The following interview needs a longer introduction to properly contextualize the Brazilian social movements background. I first met Pedro Burity, a graduate student and researcher at the University of Brasilia, at the Association of internet Research conference, this October in Rio de Janeiro. Pedro researches sociot-echnical arrangements and imaginaries for social movements in Brazil. He works with civic tech, designing digital participatory processes and public services for governments. 
In Sao Paolo, we attended the launch of a book of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (MTST), the Homeless Workers’ Movement, who projected the figure of Guilherme Boulos (a former activist, today a minister of Lula’s government). The MTST derived from the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement founded in 1984, is, which successfully organizes landless peasants through direct action (land occupations) and long-term organization, helping hundreds of thousands of families gain land access, establish cooperatives, and influence agrarian reform policies.
After the interview, which took place in Sao Paolo in a extremely crowded parque Ibirapuera, we quickly became friends, and I ended up spending a week at his house in Brasilia, where we continued our conversation and visited the various places of resistance of the city, such as Casa Comun – a shared space in Brasília dedicated to civil society organizations, movements and collectives that want to do political advocacy and incidency – the Ocupa Mercado Sul, and the University of Brasilia.
I enjoyed Brasilia’s campus, big and sunny, with brutalist architecture, many plants, a tragic history of brutal murders during the military dictatorship, which includes a designed place for socialization, conversation, and petting name beijódromo. The university, which welcomed us with students dancing to a concert of forrò on the roof during the lunch break on a Friday, seemed to me the best part of the city which otherwise is the result of a poor high-modernist architecture and planning ideal, one that signed a Faustian pact, trading legibility for good conditions of living (see for instance J.C. Scott’s masterful critique of the shortcomings of centralized planning, which uses the city as a case study). A city built for cars that still has a lot of traffic; where human activities are zoned – there is a pharmacy neighbour, a hospital neighboor, etc; a city that, how Pedro explains, has ended up internalizing the bureaucracy in the way of thinking of people. 
We also visited Ocupa Mercado Sul (Mercado Sul Vive), a concrete experiment in popular digital sovereignty in Brazil: an occupation and a lively space of popular culture, with music, theatre, cinema, popular education and the monthly Ecofeira in the old public market of Taguatinga. The Ocupa, which emerged as a response to real estate speculation and to reclaim an empty, degraded area based on the right to the city and the social function of property, is shown to use by Angel, a formidable activist and free software advocate. When we arrived, he welcomed us in space by counter-recording my interview with its own Iphone, narrating that the Ocupa is part of a larger network, the Rede Mocambos, a solidarity network connecting quilombolas, the Afro‑Brazilian communities formed by descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped captivity, with Indigenous and popular communities, artists, and artisans to build a “world shaped by their own territories, memories and struggles”. Most relevantly, he continued, Rede Mocambos combines cultural and political organisation with the development of community‑controlled digital infrastructure, with tools like Baobáxia, and community data centres that enables communities to store, manage and share their own audio‑visual archives and documents without depending on Big Tech or constant internet access. The network seeks to build autonomous “digital territories” that mirror and protect physical territories. 
After that, together with another friend, Rafael, we visited the Chapada dos Veadeiros, a national park with long hikes and stunning waterfalls, and during those days I learned the word gambiarra, which would prove useful for the rest of my trip, that refers to a clever, often makeshift, improvised solution or repair using limited resources, something like a “jury‑rig”. A bolsonarista hairdresser in Salvador later confirmed the concept in practice: in Brazil, everything is gambiarra.
In the interview, Pedro discusses the concept of popular digital sovereignty and the centrality of social movements in political change. Brazil may not be a utopia realized, but it has impressive base of popular self-organization that came to elect Boulos – the ministro do povo (ministry of the people) as someone screamed at the samba after the book launch – which highlight the link between popular movements, political imagination and state‑level change. It also has Central Bank which developed the first successful public Fintech in the world, o PIX, a public payment infrastructure that quickly and radically transformed daily life of millions of Brasilians, especially poor. As Pedro once told me: “Pix saved us from WhatsApp.”
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I’d like to start with a terminological clarification. What are we talking about when we talk about digital sovereignty, and what do social movements mean by popular digital sovereignty? 
When we talk about digital sovereignty, we can refer to different traditions and different strands of thought. In my research, when we speak of sovereignty, we try to bring the perspective of people’s self‑determination within a given territory. I try to think of this idea in a way that is not only tied to the State, which is usually what happens when we talk about sovereignty. We try to bring in more of a popular perspective, linked to autonomy. And, when we talk about Latin America, we have a long tradition of struggles for sovereignty and autonomy, from different perspectives. It’s in this sense that we try to work with sovereignty as a form of self‑determination.
