The Sovereignty Trap: Dependency, Failures, and Alternatives from Below

Abstract

The Sovereignty Trap: Dependency, Failures, and Alternatives from Below

Digital sovereignty is everywhere. It is invoked by states, companies, policy makers, social movements. This talk argues that sovereignty language has become a trap: a concept so stretched that it now serves the very forces it was meant to oppose, with Big Tech companies selling "sovereignty-as-a-service" to governments. Against this, the talk argues that sovereignty must be thought dialectically alongside dependency, drawing on Marxist dependency theory and its implications for AI value chains. Drawing on a book in progress under contract with the University of California Press, this talk theorises failure through an anticapitalist lens to examine what these failures mean in terms of digital sovereignty. It presents two sets of cases, drawn from Latin America's present and past. The first relates to the ongoing failures of Brazilian state enterprises, whose sovereignty rhetoric coexists with structural Big Tech dependency, glitches, and data breaches. The second one analyzes interrupted tech sovereignty projects of the 1970s in Chile, Peru and Brazil. The talk then turns to what social movements and workers are doing to escape this trap, examining frameworks of popular digital sovereignty theorized and put into practice by the Homeless Workers’ Movement in Brazil, and how cooperatives and collectives in Brazil and Argentina are grappling with frameworks of sovereignty and autonomy. The conclusion offers a critical reflection on co-designing and imagining other possible technological worlds beyond the current dominant frameworks.

This talk is part of the series "Critical Data & Surveillance Studies" organized by Professor Azadeh Akbari.

 

Date & Time

The talk will take place on June 22, 2026, at 4:30 p.m. at the Seminarhaus, room SH 0.109 (Campus Westend, Goethe University).

It is also possible to join the talk online via Zoom.

 

Photo by Lianhao Qu auf Unsplash

Bio

Rafael Grohmann

Rafael Grohmann is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies (Critical Platform Studies) at the University of Toronto. He is research associate at the University of Oxford, founding editor of Platforms & Society journal and leader of DigiLabour initiative. His research focuses on digital labour, AI and work, AI in the cultural sector, workers’ organizing, platform cooperativism and digital solidarity economy, especially in Latin America. He is currently working on a book manuscript on how worker collectives are failing and learning to govern platforms. Grohmann is a co-lead of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) project. He is also researcher of the AI Policy Observatory of the World of Work. His previous affiliations include Weizenbaum Institute (Germany) and University of Sao Paulo (Brazil). Grohmann published in academic outlets such as Big Data & Society, New Media & Society, International Journal of Communication, Communications of the ACM, Information, Communication & Society, and Social Media + Society. He is an editorial board member of Communication, Culture and Critique and Big Data & Society.