The 36-member working group published a Feminist Digital Justice Declaration

In August 2021, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) and IT for Change convened a 36-member Working Group on Feminist Digital Justice. This Working Group was constituted as part of the Just Net Coalition’s ‘Digital Justice’ initiative. Over the course of one and a half years, the members of the Working Group collaborated to produce the Declaration and the Background Paper. Read more about our journey.

The juggernaut of digital capitalism has colonized our bodies and lifeworlds. In the extractive value chains of the data economy, embedded and embodied knowledge are supplanted by depersonalized machine intelligence. As the planet gets subsumed in the network-data matrix, we see an intensification of inequality and precarity and the rise of anti-democratic and fascist forces.

Our public sphere is under threat. Its corporate-controlled algorithmic impulse normalizes hegemonic gender norms and practices, instrumentalizing society and human diversity for profit.
The social compact between digital capitalism and the patriarchal household enables a ceaseless mobilization of women’s unpaid and underpaid work.

Meanwhile, the surveillance state has appropriated the prowess of technology to sort and exclude those deemed unworthy, disciplining and dehumanizing feminized bodies, hounding women human rights defenders, and persecuting migrant and refugee women, among others.
We must break free now from the shackles of a digitality gone wrong, and embrace a vision of feminist digital justice. We must claim the values of a new sociality that can repoliticize data, resignify intelligence and recreate digital architectures in a networked co-existence of planetary flourishing.

The declaration of feminist digital justice we present here derives from the following values:

  • Individual and collective agency rooted in connections that straddle the local and the translocal, expanding knowledges and enabling the realization of serendipitous encounters;
  • An ethics of solidarity committed to the commonsification and feminist valorization of knowledge for social value;
  • Community-based participatory democracy built on federated translocal digital publics that thrive on civic intelligence and empowerment of historically marginalized groups;
  • A fair and equitable global economic order that is regenerative, transformative and respectful of ecological boundaries, the social freedoms of labor and diverse knowledge cultures; and
  • A global digital constitutionalism based on a reinvigorated, bottom-up and networked multilateralism for humane governance, enduring peace, thriving reciprocity and universal human rights.

Rejecting the enclosure and manipulation of network-data technologies as infrastructures of domination, we call for a feminist reclamation of the digital paradigm through the following core principles:

An AI economy organized along democratic and distributive integrity

The trajectories of AI deployment in the economy must be scaffolded by global institutional frameworks that protect human rights, social justice and gender equality at the frontiers of innovation. We need to move beyond non-binding AI ethics to a rule-of-law-based AI paradigm committed to eliminating socio-cultural bias in AI systems, promoting the creation of public value and ushering in redistributive justice in the AI economy.

Alternative platform models for regenerative appropriation

The affordances of networked intelligence must be harnessed for sustainable production and equitable distribution. Dominant platform firms that profit from gendered labor hierarchies in transnational value chains must make way for alternative platform models that transfer power to women-led and worker-owned social and solidarity enterprises.

Platformization for feminist valorization

We need an intelligence economy that humanizes labor and enables the realm of work to be reconstructed as a site of self-actualization. Platform architectures must be appropriated to create and nurture societies in which the labor of human subsistence and social reproduction is not subsumed into the logic of capital.

Community and sustainability as core principles

Community autonomy and resilience in the twenty-first century are predicated on decolonizing the digital, that is, breaking the perverse nexus between digitalization, corporatization and financialization that chains people of the global South. Web 3.0 technologies must be shaped through feminist imagination to promote public benefit, social inclusion and ecological sustainability in the South. Their application for “green grabbing”, speculative finance, unethical bio-engineering and other neocolonial patriarchal projects must be stopped at all costs.

Read the full declaration here.