Noise pollution is increasing. According to Net Zero Insights (29 April 2026), “The constant hum of servers, network switches, routers, air conditioning systems, and industrial cooling fans creates significant and persistent noise levels… Communities living near large data centers frequently report health concerns linked to the unceasing background noise. Chronic exposure causes sleep disturbance, headache, hearing loss, elevated stress hormone levels, hypertension, anxiety, and even cardiovascular risks.”

Data centres are at the heart of AI systems. Both rely on specialized chips, creating soaring demand and driving up prices for smartphones, personal computers, automobiles, and cloud computing services. The memory chip industry is currently estimated to be worth around US$3 trillion.

Assessing the environmental impact of microchips, Imec says, “The semiconductor manufacturing sector alone is responsible for around 50 megatons of CO² emissions annually, contributing significantly to the carbon footprint of consumer electronics. Astonishingly, nearly 75% of a mobile device’s carbon footprint is linked to its fabrication, with nearly half of that coming from chip manufacturing.”

Rare-earth minerals underpin the semiconductor and microelectronics sector. The term “rare-earth” is a misnomer, because they are not actually scarce, but are only found in compounds, and they are difficult to isolate and purify. Such minerals are essential to processing, storing, and transmitting information, as well as to the development of AI technologies. Their extraction can lead to severe environmental degradation, including toxic water pollution, massive habitat and forest loss, and high greenhouse gas emissions.

Rare-earth elements have unique magnetic and electronic properties that are hard to replicate. However, there are substitutes. Ceramic magnets, also known as ferrite magnets, offer a promising alternative to rare earth-based magnetic materials. They have significantly lower production costs. Graphene is another breakthrough material with extraordinary potential: it has exceptional electrical conductivity and mechanical strength.

Governments, car manufacturers, and tech enterprises are investing heavily in reducing reliance on rare earth elements through recycling, supply chains that don’t involve China, and material elimination. Major backers include the US and EU alongside vehicle manufacturers like Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz.

However, while recycling is a vital part of tackling the highly secretive supply and demand chain, it is nothing compared to securing viable, durable, and less costly substitutes. Investing in alternatives rather than ramping up global military spending (USD 2.6 trillion annually) or commercial spaceflight development (upwards of USD 40 billion annually) would represent a giant leap towards saving humankind at a time when the Earth’s sixth mass extinction looms.

As Carl Sagan wrote in relation to global warming (Cosmos, 1980), “Are we willing to tolerate ignorance and complacency in matters that affect the entire human family? Do we value short-term advantages above the welfare of the Earth? Or will we think on longer time scales, with concern for our children and our grandchildren, to understand and protect the complex life-support systems of our planet? The Earth is a tiny and fragile world. It needs to be cherished.”

Data centres are here to stay. We may not be. There is still time – maybe – to act wisely.

Photo: Earthrise, taken on December 24, 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders, Public Domain

Meteorologists expect the El Niño now building in the Pacific Ocean to be the strongest on record, peaking between September and December. This recurring warming of surface ocean waters occurs irregularly every two to seven years, temporarily raising global temperatures and reshaping rainfall worldwide.

The UN World Food Programme estimates the El Niño on the horizon could push, at minimum, 49 million people into acute food insecurity by the end of 2027 – across 45 countries already struggling to feed their populations, with the sharpest increases in Central America and southern Africa (WFP, 2026).

In South Asia, new research shows that global warming is strengthening the link between El Niño and drought in India. In Latin America, maize and bean harvests may fail in fragile parts of Nicaragua, and irrigated crops in Colombia and northeastern Brazil will most likely face water restrictions. This impacts food security further away as well; the EU imports close to 190 billion Euro of food a year from the regions most exposed. And in Europe directly, low river flows threaten hydropower and agriculture.

Those are the numbers. What concerns us at WACC just as much, however, is the story that will be told about the numbers – and how that story might affect action on climate change.

As much of the media coverage of the issue explains, El Niño is a natural cycle. However, scientists are clear that this year’s fires and heatwaves, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, are driven by fossil fuel emissions, not by El Niño, which only adds perhaps a tenth or two of a degree to a long-term warming trend.

This is creating fertile ground for disinformation campaigns seeking to deny or minimize climate change. Most advance the notion that the extreme weather events we are experiencing are a naturally occurring phenomenon and not caused by human activity.

