In the region, technological appropriation is a conflictive field where colonial-capitalist and historical relations of inequality are expressed. Therefore, if before we asked ourselves "who appropriates what?", today it is urgent to complicate the question: who and what technologies appropriate whom and what territories, bodies and data? The situated component of our analysis lies in the profound critique of the universalizing and globalist pretension of the rationality that drives hegemonic digital projects. Like every universalist project, it hides the Eurocentric and archaic provincialism embedded in the modernity that gives rise to it. This perspective engages with the historical contributions of the GT regarding the critical social appropriation of technologies, placing the territory - understood as bodies, languages, cultures and ecosystems - at the center of the issue. In other words, the appropriation of digital technologies cannot be seen as a unilateral phenomenon, aimed at observing the massive processes of datafication and extractivism of all kinds. Echoing the community feminisms and cyberfeminisms of the South (Cabnal, 2010), we are committed to understanding technology as body-territory-data in dispute, adopting a multispecies and cyborg ontology (Haraway, 1991). Far from any dominant technological determinism, we are compelled to think about new grammars of interaction between humans and non-humans. Because all technology, even the most basic and analog, functions in the multi-species and cyborg framework that is this world, in complex, situated, contradictory ways. And yet, if the human is gendered, but also racialized and classist, we cannot ignore the racialization and genderization of the technologies that govern this world. Not only because artificial intelligence and big tech, based on deep learning, have taken over, but because we intend to challenge it. At the last Clacso meeting we asked ourselves: Is artificial intelligence reinforcing a monocultural view of the world? How can we ensure that AI models respect and promote linguistic, cultural, and epistemic diversity, especially in regions like Latin America? Undoubtedly, so-called artificial intelligence is threatening not only the survival of cultural diversity but also the most basic right to a good life. Today, the entire production chain of digital technology is based on the concentration of infrastructure in the global north, on the plundering of territories in the peripheries of the world to capture metals and water that sustain them, on the international division of labor with data, on environmental pollution from electronic waste, on the design of technologies conceived by white men from the north, with their racist, sexist, LGBTQ+ imaginaries, etc. The second question, how to ensure that AI models promote diversity, is the most difficult to answer and the one that generates the most skepticism. Global AI is largely based on machine learning (ML) and deep learning. The AI ​​used by large corporations depends on an extraordinary amount of data, known as big data, where the volume and quality of the data are crucial. Based on the massive extraction of data, its processing and hierarchization, the aim is to predict and prescribe human and non-human behaviors. If the "intelligent" systems They make decisions and predict behaviors based on data-driven learning, but what happens when the data that fed the systems is not sufficiently representative of the world's linguistic, epistemic, and cultural diversity? Data are cultural constructs that are established from the moment any phenomenon is digitized. Creating data, naming it, classifying it, ranking it, relating it, is one of the most powerful ways to model knowledge about a specific domain. Data is the emergent property of intertwined systems of oppression. They function as symptoms; they are the tip of the iceberg of coloniality. Data are in a way historical and political records of our time; they are not mere neutral inputs but a record of the past and the present and, worse, they pretend to be of the future. Therefore, using databases whose design lacks diverse cultural and linguistic perspectives, and an awareness of the social responsibility involved, reproduces the cultural hegemony of their producers, produces epistemicide, and creates particular viewpoints with universal pretensions, shaped by the racist, misogynistic, and classist order of the technopower owners. Are data "situated knowledge"? but with pretensions of universality. Data pluralism involves thinking about a data ontology: What can be data and what cannot? Who defines it? Who cares about that data? For what? What do you do with them? In essence, creating data, naming it, classifying it, ranking it, relating it, is one of the most powerful forms of power, of shaping knowledge about a specific domain, that is, of generating cultures or eliminating them from the map of knowledge. Therefore, monoculture and biases are not a technical problem, nor are they solved by algorithmic transparency; they have a direct relationship with the political economy of data because they come from subjects situated in social relations in which our people do not participate (except as trained labor to label data with taxonomies of men from the north, and therefore they reflect, reinforce and reproduce stereotypes and prejudices).

Our universities, institutions, and governments, even those that are progressive, tend to rely increasingly on companies from the Global North. Today, the West depends on three companies: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, which together control almost 70% of the global market. We lack national and regional infrastructure to safeguard our data at the national level. In our region, this translates into dependency in multiple ways. For example, digital identification systems (physical documents, civil registries, national identity cards, passports), formerly managed by governments, are now managed by technology companies and/or private consortiums, providing the infrastructure for authenticating individuals to third parties (banks, applications, services, governments).

Faced with regimes that produce digital epistemicide, erase languages, disregard worldviews, and silence specific forms of violence, we propose epistemic pluralism of data, community and cooperative infrastructures, and technological sovereignty, even if these are small projects without global reach. These should be adopted by nation-states as part of their technological sovereignty projects, without contradicting their contextual circumstances. Under the slogan "Strengthening Global South Cooperation for Inclusive and Sustainable Governance," the 17th BRICS Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in July, dedicated its first day to artificial intelligence (AI) and adopted a declaration establishing principles for its global governance. It positioned BRICS as a key player in AI regulation. Because of the mass destruction promoted by Big Tech, only this powerful supranational organization challenges the rule of the Global North. Without them, we will be unable to confront, at a national level, the persistent appropriation, via technology, of any aspect of planetary life. Therefore, our Working Group's proposal is situated within this geopolitical tension: to confront the persistent appropriation perpetrated through digital technologies, understanding that, without a challenge and powerful digital activism from organizations in the Global South, the appropriation of any symptom of planetary life will be inevitable.

