Rethinking digital rights: from "me" to "we"

In an era dominated by digital interactions and transformations, the discourse around digital rights has increasingly become steeped in ideologies anchored on the tenets of individualism. We have been told over and over again that they were designed that way to champion 'personal freedoms'. Yet, recent events like this, this, this and this have suggested quite the opposite. If anything, the frameworks we have today are actually just masking a profit-driven agenda that aims to commercialise every facet of our digital existence and perpetuate colonial legacies of domination and exploitation under the guise of modernisation and progress. This deeply ingrained individualistic focus in the realm of digital rights not only sidelines our collective needs. They actively participate in the neoliberal assault on communal structures and in the longer term, the health of the planet.

Back in 1995, Nicholas Negroponte predicted that Internet would “flatten organisations, globalise society, decentralise control, and help harmonise people”. Quite a utopian picture of digital connectivity, starkly different from our reality in 2024. That instead of being a democratising power, the digital landscape has exploited user data for profit, with a few dominant players wielding significant influence over how data is used and monetised. Much of the Internet we see today can be compared to emerald mining, a process that involves the extraction of valuable resources under conditions that are far from equitable. The digital realm thrives on the same logic for data extraction, often without users’ explicit consent or fair compensation. Thus, mirroring the exploitation during the colonial era when resources were taken from local communities for the economic advantage of more powerful entities, which leaves those communities impoverished and their environments depleted.

As we observe Indigenous Peoples Day this month, it is just fitting to reflect on the parallels between historical colonisation and the digital exploitation unfolding right before our eyes. We are seeing a similar scenario play out where vast amount of data are harvested from people worldwide. And from these datasets they create a lesser-known, labour-intensive digital sweatshops fueled by the likes of Amazon Mechanical Turks. In countries like the Philippines, India, and Kenya, workers are employed under harsh conditions to process and label these enormous data pools, tasks that are essential for training AI systems. Such labour is often tedious and poorly paid, yet they are the backbone of the sophisticated algorithms we see on search engines and other digital platform. Echoing the sentiment of a popular 90s song, it's profoundly ironic that those who toil to advance cutting-edge technologies often do so in circumstances that starkly oppose the futuristic applications they help create.

This prevailing "me, me, me" agenda in the digital realm further exacerbates the issues highlighted above, where the individualistic ethos not only promotes but necessitates a self-focused view of technology. But, this cultural shift is not just a byproduct of natural course of tech evolution. Rather, it is more of an active engineering concocted by public policy and commercial interests—as noted by Greenstein in his book “How the Internet Became Commercial”. Corporations created environments that encourage constant connectivity and self-promotion, directly influencing how we conceive of concepts like digital rights, and turning them into matters of personal concern rather than communal responsibility.

Consider privacy as an example. Despite how often it is portrayed as an individual choice, our personal decisions reverberates towards the people we are connected to. I am once again citing Kasper (2007) who aptly stated that “[p]rivacy is a socially created need, and without society, there would be no need for privacy.” And it's true. A person’s use of an insecure app can compromise the privacy of their contacts. When such services become widely adopted, they set a norm, leaving others with little choice but to follow suit—often at the cost of their own security—or risk losing essential social or professional connections. Privacy is also closely tied to how rich you are. Wealthier people often have greater access to privacy, while we are here struggling to attain it using every means possible known to man to avoid surrendering our secrets to the capitalist gods. Treating privacy as a commodity has created a divide between the haves and the have nots. When privacy becomes something to be purchased, it excludes those without the means. And by portraying privacy as a matter of personal choice, we unfairly shift the blame away from the data exploiters onto individuals for lacking it. This narrative suggests privacy is purely about decisions rather than addressing the systemic economic disparities that limit access to privacy-enhancing measures. It perpetuates the illusion that privacy is a straightforward result of effort while ignoring the structural and financial challenges that prevent many from safeguarding their data.