This pattern is already visible. When Europe’s record heatwave arrived in June, social media filled with claims that the temperatures were nothing unusual, citing London heatwaves from the 1970s. After the 2024 floods in eastern Spain that killed more than 230 people, false claims spread that dams had been deliberately dismantled and that European river restoration rules caused the disaster, disinformation amplified by far-right Vox politicians.

Disinformation is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but “a tactic” the powerful use to defend the status quo, notes Philip Newell of the Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) network. It appears, however, that the tactic has shifted.

Outright denial has largely given way to attacks on climate policy itself, amplified by generative AI and spiking whenever a heatwave, flood, or drought makes the news – which is precisely when affected communities need trustworthy information the most.

This is precisely why democratic and people-centred communication and information ecosystems, especially at the local level, are vital climate stability infrastructures that protect us all, not an optional extra.

Our partners across the world show what that looks like. For example:

• Grupo COMUNICARTE has spent decades among the people in Colombia’s high-altitude Andean páramos ecosystem, weaving conservation into local recipes, elders’ stories, and mountain legends until protection became something communities owned rather than something imposed by the authorities.
• Nepal’s Indigenous Rights Foundation broadcasts dialogues between Indigenous communities, government officials, and hydropower developers, reaching roughly a million people and making decision-makers publicly accountable.
• In the Niger Delta in Nigeria, the Media Awareness and Justice Initiative helps communities collect their own environmental data, turning complaints dismissed as anecdotal into evidence-backed reports.

None of these interventions are fact-checking operations, which is how disinformation tends to be tackled. Rather, these initiatives do something that is both more difficult and more durable – they build trust, they treat farmers and elders as knowledge holders alongside scientists, and they keep local narratives at the centre.

Disinformation struggles in places where people already know whom to believe.

At the UN climate change conference COP30 last November, 12 governments signed a first-ever “Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change,” promising what Brazil’s president, João Brant, called “a wave of truth.”

This is a welcome development. However, in most of the places El Niño will hit hardest, the key channels informing communities and fighting disinformation – community radio stations, Indigenous media networks, and local journalists – work on very little.

Funding, supporting, and protecting them is not charity nor is it optional. It is climate action.

Photo: Toa55/Shutterstock

British football expert Mark Langdon made this comment in the 22 June episode of The Guardian Football Weekly podcast, reviewing matches earlier on in the FIFA World Cup 2026.

Dubbed “the most digitally connected World Cup ever,” FIFA 2026 was brought to audiences through AI-powered highlights, real-time data visualisations, and video streaming.  I asked my go-to LLM (large language model) to apply social listening tools for a sentiment analysis of African social media chatter about Bafana Bafana’s [the South Africa national team] participation in the World Cup.

The result: “deeply divided” feelings, with historic solidarity overshadowed by a significant backlash driven by regional tensions. “South Africa’s 2-0 opening loss to Mexico became a major ‘hate-watch’ event, driven by several factors,” most importantly, xenophobic violence and treatment of African migrants in South Africa.

The LLM results further indicated strong initial pan-African solidarity for Morocco, followed swiftly by social media backlash after a controversial statement claimed to have been made by Morocco’s Sports Minister was circulated online. The backlash over the fabricated quote was compounded by “political friction, including disputes over Western Sahara and allegations of anti-Black racism.”

Conversations on the street in Nairobi and on social media recalled an incident from last year’s Africa Cup of Nations tournament. Africans had not forgotten the “Towel Gate” grudge where a Moroccan player snatched a Senegalese player’s towel.

Finally, in the deciding last match, Africans overwhelmingly favoured Spain over Argentina, 88%, according to a poll by the Spanish sports daily Marca. African support for Spain was fuelled by “a mix of sporting grievances, politics, and social justice concerns.”

Growing up in Kenya with the Saturday evening TV show Football Made in Germany made fans out of us. [The football league] Bundesliga, [football team] Bayern Munich, and [star goalkeeper Harald] Schumacher were household names. Simple, benign, good fun that brought families with a television set together.

Fast forward several decades later to the FIFA World Cup 2026. “The beautiful game” evolved into a complex spectre somewhere along the way. The lenses through which the game is viewed are layered with factors that have nothing to do with purely football. In FIFA 2026, the conditions to observe the interplay between digital connectedness and the politics of sports and identity, were in place.

