Curated by Juan Ortiz-Freuler – June 17 – Sign-up here
🇨🇳💨🇺🇸 [NEWS: Trump effects-> China more popular than US]
“The 2025 Democracy Perception Index summarizes attitudes toward democracy, geopolitics and global power players, and canvassed more than 110,000 respondents across 100 countries.A majority of people surveyed had an overall negative perception of the U.S., marking a steep decline from last year. America’s reputation took a particularly massive hit in EU countries ”[…] ”Meanwhile, China kept improving its global standing, overtaking the U.S. for the first time and recording mostly positive perceptions in all regions except Europe. “
Source: https://www.politico.eu/article/usa-popularity-collapse-worldwide-trump-return/
🇮🇱 🇵🇸[NEWS: Israel cuts internet access within Gaza]
“The United Nations said on Thursday that there was a full internet blackout in the Gaza Strip, likely due to military activity damaging the last cable into the enclave, that has paralyzed aid operations. “Lifelines to emergency services, humanitarian coordination, and critical information for civilians have all been cut. There is a full internet blackout, and mobile networks are barely functioning,” deputy U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq told reporters”
🇮🇱 🇮🇷[NEWS: Israel bombs Iran state TV during live broadcast]
“The Israeli military said it targeted a “communications centre of the Iranian regime”. Iran’s foreign ministry said the strike was a “war crime”.”
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3w46pw2xn0o
“The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has counted 178 journalists killed in Gaza by Israel since October 2023, making it the deadliest conflict for media workers ever recorded.
[…]
The CPJ said it was “appalled” by Israel’s attack on Iranian state TV and argued impunity for the killings of Palestinian journalists had “emboldened” the country to target media elsewhere. “This bloodshed must end now,” the organisation said on X.
Source:https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/16/israel-bombs-irans-state-tv-after-threatening-it-would
“teleSUR reminds us that “the media are essential civilian actors, even in conflict contexts, and their protection must be a priority.” It also denounces that “the escalation of attacks against non-military infrastructure represents a clear violation of international humanitarian law, which seeks to intimidate media professionals and limit the flow of information.”
The multi-platform news organization recalled that “unfortunately, this attack is part of a growing pattern of violence and harassment against journalists and media outlets in the Global South. This occurs in a context of narrative hegemony by Western media and platforms, where disinformation exacerbates confrontations.“
🇮🇳 [Opinion – Can India be an AI-Winner?]
“Policymakers are now playing catch-up. Last year the government announced a $1.2bn programme to support local AI efforts. Some of the funds have gone towards buying more than 34,000 chips, which are being made available to researchers and startups. (Meta, an American social-media giant, owns ten times as many.) Sarvam will have access to 4,000 chips for six months. Abhishek Singh, who leads the IndiaAI Mission, the agency overseeing the project, says the goal is to kick-start a domestic ecosystem. The agency has made AI processors available at roughly a third of the cost globally. Four companies, including Sarvam, have also been selected to develop a fully homegrown AI model.”
Source: https://www.economist.com/asia/2025/06/12/can-india-be-an-ai-winner /
🇪🇺 [NEWS – NVidia leaps at opportunity to power Sovereign EU agenda]
“Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s recent tour across Europe aligned with the EU’s vision of “sovereign AI.” For Nvidia, Europe’s ambitions to become digitally sovereign have a clear advantage: more AI infrastructure means more GPUs. And the EU is right to invest, as it cannot afford to remain dependent on U.S. and Chinese tech giants.”
“The announcements came fast: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer pledged over $1.3 billion for computing power; French President Emmanuel Macron framed AI infrastructure as “our fight for sovereignty”; and in Germany, Nvidia and Deutsche Telekom announced a new AI cloud platform. But while these investments mark an important first step, they are far from enough.”
🇺🇸🇨🇳 [NEWS – Trump increases pressures to limit chinese access to chips]
“The Trump administration has told US companies that offer software used to design semiconductors to stop selling their services to Chinese groups, in the latest attempt to make it harder for China to develop advanced chips.Several people familiar with the move said the US Department of Commerce had told so-called electronic design automation groups — which include Cadence, Synopsys and Siemens EDA — to stop supplying their technology to China.The Bureau of Industry and Security, the arm of the US commerce department that oversees export controls, issued the directive to the companies via letters, according to the people. It was unclear if every US EDA company had received a letter”
Source:https://www.ft.com/content/2c0db765-03ac-4820-8a02-806469848bee
🇨🇳[NEWS: Chinese chips lagging behind US expectations?]
“Huawei’s founder said the US was exaggerating the Chinese chipmaker’s capabilities and played down his company’s technology amid trade talks between Beijing and Washington that include discussions of export controls. In a rare interview with China’s state-run People’s Daily on Tuesday, Ren Zhengfei said Huawei’s Ascend chip, the main rival to Nvidia’s products in China, “still lags behind the US by one generation”. He added that the “US has exaggerated Huawei’s capabilities — we’re not that strong yet”. Ren’s comments come as Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has sounded the alarm in recent weeks on Huawei’s progress with its artificial intelligence chips, saying Washington’s limits on the US chipmaker selling to China have given rise to a “formidable” competitor that threatens to undermine American dominance of AI technology.”
Source:https://www.ft.com/content/83ffcfde-9875-44f7-a1af-2b216bb4b4dc
🇨🇳[NEWS: Chinese firms circumvent chips controls by training models abroad?]
