News from the Collective

What is really political art? What is the relation between art and hegemony? And how to be an uncompromising antifascist in a complex, multipolar world? To discuss these deep question, we are joined by Nora Sternfeld, an independent curator and Professor of Art Education at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. Expect no clear-cut, simple answers, but in-depth discussions about the opposition between simplistic complexity and complex simplicity, para-institutionality, counter-monuments, sober coalition-building, and the notion of propaganda. Please join us in the labyrinth of concepts, because it will be worth your while.

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About

Duckrabbits Talk Back is a podcast about postartistic antifascism, hosted by Aria Spinelli, Kuba Szreder, and Sepp Eckenhaussen. The series is inspired by the comic treatise Duckrabbits Unveiled: A Sneak Peek at the Postartistic Theory and Practice (2025).

This episode is hosted by Kuba Szreder and Sepp Eckenhaussen.

Production: Anielek Niemyjski
Cover art: Kacper Greń
Jingle: Olka Dąbrowska

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, 2026

The introduction of Digital Tribulations, a series of intellectual interviews on the developments of digital sovereignty in Latin America, can be read here and the entire serie can be found here.

When I arrived in Argentina in March 2026, my friend Simone Robutti, a political organiser with Tech Workers Coalition based in Berlin, had put me in contact with Esteban from AGC (Asociación Gremial de Computación). A gremio is the specific Argentine term for a trade union, which, besides negotiating wages, does all sorts of activities: managing their members’ healthcare, owning recreational facilities, running vocational training centres, and more. They function, in practice, as a parallel welfare state organised by sector. With the nice weather of the end of the summer, I walked into the union building in the centre of Buenos Aires. As I went upstairs, I was welcomed with coffee, and we sat around the table in the AGC’s meeting room. 

As Esteban self-identifies as a Peronist, some background on this very argentinian political movement is necessary. A few weeks after the interview, I attended the march in Rosario marking the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the military dictatorship. There, another proud peronist, profession psychoanalyst, objected to my doubts about peronism, which to my eyes is not really a leftits movement, by saying that I was using “Eurocentric categories”. Peronism, he said, was neither left nor right: those are the two wings of the peronist bird. The description nicely reflects how Peronism officially presents itself, and it captures something real. the movement that emerged around Juan Domingo Perón in 1945 was not a class party but a coalition that included a bit of everything: organised labour, nationalist industrialists, the Catholic Church, and sectors of the military. 

Over the years, Peronism delivered concrete results, like wage increases, paid holidays, women’s suffrage, a social infrastructure of healthcare and workers’ services that the union system still administers today, as Esteban describes. But the same ideological flexibility that made Peronism a broad popular movement also made it incapable of resolving Argentina’s core economic problem: a country whose wealth is concentrated in agricultural land that was never redistributed, and whose governments have oscillated for eighty years between taxing that wealth and backing down when the landowners pushed back. Back in Italy, I talked to a friend who cited the case of Benetton: the italian clothing company bought roughly 900,000 hectares in Patagonia, making it of the largest private landowners in the world (with obvious contrast with indigenous communities like the Mapuche). 

The same pattern repeated with finances. A supposedly peronist like Carlos Menem (1989–1999) run a radical neoliberal policy, privatised state assets and pegged the peso to the dollar with disastrous consequences; later, Kirchnerism redistributed during the commodity boom while hiding inflation figures, and each cycle ended in external debt, inflation and a political class that had deferred the structural choices one more time. Milei’s rise is the accumulated consequence of those deferrals; funnily enough, with all the people I talked to in over a month, only one veterinary admitted that had voted for Milei “as a protest act”. Like in Italy with Berlusconi, people were too scared to admit it. 

With this, I am not saying that Peronism is not politically viable or that it should be abandoned; however, I see the need for a clearer political stance between the right and the left: as Bobbio knew, there is no escape to the political compass. 

As of today, the AGC is torn between Milei’s disastrous policies on the one side, and the very concrete threat of artificial intelligence on the other. The interview with Esteban – who was always very kind and who put me in contact with many others of Argentina’s tech worker – covers the AGC’s legal history within the Argentine union model, the obstacles created by the current government’s hostility to collective bargaining, the debate within the sector about AI and layoffs, and the union’s work through its Observatory and Laboratory on wages, tax policy, and digital sovereignty.