Rather than passion for the game itself, politics, race, and perceptions about justice mattered more on the continent. A contagion of outrage informed by past and present events spread in borderless online communities, flowing parallel to the real-time streaming of the game. Reactions on social media encouraged copycat responses.

Africa remains the underdog in world professional football, in other sectors, and more ways than could be counted. In this World Cup however, we took home an invisible trophy.

The inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance marked the first time, as speakers noted, that every UN Member State had a seat at the table to discuss artificial intelligence opportunities and risks; bridging AI divides; ensuring AI is safe, secure and trustworthy; and protecting human rights.

António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General, struck a somber note in his opening address. Calling artificial intelligence “an experiment…being run on our own societies – without a plan, and without consent,” he issued three warnings: its speed, which outstrips our institutions’ ability to govern; its power, “concentrated in a handful of companies, and in a handful of countries”; and truth:

A machine-enabled lie can now persuade as effectively as the truth – and authentic evidence can be dismissed as fake.
Further eroding the integrity of our information ecosystem and undermining trust.
A society that cannot agree on what is real cannot defend itself.

The preliminary report of the International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence was also released – a must-read for anyone wanting to understand “the state of AI”.

As Panel co-chair Maria Ressa explained, the report reflects consensus among its 40 independent members, based on the evidence. “Consensus,” she said, “means you move to the centre.” So, she added, “This is the floor of our concern, not the ceiling. And that is alarming enough.”

The report points to major gains in science, health, and education – alongside serious risks to information integrity, growing vulnerability, and increased abuse, especially against women, girls, journalists, and marginalized populations.

The two days were filled with speeches, many alternating state representatives with civil society voices. But “dialogue” – especially with those who hold power – seemed non-existent at this initial stage.

The Global Dialogue overlapped with the increasingly high-profile AI for Good Global Summit – a technology expo with staged areas for companies and organizations to showcase products and services or pitch problems that need solving. A sign of its growing popularity: for the first year it charged admission for most attendees, with a premium fee for the “Centre Stage” sessions.

Alongside impressive demonstrations of technology improving accessibility and scientific research, it was clear we remain captivated by humanoid robots – and that the allure of what we could do still overshadows what we should do. Its popularity and the claim of its organizers (International Telecommunications Union-ITU in partnership with other UN agencies, with the Swiss Government as co-convener) that it is “the United Nations’ leading platform on Artificial Intelligence” raises real questions about how it relates to – and where it is steering – the Global Dialogue.

The third event has had a longer, more inclusive history. The vision of the World Summit on the Information Society calls for a “people-centred, inclusive, and development-oriented Information Society,” and for over 20 years it has served as the primary multistakeholder forum for implementing communication and digital commitments. This is where community networks, human rights organizations, regulators, and private sector providers share sessions and plenaries – albeit alongside high-profile State sponsors.

No doubt because Geneva’s main conference centre, Palexpo, was fully booked by the Global Dialogue and AI for Good, the first two days of the 2026 WSIS Forum were held at ITU headquarters, down a construction-strewn road. The low-key setup – magnified by a confusing warren of hallways and meeting rooms – gave the impression that WSIS was the poor relation of digital governance.

The setting improved once the Forum moved to Palexpo for the rest of the week, but compared to the three halls buzzing with people (and robots) at AI for Good, the atmosphere stayed muted.

While the WSIS vision remains unfulfilled, it is still the platform that addresses the entire information society, including the digital environment. The Global Dialogue was full of speeches calling for meaningful community involvement, respect for human rights, equal access, and transparency; it is the WSIS Forum where actual efforts at community and multistakeholder cooperation are demonstrated as models for further action. It is far from a perfect, all-purpose governance and financing platform – but it is the most inclusive in focus and participation.

There is yet another significant platform coming up in a different time and place – the United Nations Internet Governance Forum – to be held in December in Nairobi, Kenya. Its 2026 theme is “Governing the Internet in the Age of Intelligence: Our Shared Responsibility.” Its mandate, linked to the WSIS process, is to bring diverse stakeholders together to shape digital public policy across both public and private sectors.

As the WACC delegation navigated these three meetings last week – and looks ahead to the IGF – we are left wondering where the most effective action on digital justice will actually happen.

