Donald Trump is back in the White House, and this time through an alliance with the billionaires of Silicon Valley. For years, concerns about the harms and drawbacks of our dependence on US technology and tech companies have been growing, but the relationship between tech and the extreme right make them undeniable. Now more than ever, we must accelerate efforts toward digital sovereignty, not just to build European alternatives, but to challenge the very model on which digital technology has been built in recent decades.
In this keynote presentation, Paris Marx will lay out the argument for digital sovereignty and how the Trump administration’s upending of the geopolitical consensus creates opportunities to chart a different path and form new relationships to collaborate on a renewed vision for digital technology that better serves the public.
He will explain the necessity of a two-pronged approach that combines more aggressive regulatory enforcement paired with efforts to imagine and realize an alternative digital infrastructure. While this includes platforms and services, it must also consider the physical manifestations of the network we all depend on. As major cloud and AI companies make an aggressive push to build resource-hungry hyperscale data centres, we must ask whether all that computation is really necessary. How do we chart not just a more just and equitable future, but a more sustainable one too?