
Pharmakon. It’s not exactly a commonly used word in most circles. I’d never come across it before reading Alessandro Sbordin’s wide-ranging interview with Dutch media theorist Geert Lovink that, among other things, invites readers to think about what the next phase of the internet might look like. Then again, and no judgment, I don’t usually hang out with the Jacques Derrida set (he originated the concept according to Wikipedia – like I said, this isn’t my usual side of the street). But after reading Sbordin and Lovink on “the internet as a pharmakon: at the same time cure and poison,” it’s hard not to think that it’s the perfect word to describe the state of debates over the internet and digital technology in 2023.

This sense of the internet – and digital technologies – as both problem and cure doesn’t just mirror a famous Homer Simpson quote: “To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems!” (Homer Simpson: Heir to Derrida?) We can see this balancing of tech as both problem and solution (thought not solutionist) in many of the pieces featured in this newsletter. As Peter Drahos points out in his book Survival Governance, and as Maria J Sousa recognizes here, digital technologies are necessary to deal with the climate emergency, including supporting green cities. At the same time, Nora Young’s guests on Spark highlight the problems with one-size-fits-all solutions often pushed by Big Tech. Meanwhile, Ana Valdivia reminds us that the computing power underlying seemingly ephemeral technologies like artificial intelligence comes at a high environmental cost. Notes Valdivia, “it is estimated that training an algorithm to automatically produce text uses 190,000 kWh; that is, 120 times more than the average annual consumption of a household in Europe in 2020.” ChatGPT: bad for education, bad for the environment.

In their way, Eric Monteiro’s (open access) book, Digital Oil: Machineries of Knowing and Lighthouse Reports’ account of the disastrous outcome of machine-learning-driven welfare policy in the Netherlands offer good reasons why more of us should probably go down the poststructuralist rabbit hole. As these two works suggest, seeing the world as data affects how we act in the world, including what we consider to be solutions and how we interpret problems.

More prosaically, how to balance the problems and benefits of any issue is the heart of public policy and governance. This challenge is represented here by work addressing Canada’s proposed Artificial Intelligence Act and a Lawfare Podcast discussing AI regulation in the US and the EU. 

Beyond specific policy issues, it’s always helpful to recall that these debates take place within contexts that privilege some actors, ideas, and outcomes over others. In an insightful article that focuses on South Africa, Antonio Andreoni and Simon Roberts consider how best smaller states – all too often overlooked in the EU-US-China-focused literature – can constrain and benefit from the large digital platforms. They make the case for an “entrepreneurial-regulatory state” that attempts to “strike the appropriate balance between the dynamic scale and scope economies of platforms, and the imperative of setting rules on platform power to ensure optimal competition for local value capture and capabilities formation.”

The Ada Lovelace Institute goes even bigger, proposing a series of reforms designed to overhaul a commercially dominated digital ecosystem that “privileges people over profit, communities over corporations, society over shareholders. And, most importantly, one where power is not held by a few large corporations, but is distributed among different and diverse models, alongside people who are represented in, and affected by the data used by those new models.” 

In a sense, their report reads like a response to Lovink’s challenge to imagine an internet and digital ecosystem beyond today’s “weird combination of platform dependency and state surveillance.” Which brings us full circle, from poststructuralist theory to public policy analysis. The next time someone wonders what philosophy is good for in the real world (such as it is), smile mysteriously, reply, “Pharmakon,” show them the Homer alcohol clip, and start talking digital policy.

- Blayne Haggart

The Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA), Canada’s first attempt to regulate AI systems outside privacy legislation, is an important and encouraging first step. But to catch up to international precedents in this space, the AIDA needs to incorporate better oversight and accountability mechanisms, and also attend to the human rights risks of AI systems.

How To Fix Canada’s Proposed Artificial Intelligence Act

How should we understand the technological and political contexts underpinning urban greening strategies? This article reviews how European countries have been promoting green urbanism in order to show how such policies come to benefit urban centres, as well as certain non-urban environments.