Each forum has a role, and each needs WACC’s advocacy on equity, participation, and accountability. But the links between best practice, multistakeholder dialogue, public policy, and sustainable development have not yet been forged, and the still largely unregulated development of AI raises a hard question: which forum, or combination of forums, will have real impact?

Speaking at the WSIS Forum, Jennifer Chung, Chair of the IGF Multistakeholder Advisory Group, directly addressed the need for coordination, collaboration, and cohesion among these four platforms – essential to implementing the Global Digital Compact and to the power of multistakeholder cooperation.

Digital justice is needed more than ever, and WACC is committed to making sure the voices and experiences of those advocating for equity, participation, and accountability are heard loud and clear in every one of these forums. But that takes all of us.

Follow these processes. Read the reports. Speak up when your national delegation takes its seat at the Global Dialogue, raise questions about community involvement in the latest AI tech, and share our stories of how technological solutions work for all at WSIS and the IGF.

Most importantly, take action where you are. Digital justice is not only decided in Geneva or Nairobi – it is built in the communities where access, literacy, and safety are still out of reach.

Support your local community media. Champion digital literacy where you live. Push back against disinformation in your own networks. The forums will keep meeting. Whether they deliver justice depends on what we do between them.

Images: (clockwise from top) participants at WSIS, ITU/Pierre Albouy; speaker at the Global Governance on AI, ITU/Antoine Tardy; AI for Good Summit, ITU/D Woldu. All photos on ITU’s Flickr profile, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. 

According to Ethnologue, a database of the world’s 7,168 living languages, almost half are endangered. Over 88 million people speak a language that may not survive this century except in historical records.

Oceania has 733 endangered languages, of which Papua New Guinea – with a population of just 8.8 million – accounts for 312. At the country level, Indonesia leads with 425 endangered languages – a direct result of a national policy that made Bahasa Indonesia the sole medium of education and government in more than 700 distinct linguistic communities.

Africa records 428 endangered languages, mainly clustered around equatorial zones where conflict, drought, and displacement are destroying community life. North and Central America account for 222, with the United States contributing 180.

Language loss is aggravated by several factors: economic pressures that often force young people to adopt dominant languages for employment, education, and social mobility; cultural assimilation and education policies that prioritize national languages; urbanization and migration; forced assimilation and political suppression of indigenous languages; and globalization and modernization, which prefer global languages in business, media, and the development of new technologies.

The role of Artificial Intelligence is controversial. In “AI will make language barriers disappear – and diminish our understanding of other cultures” (The Guardian, 9 May 2026), Italian novelist and interpreter Diego Marani warns of a “frontier in artificial intelligence and in the realm of language from which there will be no turning back.” Noting that machines will perform translation and interpretation tasks quickly, efficiently, and economically, he points to a profound change in human communication – akin to the 6,000 year-old transition from speech to writing.

“The first effect of the AI translation revolution will be to render the study and learning of languages superfluous for individuals. It will be enough to turn to our phones to understand whoever speaks to us and to translate our own speech into any language. Eventually, we shall be able to read information in every language, to write texts that can be read from one end of the world to the other. Yet knowledge – true understanding of others, of their cultures and customs, of the cast of mind of another country – will not thereby become ours. This body of knowledge will reside in AI systems, not in us.”

AI is a prime example of Arthur C. Clarke’s third law, which states that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But like magic, AI is all smoke and mirrors. It creates seemingly grammatically correct but sometimes factually wrong, “creative” translations, or invents information, particularly in less popular languages. It struggles with irony, sarcasm, implied meanings, and highly contextual cultural cues. AI models predominantly trained on English reflect Western-centric views, treat dialects as less “correct” and often fail to understand regional variants. And over-dependence on AI translation can diminish people’s critical thinking and willingness to learn another language.

In practical terms, these deficits can be overcome by developing models trained on a more diverse range of languages; by including native speakers of minority languages in the development and validation of AI tools; and by creating AI models that cater to regional languages and contexts.

But if we are to avoid language loss, the bottom line is not to allow the illusionary magic of machines to replace human empathy and intuition. In her 1998 essay, specialist in American Indian languages Marianne Mithun wrote, “The loss of languages is tragic precisely because they are not interchangeable… precisely because they represent the distillation of the thoughts and communication of people over their entire history.”