***

What is your background and what brought you to this union?

I can tell you the professional side: I have a degree in Literature. I am also a university-trained political analyst, that is, the intermediate degree from the Government and International Relations programme. And I am also a student of the Bachelor’s in Mathematical Sciences. Due to a natural political inclination, I have been politically active in Peronism for many years. And it is because of that activism that trade unions interest me. Also for academic reasons — being a Mathematics student — the area of computing caught my attention. In any case, it was partly a coincidence: I met someone and ended up here, at the union. It was a political matter, driven by the need for an IT union in Argentina. Out of a concern for social justice, and also because of a political reading of the big tech companies, their problems and the challenges they bring, it became clear that such a union simply did not exist.

And what is the history of this union? How did it come about?

The union was originally founded in 1992, but due to a combination of technical and political factors it failed to consolidate itself at the time as an industry union. There was a fundamental legal obstacle: historically, software was not recognised as an industry in Argentina, but rather as a service activity or administrative support. Only in recent years, after a lengthy legislative process, did the sector formally obtain industrial status — which is crucial because it radically changes our legal position and our capacity to represent workers before the State and companies.

On top of this technical difficulty, there were political reasons why we were not granted formal union recognition (personería gremial). To understand this, one must explain the Argentine union model, which differs from the European one. In Argentina you can have as many unions as you like (what is called inscripción, or registration), but the one that holds the exclusive right to bargain collectively and sign agreements is only one: the one with personería gremial, by virtue of being the most representative in its field.

For example, the Unión Obrera Metalúrgica (UOM) — the historic heavy industry union — sets the basic working conditions for all metalworkers in the country. The same applies in sectors such as food, construction, and transport. With a few specific exceptions, such as in some areas of the public sector where two unions hold personería gremial (ATE and UPCN), the general rule is that there is a single voice per sector. That was not the case in computing. There were two or three small organisations with a formal existence, but with no real bargaining power. We only received recognition of our majority representation and were granted personería gremial — which is essentially the legal right to represent workers before employers — very recently.

However, that recognition came in a very unstable political context. It happened during the final stretch of the center-right government of Mauricio Macri; it was a contradictory moment in which one part of his Ministry of Labour gave us its approval, while another sector of the same government, closer to the interests of the major technology companies, fought us through the courts. That left our legal situation trapped in an administrative limbo. Then, with the arrival of Alberto Fernández’s peronist government, there was an expectation of progress, but the process was slow and ultimately stalled in the state bureaucracy without being fully resolved. Now, under the current government of Javier Milei, we are directly confronted with a policy of demolition and destruction of the entire traditional union model.

At this moment we find ourselves in a situation where, legitimately and legally, we remain the recognised representatives, but we face far greater obstacles. Holding personería gremial is the first step, but the second is convening the collective bargaining table to sit down and negotiate a contract covering the whole country. To do that, you need a defined employers’ counterpart that is willing to sit down; but with four different employers’ chambers and a government that has halted all such dialogue processes, progress towards a national agreement is at a standstill.

Faced with this paralysis on the part of the State, our current strategy is to represent workers company by company. Instead of a grand national agreement that the government is blocking today, we sign specific agreements with individual firms. The law does not prohibit this: while the regulations state that the union with personería gremial represents the entire sector, they do not prevent us from reaching particular agreements with companies that choose to acknowledge their workers’ reality and sit down to negotiate.

And why is the national negotiation not moving forward? Is it a lack of political will from the government? How has the computing sector changed since this government took office?

Exactly. The government of Javier Milei, by political and ideological design, does not want national collective bargaining to exist. They can block it without facing major consequences: the Executive simply does not convene the parties and the courts do not compel it to do so. Legally, the situation is a disaster, but it is the reality we face today. It is a political game of attrition and deliberate destruction of union structures in favour of total deregulation.

