Curated by Juan Ortiz Freuler – Sign up to receive as email
🇺🇸🇯🇵🇰🇷🇸🇬🇳🇱🇬🇧🇮🇱🇦🇪🇦🇺[US seeks a…Pax Silica?]
“Pax Silica is a U.S.-led strategic initiative to build a secure, prosperous, and innovation driven silicon supply chain—from critical minerals and energy inputs to advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, AI infrastructure, and logistics.
Rooted in deep cooperation with trusted partners, Pax Silica aims to reduce coercive dependencies, protect the materials and capabilities foundational to artificial intelligence, and ensure aligned nations can develop and deploy transformative technologies at scale.
The inaugural Pax Silica Summit convened stakeholders from: Japan, Republic of Korea, Singapore, the Netherlands, The United Kingdom, Israel, United Arab Emirates, and Australia, alongside guest contributions from Taiwan, the European Union, Canada, and the OECD
This summit hailed a new geopolitical consensus: economic security is national security, and national security is economic security. Participants discussed jointly pursuing multilayered partnerships that strengthen supply chain security, address coercive dependencies and single points of failure, and advance the adoption of trusted technology ecosystems. All summit participants explored opportunities to partner on flagship projects across global technology stacks, including connectivity and data infrastructure, compute and semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, logistics, mineral refining and processing, and energy.
”
Via N.C. https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2025/12/pax-silica-initiative
🇺🇸🎖️[Oculus – from Meta to Military contracts -> Developing a networked gaze for soldiers]
–>https://youtu.be/fBI-OgunQII?t=41
🇨🇳🤖[Opinion – Humanoid Robots as the next AI frontier race?]
“the city of Shenzhen alone, with 8 humanoid robot companies, probably outcompetes the entire US industry today. If the US can’t compete with a single Chinese city, then clearly the race is between Chinese cities. Europe, meanwhile, true to form, is basically not even in the race at all.”
🔌🇺🇸[NEWS – GEOPOLITICAL RISK DELAYING UNDERSEA CABLE BUILDOUT]
Meta and Google are facing delays with long-promised undersea cable projects, according to a report by Bloomberg. A Meta spokesperson blames the delays on a “range of operational factors, regulatory concerns and geopolitical risk.”
It’s worth noting that these delays shouldn’t impact two previously announced undersea fiber projects by Google and Meta. Google is building a cable to connect Togo to Europe, which will wrap around the Atlantic side. Meta is building agigantic cable system that looks to connect five continents, which isn’t crossing the Red Sea.
🇸🇻✖️[EL SALVADOR TO DEPLOY GROK IN CLASSROOMS]
“xAI has confirmed a strategic alliance with the government of El Salvador to launch Grok for Education. The goal is to bring personalized AI-based tutoring to every public school student in the Central American country.
We are talking about an implementation in 5,000 schools that will reach more than one million children over the next two years.”
🇺🇸🇳🇴 [NORWAY’S SOVEREIGN FUND PRESSURES MICROSOFT ON HUMAN RIGHTS ]
“Norway’s $2 trillion wealth fund said on Sunday it would vote for a shareholder proposal at the upcoming Microsoft annual general meeting requiring for a report on the risks of operating in countries with significant human rights concerns.” https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/30/norway-wealth-fund-to-vote-for-human-rights-report-at-microsoft-agm-against-management.html
🇺🇸⚖️🃏[OPINION – Justice Recoded? Why It Matters that the International Criminal Court Embraced Open-Source Software and Ditched Microsoft]
The Court’s noteworthy shift towards OSS may spark similar conversations about software dependencies amongst ICTs, particularly those with common vendors and strategic partners like the UN International Computing Centre (bearing the rather duplicative acronym “UNICC”) who may support transitions.