Despite its obvious usefulness, AI imperils languages. Technological determinism should not be allowed to undermine what Diego Marani identifies as “true understanding of others, of their cultures and customs.” Nor to erase the defining characteristic of all human beings: their languages.

Graphic: The Global Education Project  www.theglobaleducationproject.org

However, for many people watching, including die-hard fans at WACC’s general secretariat, it will be hard to escape the feeling that something essential about the game may have been lost along the way.

At its heart, football is perhaps the most democratic game humanity has invented. All it requires is a ball, a patch of ground, and a few friends. It is played in the streets of Montevideo, on the beaches of Accra, in the narrow alleys of Naples, and on the dusty lots of Kathmandu. It is a game of neighbourhoods: children play on the corner, neighbours gather to watch and share a drink, and rivalries form between barrios.

In this sense, football fosters something precious: belonging, shared meaning, a local social fabric, and healthy competition. For Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, whose book El fútbol a sol y sombra (Soccer in Sun and Shadow) is one of football’s greatest chronicles, the essence of the game was playing for the pure joy of playing, the way a child plays with a balloon. He even dedicated his book to children he once met coming home from a match, singing that whether they won or lost, they had fun all the same.

But Galeano also told the other story of the sport. He showed how football became “a sad journey from pleasure to duty” as the game became an industry where profit became central.

This year’s World Cup illustrates this point like no other tournament so far. For the first time, FIFA has introduced dynamic pricing, and tickets for the final were reselling through FIFA’s own system for around USD10,000, with prices going for much higher through informal reselling markets.  The pricing practices provoked such outrage that the attorneys general of New York and New Jersey even opened a joint investigation into the matter.

Also, this year’s tournament will also be a tournament marked by immigration enforcement, with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) having arrested at least 167,000 people in and around the 11 US host cities between January 2025 and March 2026, and more than 120 civil rights organizations issuing a travel advisory warning that fans, players, and journalists could face serious rights violations during matches in the United States.

From WACC’s perspective, the story of football holds up a mirror to the power dynamics surrounding today’s communication ecosystem. The late Michael Traber, a Swiss communication and journalism scholar and WACC laureate, argued that communication is inscribed in human nature. For him, language is the shared house in which we live and communication a human need “as basic as food, clothing and shelter.”

Traber was convinced that without communication, there is no community. There is no talking to your neighbour, no knowing what is happening in your town, no coming together around common ideas, no acting collectively to meet shared concerns.

In this regard, communication, like street football, is how social fabric gets woven, how belonging and meaning are made at the most local and human level. And, like football, communication has been hijacked by a commercial, for-profit logic.

Media systems that should bring people together and act in the public interest are now designed to capture our attention and sell it to advertisers. Digital platforms and their obscure algorithms reward outrage and polarization instead of promoting social cohesion and belonging. Much of today’s media landscape does not help communities build shared meaning from the ground up. Rather, it replicates power dynamics and turns the most human of processes into a machine for selling.

For WACC, the parallel with football is clear. In both cases, something that belongs to everyone has been captured, commodified, and sold back to us, and in forms that no longer build community.

However, neither story has to end this way. In his writings, Galeano recalled several moments of resistance to the dominant profit-driven model, like the famous case of the Brazilian club Corinthians, led by the mythical footballer Sócrates, that was run democratically by its players in the early 1980s.

Communication has its equivalent examples of resistance, like the hundreds of community radio stations, feminist communication collectives, and digital rights groups that WACC has spent decades supporting, and whose work is pivotal for democracy and social justice.

These experiences prove that another logic is possible, one where communication organized around community rather than profit, participation rather than consumption, and dialogue rather than confrontation becomes the norm.

Therefore, while we at WACC will be watching the World Cup, we will also try to remember that football belongs to the street much like communication belongs to the community. Recovering this grassroots, neighbourhood-based, profoundly human understanding of communication is critical not only for democracy but also for building a life that is worth living where we can all flourish.

We hope you will join us in reclaiming communication – and football for that matter! – as a common good.

Top image: (left) Children playing soccer in northern Ethiopia. Photo by Ericjohnsonvik/CC BY-SA 4.0. (right) A member of the Pickwe Ikh Indigenous community in Colombia during training in communication and free technologies. The Common School, hosted by WACC partner PAKKIRU, equipped communities to document the environmental and social impact that mining and similar activities have on their territories. Photo by PAKKIRU.

