Why another AI newsletter, and why from here
Opening: the problem this blog wants to solve
Every week a new AI development appears and gets discussed as if the world were a single place: a new model, a new regulation, a new data scandal, a new productivity promise. The discussion —in the media, on social networks, across much of the public-policy literature— tends to happen from an implicit geography: Washington, Brussels, San Francisco, Beijing. The rest of the world shows up, when it shows up at all, as an “emerging market,” an “application case,” or a digital-divide statistic.
This blog starts from a different premise: the Global South is not a place where AI “hasn’t arrived yet” or where a “gap” needs closing; it is a vantage point from which this week’s developments look different —and from which, very often, they are better understood. Not because there is an “authentic” Southern perspective against a “universal” Northern one, but because much of what is presented as technical, neutral, or inevitable in the dominant AI discourse is, in fact, an institutional decision made in one place and in favor of certain interests —and that decision is far more clearly visible from the margins than from the center.
What this blog will NOT be
It is not an AI news blog. For that there are excellent newsletters that summarize releases and papers better than I could week to week. Nor is it a blog of techno-optimism (“AI will solve X in the Global South”) or techno-pessimism (“AI is simply colonialism by another name”). Both stances, though partly true, end up simplifying: digital technology —this I take from Stiegler— works as a pharmakon, remedy and poison at once, and holding that ambivalence without resolving it prematurely is part of the intellectual work, not a failure to take a position.
What it will be
Each week I will take two, three, sometimes more items from the AI agenda —releases, policies, papers, controversies— and comment on them briefly, not to summarize them but to ask: what does this mean specifically for institutions, communities, and states in the Global South? Not as a general reflection but anchored in the concrete fact of that week.
To keep the analysis from scattering, I organize the comments into recurring categories (though not all appear every week):
- Education — how AI enters classrooms and education policy, and what model of the student and of knowledge it presupposes.
- Governance — regulations, legal frameworks, litigation: who is writing the rules, and from where.
- Democratization — who takes part in decisions about these technologies, and who is excluded from that conversation even though the technology affects them all the same.
- Care for the commons — open source, open data, and the difference between opening code and actually sharing power.
- Environmental impact — the energy and water cost of AI, and who pays it.
- Public sector opportunities — when the state can orchestrate rather than merely regulate or buy from a vendor.
- Epistemic commons — who controls the models and the research infrastructure, and which North-South asymmetries deepen or are resisted.
These categories are not fixed: they will adjust as the blog finds its shape.
Where I write this from
[A short first-person paragraph about your position: researcher in philosophy of technology, AI governance, complexity science, and STS — no need for a full CV, just enough for the reader to understand the angle.]
An invitation, not a promise
I will not be right every week, nor do I claim this is the definitive analysis of anything. The idea is to sustain a critical, situated conversation, week by week, about something that moves too fast to wait for the long time of the academic paper but deserves more than a thread of reactions. If it interests you, I’ll see you next week.