Our analytical paths have a long history. Since 2012, the Network of Researchers on the Appropriation of Digital Technologies (RIAT), comprised of members from various countries and formally organized in 2019 as the Working Group on the Appropriation of Digital Technologies and Intersectionalities, has been undertaking a collective reflection on the conceptualization of technology appropriation and the promotion of related experiences. RIAT, and later the CLACSO Working Group, were established to share the research and intervention work of their members within a collaborative framework, through various meetings: 2012 at the National University of General Sarmiento (UNGS), Buenos Aires, with participants from Argentina and Spain; 2014 and 2015 at the National University of Córdoba, with participants from Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil; and 2016 at the National University of Patagonia and UNGS, with participants from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, and France—the moment of RIAT's formal establishment. In 2017, at the Gino Germani Research Institute, University of Buenos Aires, with participants from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and Uruguay. In 2018, at ObservaTic of the University of the Republic, Montevideo, with participants from Argentina, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. In 2019, RIAT and the Working Group (GT) at the University of Los Lagos (Osorno, Chile). In 2020, the Working Group organized "Who Appropriates What?" in Argentina and developed the Colloquium Series on Digital Appropriation in Times of Pandemic in Uruguay. In 2021, the Working Group organized "Digital Citizenship, Inequalities, and Transformation in Latin America and the Caribbean" in Argentina, with participants from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Colombia, Spain, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. And in 2022, 2023, and 2024, in Brazil, the Thematic Colloquium "Technopolitical Utopias for Well-being" was held virtually from the Federal University of Bahia.

The network maintains a website, where published books can also be found (https://apropiaciondetecnologias.com/), which compile articles authored by members of the network and the CLACSO Working Group. We conduct research on the manner, nature, and context in which individuals and social groups engage with digital technologies, as well as the conditions of their appropriation. We address topics such as the analysis and evaluation of gaps, technological skills and competencies, the importance of unequal cultural, social, and economic contexts on appropriation, the analysis of appropriation processes by collectives and social movements, the impact of technologies on societies and cities, public policies for digital inclusion, and the role of the market and emerging innovations in this field.

These multi- and interdisciplinary approaches are based on different approaches: technology use theory, software studies, political economy of communication, edu-communication, educational technology, techno-politics, geopolitics and biopolitics, cyberfeminism, technofeminism, among others.

We understand that the appropriation of technologies expresses, in various ways, a potential for autonomy for collective or individual subjects in relation to the expectations of markets or governments. We recognize that digital platforms constitute interaction interfaces whose "grammars" contain implicit models of use and users, but we also recognize the resistance and resilience inherent in the projects and processes of subversive and rebellious technologies. Understanding the links between the market, public policies, and appropriation practices are aspects that demand our attention, as they are articulated and fraught with tension.

Conceptually, we assume that the production of technologies is the result of a human process embedded in, and a product of, the power relations and dynamics—cultural, social, economic, political, and ideological—of our societies. Activity in, on, with, and against technology is a central element of this understanding of appropriation. From this perspective, appropriation expresses complex processes, and its conceptualization refers to individual and/or collective empowerment, but also to the modes of operation of capitalism itself in its neoliberal stage.

In social movements and organizations, the relationship with digital technologies is based on experimentation and creativity in their transfer and appropriation, the disruptive use of proprietary technologies, and the creation of their own technological innovation projects. At the same time, the possibility of redesigning, culturally adapting, or critically transferring and innovating digital technologies is linked to organizational and dissemination patterns, repertoires of protest, the composition of the movement or organization (gender, class, race, etc.), and the contexts in which it operates.

In times of growing feminist and anti-racist mobilization, it is important to observe the controversies surrounding demands for transformations based on the appropriation of non-neutral artifacts, whose codes are inscribed according to a new epistemological paradigm and a logic of accumulation consolidated through data manipulation. We analyze these phenomena from an intersectional perspective, examining the intersections of gender, race, territory, and social class, which challenge the liberal concept of citizenship and strain the development of a new logic that some authors call surveillance capitalism (Shuboff) and others, datafication (Van Dijck). We understand that social arrangements will be radically altered by a global algorithmic mediation project that must be widely debated by citizens. The automatic and mass processing of data, the interpretive capacity of the world and social relations, real-time monitoring, predictive analytics, and the modulation of human behavior are central themes in studies of this new type of appropriation. Regarding the material and subjective conditions under which technology appropriation occurs, we note: a) the technical developments of devices for the production, storage, circulation, and reproduction of information; b) regulations and public policies; c) business strategies for product placement, expanding the adoption of devices and services, and participating in markets; d) the impacts of capitalist accumulation via digital technologies; and e) subjective meanings and experiences, as well as intellectual, affective/emotional, and motivational aspects. Our research aims to produce knowledge relevant to the design of public policies and the actions of social movements concerned with increasing the autonomy of individuals and groups in relation to the use, circulation, and development of technologies.

The proposed Working Group will enhance the work already underway and contribute to CLACSO's efforts as a leading organization in the production of critical knowledge. We aim to create conditions and spaces for research, experimentation, imagination, and the development of alternative technologies based on addressing different needs. These technologies will be built through transparent and open processes, guided by community-based data management principles. This technology will be built by communities and populations who have been consumers until now, asserting their right to design, define, and propose the technology they require. We are referring specifically to women, Indigenous populations, migrant populations, border communities, coastal communities, and rural communities. We begin with the principle that in this historical moment, living in a digital society, it is a fundamental human right for every social group to design and build the technology it needs.