The message that Africa’s role in artificial intelligence is an investment agenda reverberated across fireside chats, workshop presentations and exhibits at the recent “AI Everything Kenya” conference with the tagline “Home to the Most Innovative AI, Cybersecurity & Tech Showcases in Africa.” The event attracted the type of participants it was designed for: venture capitalists, government delegates, and technology innovators. Civil society actors were far fewer. Concerns about digital rights, inclusion, equality, and ethics were expressed only occasionally.

Numerous conversations regarding AI are taking place, but seemingly with little, if any, convergence across them. One constellation of discussions revolves around trade, innovation, and investment. Another debates digital justice and human rights on the internet. AI is applied for noble purposes as much as for nefarious ones. There are drones that map crop disease, small language models that cater to African communities, and generative AI trained on African publications. At the same time, AI is used in lethal autonomous weapons and for domestic mass surveillance.

AI Everything Kenya was a masterclass on the technical aspects of AI: how to prepare to raise a financing round, how to integrate AI into security strategies, how to build AI-ready use cases aligned with International Telecommunications Union (ITU) standards in various domains. With the exception of a handful of sessions, the conference lost an opportunity to grapple with issues of rights, opportunities, and freedoms. “What does it mean to safeguard our humanity?” Pope Leo asks in his recent encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas: “The risk extends beyond misuse. […] The quality of a civilization is measured not by the power of its means, but by the care it is able to offer, by its ability to recognize the other as a face not merely as a function […]. Technology can also support this mutual care between people, for example, by providing tools that help us anticipate and organize things, without undermining human freedom and judgment.”

In The Great Transformation, political economist Karl Polanyi argues that the idea of a market disembedded from society was a utopia and as such, could not exist without annihilating the human and natural substance of society. A protective counter movement would emerge to prevent disaster and create stability. Extending Polanyi’s critique of market fundamentalism to the AI revolution, it could be argued that the current over-enthusiasm about AI is bound to create an AI ecosystem that is disembedded from the social. Pockets of dissent rise, but the free market persists despite the problems it has brought on.

Likewise with the AI revolution, the momentum is at an all-time high and is likely to be amplified despite the concerns that have been raised, including displacement of human labour, environmental costs, algorithmic bias, and AI-enabled violence against women and girls. As long as the siloed conversations continue, with industry in its corner and conscientious civil society in another, the risks to society and community will continue into the distant future.

Image generated by WACC using Canva Magic Studio

I seem to spend a lot of my working days reading, writing, and speaking about the harms and risks of our increasing digitalization, especially artificial intelligence.

Granted, this all gets channelled into plans and actions to address harms and strengthen benefits: what individuals, institutions, networks can do to make an impact towards a rights-based communication and information ecosystem.

But there always seems to be another piece of “bad news,” such as the latest reports on the increasing electricity usage of data centres or the projection of Meta’s and other companies’ “smart glasses” – already known for recording women without consent –becoming the next viral tech product.

It’s like trying to walk up a sand dune. Progress is so slow when the ground keeps shifting underneath you.

Then, earlier this week, I had the opportunity of interviewing several young people for a summer job with WACC. One of our questions was, “How would you define digital justice?” We just wanted to know if they understood the concept.

But they not only understood it; they expressed it more clearly than I could. “Giving rights to everyone, so everyone benefits,” said one. “Making what we have now, into what it was meant to be,” said another.

Simple words of “good news” that are helping me to reassess my approach – to centre our advocacy on what we are for, not just what we are against.

In this, so many of our community partners have inspiring stories not just on providing and strengthening solutions to local needs but also demonstrating a new paradigm of “meaningful connectivity.”

In his article for the latest issue of WACC’s journal, Media Development, Gustaff Iskandar from our partner organisation Common Room describes how the Kasepuhan Ciptagelar Indigenous community in the Highlands of West Java, Indonesia, assembled partners and knowledge to build a technical infrastructure and manage an income-generating communication network based on their traditional values in this rural and remote region.

As Iskandar writes, “It demonstrates that the most effective way to connect the unconnected is to empower them to connect themselves.”

From webinars to informal discussions, I hear the good news of increasing calls and small but practical steps to move away from the platforms and devices of the Big Tech companies. Putting a high priority on data protection, environmental sustainability, and fair labour practices widens one’s choice for collaboration platforms, video conferencing, text editing, and more.

