Incumbent powers increasingly use ICT to promote controlling and authoritarian agendas. This is evident in depoliticized narratives like those of ‘Earth systems management’ and ‘planetary boundaries,’ which simplify diverse human conditions and positions while viewing humanity as dominant over the planet (Stirling 2019). Such imaginations of control, influenced by coloniality in modern culture, are prevalent in sustainability efforts, which often promote simplistic technological responses to complex issues like global heating; as such, they benefit major commercial firms and justify further resource extraction (Arora et al. 2020; Stirling 2019).

Besides, while the internet was once viewed as a tool for emancipation and collective action (Castells 2000), its impact on political change remains ambiguous (Angus 2022). Even in supposedly more liberal and democratic regimes, increased digital surveillance coupled with widespread big data collection, storage and analysis and inadequate democratic oversight raises concerns about digital authoritarianism (Pearson 2024). Given that ICT are embraced by authoritarian leaders worldwide as tools of control and manipulation (Schlumberger et al. 2024), these trends are all the more cause for concern.

The impacts of ICT on ecosystems and human health are significant and can be categorized into direct and indirect effects. Direct effects mainly stem from the production and electricity demands of ICT devices. The digital sector currently accounts for 3–4 % of global greenhouse gas emissions, and is growing at 6 % annually, as the Shift Project showed in 2024. Despite claims of environmental responsibility, Big Tech companies often fail to significantly reduce emissions throughout their value chains (Day et al. 2022). Besides, extraction of rare metals for these technologies leads to environmental disasters and child labor exploitation (U.S. Department of Labor n.d.). With only 17.4 % of e‑waste recycled in 2019, the toxicity of this waste poses serious risks to health and ecosystems (Forti 2020). Indirectly, ICT also create efficiencies that can paradoxically lead to increased resource demands (Santarius et al. 2023) resulting from new opportunities for production and consumption.

A holistic assessment also calls for an analysis of the geopolitical implications of the infrastructures that underlie ICT. Brodie (2023) highlights how digital infrastructures create an assemblage of environmental relations that perpetuate capitalism through energy and environmental politics. These infrastructures exacerbate global inequities (Lehdonvirta et al. 2024), particularly through networks of extraction and the integration of datafication-enabled renewable energy systems, as key components in green capitalism or green extractivism (Brodie 2023).

Ricaurte (2019) applies Quijano’s (2000) concept of coloniality to these socio-technical systems, and argues that data extraction manifests a coloniality of power that perpetuates exploitation and ecological deterioration. This perspective aligns with the notion of data colonialism popularized by Couldry and Mejias in 2019, who characterize data colonialism as an extractive process driven by capitalist forces, normalizing the exploitation of people through data commodification. Kwet (2019) also argues that U.S. Big Tech firms exert monopolistic control over the digital ecosystem, particularly in the Global South, thus reinforcing resource extraction and surveillance.

Firstly, we introduce an array of community network projects that have been launched in rural areas of Mexico, within Indigenous sociocultural settings, that adopt anti-capitalisty approaches rooted in the worldviews, values, and ways of life of these communities. A brief review of five case studies documenting these processes (Baca-Feldman et al. 2018; Guerrero Millan et al. 2024; Manjarrez 2023; Myers 2016; Parks et al. 2022) allows us to highlight characteristic features, challenges and tensions characterizing these initia-tives.

