Interview with Guilherme Flynn Paciornik.
The introduction of Digital Tribulations, a series of intellectual interviews on the developments of digital sovereignty in latin america, can be read here. 
Image by Carlotta Artioli, Instagram @charl_art.
I met Guilherme – aka Guy – at the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers in Rio de Janeiro. He was unfortunate enough to receive one of the five physical copies of my first book that I brought to Brazil, rightfully laughing at my methodological section where I defined the research process as “serendipitous.”
When I later took a bus to São Paulo, Guy generously guided me through the largest city in Latin America—a place where wandering around on foot is not always recommended. As someone deeply embedded in the city and its social movements, he knew exactly the kind of authentic events and places that white leftist academics—myself included—tend to adore. 
We focused on the city’s musical life: several rodas de samba, a fanfarra, and a Palestinian bar. At the Fevro bar, located next to the railway tracks under a massive tree, with people sambando all around me, I witnessed a living example of amor & revolução. Behind the DJ booth, two written declarations captured the spirit of the place. One read “Declaramos Carnaval o Ano Inteiro“—a claim that the right to joy, to occupy the streets, and to suspend social hierarchies (the essence of Carnival) should not be confined to a single season but practiced as daily resistance against formal power and oppression. The other proclaimed: “Putaria é Resistência“—for which radical sexual freedom and bodily transgression are themselves political acts against a repressive system. 
Through him, I gained access to a wider network of people who supported my time in Brazil, for which I am deeply grateful. We eventually met for this interview in a gentrified café where I was working in the neighborhood of Vila Madalena, a hub for gringos—a term that in Brazil refers to almost all foreigners. Guy refused to do the interview inside, so we sat on a low wall on the sidewalk where he could smoke. In this conversation, Guy presents the vision of a proud socialist, shaped by years of grassroots practice as much as by his theoretical inclinations. 
Our meeting, and this subsequent interview, were perhaps the ultimate proof of that serendipity: a conversation that embodies his commitment to decentralized, autonomous spaces beyond the control of corporate platforms.
What is your background, and how did you become interested in digital sovereignty?
I graduated in social sciences and hold a doctorate in the sociology of technology from Campinas State University. My interest in digital sovereignty grew out of my work in public health, where I realized that the potential of digital tools was not being fully used to improve services. Since 2005, I have worked with technology at all three levels of government in Brazil. At the municipal level in São Paulo, I created and coordinated a program called Prevention at a Distance. At the state level in Acre, I worked on the Floresta Digital project, which aimed to integrate federal, state, and municipal services into a single digital platform for citizens, although its results were limited. At the federal level, with the Ministry of Culture in São Paulo, I participated in the Pontos de Cultura program, which is a Brazilian federal program that provides funding and support to community-based cultural initiatives, emphasizing local autonomy, cultural diversity, and digital inclusion.
Since 2012, I have been active in the hacker community and the free software movement, notably through the Hacker Bus project. My research has focused on how social movements create their own technological solutions in everyday struggles, developing their own philosophies of technology from lived practice rather than only from books. In this sense, I try not to create hierarchies between academic and activist knowledge, because both produce valid insights about the world and about social change. I have also been teaching for ten years in different universities.
Currently, I am a researcher and activist. My current work is a nationwide research project on the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) by internet service providers. As an activist, I am part of the coordination of the Digital Sovereignty Network, which includes about five hundred people working together to develop a national strategy for digital sovereignty and to influence government agendas. There are also public servants and academics. This year we spoke with four ministries. It is often exhausting but incredibly dynamic work: since June I have had almost ten meetings per week. Our working group is dedicated to changing public administration processes toward FOSS; one of our slogans is: Public money? Public code! 
How do you define “digital sovereignty”, and how do you see the current developments around digital sovereignty in Latin America, particularly in Brazil?
When I started studying the topic three years ago, I did not like the term, and I still think it is problematic, even if it is now widely accepted. The problem is both “digital” and “sovereignty”. People often associate “digital” with binary code, with zero and one, but what matters is not the binary nature. What matters are the affordances of the digital: the speed of transmission, the scale of what can be stored, and the miniaturization of information, which changes social space and social time.
The velocity of transmission and the size of what can be stored changes the time of politics in two directions. It can diminish time because events and information travel very fast and impact local politics. It can expand political time because digital space can store and prolong decision-making with low cost: there is not always a need to decide everything in a single in-person meeting, because you can have asynchronous meetings and decisions. 
But the digital also expands and contracts social space. It expands because more spaces and cultural artifacts become accessible at any moment, and it contracts because there is a sensation that all spaces are digitally linked and therefore closer. 
“Sovereignty” is also complicated. The traditional way of thinking about sovereignty, since Jean Bodin in the sixteenth century, refers to centralized state power and the nation-state system. But in the digital age, borders are less relevant, and classical political theory is not enough. We need to rethink sovereignty as something that can apply to different levels of collectives, communities, and sometimes even individuals, not only to nation-states. For instance, Indigenous digital sovereignty is sovereignty as a way of life rooted in specific cultures.