Since this government took office, the situation has deteriorated noticeably. Because there is no National Collective Agreement establishing a floor of rights for everyone, the union can only exert influence in those companies where we already have a presence and specific agreements. In those places, conditions are better because we demand higher wages and negotiate every pay rise. However, in the rest of the industry, the reality is very poor: real wages are falling and paritarias — those annual wage negotiation rounds — have practically disappeared or are proving insufficient. Added to this is the fact that the Argentine economy is in a deep crisis and the sector is no longer growing at the rate it had been for the past five years. Up until 2024, growth was steady, but in 2025 the activity slowed down and began to plateau: one month there are layoffs, the next it picks up slightly, but the growth trend has been broken.

The international outlook has also become hostile. Even before the rise of AI, we already had the problem of rising interest rates in the United States, which triggered a contraction in risk investment, as we saw with the Silicon Valley Bank crisis. Argentina has the United States as its main export market thanks to the high calibre of our professionals, strong English-language proficiency, and time zone alignment, but while the domestic market is sinking in peso terms, external demand has been hit by these global financial shifts.

In this complex context, AI appears as an aggravating factor in the risk of layoffs. We are having very live debates about companies like Mercado Libre, which operates here as a monopoly: last year they laid off workers in areas that were replaced by AI-trained processes. There is a great deal of anxiety; there is some truth and some myth in the corporate narrative, but the climate of layoffs is real. Recently, companies such as PwC and Santander Tecnología have let go of hundreds of people from their technical divisions. Even in the banking sector there are reports of failures in money transfers following mass redundancies, leading people to think that attempts are being made to replace skilled staff with bots that do not yet work properly.

There is a very powerful campaign, led by figures such as Marcos Galperín (founder of Mercado Libre), arguing that there is no longer any need to study programming or computing because “AI does everything” or because now everything is vibe-coding. They suggest that you can hire any administrative worker with a chatbot subscription and be done with it.

From the union’s perspective, and in full agreement with academia, experts, and professional computing communities, we say that is absolutely false. On the contrary: AI creates new problems and more complex technical challenges that require more training, not less. Moreover, if companies are laying off junior and mid-level developers today, where will tomorrow’s senior engineers come from? Nobody will understand how the underlying systems work. Professionals need continuous upskilling, reading papers, and understanding new metrics. Without that formation, the industry has no future, and that is something we must work on together.

And who can join the union?

The union represents workers in the private sector whose primary activity is computing. In Argentina, classification depends on the activity of the company: if you are an IT professional but work for an insurance company, you belong to the insurance sector union; if you are an IT professional at a bank, you fall under the banking union; and if you are an IT professional working for the State, you belong to the public sector unions. But if you work for a company whose core business is software or hardware, then your place is our union. We are talking about companies such as Globant, Accenture, and Mercado Libre, as well as a great many consultancies and IT firms, both Argentine- and American-owned.

Besides wage bargaining, you mentioned that the union has a very strong social dimension. How does that work?

Exactly, collective bargaining does not stop at wages. The Collective Labour Agreement (Convenio Colectivo de Trabajo) is a general framework that regulates your entire working life. For example, in our agreement we include professional career development: we establish that if a worker specialises in a programming language or masters English, they must receive a bonus for that training. Rights such as special leave or holiday arrangements that improve on the general statutory provisions are also defined.

But beyond the workplace, unions in Argentina fulfil a social role that is quite distinctive. On one hand, we manage obras sociales, the health funds that are the backbone of the healthcare system for workers. On the other hand, we are key players in recreation and tourism. It is very common for unions to own recreational grounds, sports facilities, or even hotels. In Argentina it is perfectly normal to go on holiday to a hotel on the coast or in the mountains and find that it is owned by a union. Many unions also run their own football clubs or vocational training centres. For example, if a sector needs lathe operators, the union sets up its own training centres for workers. Sometimes the building belongs to the City of Buenos Aires and the teachers are public employees, but the union is the one that organises the training and supplies the students based on the needs of its industry.

All of this social welfare is usually enshrined in collective agreements. The worker makes a contribution from their salary to the union, and the union returns that in tangible services: free accommodation during holidays, access to campsites and swimming pools, or the provision of school bags and supplies for members’ children at the start of each school year. The union, in short, accompanies the worker across many more areas of their life, not only when there is a pay dispute.

