On March 6 2023, #DAWNfeminist and @IT forChange launched the Declaration on Feminist Digital Justice, created together with 35 feminist scholars and activists from around the world. This Declaration, born out of a year-long collaboration, outlines the contours of a new gender-just digital compact to address intersectional exclusion and exploitation in the platform, the digital welfare state, and the data & AI economy. The launch was held at 67th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW67), and aligned with the priority theme for International Women’s Day 2023: “DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality”.
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 commodification 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 labour 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.