Media reports from the US to Australia are documenting significant resistance from communities to development plans for huge data centres, whose energy and water use, noise, and impact on natural areas are becoming more apparent.

People invested in their own communities are pushing back at processes and planning decisions that are not transparent or consultative, not to mention significantly negative for the well-being of the local community.    

Following WACC’s symposium in April, “Our Common Future: Advocating Digital Rights and AI Accountability,” organized with ecumenical partners, there has been increased attention on action towards AI accountability particularly from church and ecumenical partners – a powerful network to advocate for a rights-based digital future.

One result was a joint submission by the World Council of Churches and the Future of Life Institute to the first United Nations Global Dialogue on AI Governance. The submission highlights priorities for urgent action including safe, secure, and trustworthy AI; coordination of AI governance approaches; protection and promotion of human rights; transparency, accountability, and human oversight; and equitable distribution of AI’s economic benefits.

WACC also joined a submission from the Global Digital Rights Coalition (GDRC) to the Global Dialogue setting out our call for a rights-based, inclusive dialogue and decision-making process.

All these steps are part of a bigger movement, to “give rights to everyone, so everyone benefits,” and to “make what we have now, into what it was meant to be.” 

May we all nourish that positive vision – the good news to drive us into the common digital justice future we want to see.

Photo: Laszlo Mates/Shutterstock

Is it any wonder people are in thrall to the power and vicarious thrill of digital technologies when many acclaimed films and TV series extol the apparent virtues of digital surveillance. At the same time, they fear that State surveillance has gone too far.

A swift AI trawl of the Internet turns up TV series like The Capture (2019-2026): a British thriller series focusing on real-time deepfake technology, mass surveillance, and manipulated video evidence; Mr. Robot (2015-2019): a cyber-security engineer/vigilante hacker fights against corporate and state surveillance; Person of Interest (2011-2016): the “Machine” that monitors all electronic communication to predict crime; The Undeclared War (2022): a team of analysts in the UK’s GCHQ combat cyber warfare; Omniscient (2020): a Brazilian sci-fi series set in a city where citizens are monitored 24/7 by drones; Le Bureau des légendes: a French thriller centred on intelligence agents.

Films like The Great Hack (2019): exploring the Cambridge Analytica scandal and how personal data is used to shape behaviour; Enemy of the State (1998): a classic thriller about a man pursued using surveillance technology; Snowden (2016): a biographical film on the NSA whistleblower; Anon (2018): set in a world where privacy no longer exists; The Circle (2017): an attempt to create a utopian society through total surveillance.

Such productions celebrate the magic of the technology as much as a thrilling – if unlikely – storyline. They take place at one remove from reality, on the screen, in a dystopian world. There are heroes and villains and a sense that “it couldn’t happen here”. And yet surveillance – physical, electronic, computer, social media, corporate, biometric – is present in daily life and regularly abused. And it’s not just the Chinese.

An article on the US data broker industry in The Guardian (21 March 2026) said, “through contracting a network of data brokers that amass information from apps, web browsers and other online sources, federal authorities have been able to access information that it would otherwise need a warrant to obtain. Buying such information, usually en masse, can circumvent this requirement, leading many privacy advocates to label the practice unconstitutional.” Throw in Artificial Intelligence and this mass of data can provide a detailed and fairly comprehensive picture of any person’s life.

In April 2026, the US Congress temporarily extended the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) with its amendment dating back to 2008 that allows federal intelligence agencies to collect data on foreigners, including their contacts with US citizens. It would be naïve to think that the current US administration would allow the concept of democratic accountability to prevent such data harvesting. And that goes for China, Russia, North Korea, Myanmar and many others.

A new article in Computer Law & Security Review (July 2026) titled Why states are failing to rein in the spyware market noted that worldwide demand for spyware continues to grow, and “how states continue to drive the commercial proliferation of spyware through a market in which they are the primary buyers.” The author concludes that in the face of current geopolitical upheavals, “those seeking to constrain commercial spyware proliferation and its negative externalities may ultimately need to rely on a fourth option: the power of independent oversight bodies and institutions like courts to check spyware trade and misuse.”

