Topic
Data, classification and power
An entry point into data, platforms, classification and the ways social life is made visible or governable.
- Note
Africa at scale
The United Nations backs correcting a centuries-old cartographic distortion. Three weeks later, Accra is debating another form of representation of the continent: the one being encoded into artificial intelligence systems.
- Radar
Land, learning and compute: three scenes of AI in Africa
Cape Town, Egypt and Ghana show how artificial intelligence takes on territory: data centres, mass AI literacy and computational sovereignty.
- Note
Who owns a relationship?
From fear of abandonment to the self as a mine. What happens when a company can change who is on the other side
- Radar
When AI needs land
Automatic control, data centres and local media show that artificial intelligence does not live in the cloud. It depends on physical infrastructure, public resources and content over which bargaining power is distributed very unevenly.
- Note
The right not to appear
From the human safari to the algorithmic gaze: when Indigenous isolation becomes content and refusal of contact acquires value.
- Note
The self as a mine: Appadurai in Bielefeld
Arjun Appadurai calls the ‘mineable self’ a new commodity made of relationships, stories, profiles and data. A reading of his 2026 work on personhood, affect and artificial intelligence.
- Note
Nokia · The sisu that would not fit in an American pocket
From rubber boots to SMS, from T9 to Asha, and from the collapse of the mobile-phone business to AI networks. A story about Nokia, Finland and the shifting geography of technological power.
- Radar
Palantir and the Digital Twin That Does Not Yet Exist
In 2017, Argentine state agencies explored Palantir tools in connection with the archives of the AMIA case. In 2022, the company registered its trademark in Argentina. Three years later, Próspera co-founder Gabriel Delgado Ayau held a nearly two-hour meeting at the Casa Rosada. In 2026, Thiel Macro disclosed a position worth almost $76 million in Vista Energy, while the government announced a Social Digital Twin that, months later, it acknowledged was not even in the design stage.
- Radar
Sweden · When the infrequent disappears from the model
Synthetic data do not simply reproduce the world. By determining which cases and relations survive generation, they can turn the majority into normality and make the infrequent disappear.
- Radar
Who retains the power to decide?
Harare, OpenAI and Lahore show that governing AI means deciding who controls data, which institutions retain power, and which forms of knowledge count before automation becomes inevitable.
- Radar
The map left by WAIC: WAICO and the contest over AI governance
One month after Shanghai, WAICO has moved from ceremonial signature to part of a contest between architectures of power, infrastructure and cooperation.
- Essay
When prediction is not explanation
From protein language models to the person as data
- Radar
Relationships Come Before the Algorithm
Five frequencies from contemporary anthropology in the United States for thinking about the world we are beginning to automate.
- Radar
What world does AI need? A Colombian reading from Cyberia to invisible labour
Colombia is building sovereign AI models while a critical constellation —Arturo Escobar, Myriam Jimeno, Diana Obregón, Derly Sánchez Vargas and Carlos Andrés Arroyave— helps us ask which forms of knowledge, labour and worlds make that intelligence possible.
- Essay
The cloud has a geography
From a private refuge in the Andes to a new oil frontier around the Malvinas, the Southern Cone is once again gaining value as a reserve territory. Land, water, copper, lithium, cellulose, gas and oil sustain global economies and a digital future that is often represented as immaterial. Behind the cloud, soil, energy, minerals and the power relations that determine their uses come back into view.
- Note
When the cockroaches answer back
In India in 2026, a judicial slur became a political identity. The journey of the “cockroach” opens questions about classification, aspiration, embodiment, satire, power and algorithmic visibility.
- Radar
Who defines, who listens, who learns
Three recent developments in Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan show that bringing a language into artificial intelligence also redistributes authority, listening capacity and data labour.
- Radar
Before the model comes the school
Four signals from Chile and Uruguay about the institutions that turn languages, territories and memories into data before an algorithm intervenes.
- Radar
Who Governs What Becomes Visible
Three initiatives concerning Indigenous language data, audiovisual heritage, and Kiswahili show that visibility is never mere exposure. It depends on rules governing access, format, quality, and authority, and those rules also shape the artificial intelligence that may be built afterwards.
- Radar
Who Gets Paid When Kiswahili Becomes Data
DataHive Africa is testing a linguistic infrastructure in Tanzania based on paid contributions, community review and consent. The project reveals who speaks, who validates and how value is distributed when everyday language enters artificial intelligence.
