The Declaration of Feminist Digital Justice

Preamble

The juggernaut of digital capitalism has colonized our bodies and lifeworlds. In the extractive value chains of the data economy, embedded and embodied knowledge are supplanted by depersonalized machine intelligence. As the planet gets subsumed in the network-data matrix, we see an intensification of inequality and precarity and the rise of anti-democratic and fascist forces.

Our public sphere is under threat. Its corporate-controlled algorithmic impulse normalizes hegemonic gender norms and practices, instrumentalizing society and human diversity for profit.
The social compact between digital capitalism and the patriarchal household enables a ceaseless mobilization of women’s unpaid and underpaid work.

Meanwhile, the surveillance state has appropriated the prowess of technology to sort and exclude those deemed unworthy, disciplining and dehumanizing feminized bodies, hounding women human rights defenders, and persecuting migrant and refugee women, among others.
We must break free now from the shackles of a digitality gone wrong, and embrace a vision of feminist digital justice. We must claim the values of a new sociality that can repoliticize data, resignify intelligence and recreate digital architectures in a networked co-existence of planetary flourishing.

The declaration of feminist digital justice we present here derives from the following values:

  • Individual and collective agency rooted in connections that straddle the local and the translocal, expanding knowledges and enabling the realization of serendipitous encounters;
  • An ethics of solidarity committed to the commonsification and feminist valorization of knowledge for social value;
  • Community-based participatory democracy built on federated translocal digital publics that thrive on civic intelligence and empowerment of historically marginalized groups;
  • A fair and equitable global economic order that is regenerative, transformative and respectful of ecological boundaries, the social freedoms of labor and diverse knowledge cultures; and
  • A global digital constitutionalism based on a reinvigorated, bottom-up and networked multilateralism for humane governance, enduring peace, thriving reciprocity and universal human rights.

Rejecting the enclosure and manipulation of network-data technologies as infrastructures of domination, we call for a feminist reclamation of the digital paradigm through the following core principles:

A Feminist Digital Economy

A Digital Society Based on Reciprocity and Solidarity

A Digital State Grounded in a Feminist Social Contract

A Feminist Paradigm for Digital Governance

Join us!

Read the Background Paper, stand with DAWN and IT for Change, and commit to building an equitable vision of justice for our technosocial world.

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