From there, we move into the digital dimension. The digital part is a bit more complex because we are talking about a structure, about a reality that involves very powerful actors. It’s hard to even imagine what digital sovereignty would actually be. We have been facing this difficulty of imagination, of the imaginary, of the ability to create different worlds. Digital sovereignty comes in precisely in this sense: how a people, how a society, manages to self‑determine in different ways, to create its own alternative worlds within the technology we already know and within what we don’t yet know, what remains to be invented.
The entrance to the university of Brasilia.
Don’t the weaknesses of the concept of “the people” in the democratic tradition risk being repeated when we talk about popular digital sovereignty?
The notion of “the people” really does come a lot from Rousseau’s perspective, from the general will, but it has also been heavily transformed over time, not only in theory but also in practice, especially when we talk about “popular” and all the contradictions that the popular brings with it. A perspective that seems very interesting to me is that of Antonio Negri. It’s a perspective that has inspired many revolutionary movements in Latin America. Hugo Chávez himself used to say that the entire Venezuelan revolution draws its theoretical inspiration from Negri’s idea of constituent power, and that it is from this constituent power that sovereignty is born.
The difference from the Rousseauian perspective is that this general will becomes much more a matter of emancipation of people, not in the sense of a general will of single, homogeneous people, but of a diverse, diffuse people, povos, in which the general will means the inclusion of all these peopl within an emancipatory horizon. It is a much more class‑based perspective, which fuels several movements and revolutions in Latin America and helps to build what the people actually are, with all their contradictions, difficulties, and problems, but from a place that is different from the rest of the world. The Global South, or at least Latin America, has a different perspective on what “the people”, el pueblo, is. If we look at the many union leaders and revolutionary leaders we have had, that fits into this logic.
How does this history of struggle and colonialism help us understand what you’re calling popular digital sovereignty?
The history of Latin America is a history of struggle. Since the very beginning of colonisation, we’ve been dealing with different technologies and tools of oppression against our peoples. Digital colonialism is just one more form of this. Big Tech is bringing in ever more sophisticated technologies of oppression, surveillance, and colonialism. But we, as Latin Americans, have always managed to find a way out. It’s very striking how creative Latin American people are. There are similarities in the ways different peoples have dealt with colonisation historically, but it’s interesting to see that all of them managed to build their own tools of struggle from their own territories, cultures, and specificities.
It’s no different when it comes to digital technology. The Brazilian example is very powerful as a real possibility of building other worlds. And, within Latin America, we also have equally transformative initiatives, like FACTTIC, a large organization of autonomous cooperatives very closely tied to the feminist and autonomous tradition. If we look back, we can remember the Zapatista uprisings and revolutions: already back then, they were building liberating radios, community radios. In Brazil, we had hijackings of radio frequencies to broadcast communist messages during the military dictatorship. Latin America, with all its different people, each has its own way of building its digital sovereignty. And of course we will always stand together, as neighboring and solidarity‑based countries, in building the possibility of new technology that is more independent and emancipated from the technologies of the Global North, especially Silicon Valley.
Let’s move to the Brazilian case. What do you see as the interesting developments in the last few years? What has changed compared to some years ago?
I’m going to go back a bit to the idea of the State and talk a bit more about the difficulties of theorizing this “people” and of how we actually talk about digital sovereignty in practice. Today, digital sovereignty is a very hot topic, addressed by many countries, leaders, States and companies. It’s a contested concept. Part of that dispute comes from the companies, from Big Tech. On one side you have the States. On the other, this diffuse, confused, hard‑to‑pin‑down people we’ve been talking about.  In the Brazilian context, the issue of digital sovereignty has become a crucial point. Under Lula’s government, it appears in the way the government has been positioning itself ideologically on what sovereignty is, what it means to have control over one’s own resources, over one’s data. From there, we begin to talk about data, and this has become a very strong narrative, especially in the debate around regulating Big Tech, which is one of Lula’s major priorities today: regulation of Meta, of social media in general.
There are many contradictions in this discourse coming from the State, because the State is made up of many players, many figures and interests. The same contradictions that exist in the concept of sovereignty are present within state institutions. Today we have very important actors whose discourse is not very aligned with what actually happens in government. While digital sovereignty is being defended at the level of discourse, the government follows a different logic in practice, bringing large foreign data centres here, offering every kind of tax exemption. The systems the government uses today are Microsoft systems, Big Tech systems. So today, if these companies wanted to, Brazil would grind to a halt. That’s a very serious contradiction we face at the level of the State.
