The introduction to this series of interviews can be read here.
 Interview with Deivison Faustino
At the presentation of the MTST’ book in São Paulo, I met Deivison Faustino, a figure who immediately struck me as both likable and interesting. He has a rapper-like style, with his cap worn backwards, and he is a professor as well as a leading scholar and public intellectual in Brazil on the work of Frantz Fanon, the anticolonial writer of the Algerian resistance. Together with Walter Lippold, he is the author of “Colonialismo digital: por uma crítica hacker-fanoniana”. In light of the deep global penetration of North American digital platforms, digital colonialism—whose genealogy is well reconstructed here—should not be understood as a phenomenon limited to Latin America; it concerns us all. 
He speaks with confidence and engaging rhetoric, and we arranged an interview a few days later, at a discussion organized by Geledés – Instituto da Mulher Negra, a civil society organization that defends the rights of women and Black people against racism and sexism, and that carries out advocacy, education, and research activities. The event was titled “Artificial Intelligence – Cyberactivism and the place of Black women in confronting democratic erosion.” Sitting in the third row, I noticed that I was not only the only foreigner, but also the only white man present at the discussion—something that already says a great deal about Brazil’s internal racial divisions, which, according to my interlocutors, are far deeper and more concealed than they might appear.
The conversation, which also involved two other researchers, revisited several issues that have made headlines in recent years, particularly how artificial intelligence can end up promoting disinformation and hate speech, manipulating perceptions, and creating information bubbles. After an excellent refreshment, around 8 p.m., I cornered the poor Deivison for the interview, pleasantly interrupted by a samba playing in the bar on the floor below, which provided a counterpoint to the content of our discussion.
Indeed, although the discourse on digital sovereignty has gained significant prominence in the Brazilian media, I have rarely encountered truly radical critiques of it. Yet radical critique is a duty of thought: Marx urged us to grasp things at their root, while Cornelius Castoriadis saw in the radical imaginary the capacity to bring forth what does not yet exist. And if, with Bernard Stiegler, the risk of computational capitalism lies in the symbolic misery of a passive imagination whose desires are pre-fabricated by the technological industry, then this kind of contribution seems to me central to the debate.
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The first question is about your trajectory: how did you become interested in the issue of digital sovereignty?
My intellectual journey begins with social movements, especially hip-hop and the Black movement. For a long time, I worked as a researcher of anti-racist thought, studying various authors, until I reached Frantz Fanon. In a way, I helped popularize his name in Brazil. I began studying him when almost no one spoke of him, and a series of transformations in the country allowed Black authors to gain visibility—and at that moment, I was there, presenting Fanon.
Fanon has a discussion on technology that is central to his work, though it is little studied. However, my entry into technology was not through Fanon. In the early 2000s, the free software movement was very strong in Brazil, and several programmers and intellectuals in that movement were linked to popular, Black, and indigenous movements. I was trained by some of these people, especially by Márcio Banto, known as Ikebanto, who to this day is a free software programmer and refuses to use proprietary software under any circumstances. At that time, I was part of a hip-hop collective and was also organizing the Black movement from a radical left perspective. The idea was to develop secure communication technologies to support MST (Landless Workers’ Movement) and MTST (Homeless Workers’ Movement) occupations, while simultaneously discussing themes of revolution and political organization with young people. The free software movement was very attractive to this group, which was already thinking about technology politically. It was the moment when the internet began to spread more widely in Brazil, and digital inclusion for people in situations of social vulnerability was being discussed.
In 2003, with the election of Lula and the appointment of Gilberto Gil at the Ministry of Culture, free software gained momentum. Gil had a clear policy of strengthening the movement, and the Pontos de Cultura (Culture Points) program was essential in this process. These points distributed resources to grassroots social movements to set up studios—and the studios were all based on free software. Thus, the free software community trained hip-hop youth in recording, editing, and filming programs. With these resources, we managed to set up studios in the favelas during a time of great precariousness. It was a different Brazil. Back then, we had a political organization called Grupo Kilombagem, and Ikebanto—this hacker who joined us—upheld a Simondonian idea: everyone should learn to program. I never quite mastered it, but I became convinced it was important. Later, I entered the university and began to study anti-racist thought academically. I found in Fanon a reflection on capitalism and racism that made sense of my previous experience.