- Essay
Digital violence is not a design flaw
From synthetic images created in a school to the automatic reuse of photographs on Instagram. An anthropological account of how platforms and institutions distribute harm and the work of repair.
- Radar
Kwe’sx uma kiwe îtxi
A Nasa Yuwe interpreter reveals the potential of natural language processing and raises a decisive question about who governs the data when an Indigenous language enters artificial intelligence.
- Radar
Three Places from Which Artificial Intelligence Is Being Contested
Three cases show how artificial intelligence redistributes labour, knowledge and power across South Asia, Africa and Latin America.
- Radar
The radio speaks, the needle remembers and the cloud extracts
Namibia and the Colombian Amazon show that protecting a language or healing a territory also requires decisions about what may become data, what should remain outside the machine and which materials sustain artificial intelligence.
- Note
Cinema ParAIso
Artificial intelligence is reshaping audiovisual production, but the debate is not only about generated images. It affects labour, archives, languages, rights, representation and the power to decide which stories circulate.
- Radar
Kiswahili Language and Global Infrastructures of Translation
Social and cultural anthropology radar on Kiswahili, African language models, AI, memory, heritage and global classification.
- Essay
The Besieged People
How populism turns distrust into an infrastructure of power across platforms, AI, and democratic life.
- Radar
The science a platform can read
The documents published by Genesis Mission show that its wager is not merely technical. It redefines what counts as scientific productivity, credit and talent.
- Essay
AI Does Not Evolve Alone
Anthropological approaches to reading artificial intelligence as progress, classification, labour, infrastructure and a struggle over power.
- Radar
Who can claim, who can count, who is left out
Three scenes for considering how artificial intelligence and data reorganise access to justice, the value of science and representation in health.
- Note
The Platform and the Category
Palantir, Carissa Véliz and the struggle over who defines what is visible, urgent and disposable
- Radar
Ensamblajes Is Not a Waiting Room
Volume 3(1) of Ensamblajes shows why predoctoral research is not a waiting room: music, bodies, the city, myth and death read as situated accounts of social borders.
- Essay
The Third Obligation: Accra and the Debt the West Refuses to Repay
The Accra summit turns resolution A/RES/80/250 into an institutional agenda. This note asks whether recognising historical harm also entails restitution and examines how that question reappears in the political economy of AI.
- Radar
Repair, catalogue, sustain: who keeps custody of memory
From heritage as an object of repair to data catalogued with AI and culture as social infrastructure after crisis: three planes of a single anthropological question about who keeps custody of memory, traced from Africa and Asia.
- Radar
Taking part is not the same as being seen: from territory to data, who reshapes the rules
From Bonn to Busan, Indigenous and community participation enters climate and heritage institutions that are now shaped by data, platforms and AI systems.
- Radar
The frontier is negotiated at Évian
The suspension of Fable 5 and Mythos 5, the G7 summit and the responses from China, Europe and the Global South show that frontier AI is governed through jurisdiction, data, infrastructure and alliances.
- Note
The gesture as data
From Meta to Gurugram, how clicks, skills and bodily techniques are turned into data to train automation.
- Note
The company that acts alone does not exist
Palantir imagines an armed technological republic, the United States restricts Fable 5 and Mythos 5 as strategic capabilities and Milei proposes non-human corporations. Algorithmic autonomy appears as a political fiction that hides people, data, territory, labour and life.
- Radar
Recognition is not enough: algorithms, territories and disinformation
An anthropological reading of recognition, algorithms, territory and disinformation from Colón, the Brazilian Amazon and Indonesia.
- Radar
China and those who feed AI
Three researchers help us understand Chinese artificial intelligence from the street, the factory and the global infrastructure of data.
- Radar
India under heat: counting, circulating, sowing
An anthropological reading of India through extreme heat, caste census, state data, social circulation and seeds.
- Essay
What once destroyed presidents now elects them
From Watergate to AI, an anthropological reading of how visible transgression went from scandal to an infrastructure of power.
- Radar
Spanish anthropology for reading infrastructures, platforms and everyday life
AIthropology Lab radar on Susana Narotzky, moral economy, food delivery, neighbourhoods, networks and commons, from social and cultural anthropology in Spain.
- Note
Not too late again: AI, data and public ethics
The opening in Valencia of the UN's AI Governance Lab, read through anthropology: data, consent, algorithmic harm and public ethics.
- Note
Leo XIV, artificial intelligence and the new human question
An anthropological reading of Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical of Leo XIV on artificial intelligence, human dignity and technological power.