Topic
Indigenous sovereignty and decolonisation
Writing on Indigenous peoples, cultural and technological sovereignty, data, territory and repair.
- 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
Open does not mean shared
China is proposing an open artificial intelligence ecosystem around BRICS to expand the technological capacity of the Global South. The initiative promises to reduce dependencies, although infrastructure, capabilities and forms of governance remain profoundly unevenly distributed.
- 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.
- 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.
- Essay
Why doesn’t Abya Yala have its Accra?
Unthinkable history, extraction and the obligation to repair
- 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.
- Essay
Cortés and Pizarro: conquest, thanatopolitics and imperial memory. From Abya Yala to contemporary Spain
An essay on the conquest of Abya Yala, colonial thanatopolitics and contemporary forms of imperial memory in Spain.
- 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.
- 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.
- Radar
Who decides how to become legible to the machine
Indigenous sovereignty in the face of AI, musical genres becoming homogenised, and voice as a potential barrier to accessing rights in India.
- 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 owns the seas through which artificial intelligence travels?
The expansion of submarine cables shows that artificial intelligence does not inhabit an immaterial cloud. Its infrastructure occupies the seabed, crosses jurisdictions and reorganises relations of ownership, sovereignty and development.
- 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
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.
- Radar
AI Is Decided at the Border, in Training and Through Contracts
Access to models, scientific training and public procurement show how artificial intelligence is becoming state infrastructure.
- Radar
Who gets to name, earn and pass things on
From Indigenous consultation in Mexico to cultural royalties in Rwanda and Tamu language training in Nepal, three developments show that culture needs authority and means to stay alive.
- Radar
Releasing the Weights Is Not Enough
A model can be downloadable and still remain tied to a border, a cloud or a network. Access to AI depends on weights, permissions and material capacity.
- 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.
- 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
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.
- Radar
AI does not understand worlds, the forest is not a resource and heritage does not fit inside a file
Three recent scenes show how AI systems, extractive policies and international heritage frameworks translate living cultures into their own languages.
- Radar
Languages, borders and forests. Who has the right to belong
Three scenes connected by a single anthropological question. Who can name, inhabit and care for a territory.
- Essay
Four ways of remapping Abya Yala
A note on Ollantay Itzamná, Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Gladys Tzul Tzul, read from Abya Yala and against the colonial map, including the one now learned by artificial intelligence.
- 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
Marisol de la Cadena and the worlds that do not fit
Indigenous futures, languages at risk and patrimonialised bodies in the June issue of American Anthropologist, the most complete count to date of human remains in British institutions, and Marisol de la Cadena's election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: what anthropology does with what the dominant frameworks cannot handle, and what that says about an AI that classifies, translates and normalises.