Monday 12 October is Spain’s National Day and, across much of Latin America, a date marked as a day of Indigenous resistance or cultural diversity. It is a fitting day to return to Athens. There, from 8 to 10 October, the first Digital Commons: Infrastructures, Design and the Ethics of Autonomy conference, co-organised by the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University and the Demokritos research centre, devoted its opening panel to community infrastructures, placing telecommunications networks in the Sierra Norte of Puebla and Cauca at the centre of the discussion [1] [2]. On Friday, we introduced some of the questions raised by the conference [3]; in this edition, we turn to what it has left in writing.

For now, only written abstracts are available for the conference presentations. The organising committee confirmed to us by email that the event was neither streamed nor recorded, and that a publication based on the talks is planned, although its arrangements have yet to be finalised [4]. What follows draws on the programme abstracts [5] and previously published research. Quotations from the abstracts have been rendered in English for this edition; we do not attribute anything to the spoken presentations that we have been unable to read or verify. At a conference devoted to shared knowledge, the fact that what was said in the room will remain undocumented until that publication is itself revealing. Read together, the abstracts trace a question running through AI: who decides what is extracted, what is returned, and to whom an account must be given?

At a glance

  • Puebla and Cauca. Telecommunications networks reaching territories that already have their own assemblies and structures of authority.
  • Delhi. In August 2025, a court provisionally ordered Sci-Hub to be blocked; in another conference abstract, Nikos Smyrnaios argues that foundation models are trained on public and pirated knowledge without authorisation.
  • Cameroon and Athens. Platform earnings distributed through networks of relationships, set against performance metrics that can affect who is allowed to remain in a country.
  • The Cyclades. Community archives and a presentation on the ‘fragile promise’ of the commons when AI enters the field of cultural heritage.

Puebla and Cauca — What does a network inaugurate where an assembly already exists?

In his keynote, Alberto Corsín Jiménez, a researcher at Spain’s National Research Council (CSIC), proposes, according to his abstract, the idea of ‘augural’ commons: digital infrastructures that inaugurate ‘territories they do not yet possess’ [5]. Viewed from the Sierra Norte of Puebla or from Cauca, the formulation invites a question from the other direction: what happens when a network reaches territories that already have names, assemblies and their own authorities?

This is the terrain explored by Adrián López Angulo, who coordinates the Technologies for Autonomy area at REDES A.C. and capacity-building for LocNet in Latin America, an initiative of Rhizomatica and the Association for Progressive Communications (APC). His abstract describes telecommunications ‘appropriated, designed and governed from within’ the territories themselves [5]. These cases have documented histories. In Oaxaca, REDES worked with Rhizomatica and the community of Talea de Castro on the first community mobile-phone network. In 2016, Telecomunicaciones Indígenas Comunitarias (TIC A.C.), an association established by 16 communities together with REDES and Rhizomatica, obtained Indigenous social-use telecommunications concessions [6]. In the Sierra Norte of Puebla, the Unión de Cooperativas Tosepan is developing Wiki Katat, a mobile virtual network operator supported by REDES since 2020 and operating over Altán’s wholesale network [6] [7].

In Cauca, Jxa’h Wejxia Casil, whose name in Nasa Yuwe means ‘Network of the Wind’, brings together Indigenous guards, a community action board and a cooperative in Caldono led by people who signed the Peace Agreement, with support from Colnodo, the UN Development Programme and the UN Verification Mission [8] [9]. Here, too, communal life is built across different populations.

Paraskevi Zotali, an anthropologist and engineer, doctoral researcher at Panteion University and member of the organising committee, reads Wiki Katat through comunalidad [5]. The concept is developed in the work of the Ayuujk (Mixe) anthropologist Floriberto Díaz Gómez, from Tlahuitoltepec, and the Zapotec thinker Jaime Martínez Luna, from Guelatao, both in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca [10] [11] [12]. For Díaz, communal life rests on the land as mother and territory, consensus in the assembly, unpaid service as an exercise of authority, collective labour, and rituals and ceremonies [11]. Seen in this light, the shared management of a resource — what Anglophone scholarship calls the commons — is only one part of something much broader.

For AI, the question that follows is concrete. If connectivity is decided in an assembly, will that same assembly decide which data leave these networks, and which models receive them? The programme offered a way of approaching this question. SEXTANT, a model developed by Karen Soacha-Godoy, of the MINKA Citizen Observatory (ICM-CSIC) and the Open University of Catalonia, and Jaume Piera, of the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC), which we discussed on Friday, offers a framework for navigating data governance in citizen-science platforms [1] [3].

Delhi — Who owns the knowledge used to train machines?

