Daniela Tafani
LightNews LightNews
Daniela Tafani
@danielatafani.bsky.social
100 followers 97 following 76 posts
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Daniela Tafani
justinhendrix.bsky.social
www.techpolicy.press/irans-case-s...
Our letter and our bitter experience of witnessing a massacre of protestors in Iran during the internet shutdown are a loud cry that the threat of market domination by the US and China should not convince us to give up the idea of a free global internet and a decentralized system of digital governance and infrastructure. The ITU, as the United Nations’ specialized agency for digital technologies, is mandated to facilitate and safeguard international connectivity. This mandate will not be achieved by a nationalist and nationally centralized system of internet governance. As we have written: A network designed to be global, open, and resilient is being reframed as something states can fragment, weaponize, and shut down at will. In the context of internet shutdowns, the debate over digital sovereignty has reached its limits: when states sever connectivity and kill with impunity, the priority can no longer be sovereignty but ensuring that people can remain connected and in control of their communications.
January 15, 2026 at 1:57 PM
Reposted by Daniela Tafani
justinhendrix.bsky.social
Perhaps in the year ahead, instead of prioritizing questions like, “How do we regulate tech to ensure a healthier democracy?” we should instead put more effort into answering “How do we preserve space for human agency and resistance in an increasingly authoritarian century?”
Abridged from the screenshot: Indeed, where authoritarianism is rising—and that is nearly everywhere, according to the 2025 editions of the Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index, the Freedom House Freedom in the World report, and the V-Dem Institute Democracy Report—AI is increasingly a tool of authoritarian control and a threat to democratic systems. OpenAI might be selling “democratic AI,” but as legal scholars Woodrow Hartzog and Jessica Silbey contend, today’s “AI systems are built to function in ways that degrade and are likely to destroy our crucial civic institutions,” which they say includes universities, the free press, and the rule of law itself. That is even before all of the ways AI is being deployed around the world for surveillance, manipulation, and control. A clinical look at the situation requires adopting a new frame for the new year, and to prioritize interrogating the “tenacious connections” between AI and authoritarianism rather than building more intellectual scaffolding for “responsible AI.” Instead of prioritizing questions like, “How do we regulate tech to ensure a healthier democracy?” we should instead put more effort into answering “How do we preserve space for human agency and resistance in an increasingly authoritarian century?” This may appear to be a pessimistic reorientation, but it points towards what should be sources of hope: the clear need for solidarity with existing movements for the rule of law, democracy, human rights, social and environmental justice; and the urgency of building alternative public technology infrastructures that are free from both corporate and state control. This is the reorientation that is needed in tech policy beyond simply asking corporations and states to behave more responsibly when it comes to AI.
January 15, 2026 at 2:55 PM