As an IT union, we believe we have an active responsibility to engage in the debate about the platform economy. It is a topic that partly goes beyond our direct remit — for example, Uber workers are not strictly IT professionals — but we understand that our contribution from an academic and intellectual standpoint is very valuable. That is why we are driving forward the Observatory and the Laboratory: to tell the CGT, government officials, and members of parliament that we have a technical advisory capacity. Personally, for example, I have advised the Peronist labour commission on behalf of the union, and I was part of the advisory group for the artificial intelligence bill that was discussed at the time.

We do this technical work because we believe the union is a fundamental political actor in public debate. In Argentina this has a very strong tradition: in Perón’s era, more than 33% of public offices were held by union representatives. And in that spirit, we engage in the debate about digital sovereignty in the country. We defend the need for a state-owned enterprise to exist and for local data centres to be in place to safeguard personal data and the sensitive areas of the Argentine State, while also seeking greater operational efficiency.

We were directly involved in this. Some of our comrades were part of working groups in the previous government alongside Luis Papagni (Undersecretary of Administrative Innovation during Alberto Fernández’s government). The union played a role in what we believed was digital sovereignty: previously, Argentina’s digital management systems were in the hands of a private company, and when Luis came in, what was done was to bring those systems under the national State so that the State itself could manage them — making both the systems and the data centres part of the public domain.

As a union we are firmly convinced of the need for digital sovereignty in Argentina. Furthermore, historically, this union has championed free software and has driven an international free software conference that has hosted very prominent figures in the sector. In fact, we have an agreement with the Linux Foundation and have participated in international open source spaces such as OSPO. We are believers in that philosophy and integrate it into our technical and political vision.

And what do the Observatory and the Laboratory actually do?

The Observatory began, above all, out of a need to shed light on wages. In Argentina there is very powerful corporate propaganda claiming that software jobs are extraordinarily well-paid and that salaries are extremely high. I started looking for reliable sources because companies were citing surveys from employers’ chambers that were not public, and whose figures made no sense when we compared them with reality.

So we said: let us talk to our workers. And we began building our own data, using official sources — such as information from the state revenue collection agency — alongside other sources. From there, we developed a systematic body of work on wages in the sector.We then added another focus: in Argentina there is a promotional regime for software companies which, in practice, means they pay very little tax. So we began to show that these are leading companies, among the most valuable in the country, that nonetheless pay no taxes.

We began to highlight that many of these companies are registered abroad, in tax havens; that they keep their workers outside collective labour agreements; that they pay relatively low wages; and that, at the same time, they receive economic benefits from the Argentine State. From there we began producing more comprehensive reports on the state of the industry: approximately 160,000 workers, of whom 70% are men; age distribution; geographic location; working conditions; and above all the median real wage, which today sits at around one and a half million pesos ($1,500,000) — which is low.

By contrast, in the companies where we have a collective agreement, wages reach approximately 2,700,000 pesos, which is significantly higher. We also analyse how many workers are freelancers, how many are employed on a permanent basis, and how many are paid in dollars versus pesos. All of that work had an impact. It was picked up by national media, and companies such as Mercado Libre were forced to respond. There was an impact in government and in Congress: members of parliament began discussing the possibility of removing those tax benefits. In the end, they were not removed. During Alberto Fernández’s peronist government, there was scope to act, but no progress was made. And with the current government of Javier Milei, which is very closely aligned with the tech business sector, that possibility is practically non-existent. 

What we did achieve was placing the issue on the public agenda. We managed to make it a recurring subject of debate: so that whenever Galperín weighs in on social media, questions about the subsidies his company receives arise; and periodically the media returns to the topic. In other words, the policy was not changed, but a sustained challenge was generated.

The Laboratory, on the other hand, emerged from the need to intervene on a technical level. We have a project for real-time verification of platform algorithms, with the aim of detecting possible violations of labour regulations: unrecognised overtime, payment problems, wage discrimination, or forms of surveillance extending beyond the workplace. The idea is to develop a platform or verification system. That work has already begun. We also have a preliminary version — a proof of concept — that we developed together with the Universidad de San Martín, funded as a research and development project, called VerifyLabor.