The panel on India was co-organised by Alexios Tsigkas (FLAME University) and Vijayanka Nair, Professor of Anthropology at San Diego State University, with a doctorate from New York University, who also chaired it [1]. In this panel, Sinjini Mukherjee, a sociocultural anthropologist and independent researcher based in India, with a doctorate from Heidelberg University’s South Asia Institute and an honorary visiting scientist affiliation at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata, examines the academic publishers’ case against Sci-Hub before the Delhi High Court. She contrasts it with the Indian government’s One Nation, One Subscription initiative [5]. Her abstract describes scientific knowledge locked behind unaffordable paywalls and sets out to dismantle what she terms the academic–publishing–industrial complex. On 19 August 2025, in an interim order in those proceedings, the court found that Sci-Hub had breached an earlier undertaking and directed India’s telecommunications authorities to instruct internet service providers to block the site and its mirrors [13].

The following day’s programme presented the other end of this chain. According to his abstract, Nikos Smyrnaios, of the University of Toulouse, argues that foundation models ‘are trained on enormous amounts of public and pirated knowledge without authorisation’, against a backdrop of concentrated power that he characterises as a Big Tech oligopoly and a predatory logic. He proposes an AI commons approach in response [5]. Read together, the two abstracts leave a question that neither fully articulates: why is access to scientific knowledge contested in India’s courts while, according to Smyrnaios, its use to train models proceeds without seeking permission?

Giannis Perperidis, a postdoctoral researcher in AI ethics at Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies, takes open AI as an example, against the backdrop of DeepSeek’s rise. He argues that ‘meaningful openness can only flourish in the context of the commons’; outside it, ‘open’ becomes ‘a mere analytical label’. Nina Wenhart, a media art historian and lecturer at the University of Arts Linz, describes a practice moving in that direction. The Co.Lab AI+ she presents, with its living library and ethics committee, understands autonomy not as technological self-sufficiency but as ‘less dependency and greater collective capacity’, made concrete through ‘infrastructures of reuse, accountability and return’ [5]. The title of her paper encapsulates this section: Return, Not Extraction.

Cameroon and Athens — Who decides what work is worth?

The panel on platform labour offered two different scales of analysis. Ewa Majczak, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral researcher in Anthropology at UCL and the University of Cape Town, and Liz Fouksman, a professor at King’s College London, study fashion influencers and people driving for ride-hailing platforms in Cameroon. Their abstract describes earnings circulating through networks of relationships ‘not as payment for services rendered’ but as a form of ‘relational anchoring’: practices of commoning rather than exchange [5].

In Athens, Christina Korkontzelou, a doctoral researcher in Social Anthropology at Panteion, conducts an ethnography of a labour dispute in a call centre in 2024 and 2025, triggered by the non-renewal of several contracts. Meeting performance targets governed access to contract renewal. For migrant members of staff, ‘the continuity of legal residence in Greece’ was at stake, tied to their employment status [5]. Her abstract presents algorithm-driven evaluation systems as sites of ethical dispute, within what the literature calls digital Taylorism. The two studies reveal different ways of determining the value of platform-mediated work. In Cameroon, value circulates through a network of relationships; in an Athenian call centre, a metric can affect who gets to stay in the country.

Athens — The border as an AI infrastructure

The connection between performance metrics and residence status leads to another initiative scheduled for Saturday 10 October in Athens. The conference collaborated with TRANSEUROPA, European Alternatives’ festival, held in the city from 7 to 11 October under the theme Reclaiming the Cloud(s) [14]. As part of the festival, Digital Borders, a citizens’ assembly on AI, migration and border control, announced the participation of the Greek Forum of Migrants, the Greek Forum of Refugees, Homo Digitalis and Forensic Architecture, among other organisations, as well as the conference itself. Its starting question was how digital infrastructure can create borders instead of connections [15]. The organising committee has also announced a contribution on digital commons, the collective reclamation of infrastructures and the ethics of autonomy for the issue of EA Journal devoted to the festival’s theme [14].

Every border begins with identification, and Thursday’s panel on India offered another perspective on identification. According to her abstract, Nair examines memes and short videos that use humour to question Aadhaar’s promise of a ‘unique’ identity and frictionless access to social benefits. Aadhaar is India’s biometric identification system [5]. Identifying, classifying and deciding are tasks that AI promises to automate. The Athens abstracts remind us that these processes are also contested from below.

The Cyclades — Who describes an archive when AI arrives?

The final panel on Saturday, held at the Demokritos research centre, focused on cultural heritage. It included Digital Cyclades: Building a Community Generated Cultural Commons, a paper by Jacob Moe, documentary filmmaker, researcher and founder of Archipelago Network [1] [16]. Founded in 2019, Archipelago Network documents maritime crafts, pottery and biodiversity across the islands. Its work on mining brings together photographic and audiovisual collections assembled with local historians, museums and workers’ centres [16] [17]. The network itself describes Digital Cyclades as a community-driven initiative for documenting and reusing the Cyclades’ contemporary heritage [18]. The same panel included a paper by Alexandra Bounia and Despina Catapoti, of the University of the Aegean, on what its title calls the ‘fragile promise’ of the commons when AI enters archaeology and heritage [1].