Rather than searching for the perfect definition, I see the concept as part of an ongoing social struggle, which is more fertile. The disputes around its meaning are political and productive. As  Bourdieu once noted this quoting Austrian philologist and literary critic Leo Spitzer, the polysemy of a word is the visible vestige of the historical social struggle for its meaning. 
Governments across Latin America are only beginning to take this seriously. In the region there are historical precedents like Chile’s Cybersyn experiment in the 1970s, or Cuba’s digital initiatives. Latin America is many different people, and we used to gather more to discuss free software than to discuss digital sovereignty, as we do now. Uruguay is often cited as a positive case: they run their data centers with free software and have comprehensive programs. But in most countries, including Brazil, the debate is still in its infancy. Many lawmakers and public servants do not really understand what personal data means or how platforms operate.
Nowadays, many think sovereignty can be achieved just by hosting data centers locally, ignoring issues like legal jurisdiction and cloud control. Besides existing hardware-level vulnerabilities, what they often forget is that the US Cloud Act allows the US government to request information from US-based companies, even if the servers or data centers are outside the United States. 
In this sense, we need political education at all levels: ministries, civil servants, and parliament. Digital sovereignty is today where environmental or gender policies were decades ago: the beginning of a long struggle. And a central point of this struggle is avoiding US platforms to be able to influence political behavior, fueling hatred, misogyny, and far-right ideologies. Young people can drift from their families’ values because of the ideological content they encounter online. Schools, leisure, and public spaces can become more reactionary under the influence of algorithmically produced culture. It is not simply a veil being lifted to reveal a society that was always the same; platforms can actively create and expand new reactionary individuals and groups.
We are trying to counteract this by forming coalitions between movements, from feminist and housing groups to rural workers, and by raising awareness of how platforms monopolize and control visibility of the social world. They decide which posts are visible and which are not. This power over visibility undermines social movements’ ability to reach their own base. Many activists still think one million views means mass outreach, but in a country of 213 million, that is tiny. We need to reconnect online mobilization with offline presence, combining digital tools with physical organization to rebuild deeper, community-based politics.
What has changed in the debate and in the movements in the last decade?
There is more interest in these topics now than there was a decade ago. The rise of misinformation and the political actions of major platform owners had the effect of making people pay attention. When moderation policies weaken, people become aware of what is at stake, including the normalization of hate speech and attacks on rights.
In Brazil, the Digital Sovereignty Network was almost inactive after the last elections, but it is alive again. We thought a small meeting in Brasilia would attract twenty people, but one hundred and twenty came. Movements that were not previously linked to digital sovereignty joined, alongside initiatives such as the Internet Legal campaign. Major actors, including the CUT union in Sao Paulo and the World Women’s March, showed up. The government itself was surprised.
External pressure also matters. When US politics signals protection of big tech and increased trade conflicts, it can push the movement to grow, because people feel the dominance and the need for alternatives. What we are trying to do is connect social movements and the government to create a National Plan on digital sovereignty. It is tiring work and often unpaid, but there is genuine momentum now.
How do you connect digital sovereignty to Web 3.0 and alternative social media, like the ones you build and research?
Extending the idea of sovereignty to collectives and Indigenous communities links directly to alternative technologies. For over twenty years, people talked about “the internet” without really engaging with how software is made and what it enables. I never liked mainstream social media, and I closed my accounts.
The Fediverse, short for Federated Universe, is built in Free and Open Source Software and is federated and distributed. Different types of social media platforms are connected by the ActivityPub protocol. For microblogging there is Mastodon; for macroblogging there are platforms such as Friendica; for image sharing there is Pixelfed; for video hosting there is PeerTube; for discussion groups there is Lemmy; for audio sharing there is Funkwhale, and so on.
All of these are software you can install on a server to start a community. One installation is called an instance. The community decides the features of the instance, such as character limits, and whether there will be custom emojis. Most importantly, communities decide who they federate with and who they do not.
From one account you can see the federated network, across many servers, without a single center and without a few companies deciding who sees what and when. In general there are no advertisements, and feeds are chronological. The principle is communication between people, not turning people into data for profit.
We create and host our own instances of the Fediverse, like Organica.Social on Mastodon, where communities can set their own rules, moderation systems, and features. For example, you can prioritize public health and science above misinformation and conspiracy theories.
The main difference with corporate platforms is that communities decide what interactions are possible. Big tech’s real job is often to hide parts of the world: Gaza disappears, Cuba disappears. They show you only what you already like, and that destroys informational diversity. In our networks, you can build local instances tied to neighborhoods or topics, creating real, plural public spaces.
We are also experimenting with ultra-slow and non feed-based social media. For example, Miga, Make Internet Great Again, is blockchain-based, and you can only post one meme per week, one idea per week, one piece of gossip per week, and one book per month. It is a way to reject the addictive logic of continuous feeds.
