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All hail scale...what are we doing here?
Hey everyone,
In Brazil, someone stole a professor’s identity and tried to take $80,000 with it. In Rwanda, a finance minister was warned that funding from the Tony Blair Institute could disappear if Oracle was removed from the government tech stack. In India, a system glitch cut 2 million people off from food rations.
What do these stories have in common? They’re all tied to digital public infrastructure, a bland name for a powerful, messy, and at times dangerous idea.
DPI is often sold as a sleek solution to clumsy governance: biometric IDs, instant payments, seamless data-sharing. And it could be great. But when technosolutionists are given free rein to “optimize” the state, people fall through the cracks, sometimes with devastating consequences.
Working on The Vaporstate series, I expected the worst: Aadhaar-linked deaths, Big Tech embedding itself into public systems, and “public-interest” narratives masking surveillance and private capture. And I found plenty of that grim reality, but I was surprised to also see green shoots of more promising work. Real efforts to build state capacity and chart a third path beyond US and Chinese models of racing to build ever more compute — one that at least claims to put the public first. DPI’s promise is real, but so are its risks. Whether digitizing government actually benefits people depends on our willingness to ask hard questions about failure, accountability, and who really holds power when these systems break. The final episode of The Vaporstate dropped on Friday (and we’ve shared more about the series below!).
In that final episode, we introduce our next fact-finding mission, one that takes a slightly different shape. Instead of sorting through case studies to build a broader picture, we’re interrogating narrative and hype to find a dose (or twelve) of reality.
The India AI Impact Summit is just around the corner, and it’s the first major AI summit hosted by a Global Majority country. As world leaders and tech executives descend on Delhi, AI hype is already dominating the narrative. In the lead-up, industry and government leaders have leaned hard on concepts that matter but are often co-opted, using buzzwords like “democratization,” “sovereignty,” and “AI for good” to build excitement around new digital systems without meaningfully unpacking their real-world impacts. In partnership with AI Now Institute and Aapti Institute, we’ve produced a series of interviews with people who bring substance, analysis, and lived experience to these ideas.
Rather than letting these terms be endlessly recycled to serve those with power and little accountability, we’re taking on 12 core ideas across 12 interviews with people who know them deeply. I speak with people like Naomi Klein, Karen Hao, Meredith Whitaker, and Nikhil Dey (coming soon!), who are offering clear-eyed conversations about power, geopolitics, and the public interest. Each episode presents a “frame,” unpacking a dominant narrative, and a “reframe,” revealing what sits beneath it while imagining alternative, people-centered futures.
The first four interviews are live on our YouTube channel now, with eight more coming this week. Check them out, and keep an eye on the podcast feed for highlights in the weeks ahead. I can’t wait to hear what you think.
Alix
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Podcast Highlights
🎙️On the feed now: The Vaporstate
a mini-series on the toxic trade offs of digitising nations.
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Mila Samdub and Astha Kapoor unpack DPI through an Indian lens, discussing life with Aadhaar and how the system has evolved to serve political agendas and corporate interests. Usha Rumanathan traces the political maneuvering behind Aadhaar’s creation.
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Rafa Zanatta and Luã Cruz explore two pillars of Brazil’s DPI, from PIX, the frictionless payments system that enables instant transfers and new forms of fraud, to gov.br, the digital ID platform through which Rafa's mother’s identity was stolen.
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Daniel Howden and Beatriz Ramalho da Silva from Lighthouse Reports examine the complex ties between Tony Blair, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and their influence over national digitization projects in the Global South through the Tony Blair Institute.
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Astha Kapoor and Amba Kak join Alix to reflect on The Vaporstate series and the upcoming AI Action Summit in India, the first hosted by a Global Majority country. Will it open space for civil society, or just give tech companies another chance to whisper AI promises into government ears?
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Reframing Impact: AI Summit 2026
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AI is often sold as a climate solution, but sustainability claims can obscure deep ties between tech, fossil fuels, and the state. Alix talks with Naomi Klein about community-led resistance to these extractive systems.
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Dominant narratives call under-resourced regions “data rich” to signal strategic importance and a path into the global economy, but in practice this reinforces colonial dynamics. Karen Hao reveals how the concept actually subjugates these economies.
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AI and content moderation jobs are framed as opportunities for youth in high-unemployment countries, but in reality they’re low-wage and exploitative. Joan Kinyua unpacks this reality and the protections needed to safeguard young workers.
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AI hype frames “the future” as full digitization, but these systems often serve state and corporate interests. Usha Ramanathan explains how “AI for development” can control populations, boost corporate growth, and evade accountability.
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Check out the full series; new interviews dropping this week.
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Highlights from the New Protagonist Network
Data centres
- Global Action Plan and Foxglove made the UK government admit “serious error” in forcing through a hyperscale data centre in Buckinghamshire Council (UK).
- A report by Harvard’s Dominici Lab, commissioned by Tucker United, shows a proposed power plant in West Virginia (USA) would elevate health risks for residents and cost $35 million in annual health damages.
Grok
Age verification and social media bans
Security and militarisation
AI discrimination and automated decision-making
Campaigns
Training data and copyright
AI Agents
Regulation
Find out more about the New Protagonist Network and apply to join.
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ICYMI: NPN Slack updates & welcoming new members
Welcome to our new members! Katie Wells, Hanna Storey, Jenni Olson, Edu Martín-Borregón, Grace Brigham, Anna Colom, Julie Marchal, Michal Luria, Harry Atkinson.
Poll: are you interested in an AI Summit debrief in February? Let us know!
What we talked about on Slack this month: private companies working for ICE, Digital Public Infrastructure / digital ID, AI for financial services, Big Tech lobbying of the AI Act, the verbal violence received by Adele at Davos from a Cloudflare executive.
NPN Programming:
- In January, we ran a first edition of a narrative strategy workshop with partner Kenya Comms Hub. Working on narratives is something we’ll do more in the future. Stay tuned!
- Our February Broadcast Media Training is already full. Stay tuned for new spots in April.
Don’t hesitate to share your work on Slack (#share-your-work)!
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