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Governments increasingly use algorithms for decision-making in fields such as education, welfare, justice and policing. These systems tend to overly affect marginalised communities and hide policy choices beneath the veneer of technology, meaning governments can remain largely unaccountable for their failures. In our digital future, efficient regulation and widespread public awareness prevent governments from deploying such systems and hold them accountable when they cause harm.

The science is clear: we are living in a climate emergency and need to rapidly move to a more just and sustainable society. This includes making changes to internet infrastructures, to date the world’s largest coal-powered machine. Following lessons from previous discussions in digital rights, it is important to switch from a reactive to a proactive mode. We need to go beyond making things less bad and start making things fundamentally better. I would like to work on co-developing internet infrastructures that centre people and the planet over profit and capital.

How can we manifest a vision for tools, identity and data stewardship that aligns with our values and lets us control our digital destiny?

While digital worlds are open to everyone, individuals can choose to not engage with them. (Digital) education helps promote better intersectional decision-making and implementation mechanisms. By naming exploitative practices at the social and material level, harms can be halted, prevented and made impossible. Digital developments no longer depend on capital-multiplying investor strategies and are no longer driven by elites. Instead, decolonial, sustainable design forms the foundation of our digital worlds.

More work and support for alternative, fair, feminist data governance mechanisms.

Translocal community initiatives that address climate degradation through the ancient tradition of communing – the act of maintaining resources (from forests to digital code) for the common good – need more funding and support. In this way, our world’s most precious spaces will be protected and nourished before it is too late.

Content moderation and algorithmic curation are reshaping the way people relate and present themselves on digital platforms. Additionally, the digital profiles being built around people can direct them to damaging content, such as disinformation, without any way of knowing how this is happening or what exact data is being used for it. In our digital future, we reverse that situation through algorithmic transparency.

In our daily lives, our possibilities and our opportunities, the truth is that technology and AI govern us when we should be governing them. Instead of accepting the version created by a few, how can we take charge, control our technology, and create a future we all want? Let’s start by thinking about this in an open-minded way.

This requires getting more funders on board – for supporting work towards the ‘third horizon’, where new ideas and paradigms emerge – and taking steps to practise and experiment with these alternatives.

Infrastructures are a complex combination of hardware, software, relationships, skills and knowledge. They find their purpose and become vital in the multiple, distributed realities of our activism, work and collaboration. We need a multiverse of interconnected internets.

Access to knowledge is a question of justice. We need to fight for fair access to knowledge, education and, thus, power for all people at various levels. By marginalised knowledge we mean tangible and intangible items held in institutions that are seldom or never displayed for institutional or structural reasons, as well as modes of representation and narration that neglect multi-layered histories and perspectives. We would like to ensure that marginalised and repressed knowledge gains more visibility in Wikimedia projects in the future, and expose the mechanisms used to appropriate, suppress, and marginalise that knowledge.

Citizens, governments and institutions need to be able to adapt software to their needs. Under current models, most software is ‘licensed’ rather than sold. This prevents changes and locks institutions into cooperation with a small number of licensed vendors, sometimes only one. Licences are often sold per user/computer/institution, whereas open source software is paid for once, when it is developed/installed. Open source software is often more secure, has lower maintenance costs because of actual competition between (service) vendors, and it promotes independence and sovereignty over digital infrastructures. There’s plenty more reasons, but basically, it’s a good idea to use open source software as much as possible.

While we are starting to understand the extractivist foundations of AI development (for example, its environmental and labour aspects and centralisation of profits), we need to expand our analysis along the full length of the AI value chain to address these injustices with adequate regulatory frameworks. Sustainability is often presented in current European digital policy discussions as standing in the way of objectives such as innovation or competition. In the future, digital regulation narratives should no longer pit sustainability against other objectives, but be considered a necessary point, in and of itself.