You mentioned that you think digital sovereignty on different levels. What do you mean? 
That’s where the popular perspective comes in. What is actually in the interest of these people? I tend to think from a more class‑based perspective. Is it in the people’s interest to have their data controlled by a large corporation, or to have the possibility of determining what will be done with the data they produce? Is it in their interest to be able to understand what they’re doing on their phone, to understand their smartphone, how their data are being used and what technology actually is? Part of what I understand as popular digital sovereignty is trying to break with this technical alienation we live with today, simply accepting what we use, of having an uncritical view of the tools we rely on. It’s about building the possibility of understanding and having autonomy—bringing these two concepts together—to choose the technologies we would like to use as Brazilians and as Latin Americans.
I usually think of sovereignty on three levels. On a more individual level, it’s about having the autonomy to choose whether you’re going to use WhatsApp, or another means of communication, whether you’re going to join certain platforms or not, and doing so with awareness of what’s at stake. On the community level, it’s about having control within a territory, within a community: running a small database, an infrastructure that enables independent communication, that allows that territory to have its own technological means. At the level of the State, it is above all about ensuring, through public policy, support for everything I’ve been talking about: support for this possibility of self‑determination. The importance of the State, in this role, is precisely to provide backing for these bottom‑up initiatives, to provide infrastructure and financial resources via public policy. That, for me, is the State’s main function in promoting sovereignty in the digital realm.
The entrance to the Ocupa Mercado Sul.
I tend to think that Big Tech platforms are, above all, infrastructures, with a few novelties. For example, they change more quickly, they allow third‑party services to be built on top of their infrastructure. But the history of infrastructures shows that there is little room for autonomy and self‑determination once these infrastructures – think of roads, or electricity – are already in place. How was PIX possible?
In terms of infrastructure, we’re talking about Brazil, a country of continental proportions. Brazil has a public higher‑education infrastructure that is free and of very high quality. Being a country in the Global South, Brazil built Petrobras, a company that operates in oil exploration, production, refining, sale and transport, which today competes with big multinationals like Shell, among others. All of this was built here, with local technology, labour and brains—sovereign technology. Today we’re in a complicated scenario, in which Big Tech’s dominance in technological terms is so strong that it’s hard for us to picture other scenarios. But we do have the conditions—in terms of education, people, territory and, I believe, imagination—to build an infrastructure that allows us to achieve this sovereignty, this self‑determination over how we’re going to develop our technology, as happened with PIX. 
PIX was born out of efforts to think a technology that would be unimaginable in the United States, for example. The way the US treats PIX shows this: they often see it as an unfair competitor to their credit card companies. But the key point is that PIX is not a commercial competitor in that sense. PIX is a public payment infrastructure. This perspective of the commons, of the public, is something we built and that today threatens the hegemony of US payment systems, for example. And here the popular aspect appears again. PIX is the result of the work of public servants. Where did these public servants come from? From public universities. Today, public universities are, for the most part, made up of women and, increasingly, of Black, brown and Indigenous people. These are increasingly diverse communities of students and researchers who embody Brazil’s cultural and technological richness. And when I talk about technology, I don’t mean only in the narrow sense of high‑end digital tech, but also in terms of social technologies, of how we organise ourselves as a community. From these social technologies, mixed with technique, with scientific and technological development, we are able to create marvels like PIX.
This ranges from small platforms for specific communities all the way up to the level at which these popular sectors manage to reach the State, influence public policy, bring in diversity. Even with all the difficulties and in what is often a catastrophic‑looking scenario, we manage to imagine a new world in which we can truly be digitally sovereign. 
Angel and a local film maker at the Ocupa.
 What are the specific conditions in Brazil that allow the transition from social movements to the government, and what does this tell us about the current relevance of social movements in transforming reality?
There’s a very powerful phrase that comes from social movements: “Only struggle changes life.” I think social movements are responsible for radical changes in how we largely see and build the world. These are movements that position themselves as actors who really imagine new scenarios, who are there in pursuit of social change. It’s from social movements that ideas and possibilities for different worlds are born. The case of the MTST is emblematic. One of the movement’s initiatives—outside the strictly digital universe but squarely in the realm of social technologies—is the Cozinhas Solidárias , “Solidarity Kitchens”, created to feed unhoused people in the cold nights of São Paulo. It started as an initiative feeding about 200 people a day in a public square and, little by little, with organization, work and these social technologies, it gained momentum and became an increasingly popular idea, a good idea. Today, roughly four years after the initiative began, the Cozinhas Solidárias have become public policy, and there are already thousands of kitchens around Brazil, feeding thousands of people every day. This is born from a small initiative within a social movement. We often underestimate the potential of a small, transformative idea. When we talk about the technology hub, we’re talking about Ocupa Lab, a social laboratory for technological innovation. It starts as a small lab, a 10‑square‑metre room in an occupation on the outskirts of São Paulo. There, people who often don’t have basic reading and text‑comprehension skills are taught how to use a mobile phone, how to deal with basic technological functionalities, placing people from these communities into the job market as programmers and software developers, and bringing a new worldview into this tech universe, which today is so skewed by the ideals propagated by Silicon Valley.