One of the objectives is to advance that system. Other objectives include organising hackathons, producing publications, and curating technical articles, especially on artificial intelligence and its implementation. We also aim for the Laboratory to be able to develop its own positions on technical debates — for example, the question of technical debt, which is also a political discussion. Looking ahead, we are thinking about organising conferences and other activities that may emerge from that space. That, broadly speaking, is the objective of the Laboratory. And together with the Observatory, because we conceive them as parts of the same project: the Observatory with a more research-oriented focus, and the Laboratory with a more technical and development-oriented one.

And what is the ultimate goal? Would it be to build an international network?

Yes, but it is an objective of the union as a whole, not just of the Laboratory or the Observatory. The idea is to build an international union capable of engaging in these debates in spaces such as the ILO or at global conferences, and with the capacity to address companies like Google, Anthropic, and others directly. To be able to say that there are limits, that not everything is permissible — especially when it comes to working conditions.

It also involves discussing more structural questions: if technology is going to make workers more productive, then why does that not translate into better wages or a reduction in working hours? And, moreover, putting the ethical questions linked to artificial intelligence on the table. Today that discussion is completely dominated by the companies themselves. It is presented as a debate between actors such as OpenAI and Anthropic, but in reality the “ethics” they put forward tends to be aligned with geopolitical interests: basically, as long as the systems work against the enemies of the United States, anything goes. In that scenario, a real counterpart is missing. What is missing is for IT workers to be represented in that discussion and to be able to intervene from their own perspective.

I was thinking about the case of Mercado Pago in Argentina and its comparison with the Pix system in Brazil: how do you see that relationship and what differences seem most relevant to you?

In Argentina there is a comparable local example, which is Cuenta DNI. It works with your national identity document: with your DNI you can already make transfers. It is an application from Banco Provincia. It offers discounts and cashback, works extensively with neighbourhood businesses, and has enabled fairly widespread digital inclusion. In practice, you have an account and a payment app, similar to Mercado Pago, but linked directly to your identity.

It is not a Central Bank system like Pix in Brazil — it belongs to a provincial bank. But it is interesting for a legal reason: Banco Provincia predates the National Constitution, so it has a presence across the entire territory and, because it is a digital wallet, it can operate throughout the country. And now there are discussions about Pix beginning to be used in other countries as well. That is why we argue that there should be a nationally owned tool that competes with both Cuenta DNI and private digital wallets. There is also MODO, a wallet promoted by several private banks, but it does not have the same benefits scheme or the same impact in terms of financial inclusion.

And the pan-American perspective? Do you speak with unions in other countries?

Dialogue with other countries does exist; there are regional exchange forums. But the reality is that there is no Latin American bloc that functions in a coordinated way. In Argentina there is Mercosur, even the Mercosur Parliament, but in practice it has very little influence.

There was a period when greater regional integration seemed possible — during the governments of Lula in Brazil, Chávez in Venezuela, and Morales in Bolivia — but that process did not consolidate. Today the situation in Latin America is quite fragmented: each country moves forward on its own, with a few specific exceptions. And this is not purely an ideological matter. There was no significant integration even between governments of a similar political sign, such as Macri’s in Argentina and Bolsonaro’s in Brazil. It is one of those processes that everyone considers important but that has never managed to develop in practice. The most that exists today is Mercosur, which survives, but functions essentially as a trade agreement, without any real political or technological integration.

What is the role of art in building new social movements and media? Artists Elke Uitentuis and Tibor Dieters, and media theorist Geert Lovink join us in the studio to discuss what kind of media conglomerates we dream of, the models that inspire us, and the kind of coalitions we are ought to build. As you will hear, we all want to break away from the art world’s cozy bubble of empty political statements and build something else. The fundamental point, in Geert’s words, is to move art from policing at the discursive level to mobilising at the image level.