Ten years ago, the artist and geographer Trevor Paglen, renowned for his photographs, films, installations, and books on the theme of surveillance, engaged in a conversation with long-time collaborator, computer-security expert, activist, and hacker Jacob Appelbaum, published in BOMB Magazine (22 March 2016). Paglen began by saying:

“The Internet was supposed to be the greatest tool of global communications and means of sharing knowledge in human history. And it is. But it has also become the most effective instrument of mass surveillance and potentially one of the greatest instruments of totalitarianism in the history of the world.”

Ten years later, surveillance is so taken for granted that films and TV series are making a virtue out of it, governments are blatantly misusing it, and people are ignoring the dangers. Or are they? A recent symposium held in Berlin underlined the need for greater public oversight of digital rights and AI accountability. It set out an action plan for advocacy in international and national spaces, critical thinking through existing and new educational resources, and cross-sectoral networking to share information, knowledge, and financing.

So who knows if the next Netflix hit won’t be the one where civil society fights back to reclaim digital technology to build a fairer, safer, and more inclusive world? Anyone seen From Meta With Love?

Poster: Saskia Rowley + Shutterstock

On 25 March 2026, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google negligent for designing social media platforms that harmed a young user through addictive features, awarding $6 million in damages. Just one day earlier, a New Mexico jury had ordered Meta to pay $375 million for misleading consumers about platform safety and enabling child exploitation.

These verdicts, the first of their kind, signal that public perception of social media giants is shifting. For years, these companies operated with little oversight and were shielded by a cultural narrative that saw them as neutral utilities and as important actors for democratic communication.

However, that narrative is unraveling. As one of the plaintiff’s legal counsels said after the Los Angeles verdict, “accountability has arrived.”

Yet the legal verdicts shed light on something more fundamental than corporate negligence in individual cases. They expose the structural logic of an industry whose profits depend on capturing and monetizing human attention.

Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff described the situation a few years ago as “surveillance capitalism,” which can be understood as a dominant business model in which platforms collect behavioral data, develop predictions, and optimize systems to influence behavior in ways that generate profit for advertisers. The longer users remain engaged, the more advertisements they see, and the more valuable they become to advertisers.

Internal documents revealed during the trial showed that Meta executives knew that children with “adverse effects” were most likely to become addicted to content on their platforms, yet the company pursued strategies to attract young users because it is a valuable demographic from a revenue generation perspective.  

In other words, the problem is not merely that harmful content reaches children. It is that the entire architecture of these platforms, which include features such infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic recommendations, and push notifications, is engineered to maximize time on site because attention is the commodity being sold.

Now, if we know that the business model behind these platforms is not only ethically questionable because of their effort to capture our attention at all costs but also harmful to vulnerable members of society, can we think of different financial models that allow for a different type of digital ecosystem?

For example, the Club of Rome’s Earth for All report proposes treating data and knowledge as commons, much like minerals or the atmosphere, and establishing “citizen funds” that charge corporations for extracting these shared resources and redistribute the revenue to citizens.

Other proposals, from global governance entities like the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, include digital solidarity contributions modeled on climate finance mechanisms, debt-for-digital-rights swaps for low-income countries to help bridge the digital divide, and ethical investment models grounded in human rights framework.

These models would fundamentally reorder the relationship between platforms and the public, transforming users from raw material into stakeholders with claims on the value their participation in the digital ecosystem generates. And while none of these approaches are sufficient alone, and it’s unclear if there is enough political will to transform them into policy, they show that alternatives to the current extractive model are possible and urgent.

In this context, civil society currently has a rare opportunity to shape the logic of future financial models for digital technology. The 20-year review of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS+20) and the implementation of the 2024 UN’s Global Digital Compact resulted in mandates for states and UN bodies like the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the United Nations Group on the Information Society (UNGIS) to assess global financing gaps.

This is a technical process that, as climate governance has shown, can decisively shape later political negotiations. These processes, while appearing abstract and bureaucratic, are key spaces where some of the rules of the digital future will be written.

WACC and its allies and partners around the world continue to engage strategically in these forums, contributing evidence, proposing alternative models, and inviting grassroots and voices from the global South to the table.

The Meta and Google verdicts have demonstrated that the attention economy can be challenged. The question now is whether we can build something better in its place: a digital future based not in extraction and addiction but in participation, equity, and the common good.

Photo: Phatsuke/Shutterstock