The Digital
Is Still Our Friend

In the last decade, I have followed the lives of hundreds of young people from India, Bangladesh, Brazil and Namibia and a common thread has emerged. They love being online. They are passionate content creators. Their aspirations are to nurture a community beyond what they are born into, to have fun, gain status and, most importantly, make a mark ‘out there’ through their digital expression. These creative climbers are aspirational influencers. They want to be recognized and respected by an online public. They want to be seen and heard. Whether they are promoting sarees¹ on Facebook Live or selling pickled vegetables from rural India to the Indian diaspora via Instagram: It’s their entry point to a better future.

In fact, countries in Asia and South America are fast growing their creator economy and are expected to soon surpass the United States, which should be unsurprising as 90 percent of young people live in such regions. Many such young people live in illiberal, non-democratic, economically constrained, and patriarchal and precarious contexts. For instance, less than 13 percent of the worlds countries enjoy a liberal democracy. As their state, their market, and their families fail to provide them with legitimate opportunities for labor, love, leisure, and learning—to self-actualize, the digital, despite the harms, has become their friend.

This sentiment stands in stark contrast to the current “pessimism paralysis” experienced by those in the West who are feeling despair to the point of impotence towards all things digital. Media headlines on a daily basis alert us to how Big Tech² is destroying our democracy, and social media is ruining our children’s mental health. When it comes to AI, there is a wave of fear around how these new innovations are destroying our jobs, and our planet. We in the West continue to project and impose these sentiments of fear through designs and policies on the rest of the world, from the comfort of our homes, and our nations with freedoms that most of the world aspires to. Pessimism seems to me a privilege for those who can afford to despair. The rest of the world has to be hopeful if they want to have power over their own futures.

Doomsday divas are aplenty today. You may find a priest of tech infusing a dose of guilt to the AI curious. “Did you know that ChatGPT ‘drinks’ a bottle of water for every 20 to 50 questions that it answers?” Another may remind their followers of their moral weakness for staying on Facebook, X (former Twitter), and Instagram, while shepherding their flock through these channels. And in recent years, I have engaged with a growing number of top officials at aid agencies and thinktanks who morally grapple with whether they should connect the unconnected in the so called “Global South”. After all, aren’t they just feeding these vulnerable communities into the extraction machine? Would it not be best to keep them protected from this new round of data colonialism? Their assumed immunity to these very “structures of oppression” and surveillance are palpable.

These influential voices, through their daily dose of fear and guilt, infuse a climate of anxiety into the new generation in the West. In a recent class of mine on inclusive tech, the majority of my students responded with a “no” to a live quiz on whether it is possible to infuse inclusive values into tech. They don’t even want a seat at the table because the very act of engagement with AI seems to be complicity with Big Tech. The only way forward, is to blow up the “system.” Or to “opt out” of this oppressive regime, as another student suggested. Ideological purity comes in the way of an inconvenient reality of AI being part of their everyday lives—from the way they move, they love, to the way they learn.

The perspective of my students differs significantly from that of people of similar age whom I have encountered in my research. During the pandemic, the Innovation Services division of the United Nations Refugee Agency commissioned me to study digital behaviors among Venezuelan refugees in Brazil. We found that far from wanting to opt-out, refugees wanted in—desperately so. Connectivity was gold. Hugo, a nineteen-year-old homosexual Venezuelan man, kept his spirits up by sharing his vulnerability through his Facebook posts. Doing so allowed him to be himself, and develop a sense of self-love after much persecution.

To be yourself is a humble but essential first step to an active life. This matters for the majority of youth, who due to their socio-economic status, nationality, sexuality and gender, struggle with the basics of human dignity. Laws and social norms dehumanize entire populations—60 countries continue to criminalize homosexuality in 2025, some with death sentences like in Uganda and Yemen. Girls and women legally and socially have the rights of a child, or perhaps less so, in the case for girls and women in many parts of the Middle East. With the Taliban rulings on banning women and girls from accessing schools, public parks, salons, and work spaces, it is unsurprising to find them enthusiastic about the digital in their push against public erasure.

The fact is that Big Tech, while extractive and exploitative, can also be enabling and empowering. While some of the biggest digital services offer authoritarian states extensive opportunities to monitor critical citizens, they also serve as essential platforms for self-actualization. These are messy realities we live with. To deny this fact is to start from a point of dishonesty which can inadvertently influence how we design and regulate such platforms. We need to give equal and fair weight to the value that comes from such digital tools. If European states want to reclaim agency from corporate power, and steer these tools towards public interest, they need to think of their public as global citizens and craft solutions that embed human pleasure, intimacy, innovation, and overall flourishing while mitigating harms and risks.

When we speak of alternatives in the West, it is often more grassroots cooperatives pushing against the market. We have seen such alternatives fail to scale. Geert Lovink³ and I were at an event at the V2_, Lab for the Unstable Media⁴ in Rotterdam in fall 2022. An audience member asked him whether he was hopeful about the future. Lovink, nowadays a self-acknowledged media pessimist, responded despondently that his last decades of activist work on alternative platforms failed to realize. He is not alone in his bleak outlook on the digital future.

The silver lining of today’s geopolitics has pushed the EU to look again closely at alternative state tech models, where the Global South has taken the lead. The EuroStack⁵ for example is closely emulating the India Stack⁶ —a government initiated digital public infrastructure that is open source and strives towards digital sovereignty. The problem however remains that the EU still takes an inward-looking approach to their tools, their youth, and their states—more stick and less carrot. The EU fortress mentality has to go if they are to take on the global leadership on defending democratic values in tech.

Nobody denies these are difficult times. It is a struggle to stay hopeful for many. While legitimate concerns drive our fears towards the digital, we need to fairly account for the sentiments and actions of Global South youths to ensure we do not inadvertently destroy that which they value the most—rare spaces for self-actualization. Young people’s extraordinary hunger for being digital is akin to their hunger for more freedoms. Sharing something beautiful from a place of ugliness sustains human dignity. Creating moments of joy, inspiration, and entertainment with digital media cultivates hope for the future. It is not naive to be optimistic about our digital future. It is our moral imperative to design with hope.