The great turning point came in 2020, shortly before the pandemic, when I reconnected with Walter Lippold. He is a hacker, part of the hacktivist movement—what we used to call the “man of the black screen.” Walter was one of those responsible for disseminating Fanon’s thought, scanning and distributing his books freely when there were still no translations in Brazil, in sync with the movement for free information. When we met, I was already studying technologies in Fanon, and the encounter was explosive: we wrote an article together on algorithmic racism. It became so extensive that it turned into the book Digital Colonialism. That has been my journey so far.
I was surprised by the level of Fanon’s popularity here in Brazil. In Italy, for example, this doesn’t exist in the same way. But who was Fanon? Why is his thought relevant to issues of technology, power, and subjectivity today?
Fanon was a thinker, activist, and militant in the national liberation struggles in Algeria. Born in Martinique, he was educated in France and fought in World War II. A crucial point in his thought is the relationship between the universal, the particular, and the singular. He shows how colonial power relations impose a project of “the human” that takes the white man as the parameter. This critique is fundamental for us to think today about algorithmic reasoning—which takes Europe and the United States as the standard, generating biases of territory, language, race, and gender. Fanon was an organic intellectual of the Algerian National Liberation Front and wrote about the political character of technology: colonialism used technology as an instrument of domination. It is important to remember that Fanon wrote in French, but the first translation of his texts was into Italian. This happened thanks to Giovanni Pirelli, son of the owner of Pirelli. He quit his family, became a communist, and financed resistance movements in Africa. Fanon was a close friend of Pirelli, went to Italy frequently, and almost died there. When Fanon died, Pirelli coordinated the Italian translation of his works. Fanon was widely read in Italy in the 1960s by the anti-fascist movement and later by the psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, but he subsequently fell into oblivion. Something similar occurred in Brazil: Fanon was read by the left in the 1960s and by the Black movement in the 1970s and 80s, but then he disappeared. Only with the affirmative action policies in the 2000s—when the Black population began to enter universities and demand Black authors in academic curricula—did his name and those of other Black thinkers return to the center of the debate.
Fanon uses the radio as an example to think about the relationship between technology, colonialism, and anti-colonial struggles. In the 1950s, radio was the most sophisticated communication technology available, and the French used it to penetrate the subjectivity of Algerians: to disqualify the struggle, calling it barbaric or terrorist. The Algerians, at first, began to demonize the radio, seeing it as a colonial technology. Fanon shows that this path was infertile: every technology opens new possibilities and contradictions. The turn in the revolutionary struggle happened when militants stopped demonizing and began to raid French radio stations, stealing transmitters and creating their own programs, such as “The Voice of Algeria.” This technological appropriation changed the course of the struggle and allowed the revolutionary message to penetrate even deeper into the Algerian people. The French, realizing the power of this communication, banned the sale of batteries to Algerians to prevent their access to the radio. 
Fanon concludes that the revolutionary turn is not to reject technology by treating it as an absolute evil, but to contest its terms, to put it at the service of the struggle for justice. This implies understanding how it works—a hacker gesture, so to speak. Here in Brazil, the free software movement and hacktivism played a similar role when they brought open technologies to favelas, quilombola communities, and indigenous villages. Today, we discuss how to update the idea of free software. It is no longer enough to replace Windows with Linux; it is necessary to think about secure networks and free technologies in the face of the global dominance of Big Tech. For this, focusing on software is not enough; we need to discuss hardware and the entire infrastructural geopolitics of contemporary digital colonialism. OpenAI is anything but open. Hacktivism, which emerged as a political rebellion, ended up being co-opted by the neoliberal market of the Californian Ideology—many hackers became entrepreneurs or far-right influencers. Our effort is to rescue the critical dimension of hacktivism and articulate it with Fanon’s thought, which allows for a combination of technological critique, anti-racism, and anti-capitalism.
