companies to tackle sexist hate.

We have been one of the few civil society organizations straddling engagement with private platform companies (in particular, Meta) for a techno-design overhaul and advocacy in key UN forums — consultations of the UN Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on Big Tech’s human rights obligations and Generation Equality Action Coalitions of UN Women.

And…we’re sharpening the critique on Big Tech issues with a clear agenda to decolonize the digital.

A first-of-its-kind media initiative from IT for Change, we launched our monthly newsletter, DataSyn, dedicated to providing concise and relevant analysis on Big Tech issues. We went live in October 2021, with a debut issue that looked into the Chinese response to Big Tech control, and haven’t looked back since. Over the months, we have covered a host of issues including Big Tech’s growing hold over internet infrastructure, fintech, food systems and digitalization, and labor in the digital economy. Our year-end issue featuring 21 key voices reflecting on the struggles against Big Tech in 2021 is a feat that we are particularly proud of. DataSyn’s readership spans academics, policy professionals, and activists. We have been able to instrumentalize the essays from DataSyn toward various advocacy initiatives.

An extractive digital economy has created a gaping data-divide among countries, manifesting and deepening global inequality. With our institutions and systems steadily getting datafied, public infrastructure and services like education and health are rapidly becoming integrated with transnational digital value chains. It is more important than ever before for people and nations of the Global South to reclaim their data and digital infrastructure. This calls for checking geoeconomic and geopolitical power in the digital space, and relocalizing the gains of the digital in a sustainable and equitable manner. The de facto control of the technology corporation over people’s destinies must make way for bold public policy models

Our collective future hinges on an expanded ideal of human rights — one that places human agency and collective democratic will in relation to the digital condition. This year we have made important strides in building the alternative narrative to the mainstream; collaborating with civil society actors, researchers, and trade union activists; and contributing to public policy processes. From working to preserve policy space and data sovereignty in digital trade agreements, furthering workers’ rights over data, to promoting conceptual frameworks on the data commons, and equipping governments from the Global South in their policy development on data and AI, we have used various routes to shape a new institutional vision of digitality.

We furthered the digital industrialization agenda for the Global South.

Our longstanding contributions to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the South Centre have been crucial in putting the agenda of digital sovereignty front and center in global policy discussions. At the 15th quadrennial session, the Ministerial Declaration of G-77 group of developing countries invoked the idea of ‘digital industrialization’, a concept we have pioneered. Another key agenda-setting opportunity has emerged through our participation in the UN Secretary General’s 10-member expert group on technology facilitation. We worked to ensure that the notion of ‘global digital public goods’ received its due in the UN Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) Forum in May 2022.

Read our policy briefs prepared for this forum, expected to form a part of the official background report to the UN STI Forum.

The political economy of development in the 21st century is predicated on the trajectory of digitalization — the manner in which institutions can evolve to meet the imperatives for an equitable and just digital paradigm. Big Tech and its mutations in the form of Big Agri, Big Pharma, and Big Retail divest people of their control over material and knowledge resources, undercutting local economic autonomy and shrinking the policy space for developing countries to reimagine the digital society and economy. Indeed, there can be no development justice without digital justice. Well aware of this connection, social movements and global civil society at the forefront of various struggles have begun expanding their repertoire to incorporate the digital sub-text in their critiques and strategies.

We are humbled that many organizations making this shift have turned to us with the faith that we can bring synergies by making the relevant data and digital connections to the work they do. These partnerships have matured into working groups, activist teach-ins, practitioner institutes, and programming roadmaps focusing on priority actions for a fair, just, and equitable global digital order. We have also had the opportunity to advise and input into the organizational thinking, agenda, and programming priorities of philanthropic foundations, as well as academic networks of the North working in solidarity with the South.

We are at the cutting-edge of naming how digitality is changing work and workers’ rights.

It would be no exaggeration to say that our theoretical and policy efforts have visibilized the need to account for algorithmic control as a new form of exploitation, and the idea of workers’ data rights as a vital agenda, in digitalized workplaces.

Our credibility in the space has been affirmed through various key partnerships, including with leading institutions like the ILO and philanthropic foundations like the Ford Foundation. To inform the directions of philanthropic effort on just futures of work, we successfully convened a series of dialogues with over 80 scholars, practitioners, unions, multilateral agencies, government representatives, and digital rights activists from across the world.

Connectivity does not automatically lead to meaningful inclusion in economic, social, and political life. The barriers to participation in the digital economy and society are socio-structural, arising as they do in historical power structures. Our field programs have undertaken the difficult work to address this through sustained interventions with the public education system, local government institutions, and marginalized communities.

We have co-constructed context-appropriate models of education and digital literacy that harness the emancipatory potential of digital technologies for the empowerment and participation of those rendered voiceless by the powers that be, also working with grassroots and public institutions to build capabilities for adaptation and transformation. Our commitment to community and institutional capacity-building has only deepened through these years of the pandemic.

Our Prakriye Centre continues to be an enabler of rural women’s access to entitlements and services.

The pandemic years have seen acute distress in rural India, with disruption of public institutional services that have hit poor women the hardest. This year, through 37 gender helpdesks at the community-level, our team of trained para-counsellors provided support services to over 600 women survivors of domestic violence.

Our information centers helped process over 1,000+ welfare entitlement applications, also reaching 1,500 women members of Self Help Groups through media-supported learning forums. Women infomediaries of two centers rose to the occasion, collectivizing community members and mobilizing the local government to convene Pension Adalats (adjudicatory processes to respond to people’s pension-related grievances). Over 100 pension applications from 16 villages were successfully filed through this effort.

Our Hosa Hejje, Hosa Dishe (New Steps, New Directions) team filled a critical gap – reaching out to over 600 girls in Bengaluru city through FM radio.

During the pandemic-related school closures, we initiated a 30-minute FM radio program, ‘Nan Voice Nan Choice’ (My Voice, My Choice), to continue our work with adolescent girls, supporting their empowerment journeys on a virtual platform. Since our in-school girls’ clubs were not possible to organize in this period, the radio program was a timely innovation, using a range of innovative formats — expert interviews with feminist counsellors, teachers, activists, and mental health professionals; a fictionalized mini-serial on adolescent girls’ challenges for self-actualization; and inspirational stories of girls who broke barriers — in order to communicate and reinforce a feminist narrative about adolescence. Girls from marginalized social backgrounds enthusiastically participated in the brainstorming and content development. Over 600 girls were reached through this program and the audio bank of content will be taken to schools across the state in the coming year. Give the program a listen.