People often know the problems of big tech, so a question emerges: why do they not move to alternative social media? One hypothesis is cognitive dissonance: people know, but they stay. Another approach is to think in terms of damage reduction, a term used in public health for heavy drug use. In that sense, the Fediverse can be a step down the ladder, away from the most harmful dynamics.
There is always a question of scale. Decentralized networks can grow, but growth is cultural more than technical. When unions, movements, and influencers understand the collective logic, they bring their people with them.
Big tech is trying to invade this space too. BlueSky and Threads now use federated protocols, but under venture capital logic, which reproduces many of the same problems. I am also concerned with age verification, and with bots and automated profiles invading Fediverse communities, and with developing tools that help human moderation identify racist, misogynistic, and fascist content.
What role do you see for the state in building digital public infrastructure and decentralized media?
We are used to a centralized way of thinking: either something is state owned, or privately owned. The Fediverse does not work like that. At the same time, we are struggling with the government to change how we communicate. Take Bolsa Famillia, which provides money to families that meet certain criteria. We argue that information should not be distributed via WhatsApp, but through a Mastodon instance or another open-source platform.
To be clear, the state can have its own instances to distribute information, reports, and news. This helps public visibility and growth of the Fediverse without removing the power of community instances, because everything is federated.
There are already examples. Ibram, the Brazilian Institute of Museums, oversees more than one thousand museums, and about two hundred of them use Tainacan. It is a WordPress plugin that can connect to the Fediverse, which means WordPress blogs can become part of the federated ecosystem.
At the same time, it would be a nightmare to have only state-owned social media. In many contexts, that would make it difficult to criticize the government and would threaten freedom of expression. In the Fediverse you can have both: state instances and community instances, connected but independently moderated.
Because it is Free and Open Source Software, you can study and change the code for your needs. It can also be georeferenced, so people can connect to what happens in their neighborhood: a show on the street, an exercise program for older people, or a road closure because pipes are being renewed. We call this campaign FediGov.br: bringing the government into the Fediverse in a decentralized way.
Speaking of infrastructure, what about Brazil’s public fintech, PIX? Can it be considered an advancement in digital sovereignty?
It is quite remarkable. While other electronic payment methods in Brazil incur fees, PIX operates with zero tariffs and no taxation for individuals. Consider that American card companies like Visa, American Express, and Mastercard hold a large share of the market. With PIX, businesses of all sizes can avoid paying fees per transaction to these companies, and this keeps money inside the country.
PIX enables direct financial transactions between individuals through a cryptographic and secure system. This has frustrated North American companies, which had sought to implement a payment system via WhatsApp and later abandoned that project. Now WhatsApp has integrated PIX without fees, recognizing that adoption would otherwise be limited.
PIX is a positive step, but digital sovereignty is not only about payments. It is about the broader technological ecosystem and who controls it.
Let’s talk about the imaginaries of digital sovereignty. What kind of future do you envision for the next twenty years?
Some philosophers distinguish between the future, meaning everything you can imagine, and what you actually build given concrete circumstances. We do have a vision. I am a socialist, against the exploitation of men and women by men and women. We already have the technology to live well and to live happily.
Digital technologies can help connect the richness of the world’s cultures, and also the cultures that exist in each neighborhood. But the digital is not the central issue in itself. It is part of the struggle, a set of tools that can make some things easier.
The main idea is that we should work less. We could have different gender relations, different race relations, and different relations among cultures and ethnicities. People could have real self-determination, and at the same time access broad culture, not only what an algorithm recommends.
Marx said a person could do productive work in the morning and be a critic or an artist in the afternoon. Digital tools make that kind of life more possible. But capital can respond by creating “digital drugs” that addict people and reduce the possibility of real communication and collective organization.
Regulation is possible. China’s platform regulation is an interesting example: they have rules limiting addictive algorithmic design, such as infinite scroll. China is not a model or a dream for us, but it shows that strong regulation can happen, even if one does not agree with their broader political project.
I agree, the role of digital technologies should be giving everybody time to be wise – that’s the really revolutionary point of communism. Finally, what pragmatic steps can Latin American countries take in the coming years?
We need to build alternatives, each country following its own path but with shared goals. It is not only about governments or leaders. It is about daily work by social movements, educators, and activists. We must challenge the regimes of visibility and attention imposed by global platforms.
If I had to choose only one priority, I would focus on building alternative social media even before building public data infrastructure, because control over visibility is now central to the political struggle. This is ultimately a politics of care: care for people, technologies, and other species. It requires new concepts, new languages, and our own philosophical tools, not only those inherited from Europe. As Brecht said: “Don’t accept the habitual as a natural thing. In times of disorder, of organized confusion, of dehumanized humanity, nothing should seem natural. Nothing should seem impossible to change.” The future is not written yet, and we are going to fulfill our part in this chore. The future is free.