In Brazil, in recent years, a very important movement for data protection has been forming. However, how does this movement resolve the issue of protection? Sometimes it tends toward an institutionalist place and limits itself to state regulation—without a critique of the State itself and the logic of power. Other times, it does not incorporate racism, which, in a country like Brazil, is a major limitation. The debate remains dominated by white men from the Southeast, even those on the left, and this carries a lot of weight because issues involving other populations end up not entering the agenda as central. So, we are also interested in contesting this movement to think about the necessity of anti-racism as a component element. Discussing data protection or algorithmic racism without incorporating anti-racism and a critique of capital is to reproduce old schemes of domination.
But we were also interested in critiquing anti-racism itself, because we, as Fanonians, move toward anti-capitalist thought. A good portion of the people discussing algorithmic racism did so with a reformist agenda, in the sense of:  there is bias in the algorithm, so how do we solve it? Wait for Google to hire a Black programmer to audit the bias and revise it. Or you receive money from Microsoft to do a project in a quilombo. For us, this solution ends up bringing some limiting traps. So the idea of the “Fanonian hacker” was also to propose a reversal in the way the debate was being framed at that moment.
I think the perspective of regulating personal data protection should always be combined with industrial policy. When Fanon speaks of the need to build one’s own radios, wouldn’t that be equivalent to this idea of autonomous technological production?
Exactly. It is necessary to discuss regulation, but also to build technical, infrastructural, and political alternatives to Big Tech. We need to update the free software movement, create secure communication networks for social movements, and think about organizational strategies outside the regulatory logic. For example, Walter, my research partner, studies cyberwarfare and new forms of surveillance and control. This worries us greatly, especially when we see how proprietary digital platforms make social movements dependent. The information war and the Palestinian genocide exemplify this: companies like Palantir, Meta, and Google provide tracking and control technology. That is why we insist that movements understand the socio-technical dimension of contemporary “death power.”
Two concepts I like from Fanon are “sociogenesis” and the “zone of non-being.” How do you see these concepts applied to the debate on digital sovereignty in Latin America?
These concepts are very dear and very complex. Fanon places sociogenesis in articulation with ontogenesis and phylogenesis: the first as historical-social mediation, the second as singularity, and the third as universality. It is necessary to think about any problem within this triad. Colonialism prevents the recognition of the colonized as a universal human and a singular subject. All modern technological development stems from a Eurocentric notion of the human that excludes the colonized, taking the white person as the universal.
Fanonian sociogenesis politicizes the perception of universality; it shows that what seems neutral is not. Take the case of facial biometrics: the numerical parameters used to define “the human” reflect a racialized gaze, while racism renders the Black person invisible as part of universal humanity. This has mathematical and technological implications, but it also allows us to think about the particular dimension of technological development itself. Furthermore, it allows us to reflect on the particular: what technologies could the South develop to meet its own needs? Big Tech impoverishes this possibility by concentrating power and buying up startups that could generate local solutions. Thus, specific needs cease to be incorporated into the mathematical models that govern artificial intelligence.
There are clear biases: if we search for “Amazon” on Google, we see only the forest. There is a bias here, which is the gaze of the white person from the North upon the Amazon, because the forest itself is a forest in relation to people; that type of forest is the result of indigenous forest cultivation technologies. So, having only the forest without the people is already a partialized view of the Amazon. The invisibility of local contexts has grave consequences, especially when algorithmic models are used in areas like mental health. An algorithm trained with data from the North may pathologize cultural differences or produce wrong diagnoses in indigenous or Black populations. Sociogenesis helps us understand these asymmetries.
Fanon also reminds us that violence is a product of the colonial structure itself. He does not glorify armed struggle, but he recognizes that when violence is already present, the colonized can choose to die passively or to react. Today, this radicalism can be thought of in other terms: refusing digital sovereignty policies that are merely a facade for the expansion of Big Tech, for example. Digital sovereignty is also about asking whom it serves. I might not sign a digital sovereignty manifesto whose motto is to bring a TikTok data center to dry up the water of a quilombola community, for example.
And how do you see the development of the debate on digital sovereignty in Brazil, especially now, with so much presence of the theme in the media and government policies?