🇮🇳🇷🇺🇨🇳[PUTIN’S TRIP TO INDIA]
“And yet, the U.S. remains a far more forward-looking and important relationship, said Bajpaee of Chatham House. “Russia remains a key strategic partner. India does not want to sever that relationship with Moscow and it particularly doesn’t want to do that under U.S. or Western pressure,” he said. “But the direction of travel, I would argue, is towards a managed decline.””
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/05/g-s1-100899/putin-modi-india-visit-russia-trade-oil
🌎[OPINION – CHILE CONSOLIDATES SOUTH AMERICA’S TURN TO THE RIGHT]
🇮🇷🇧🇫[OPINION – IRAN TRADE OUTREACH TO BURKINA FASO?]
“As Iranian officials attempt to weather this rocky new reality, they have looked to advance geostrategic interests elsewhere. As an expert on Iran’s foreign policy, I believe one key emergent area for this is Africa, where Iran has increased its outreach to historically dependable and strategically significant partners such as Burkina Faso. This outreach has created important opportunities for Tehran to engage with countries on issues such as security and critical minerals, while also expanding its market for weapons and other exports while bypassing sanctions.”
🌹⌛[OPINION – ROSY MEMORIES OF NAM]
““For those who lived through socialist Yugoslavia, political memory — anti-fascism, self-management, or the Non-Aligned Movement — is intertwined with emotional [memory]. It’s not just about Tito, but about the memory of an era that isn’t perceived as a disaster.” The House of Flowers in Belgrade — the mausoleum where the leader rests — is the heart of the Museum of Yugoslavia, the most-visited museum in the country.”
https://english.elpais.com/eps/2025-12-06/red-nostalgia-souvenirs-from-the-ruins-of-communism.html
🌍[NEWS – NAM NETWORK OF CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANIZATIONS]
“There has never been a single network uniting NGOs in the Non-Aligned Movement region. For the first time, an initiative put forward by Azerbaijani civil society has gained international support from a vast region covering two-thirds of the world’s countries, and NGOs from 116 countries gathered in Baku for this idea and established a joint platform. The fact that civil society representatives from 116 out of 120 countries represented in the Non-Aligned Movement are included in this composition is a unique event not only in Azerbaijan, but also in the Global South.”
📜[LONG READ – NEW DIGITAL SOCIAL CONTRACT]
“The Paper proposes an architecture for a new digital social contract grounded in equity, ethics, and empowerment. Urging immediate action, it advocates a “Digital Bretton Woods”—a new multilateral pact to govern data and artificial intelligence (AI) as global public goods, drawing inspiration from the Chinese model of technological sovereignty while critiquing outdated global governance structures”
📖[FROM WITHIN THE NETWORK: PAPER-> Regional integration as a remedy against technological dependency? The contradictions in the calls for regional integration in Latin American AI strategies]
“This paper offers an empirical contribution to the issues of South-South cooperation and multipolarity in the context of regional integration by examining artificial intelligence (AI) policy developments in Latin America. Analyzing the national AI strategies of seven Latin American countries, and engaging with contributions from dependency theorists, the research reveals how aspirations for Latin America to lead in AI innovation often replicate technology policy imperatives from the Global North.”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25729861.2025.2545040#abstract
📘[FROM WITHIN THE NETWORK – A CATALOGUE OF FACEBOOK HORRORS]
“a preliminary and non-exhaustive “catalogue of horrors” that will form part of a data base project starting in Spring 2026 in the Digital Humanities laboratory at the Department of Humanities of the University of Roma Tre. If you think that we have missed some important Zuckerberg-related abuses or misdeeds, please do contact the authors at domenico.fiormonte@uniroma3.it “
🏢[Jobs – Director Sovereign Tech Agency]
The Sovereign Tech Agency is a new kind of organization at the intersection of technology, politics, and public stewardship. We secure digital infrastructure in the public interest—strengthening the open source ecosystem and helping shape its future.
https://www.sovereign.tech/jobs/programs-director
🗳️ [NEW LOGO – OPTIONS – OPINIONS WELCOME]
I have been working with designer Aki Guerineau on these new logo options. Thoughts most welcome!
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