(Essay published in Digital New Deal of IT for Change, illustration by Kevin Ilango) The shockwaves of the Covid-19 pandemic have brought to the forefront the physiognomy of digitization. In the backdrop of a fragmented multilateral stage, the intensified use of digital technologies to support the post-pandemic recovery has come without sufficient awareness…
After forty years of computerization against a background of reconfiguration of the geopolitical spectrum, the broader question of developing a new interpretation grid for the current socio-technical system is now more urgent. Our economies are not only transformed by “digital” flows and networks. They are more widely affected by the combined effect of ubiquitous…
Five months since the onset of the pandemic, the concert of Nations displays a sharper image on the world stage. Driver of economic and social recession, the pandemic is phenomenally accelerating the political times and appears to be covering up the past with the future. Previous trends were in full view. In October 2019,…
The SARS-CoV-2 virus has put the weak global architecture in check and points to the importance of the social. Human mobility, viral spread and vulnerabilities are three key forces, acting faster than the political and the cultural. The information and electronic communication ecosystems are closely intertwined with this commotion. What role do these play?…
The expansion of the Internet and electronic communications, as new global interdependence and infrastructure of industrial economies, is well established. Networks of information exchange, the Internet has also set up a global commons which, like other commons, is involved in a fierce strategic dispute. Russia plans to start its own network in 2021 and…
Notwithstanding the “happy” globalization that appears to be called into question, information flows are nevertheless on the rise. Unopposed, they have laid and continue to lay a web of interdependence as tenuous as irreversible within societies. Both captives and cardinal points of this web, the media and more generally the producers of information have risen…