Reframing "Sovereignty"
Dominant narratives suggest that digital sovereignty comes from buying AI products or hosting data centers, but true control can’t be rented from tech companies. Alix reframes “digital sovereignty” with Rafael Grohmann, exploring how governments can build capacity, invest in innovation, and make informed long-term tech decisions.
RAFAEL GROHMANN – SOVEREIGNTY
Rafael Grohmann is an assistant professor of media studies (critical platform studies) at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on digital labor, AI in the cultural sector, workers’ organizing, platform cooperativism, and the digital solidarity economy, especially in Latin America.
In this conversation, Grohmann unpacks digital sovereignty. He historicizes the concept, tracing it to 1970s anti-imperialist political economy, which examined how global power and economic dependence shaped national development. Today, he argues, digital sovereignty has returned in a depoliticized form as the site of a battle between states and Big Tech that often sidesteps questions of who holds power and who benefits. In place of such top-down uses of the concept, Grohmann introduces a bottom-up notion of “popular digital sovereignty” based on his research with social movements and cooperatives in Latin America, which prioritizes community control, education, and the sharing of resources. A critical part of this approach is building and circulating prototypes of an alternative world.
"We are living in a kind of academic 'Stranger Things' nostalgia...recovering these old words like imperialism, colonialism, and sovereignty, because we didn't address those issues properly in the past. So the monsters and the zombies are back."