Listen to Duckrabbits Talk Back

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About

Duckrabbits Talk Back is a podcast about postartistic antifascism, hosted by Aria Spinelli, Kuba Szreder, and Sepp Eckenhaussen. The series is inspired by the comic treatise Duckrabbits Unveiled: A Sneak Peek at the Postartistic Theory and Practice (2025).

Production: Anielek Niemyjski
Cover art: Kacper Greń
Jingle: Olka Dąbrowska

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, 2026

What is to be done when the usual economies of art — grants, markets, donors, biennials, institutions, and endless unpaid labour — reach their breaking point? In this episode, we look at interdependent economies of art and the search for alternative modes of organising artistic production amid systemic breakdown. Together with Kathrin Böhm, Marco Baravalle, and Yazan Khalili, we discuss more-than-capitalist economies, commons, alter-institutions, donor dependency, voluntary work, class privilege, and infrastructures of solidarity. Yet again, do not expect simplified responses to complex questions, but rather clarity that stems from years of practice, based on grounded reflections on Company Drinks, S.a.L.E. Docks, Radio Alhara, The Question of Funding, and Learning Palestine. Please join us as we ask whether art workers should defend institutions, abandon them, occupy them, or build something else — because after the breaking point, interdependent economy becomes a matter of survival, autonomy, and collective imagination.

* Correction to the episode: Company Drinks was not started in 2013, as stated in the episode, but in 2014.

Listen to Duckrabbits Talk Back

RSS: https://media.rss.com/duckrabbits-talk-back/feed.xml
RSS.com homepage: https://rss.com/podcasts/duckrabbits-talk-back
Apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/duckrabbits-talk-back/id1896885677?l=en-GB
SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/networkcultures

About

Duckrabbits Talk Back is a podcast about postartistic antifascism, hosted by Aria Spinelli, Kuba Szreder, and Sepp Eckenhaussen. The series is inspired by the comic treatise Duckrabbits Unveiled: A Sneak Peek at the Postartistic Theory and Practice (2025).

Production: Anielek Niemyjski
Cover art: Kacper Greń
Jingle: Olka Dąbrowska

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, 2026

“What was your screentime over the weekend?”

“9 hours.”

“So, suddenly, you are going to have a lot more time to fill. What will you do?”

“Stare at a wall.”

This now-viral interaction between a BBC reporter and Isabella, a young student in the UK, unfolded in response to the country´s new social media ban for those under 16. While some considered Isabella’s apathetic response as peak humor, others emphasized their concerns and criticism about her generation and their relationship with technology.

We’re witnessing a global wave of public policies targeting young people and their use of digital media. Around the world, countries are implementing smartphone bans in schools, nationwide social media bans under 16 or 14, and attempting to regulate platforms and the content and experiences they deliver to children and teenagers. There seems to be a collective interest across the political spectrum to protect young people from “the digital Wild West” and “predatory algorithms” – a noble task indeed.

In the narrative that is driving this debate, children are generally positioned as closer to victims than to villains, with experts classifying the media coverage around children’s social media usage as contemporary moral panics. However, a meme that has persisted the test of time and seamlessly entered the public imagination is taking this moral panic and giving it a spin of its own: How about we ridicule the kids instead of protecting them? That is the hot take the iPad Kid meme brings to the table.

We’ve all come across videos of young children screaming when someone takes their iPad away, right? Or throwing annoying tantrums in planes or restaurants for everyone to see? And the one with the peanut butter spread all over the display like it’s a piece of toast? Gross, right?!

Rather than the actual footage of misbehaved, screen-addicted kids, the iPad Kid meme seems to be about young adults imagining, describing, or exaggeratingly re-enacting what these little humans must be like. Rather than real examples of the younger generation, iPad Kids are more of a mythical persona, a folk devil existing in tales that warn us of existing evil.

Memes are highly effective tools for co-creating such narratives. Their stance — whether they convey ridicule or empathy by presenting something as distant or relatable — opens the door for users to form affinities or aversions. Although this has the potential to redefine and reshape the power dynamics of the discourses that shape society, it can also strengthen the position of old narratives and moral panics if they become memeable.