Digital Technologies and Public Policies Applied to Green Cities

Big Tech aims to address large-scale social issues, from housing to urban transportation, with catch-all solutions. In this podcast, experts discuss the perils of tech solutionism, the status of tech industry co-ops, and some alternative peer-to-peer strategies that focus on solidarity in times of crisis.

Tech Solutionism, Mutual Aid and Cooperatives

Today, the Norwegian offshore oil industry is largely digital, operated by sensors and driven by data. How does its digitalisation impact the way we understand work and ways of knowing? What is gained or lost when objects and processes become algorithmic phenomena, and the digital is inferred from the physical?

Digital Oil: Machineries of Knowing

It is no contradiction for rivalry and collusion to exist alongside each other; it is what happens in monopoly capitalism. To foster ‘optimal rivalry’ in the digital economy, this paper proposes an industrial-competition policy approach to reward innovation while still enabling different business models to contest market power.

Governing Digital Platform Power for Industrial Development: Towards an Entrepreneurial-Regulatory State

This interview with an AI regulation researcher speaks to the challenges AI poses to policymakers, the strategy the United States is set to pursue, and how it is both different from and similar to the EU’s approach.

Regulating AI

To reshape the digital ecosystem, and bring greater balance to the asymmetric power dynamics between platforms and people, societies must transform infrastructure into open and interoperable ecosystems; rebalance the centres of power with new, non-commercial institutions; and ensure public participation as an essential component of technology policymaking.

Rethinking Data and Rebalancing Digital Power

Techno-utopians are dreaming up AI solutions to the climate crisis, but they remain oblivious to the real material and ecological harms the tech industry has already wrought, from drought-stricken regions of Mexico, to forest fires in Spain.

Silicon Valley and the Environmental Costs of AI

This interview with a prominent media theorist delves into why today’s digital status quo, ‘a weird combination of platform dependency and state surveillance’, is leaving activists with little choice but to imagine what will come after the internet.

The End of the Internet

Across the Netherlands, this investigation reveals, dozens of low-income neighbourhoods continue to be singled out for data-driven profiling – even after the 2021 Dutch childcare benefits scandal, in which a machine learning model led the government to falsely accuse thousands of fraud.

The Algorithm Addiction

Digital Rights Archive Newsletter - Second edition

If the 2018 Facebook-Cambridge Analytica revelations led to a popular “techlash,” the past 12 months can be seen as the year of tech’s reckoning. Meta/Facebook’s collapse in value was a humbling comedown for a company that was previously seen as an unstoppable global force; the cryptocurrency bubble burst spectacularly; Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has people considering the previously unimaginable possibility of a post-social-media world.

More than anything, the events of the past year have served as a potent reminder that tech in all its guises does not exist separate from society, and that the social-technological tension works both ways. Tech issues are social issues, and social issues increasingly have an unavoidable technological dimension. This tension is clearly on display in the first edition of the Digital Rights Archive Newsletter. From cultural policy to finance to labour policy, we see in these podcasts, reports, videos and books the processes of construction of what the International Political Economy scholar Susan Strange would call “bargains”: the negotiation of the basic rules governing 21st century life.

At times, the pull of the digital revolution creates new challenges around the expansion of new business models, and as Fassi-Fihri argues in her book, new rights.

While the technologies and players may be novel, many underlying issues remain the same as they always were. Should the government continue to play its decades-long role in shaping cultural policy, or should we leave it to the (platform-dominated) market? Should companies be allowed to despoil the environment in pursuit of profit? How should financial instruments like cryptocurrencies be treated? How can we maintain competition law in situations where innovations can give rise to increased monopoly pressures? How can workers in both the Global North and the Global South improve their situation?

The very breadth of these works serves as an argument that understanding public policy today requires a sound appreciation for the digital dimensions that they highlight, even as they make clear that digital policy only has meaning within the specific contexts in which digital technologies are deployed, be it, say, culture or finance.

