UNESCO calls for a shared commitment to critical media and information literacy. Arturo Escobar proposes a revolution of care in response to artificial intelligence. And the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights warns about the technologies transforming territories across Latin America. Three perspectives on who decides, who participates, and which forms of life we wish to sustain.

1. UNESCO and media literacy as a shared responsibility

UNESCO’s Global Media and Information Literacy Week takes place from 24 to 31 October. Under the theme We All Play a Part – Media and Information Literacy for the People, the initiative brings together activities from different continents to strengthen people’s ability to understand, evaluate and produce information.

The 2026 edition takes a decentralised, participatory approach. As well as teaching people how to recognise false information, it encourages critical engagement with environments in which algorithms and artificial intelligence increasingly shape our relationship with knowledge.

AIthropology Lab is included in UNESCO’s official list of celebrations with AIthropology FM: Thinking Critically with AI, a week of special programming on our online radio station devoted to exploring the social and cultural consequences of artificial intelligence through anthropology and critical thought. This is an independent initiative organised by AIthropology Lab.

Our contribution rests on the conviction that media literacy involves understanding who designs digital tools, what power relations they embody, and which forms of knowledge they leave out. Alongside learning how to use these tools, we need to develop collective capacities to question them and participate in decisions about their development.

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2. Arturo Escobar and the revolution of care in response to artificial intelligence

A tribute to Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar was scheduled for 21 October at the University of Cuenca, Ecuador, together with a lecture entitled The Revolution of Care as a Response to Artificial Intelligence (La revolución del cuidado como respuesta a la inteligencia artificial). The proposed theme connects care with one of the most profound technological transformations of our time.

The event formed part of a gathering in Cuenca of the Southern Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact, a Latin American network of critical thinkers and social movements in which Escobar participates. The previous day, one of the gathering’s public panels was due to bring together Maristella Svampa (Argentina), Edgardo Lander (Venezuela), Miriam Lang (Ecuador/Germany) and Gabriela Cabaña (Chile) to discuss geopolitics, emerging right-wing movements, artificial intelligence, data capitalism and the energy transition.

For decades, Escobar has challenged the notion that all societies should be organised according to a single model of development. His concept of the pluriverse recognises multiple ways of inhabiting, knowing and organising life, in opposition to Western modernity’s claim to universality.

His reflections on artificial intelligence have not emerged in isolation. At a conversation held on 1 July 2026, Sentipensar las transiciones: diálogos sobre el pluriverso y las autonomías (Thinking and Feeling Transitions: Dialogues on the Pluriverse and Autonomies), Escobar asked how technology, and artificial intelligence in particular, might become pluriversal: how it might serve many worlds rather than a single patriarchal world driven by hyper-accumulation.

According to the published account of that conversation, he linked this question to ecosocial transitions, interdependence and a revolution of care aimed at transforming our ways of existing and living together. He also spoke of techno-patriarchal billionaires and their artificial intelligence, and recalled Brazilian Indigenous thinker Ailton Krenak’s warning about AI encroaching upon our ways of life.

Within this framework, artificial intelligence raises questions that go beyond technical performance. Which forms of knowledge does it privilege? Which relationships between people, communities and territories does it strengthen or weaken? Who decides which problems should be solved through automation?

The revolution of care offers a starting point for reconsidering these decisions through community autonomy, cooperation and the conditions required to sustain life.

The title of the Cuenca lecture suggests thematic continuity with Escobar’s reflections in July. Nevertheless, until a recording or transcript becomes available, we cannot attribute specific arguments to what he said on 21 October.

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3. Latin America and the technologies entering its territories

On Tuesday 20 October, the Office of the Special Rapporteur on Economic, Social, Cultural and Environmental Rights (REDESCA) of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) warned about the impacts of military and dual-use technologies on communities and territories across the Americas.

Drones, artificial intelligence, satellite communications, biometric systems and digital platforms can contribute to environmental protection, but they can also enable new forms of surveillance, territorial control and illegal extractive activities.

The statement addresses their use in security policies and extractive activities, as well as by armed groups and criminal organisations. These technologies can undermine access to water, food, healthcare and a healthy environment, while exacerbating displacement and confinement.

Examples documented in press coverage include satellite connections used to coordinate the logistics and payments of illegal mining operations, drones deployed to monitor territories linked to illicit economies, and the sale of mercury through social media. Drones have also reportedly flown over Indigenous communities affected by conflicts involving illegal logging.

Yet the same tools can help communities detect deforestation, identify illegal extractive activities and document threats to their territories.

The Special Rapporteur calls for mechanisms for participation, oversight and accountability that protect collective rights and support community capabilities without shifting responsibilities belonging to public authorities onto affected populations. The statement also points to the environmental costs of advanced technologies, including energy and water consumption, mineral extraction and electronic waste.

The statement coincided with a United Nations conference on transnational organised crime in Vienna, where representatives of Amazonian Indigenous peoples called for international action against environmental crimes.

At stake is who controls territories, who produces knowledge about them, and who decides how the tools transforming their living conditions are used.

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A shared question

The three stories raise a shared question. How can we build a technological culture in which people and communities can make decisions about what affects their lives?

Critical media literacy, the revolution of care and the defence of territories offer distinct but complementary responses.

From an anthropological perspective, they invite us to recognise that no technology exists independently of the social relationships, forms of knowledge and environments that make it possible.

Together, these perspectives shift the conversation towards the social, ecological and political conditions in which artificial intelligence is used.

And towards a deeper question: which worlds do we want to make possible, and which do we have a responsibility to care for?