Latin America was built from colonization, and this, from the outset, frames the problem in terms of technological development, because it is inserted into capitalism through colonization. This is different from the United States, which was a settler colony, built to be the home of various European ethnicities—a territory where surplus labor, to use a Marxist term, was used for its own development. It is no coincidence that the various North American states united against England to build a project of autonomy and sovereignty that presupposed independent national development. Latin America was the opposite. Except for the territories liberated by Bolívar, national independences did not presuppose autonomous projects of capitalism and national development, but rather the readjustment of colonial logic in other terms. Florestan Fernandes, an important Latin American thinker, says that Brazilian decolonization was “interrupted from above.”
Brazil was a colony of Portugal. In the 19th century, Dom João fled Portugal for fear of Napoleon and came to Brazil, declaring it the seat of the empire. Our independence, led by the prince regent, was a conciliation from above that did not alter the slave structure or colonial property relations. National production continued to be the violent monoculture of export extractivism—sugar cane and, later, coffee. Fanon also speaks of these national bourgeoisies created by and for colonialism to serve the interests of the metropolises; therefore, they neither adhere to democratic and universalist ideals nor aim for political and economic autonomy. They seek only to be intermediaries for colonialism or neocolonialism. This is a very important point.
This always placed Brazil and Latin America in a subservient position, subordinate to the European and US economies, and sustained elites who were violent toward their own people. But in a country like Brazil, which is large—and Brazil differs from other Latin American countries in this aspect—there is a moment when the Brazilian bourgeoisie attempts a type of technological development. This was the era of Juscelino Kubitschek and the policies called “import substitution,” which sought to attract the export of British, American, European, and German capital to develop the technological park so Brazil could move closer to a more developed status. However, this process was late. Brazil developed an important automotive production park, for example, in the 1960s, but at a time when Europe was already exporting its production outside the continent. So, even though Brazil developed technologically more than some Latin American countries like Bolivia or Venezuela, Brazilian development was always subordinate to international capital. Still, there were important advances: the construction of Petrobras, our state oil industry, which provides a very comfortable position for Brazil in international disputes because it is exploited with national capital, with State money, and the royalties return to the State itself.
But what happens with digital technologies? First, there is a school of thought called “developmentalism” that directs this effort of technological development subordinate to central countries. This effort was destroyed by globalization at the turn of the 20th to the 21st century, and the elites dismantled the national industrial park to allow the entry of foreign capital. What is interesting to consider is that, even in the Lula government, sectors began to bet on what some call “neodevelopmentalism”, an attempt to resume the project of technological development, hydroelectric plants, and various branches, but this effort is limited by the high internationalization and financialization of capital in its current stage of accumulation.
It is within this debate that the discussion on sovereignty appears. When the digital issue comes to the center, some people thought it was enough to translate these neodevelopmentalist initiatives into the digital technological sphere; but they ran into the change in the dynamics of capital itself. For example, the export of capital from Big Tech is not so much about technology, but about services. There is a difference here: Volkswagen or FIAT needed to set up a factory here, but Microsoft doesn’t need to set up a factory here; it can even export a data center and rent space in its cloud without employing people or transferring data processing technologies. It is only at this moment, when the data center proves to be a major environmental problem, that Big Tech considers transferring them to Third World countries to access the water and electricity of those territories. But the technological centers remain in Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, or Wuhan. This places a set of obstacles in the way of this neodevelopmentalist intent because it cannot resolve what we call “value transfer” in Marxism: Brazil exports iron, gold, cobalt, lithium, and data, and you import cell phones. It is an unequal exchange that presupposes the enrichment of the more developed country at the expense of the impoverishment of the supplier of primary goods. A colonial path of capitalist development.
So the neodevelopmentalist intent runs into changes in the dynamics of capital itself. What is our problem? Often the debate is conducted based on indicators of sovereignty, such as the data center. We looked at world maps of data centers and identified a wide concentration in the Global North, partly due to climate issues related to the cold in those regions. But this is only the appearance of the phenomenon. When the Lula government creates tax exemption policies for Northern data centers to install themselves in Brazil, it operates as if this were a project of sovereignty, but it is only the intensification of the country’s subaltern position in the international division of labor. What is sovereignty? Is it having to take care of the environmental waste of central capitalist countries? Is it just GDP development? In Brazil, technological development was often achieved through the destruction of indigenous territories and quilombos, displacing Black populations. A true project of sovereignty would aim for investment in science and technology, in the production of technological responses that meet local needs, which includes the construction of data centers under local government management, obviously, but is not limited to that.
