The REAL-Postgrowth project (Post-growth – REAL – A Post-Growth Deal) is excited to announce that Cecilia Rikap, Head of Research at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, University College London, will present her new book at ICTA-UAB, as part of our monthly public seminar series.
Book launch: "Digital Dependency Theory. Sovereignty and development in 21st century capitalism"
Speaker: Cecilia Rikap, Associate Professor in Economics and the Head of Research at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, University College London
Introduction by Jason Hickel
How did we arrive at a world in which a handful of megacorporations from the United States -and to a lesser extent, from China- control the production and use of the technologies that define contemporary capitalism? How does this transformation affect the digital peripheries: Latin America, Africa, and even Europe? The traditional frameworks that associate power with property and territory, and innovation with progress, cannot help us to answer these questions.
Thousands of companies, universities, public research organizations, and even governments, located all around the world -even inside the US and China- are part of the new peripheries, creating value and knowledge for others. Those who accumulate the benefits are not entire countries but Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft. They are the new core of global capitalism. Resulting relations of dependency cannot be described through the binary opposites of imperial power and colony, or feudal lord and serfs, as suggested by frameworks such as digital colonialism and techno-feudalism.
Dependency today instead means a web of complicities, tensions and hierarchies. Who are the peripheries’ local accomplices of digital dependency? What are the ideological discourses and networks of economic power? How are nature’s extractivism and data and knowledge extractivisms connected? How is work being transformed in a world in which new technologies are a powerful mechanism of control and indoctrination? What impact does it have on our ability to think critically and on our creativity when a corporate minority reduces the definition of intelligence to a statistical inference computed by algorithms? And why is it that, faced with the need to build an alternative, attempts to expand digital sovereignty equally fail?
Dr. Cecilia Rikap is an Associate Professor in Economics and the Head of Research at the University College London’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. She has been a tenured researcher of the CONICET, Argentina’s national research council, and associate researcher at COSTECH lab, Université de Technologie de Compiègne. Before publishing “Teoría de la Dependencia Digital. Soberanía y Desarrollo en el Capitalismo del Siglo XXI” with Caja Negra, she also authored the award-winning book Capitalism, Power and Innovation: Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism Uncovered and co-authored the book The Digital Innovation Race. She has another book coming out in 2026. “The Rulers: Corporate Power in the Age of AI and the Cloud”, published by Verso Books.