In times and cultures that, on the one hand, tell us children are vulnerable beings in need of protection, but, on the other hand, constantly remind us of our failures to protect them, we find it worth exploring whether enjoying the ridicule and hate of kids through memes warrants curiosity. So, following this instinct, we did a deep dive to understand why memes turned on kids (and their iPads).

Who is the iPad Kid? A Starter Pack

To understand the iPadKid myth — and why we like to mock them so much — we looked at entries under the ‘iPad Kid’ section on Urban Dictionary and strolled around Know Your Meme, which, thankfully, provided us with much-needed visual starter packs. The start seemed pretty straightforward: iPad Kids are simply children addicted to their portable screens, right? But as we dove deeper, we discovered that these kids exhibit repetitive patterns that have much less to do with tablets than one might expect from a persona named after one. Rather, it was more about dirty looks, insufferable behavior, and a lack of tech skills that reached far beyond iPad usage. So what are these little demons like?

Sick and Sticky

iPad Kids are considered stinky. They reek of all the deep-fried, carb-heavy foods they eat and proudly wear ketchup stains on their Fortnite and Minecraft t-shirts. They can’t be bothered with proper eating etiquette because Cocomelon is simply more deserving of their attention.

Their mouth is dirty, their fingers sticky, and they like their unhealthy food with a side of boggars they diligently dug up from their noses. On the rare occasions of their cleanliness, you can tell them apart by a signature bad posture from crouching over their screen of choice, and spreading mysterious diseases with their omnipresent runny nose, crusty cough, and careless sneezing.

“ipad kid starterpack | /r/starterpacks”. Uploaded in 2021 by Reddit Moments. From: Know Your Meme

Since they don’t get outside much, they engage in hardly any physical activity, living a sedentary, indulgent lifestyle fueled by Cheetos and chocolate milk. Their bodies are contorted, greasy, and fat. They are absolutely monstrous.

Fucking stinking fat-fingered maccies poo-smelling freak, typically called Ollie, highly fat like a bowling ball, he doesn’t fall down the stairs, he rolls and sets Richter scale level 12 when he walks. (Family orgy time, Urban Dictionary)

An intense, short, fat 200-pound kid who rocks back and forth, annoying everyone who comes in their way. Most kids below the age of 10 come down with a disease known as the iPad kid disease. Most people are annoyed by the existence of an iPad kid. An iPad kid gets most of their exercise by typing all day on their greasy iPad and whines to their mother to buy an Oculus to become a monster, a greasy iPad kid, and a gorilla tag kid. (quanlingling_finglemingle, Urban Dictionary)

6 year old kid at a restaurant starterpack | /r/starterpacks”. Uploaded 3 years ago by Reddit Moments. From: Know Your Meme

A Test of Everyone’s Patience

iPad Kids are supposed to perform their unsanitary, narcissistic rituals in semi-public spaces, such as restaurants, planes, queues of any kind, or big family dinners. Here, their bad manners extend beyond their eating habits. They throw tantrums, curse for no reason, and, on occasion, present chronic online takes on society and politics. Their weird and antisocial behavior is particularly inconvenient for their families, who most often consist of exhausted wine moms, but also absent fathers, and drug-dealing siblings. These kids just can’t behave properly, and it really shows when it comes to handling technology.

“iPad Kid – 4-year-old kid at a restaurant starter pack | /r/starterpacks”. Uploaded 4 years ago by Reddit Moments. From: Know Your Meme

It is true that parents are to blame for these aberrant behaviors? After all, they gave their child an iPad, too early — “in the moment they exit their mum’s pussy” according to Urban Dictionary user Pain au Chocolat, and “likely to distract them from a divorce”. Every tantrum or issue that would require any actual parenting is fixed by giving the little menace an iPad and letting overstimulating cartoons do their job. iPad Kids are the result of this careless and neglectful child-rearing style. Unfortunately, Cocomelon does not teach you manners.

iPad Kid: SKIBIDI TOILET I WANT MY IPAD NOW

Millennial Parent: Sure, honey, you can have as much unsupervised and unlimited screen time as you want! You’re so cute!