Since this is the inaugural Digital Rights Archive newsletter, it’s worth saying a few words about the archive itself. The articles featured in this newsletter, selected from the Digital Rights Archive itself, offer some starting points on these important and complex issues. If you find these articles useful, there’s a lot more at the Digital Rights Archive.

The Archive is designed to provide policymakers and citizens with a solid knowledge base for understanding digital policy issues. Unlike automated services like Google Scholar, the works included in the Digital Rights Archive, as well as in The Syllabus project of which it is an offshoot, are selected via “artisanal automation”: using algorithms to scour the web, with the best pieces hand-selected for inclusion in the archive. Think of it like algorithmic collection combined with expert curation, automation used to augment, not replace, human action, a small challenge to established orthodoxies at the end of a tumultuous year.


This lecture traces the development of Canadian broadcast policy as applied to the Internet, and recounts how Bill C-11 – a relatively uncontroversial bill when first introduced – came to spark a firestorm that is still raging.

Canada’s Battle over Internet Streamers: A Cancon Story of Freedom of Expression, Algorithms and Cultural Policy

Detailing the work of delivery couriers' unions in Seoul and Toronto, the possibilities of applying 'affirmative action' to algorithmic discrimination, and the lessons to draw from worker displacement trends originating in the 1980s.

Gig Work in a Precarious Economy: Comparative and Canadian Perspectives

In 2021, Canadians’ awareness of Bitcoin hovered at around 90 percent, while ownership more than doubled over the two prior years to reach 13 percent. Among its other insights, this report finds that Canadian Bitcoin owners in 2021 were most likely to be male, aged 18 to 34 years old, and in possession of a university degree or high income. This group largely sees Bitcoin as an investment.

Private Digital Cryptoassets as Investment?: Bitcoin Ownership and Use in Canada, 2016-2021

To help consider the ways Canadian law should respond to the realities of the new economy, this paper focuses on AI's economic inputs to examine how AI incentives and business practices are interacting with traditional models of assessing market power's impact on competition.

Through the Looking Glass: AI, Mergers and the Role of Competition Law in Digital Governance

In its functioning, blockchain should be considered as itself a common pool: it gathers and governs a community of validators, who in turn manage public information and potential computing power for a shared purpose. In its uses, however, it is more difficult to describe blockchain as a common-pool resource, given that it is fundamentally meant to allow for exclusivity in assets and often leads to speculation.

La blockchain: Un commun au service exclusif de l’appropriation?

The government has four bills before Parliament meant to rein in tech giants. At the same time, the industry is retrenching. It is possible that companies like Meta and Twitter will soon stabilize and normal relations will return. But there is also widespread concern that the latter, at least, will collapse. Either way, Parliament can expect to shortly find itself with laws that are both new and out of date.

Tech Turmoil Complicates Canada’s Policing of the Online World

This book argues that the digital revolution has transformed fundamental rights and freedoms to the point that we need new categories. It details an emergent set of fundamental rights which have been enshrined in French and US jurisprudence, and are exclusively dedicated to the digital sphere.

Les droits et libertés du numérique: Des droits fondamentaux en voie d'élaboration: Étude comparée en droits français et américain

Investigating how US and European digital platforms respectively create and extract value, as well as how these firms contribute — negatively or positively — towards entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystems in Europe.

Has the U.S. Big Tech Model Spread to Europe?

Groups opposing the construction of polluting and water-intensive data centres have begun to emerge in different regions. Everywhere they appear, these local activists are laying bare Big Tech’s profoundly problematic record on community and the environment.

Big Tech’s New Headache: Data Centre Activism Flourishes Across the World

Pulling together lessons from Ghana and South Africa, as well as from the whole of Asia's manufacturing industry, this policy dialogue considers the future of workers and inequality in the Global South.

The Political Economy of Digital Capital

Digital Rights Archive Newsletter - First edition

Highlights from the experts: The best materials uploaded to the archive. 

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