Many people are not equipped with the knowledge to make informed decisions about their privacy. Some wouldn’t understand the trade-offs they are making by sharing their personal information in exchange for free services. The noisiest privacy proponents you'd see online even dare call them 'normies' for being 'too stupid' to surrender their privacy in this time and age. I would like to note this. People surrendering their 'privacy' for access to a platform is NOT stupidity. Stupidity is calling them stupid and not understanding the material conditions on how and why that happened. It is infantalising to assume that people would be so willing to relinquish their rights because 'they don't know enough'. Participating in BigTech platforms does not exist in a vacuum. And more often than not, participation is borne out of necessity and constraint.

This systemic issue mirrors the disconnect between individualistic frameworks and collective, long-term thinking. While today’s platforms encourage personal convenience and immediate gratification, often at the expense of privacy, indigenous cultures offer a contrasting model. By embracing principles like the Maori’s whanaungatanga, Igorot’s og-ogbo and Minangkabau’s gotong toyong, we can envision a digital ecosystem that shifts focus from individual gains to collective welfare. A stark contrast to the self-centred, narcissistic approach we see everyday as we browse Instagram’s Explore tab or Tiktok’s Discover page. These indigenous traditions remind us that decisions about shared resources, whether physical or digital, must consider their impact on the entire community, an ethos sorely lacking in the self-centred design of many BigTech platforms.

In the face of the current digital rights framework dominated by commodification, consumerism and individualism, there is an urgent need to pivot towards a decolonial and degrowth approach in digital rights. The Euro-American centric paradigms that have long dominated and distorted our approach to digital interaction have failed the global majority. These frameworks perpetuate a colonial legacy and dictates terms and conditions from a viewpoint that aligns with Western interests at the expense of local and indigenous practices. In various communities across Asia and Africa, for example, data and digital resources are traditionally seen as collective assets, integral to the welfare and advancement of the entire community rather than just the indivdual. This communal approach to digital resources has become evident in practices such as community-managed cooperative mobile networks in South Africa and Mexico, where the technology is maintained and used by the community to ensure that all members have access. Such models highlight a stark contrast to the individualistic, privatised approach, where data is often siloed and monetised on individual bases, leaving the control largely in the hands of corporate entities.

Building on this, the principles of degrowth provide a compelling framework for rethinking our digital rights and challenging the unsustainable practices of data exploitation.Degrowth challenges the relentless drive for technological advancement and data accumulation. Instead it proposes that we prioritise ecological sustainability and human well-being over corporate profits. At the heart of the degrowth argument is the call to curb unnecessary data collection, which is critical in an era where the over-collection and exploitation of data are rampant. This would mean that data collection is limited strictly to what is necessary for the functionality of services, rather than for surplus value extraction through surveillance capitalism. We need to reorient our relationship with technology to make it align with the principles human rights, working class liberation and environmental sustainability. As long as these problematic business models persist, we are trapped in a destructive cycle where companies often play the dual roles of arsonists and firefighters.

To dismantle the capitalist structures underpinning individualistic data ownership, we must transition towards collective data governance systems that serve the needs of communities rather than perpetuating corporate profiteering. Community-controlled data trusts can become instruments of proletarian power, ensuring transparency and equitable access to digital resources that are currently exploited for surplus value extraction by monopolistic tech giants. Incorporating indigenous knowledge systems into the discourse on digital rights challenges the hegemony of capitalist paradigms by offering models where technologies are harmonised with cultural practices and collective well-being rather than being tools for extraction and alienation. Decentralised (not blockchain and crypto bros) and open-source technologies can serve as the technological arm of class struggle, redistributing power from the oligopolistic tech elite to workers and communities. By resisting monopolistic control and supporting democratic alternatives, we can begin to erode the concentration of power and build a digital commons that aligns with the principles of equality, solidarity, and liberation from capitalist exploitation. The challenge for us, activists, lies not just in resisting the commodification of digital spaces but in reimagining the world we want to live in and doing all we can to make that happen.