“Closed panel on “”Critical Internet Governance: Digital Solidarities”” at 4S, the annual meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science in Toronto 2026.

Digital sovereignty is the name of the game in geopolitical struggles and industrial policies of the contemporary historical moment. Issues such as secure access to connectivity and computation, previously treated under the rubric of digital rights, are now being reframed as political-economical questions of sovereignty. In this paper presentation, I argue for digital solidarity as a normative alternative to both digital sovereignty and digital rights.

Top-down policies of digital sovereignty aim to increase control over supply chains and infrastructural dependencies to enable the self-reliance and self-sufficiency of privileged actors, pitching them against others, especially perceived hegemons. Older, bottom-up demands for digital rights petition the same powerful actors to grant and guarantee the security and well-being of digital subjects. Digital solidarity — as an alternative to these two options – is not concerned with capillaries of vertical power dynamics. Rather, digital solidarity is about building coalitions for cooperation on collective empowerment, reaching out horizontally in the spirit of mutual aid.

I demonstrate the workings and limitations of digital solidarity on two examples of industrial policy and geopolitical cooperation; one historical and one contemporary. The historical example is the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) that lead to setting up the Non-Aligned Movement Centre for South-South Technical Cooperation (NAM CSSTC) intergovernmental institution in Jakarta. The contemporary example is the present ecosystem of indigenous 5G networks in India, comprised of industrial policy, research capacity and actually deployed telecommunications infrastructures. These enable launching non-aligned technological trajectories.”

https://www.xcdsystem.com/4sonline/program/342Jv8n/index.cfm?pgid=571