“Chinese companies have also been able to access banned chips by using overseas cloud services powered by advanced Nvidia chips. The cloud services of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have rented Nvidia-chip servers to Chinese companies and universities, according to media reports.The Biden administration had floated a restriction targeting this gap that allows China’s use of American cloud services, but so far cloud services are not covered by export controls. The AI diffusion rule, proposed in the final week of the Biden administration, aimed to restrict chip exports to most nations in the world, exempting key U.S. allies, and also regulate foreign companies’ use of American cloud services.”
Source:https://restofworld.org/2025/chinese-companies-skirt-us-chip-bans/
🪖🇺🇸[NEWS – Meta to develop Mixed Reality tech for US Army]
“With Trump winning the U.S. presidency in November for the second time, Zuckerberg and other tech executives have since courted favor with the White House by making sweeping policy changes like relaxing content-moderation guidelines.Meta has also been pitching its open-source Llama family of AI models to government agencies and in November said it would make the those tools available to government units “working on defense and national security applications, and private sector partners supporting their work.”“Meta has spent the last decade building AI and AR to enable the computing platform of the future,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. “We’re proud to partner with Anduril to help bring these technologies to the American service members that protect our interests at home and abroad.”
Source:https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/29/meta-anduril-partner-on-vr-ar-project-intended-for-us-army.html
🪖🇺🇸[NEWS -OpenAI wins U$200M US defense contract]
“ChatGPT maker OpenAI was awarded a $200 million contract to provide the U.S. Defense Department with artificial intelligence tools, the Pentagon said in a statement on Monday.
“Under this award, the performer will develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains,” the Pentagon said.”
“The White House’s Office of Management and Budget released new guidance in April directing federal agencies to ensure that the government and “the public benefit from a competitive American AI marketplace.”
The guidance had exempted national security and defense systems.”
Source:https://www.reuters.com/world/us/openai-wins-200-million-us-defense-contract-2025-06-16/
🪖🇺🇸[NEWS -Anthropic developing AI for intelligence services in US]
“Anthropic is not the first company to offer specialized chatbot services for intelligence agencies. In 2024, Microsoft launched an isolated version of OpenAI’s GPT-4 for the US intelligence community after 18 months of work. That system, which operated on a special government-only network without Internet access, became available to about 10,000 individuals in the intelligence community for testing and answering questions.”
Source:https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-releases-custom-ai-chatbot-for-classified-spy-work/
🪖🇺🇸[NEWS -Oracle launches ecosystem for Defense tech providers]
“Oracle today announced the Oracle Defense Ecosystem, a first-of-its-kind global initiative to redefine the delivery of defense and government technology innovation. The ecosystem is designed to strengthen U.S. and allied national security and help accelerate the disruptive potential of emerging defense technology by creating new opportunities for defense innovators to leverage the latest cloud and AI technologies. Initial members of the Oracle Defense Ecosystem include Arqit, Blackshark.ai, Entanglement, Fenix Group, now part of Nokia Federal Solutions, Koniku, Kraken, Mattermost, Metron, SensusQ, and Whitespace.”
⌛ [Paper – Histories of digital colonialism]
“Just as it is important to learn from anti-colonial experiences to inform resistance to digital colonialism (Schneider, 2022), it is necessary to look at their limits. NWICO, for example, was ultimately unsuccessful in bringing about the kind of changes that the non-aligned hoped to see, in part, according to former Assistant Director General of UNESCO Antonio Pasquali (2005, p. 198), because intellectuals did not manage to mobilize more popular support. This would suggest that a crucial challenge for the current wave will be to make its opposition to digital colonialism palpable, relevant, and appealing to everyday people dealing with many other urgent social challenges. Similarly, a sobering look at NWICO’s history highlights other areas of concern for the current wave, such as how an overemphasis on macro structures of domination can fail to account for local agency and contingencies, and how anti-colonial rhetoric can pave the way for reactionary nationalist policies.” https://academic.oup.com/joc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/joc/jqaf003/8078024
🏗️ [Paper – Infrastructural power]
“The typology provides scholars with a novel analytical framework for examining internet governance preferences, while offering policymakers a practical roadmap for advancing digital strategic autonomy and resisting coercion, and shaping initiatives like the Non-Aligned Tech Movement. By focusing on how governments exercise infrastructural power, the article contributes to debates on sovereignty and digital decolonisation, while challenging the paralysing narrative of internet fragmentation.” https://policyreview.info/pdf/policyreview-2025-2-2009.pdf
đź“Ś[INTERNAL NEWS]
New logo! This version is open to your suggestions. It was sketched on Obsidian/Excalidraw, so if others want to send alternatives, we could collect a couple and then vote on it!
📢 [Call for papers]
“Data cultures in the era of surveillance capitalism: cultural extractivism in Higher Education” – Shared by a NATM member on the list
More info:
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21652 [Deadline September 30]
Data cultures in the era of surveillance capitalism: cultural extractivism in Higher Education
Cultural Studies and Media Studies / Interdisciplinary Humanities [In Person Only]
📚Reading group: Guilherme Cavalcante Silva and Juan Ortiz Freuler are coordinating a reading group to explore the value of dependency theory for analyzing north-south tech dynamics. If you’re interested, send an email to juanof@protonmail.com , gcsilva@yorku.ca . Next meeting June 25st.
Readings proposed by Luciana Musello: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01115063 & https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0486613409357182
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