The projects are situated in southern Mexico, and mainly involve rural Indigenous communities in the states of Puebla, Oaxaca, and Chiapas, areas with scarce state or commercial communication infrastructure. While this limited access to ICT has led to further marginalization of many of these communities, this isolation has also enabled communities to adopt ICT on their own terms, as shown by the Telecomunicaciones Indígenas Comunitarias (TIC) A.C. project in Oaxaca, which established over 70 community-owned cell phone networks to promote local autonomy and self-determination (Parks et al. 2022). Similarly, a case study featuring the Tosepan Cooperative in Puebla demonstrates how limited connectivity can spur decisions about beneficial network architecture, focusing on community needs (Baca-Feldman et al. 2018). Tools like community radios in Chiapas have also supported efforts to defend territories against state and corporate abuses (Guerrero Millan et al. 2024; Myers 2016). Participants emphasized the importance of collective self-determination in these projects, for example through collective ownership of ICT infrastructures by community members and cooperatives with a non-profit ethos (Parks et al. 2022). While reliance on for-profit companies and the state can constrain autonomy to a certain extent, for example for access to the internet backbone, non-capitalistic principles persist (Baca-Feldman et al. 2018). Moreover, these projects support the perpetuation and flourishing of local Indigenous cosmovisions and ways of being (Guerrero Millan et al. 2024): For instance, community leaders in the TIC A.C. networks articulate these initiatives as expressions of communal life, helping to resist market-driven communication norms and to protect their ways of living and relating (Manjarrez 2023). This can be viewed as posing a radical challenge to the colonial and extractivist epistemology that is characteristic of mainstream approaches to ICT.

Overall, the design and implementation of these projects appear to have been informed by much awareness of the global social-ecological challenges we identified with regards to capitalist forms of ICT: They are small-scale and frugal, rely on community-built and -controlled infrastructure, and aim to bring about forms of collective emancipation. However, it remains unclear to what extent such initiatives also support the emancipation of disadvantaged social groups – such as women – within these communities, particularly given the prevalent involvement of men in several of these initiatives. Further research could seek to identify the extent to which these projects can be considered to stand as examples of prefigurative, decolonial ICT-enabled assemblages.

The aforementioned examples can be contrasted with several other studies that concern a very different set of community networks, initiated in various European countries but that grew and extended to encompass other contexts (Béranger 2024; Kostakis et al. 2018, 2023; Robra et al. 2020; Shulz et al. 2024). These projects are networks centred on what has been termed commons-based peer production (CBPP) (Benkler 2017) – that is, the “value creation and distribution that appears within the ecosystems of commons-oriented communities, where open technological infrastructures allow individuals to communicate, self-organize and, ultimately, co-create non-rivalrous use value without the need to seek permissions” (Kostakis et al. 2018, p. 1684). While originally many such initiatives have taken place to produce free and open-source software and knowledge – such as Wikipedia or Debian Linux – in more recent years CBPP has been taking place in the field of open design, and concerns the distributed production of hardware, facilitated by ICT.

Advocates view these projects as promising to pursue a degrowth agenda, which seeks to radically transform human activities and societal organization toward deep sustainability (Parasie and Shulz 2024; Robra et al. 2020). We reviewed studies examining CBPP in transnational networks that emphasize the online sharing of blueprints to manufacture locally and aim to bring social and environmental value – for the production of DIY windmills, affordable robot hands and prosthetics, small-scale and regenerative farming tools, or the distributed manufacturing of objects using plastic recycling.

While these projects enabled the production of social value locally, their reliance on online infrastructure raised the question of the sustainability of the global internet; their use of advanced ICT such as 3D printers conflicted with aspirations for eco-sufficiency from a degrowth perspective; and their need for problematic materials like rare earths was a source of additional ethical concerns. Evidently, understanding these features and tensions is crucial for evaluating the effectiveness of community networks in achieving their transformative objectives.

Besides, compared to the other types of community networks outlined above, these projects are much less about fundamentally addressing the colonial epistemology embedded in dominant socio-technical systems, as identified by scholars such as Ricaurte (2019) or Couldry and Mejias (2023). Therefore, future research could aim to assess the relevance, from a decolonial perspective, of such ICT-enabled assemblages that align themselves with dominant ways of knowing and being.

Future research could aim to assess the relevance, from a decolonial perspective, of such information and communication enabled assemblages that align themselves with dominant ways of knowing and being.

Nonetheless, both types of community networks introduced above appear to be promising avenues for designing emancipatory ICT-enabled assemblages that may support collectives to address the global challenges mentioned in the previous section – be it through tools critically selected to reinforce and defend collective autonomy and ways of life locally, or to engage in transnational networks of open-source hardware production.