The potential of this initiative is enormous. By bringing in people with a different mindset, who think about technology in terms of how it can and should be, the sky is the limit. The movement’s idea is that these initiatives—from the tech school, which offers free courses, to “Contrate Quem Luta” (“Hire Those Who Struggle”), a digital solidarity‑economy platform that connects workers from the movement to people interested in hiring them, to clients—will become public policies, involving public infrastructure, public resources provided by the State, ever‑growing participation and ever‑greater technological development of these platforms, so that we can envisage an emancipatory, different, sovereign technology.
Popular digital sovereignty really is born from below, from those at the bottom. It’s initiatives are like those of the MTST itself, with its struggle for housing and territory, which today necessarily runs through technology. We have the MTST; we have initiatives that follow more autonomous currents, like MariaLab, which seeks to build secure infrastructures to protect the privacy of social movements, of individuals, of feminist groups. We have initiatives like data_labe (Datalab), which creates everyday tools to make life easier for people living in the peripheries, which is where the people are. 
In Latin America, we have networks like FACTTIC, an organization of independent, autonomous cooperatives, very closely connected to the feminist and autonomous tradition, which shows that it is possible to build technological‑production networks outside the traditional corporate logic. It’s these initiatives that will provide the possibility of building a new kind of technology, of imagining a world without Big Techs, a world in which we can truly have autonomy over what kind of technology we’re going to use and can determine ourselves as a technological power capable, above all, of caring for its own population. 
Pedro and Rafael at the faculty of political sciences in Brasilia.
Do you think there are some practical steps that, over the next five years, Brazil or other Latin American countries can take to curb or at least reshape the penetration of Big Techs?
Absolutely. We’ve talked a lot about the popular, but I believe the State has a fundamental role here. Popular initiatives already exist; they need support. From the State’s point of view, there are a number of challenges in terms of platform regulation. Brazil has been experimenting with innovative and important initiatives in this field, but at the same time there are constant struggles in domestic politics, because the lobbying efforts of these companies are very strong. Regulation is, in my view, the first step: regulation of social media and, now, of artificial intelligence as well, built with the participation of social movements, civil society and the broader third sector.
Then comes investment. We have a large public higher‑education structure that is free and of high quality. It needs investment, labs—including social labs—resources. It needs state incentives to create new things. There is also the issue of creating our own data centres, rather than simply importing Amazon data centres because we have clean, abundant energy. We are capable of building our own data infrastructures, without importing infrastructures from abroad or bringing in foreign data centres that pollute what we have and keep our data under the control of US companies. We need to have our own data infrastructure so we can have greater control, hold the key to that vault which is currently in US hands. Today, a large part of our government data and citizens’ data is stored in databases abroad. Changing that is a fundamental step.
In the end, you speak not only of technological sovereignty but also of epistemic sovereignty. What does that mean concretely, for instance in the debate on artificial intelligence?
It’s not enough to try to compete in this technological landscape purely within the logic of the “artificial intelligence race”. That’s not sufficient. I don’t think we should enter this race in the same way it is framed today. Our role, as the Global South, as Brazil, as a people, is to think about the possibility of actually building new technologies, to imagine an artificial intelligence different from what we have today, or even to rethink what “artificial intelligence” means to us. Sovereignty is also about that: sovereignty of thought, of episteme. Technological sovereignty is deeply tied to epistemic sovereignty, to the production of knowledge and of meanings attached to that knowledge.
To think about epistemic sovereignty is to ask who defines what “intelligence” is, which data matter, which problems deserve to be prioritised by these technologies. It is to be able to say, starting from our Latin American experience, what the urgencies are that we want technology to address: hunger, housing, transport, police violence, environmental destruction. And, from there, to produce knowledge, data, methods and tools that respond to these issues, without simply importing ready‑made models from the Global North. In short, it’s not only about saying “we’re going to build our own technology,” but also about asserting: we are going to decide what counts as relevant technology, what counts as intelligence, what counts as progress, on the basis of our own criteria and needs.
The entrance to the Casa Comum.
The book launch of at the MTST in Sao Paulo.