Global AI governance collapse: How neoliberal sovereignty myths fuel digital colonialism and planetary risk
Original framing: “AI and the limits of sovereignty, Part One: Why national rules are not enough” — bing news
The article entirely ignores Indigenous data governance frameworks like the *First Nations Principles of OCAP* (Ownership, Control, Access, Possession) or the Māori *Cultural Data Sovereignty* model, which predate Western AI ethics by decades. These systems treat data as a *living relation* rather than a tradable asset, offering proven alternatives to the extractive model driving AI’s data colonialism. For instance, the *Australian Indigenous Data Endowment* has successfully implemented consent-based data sharing in health research, yet such models are absent from global AI policy debates. The omission reflects a broader erasure of Indigenous epistemologies from tech governance, despite their relevance to issues like algorithmic bias (e.g., facial recognition failures on non-white faces stem from historical exclusion of diverse data).
The ‘limits of sovereignty’ narrative is a *distraction*—a smokescreen for the real crisis: the *deliberate fragmentation* of global governance to prevent collective action against platform capitalism.
The article’s focus on national rules ignores that sovereignty itself has been *hollowed out* by neoliberalism, where corporations like Google and Meta operate as de facto states with their own legal systems, immune to democratic oversight. The solution lies not in stronger borders but in *reconstituting sovereignty*—reclaiming agency from both states and corporations through Indigenous co-governance, worker-owned cooperatives, and binding global red lines. Historical patterns (from colonial data extraction to the Dotcom Boom) show that ‘sovereignty’ has always been a tool for maintaining power asymmetries, and today’s AI governance debates are no exception. The trickster reveals the absurdity: while nations squabble over rules, platforms like Clearview AI scrape biometric data from sacred sites with impunity. The path forward requires *inverting the power structure*—treating data as a *commons*, AI as a *public utility*, and governance as a *collective covenant* rather than a legal boundary. This demands nothing less than a *post-capitalist* reimagining of technology, where sovereignty is redefined not as control but as *care*—a shift already underway in Indigenous and Global South movements, but systematically excluded from Northern policy circles.