There is currently a dispute over the notions of sovereignty. So much so that the MTST will say: it is no use talking about sovereignty if there is no real popular sovereignty. We know that many social movements are outside this debate. The Lula government was under a lot of pressure and is now going to create a national artificial intelligence plan. But the plan often starts from the premise that we “cannot fall behind.” So, you buy sophisticated computers, you buy services, but there is little discussion about equalizing access to these technologies and, above all, creating the scientific conditions for us to produce our own technologies. According to official CGI (Brazilian Internet Steering Committee) research, there are still many people without internet access in Brazil. It has increased in recent years, but there are still many people who only access the internet via SIM cards. You pay five reais, but you can only access Facebook and WhatsApp. A survey from three years ago showed that among the poorest segments, a large number of people in Brazil think the internet is Facebook or Instagram.
A project of sovereignty would imply thinking about structural social inequalities on one hand, but it would also imply thinking about this inequality in terms of a development project: for example, in the matter of communications, if a company is going to have a concession to install cables, it needs to have a counterpart, which should be ensuring that all schools and hospitals have internet access. This never happens. They put the cable in the Southeast; even here in São Paulo, the richest city in Brazil, if you go to Morumbi, which is the richest neighborhood here, you have a greater number of internet antennas than in Paraisópolis, which is the favela just 100 meters from Morumbi. So capital builds its own logic of distribution without having to pay a “toll” to the State, because no one is saying let’s leave the internet, we don’t have the conditions like China has to create our own system, not today, but the demand is for plans that allow investment in local development and the overcoming of inequalities. In this sense, there is a dispute over which project of sovereignty we want. And the impression of many people, including myself, is that the federal government has been serving Big Tech more than social needs. 
Speaking of dependence, do you think there is also a form of epistemic dependence in the Global South?
Undoubtedly. In the 2000s, computer schools proliferated in Brazil, but they taught “Windows,” not computing. People were digitally alphabetized within Microsoft logic. This persists: today many think digital technology is summarized as Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. This epistemic colonization impoverishes creativity and political imagination. Alternatives exist—platforms and systems that are not based on data extractivism—but they are rarely considered. Politicians and public managers also reproduce this mentality: when we discuss alternatives to Big Tech, they argue that Amazon is “faster” or “cheaper.”
Sérgio Amadeu usually responds: what if the fastest is not the best? Perhaps the best is the most secure, or the one that responds to local needs. There is also a symbolic colonization: surveillance cameras, for example, are sold as synonymous with security, even when they do not reduce violence. Poor municipalities invest millions in cameras while lacking hospital beds and school supplies. No one knows who supplies this equipment, where the data goes, or what interests move this market.
To conclude: you research the relationship between digital systems and public health. In what way can technologies reproduce institutional and structural racism?
I am currently participating in two projects on algorithmic racism and digital health. We are living through an aggressive transition from conventional health to automated models of diagnosis and care. Apps offer therapeutic guidance, and even the SUS (Unified Health System) hires technologies of this type, justifying the replacement of professionals with automation. The question is: if algorithmic racism implies bias, what happens when we replace human care with automated models? The risk is that these mathematical biases translate into wrong diagnoses—and in health, an error means death.
There are already studies in England and the United States showing that, from a logical-mathematical point of view, if social inequalities are not considered in the adjustment of the models, they reproduce the same inequalities. In Brazil, where the Black population dies earlier, Black women die more in childbirth, and indigenous people have higher rates of tuberculosis, the danger is enormous. Racism is a social determinant of health. Therefore, automated systems need to take this dimension into account, but the problem is that those who define automation are the market—and the market privileges surveillance, profit, and global standardization. The struggle now is to ensure that digital care does not deepen the inequalities that already exist.