In a panel earlier that morning, Sonia Chinn, a History course coordinator at the University of Texas at Austin, raised a condition that such archives ought to meet, drawing on Maya textiles. Her abstract recognises weavers as ‘knowledge holders and co-theorists’ and warns of the risk of extraction or cultural appropriation when designs circulate and are commercialised without authorisation [5]. Once a community archive is described, tagged and opened up, it also becomes legible to systems trained on material available online. Wenhart’s question returns here: what is given back to those who produced that knowledge?

Sovereignty or autonomy

The Athens programme uses two words that do not mean the same thing. In papers looking towards Europe, sovereignty comes to the fore: public digital sovereignty and partnerships between public institutions and the commons in Vangelis Papadimitropoulos’s (Panteion) paper, or the political economy of open source in the context of European digital sovereignty in Felix Ansmann’s [1]. In the work coming from Puebla and Cauca, autonomy comes to the fore — the word used in the title of López Angulo’s paper and in the conference’s own title [1].

Athens offers a useful distinction for understanding AI: opening up a resource is not the same as governing it, and governing it is not the same as being able to sustain it. The networks of the Sierra Norte and Cauca arrive at that understanding through the assembly, not through the licence. The comunalidad Zotali identifies in Wiki Katat makes the point through its own history: before a shared resource, there are the relationships that sustain it and hold responsibility for it. When the organisers publish the conference papers, we will return to them.

References

[1] Digital Commons Conference. Digital Commons: Infrastructures, Design and the Ethics of Autonomy. Programme. Athens, 8–10 October 2026. https://digicommons.org/programme/

[2] PhilEvents. Digital Commons: Infrastructures, Design and the Ethics of Autonomy. Call for papers. https://philevents.org/event/show/143313

[3] AIthropology Lab. Autonomía, ¿para quién? Radar, 9 October 2026. https://aithropologylab.org/radar/2026-10-09/

[4] Digital Commons organising committee. Email to AIthropology Lab, 9 October 2026.

[5] Digital Commons Conference. Programme with abstracts and biographies (PDF). Version dated 2 October 2026. https://digicommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Programme-8-10-Okt-Digital-Commons-interactive-_2-Okt.pdf

[6] REDES A.C. Quiénes somos [About us]. https://redesac.org.mx/quienessomos/

[7] Suárez Bernal, Laura. Comunidades indígenas controlan operadores móviles virtuales en México [Indigenous communities control mobile virtual network operators in Mexico]. Mobile Time Latinoamérica, 27 March 2024. https://mobiletime.la/noticias/27/03/2024/comunidades-indigenas-controlan-operadores-moviles-virtuales-en-mexico/

[8] United Nations Verification Mission in Colombia. Jxa´h Wejxia Casil: A network connecting Cauca with the world. 18 November 2020. https://colombia.unmissions.org/en/node/16439

[9] Radio Nacional de Colombia. «Red del viento» referente de conexión comunitaria en el Cauca [‘Network of the Wind’, a benchmark for community connectivity in Cauca]. 23 October 2024. https://radionacional.co/podcast/encuentros-de-paz/red-del-viento-referente-de-conexion-comunitaria-en-el-cauca

[10] Doyle, Rosie. Comunalidad, Development and Indigenous Rights in Oaxaca, Mexico. Journal of Law, Social Justice & Global Development, no. 26 (2022), published in 2024. https://journals.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/lgdjournal/article/download/1598/1204

[11] Díaz, Floriberto. Escrito. Comunalidad, energía viva del pensamiento mixe. Ayuujktsënää’yën – ayuujkwënmää’ny – ayuujk mëk’äjtën. Edited by Sofía Robles Hernández and Rafael Cardoso Jiménez. Mexico: UNAM (La pluralidad cultural en México. Voces indígenas, 14), 2007.

[12] Martínez Luna, Jaime. Eso que llaman comunalidad. Oaxaca: Culturas Populares-CONACULTA, Secretaría de Cultura del Gobierno de Oaxaca and Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú Oaxaca, 2010.

[13] Delhi High Court. Elsevier Ltd. & Ors. v. Alexandra Elbakyan & Ors., CS(COMM) 572/2020. Order dated 19 August 2025. Indian Kanoon. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/132738267/

[14] Digital Commons Conference. Partners. https://digicommons.org/partners/

[15] TRANSEUROPA Festival. Digital Borders: a citizens assembly on Migration, border control and new technologies. Athens, 10 October 2026. https://transeuropafestival.eu/events/ddc-assembly-ai-and-migration/

[16] Archipelago Network. About. https://archipelagonetwork.org/about/

[17] Archipelago Network. Extraction in the Cyclades: Digital Traces. https://archipelagonetwork.org/project/extraction-in-the-cyclades-digital-traces/

[18] Archipelago Network. Job Opening: Metadata Cataloguing & Data Entry (part-time). 23 September 2026. https://archipelagonetwork.org/job-opening-data-entry/