7th Grade Teacher: Why don’t some of my students know basic grammar or English? They are operating at a 3rd grade level.

School Psychologist: They’re iPad kids, all raised on technology and unable to use their brains independently.

(aflashofthelightning, Urban Dictionary)

“iPad Kid – Raised-on-Ipad Kid Starter Pack | /r/starterpacks”. Uploaded in 2023 by Reddit Moments. From: Know Your Meme

Kindergarten Dropout, Roblox Royalty

In the myth, the kids can’t use technology like normal people do. No matter how fancy their bulky iPad cases are, you can count that their screens are sticky, greasy and crusty (or a dangerous mix of the three). They also spend a lot of time on these devices, usually watching dumb, childish cartoons or playing games that require little in the way of motor or cognitive skill. As Urban Dictionary experts affirm, these kids often turn out to be “kindergarten dropouts”. They are glued to their iPad screens and will throw tantrums, fits, and cry if anyone tries to interrupt.

The iPad Kids are Roblox’s royalty — spending hundreds of real dollars to customize their avatars and troll other players. But give them a controller, and they won’t be able to play anything more sophisticated. And when they get sucked deep into the latest Paw Patrol lore, or a random Roblox obby, they lose any sense of their surroundings and blast the volumes so anyone could hear what they are up to. According to LikesPoetryCorner’s entry on Urban Dictionary, it is not unusual that iPad Kids “lose all awareness of their surroundings, often randomly contorting their bodies and throwing themselves in awkward ways over furniture, bumping into things, and randomly vocalizing.”

They will often come up to you — even if you are a random stranger — and ask if they can play games on your phone with their snot-covered fingers. And once they grow out of this phase, they will start sending you weird and unfunny memes at 3 am. There is just no escape from their inappropriate handling of our dear technology.

“iPad Kid – iPad kid starter pack | /r/starterpacks”. Uploaded in 2021 by Reddit Moments. From: Know Your Meme

We’re All iPad Kids?

Although our exploratory quest was enlightening, it also led us to more questions. Just when we thought we were on the verge of a breakthrough, an anomalous Urban Dictionary about iPad Kids — that did not reference kids or iPads — caught our eye:

When someone needs their phone so much that they use it even while eating or in the bathroom. Comes from parents’ tendency to give their children mobile devices at a young age to get them to eat their food or keep them still. (vicksgarden, Urban Dictionary)

This made us wonder: what if adults can also become iPad Kids? What if the trick of the trade is that the iPad Kid meme, at its deeper core, is not about kids (nor iPads) at all?

Maybe you grow up, but not out of it. The iPad will be replaced by a phone. The kid will turn into an adult, but the antisocial dependence on technology remains. Urban Dictionary entries recommend “staying away” from iPad Kids or “avoiding them at all costs” as they might be contagious. Their dirty screens could carry ‘deadly diseases’ or their ’terrible mucos’ could get on your own phone if you allow them to get too close. One particularly angry entry written by Ballslover42069 takes this to a whole other level, calling iPad Kids slurs and suggesting we should kill all of them as they “are a different breed of human” and “set up for failure in every way”. Another entry even explicitly defines the iPad Kid figure as:

A dangerous disease that infects small children, typically between the ages of two and ten. Symptoms include brain rot, lack of situational awareness, loud voice, and disgusting habits.

An iPad Kid is created after giving an iPad to an offspring immediately after exiting the womb. It is typically done to avoid raising the child or to distract from the divorce. Once the child reaches age 4, the disease develops additional symptoms that can manifest in several ways. Inability to look away from the iPad. Eats while watching YouTube at full volume alone or with company. Lack of motor skills. Restricted diet.

Signs of an iPad Kid:

-iPad/tablet with the child at all times. It will typically be encased in a comically large protective case; however, it will still somehow be cracked. It will have gunk (snot, boogers, feces, etc.) coating half the screen.

-Inability to consume anything other than dino nuggets, mac & cheese, or ice cream.

-Upon removal of their iPad, they will immediately begin screaming & crying.

-Extreme stupidity; kindergarten dropout.

Upon witnessing any of these symptoms, please maintain a safe distance to avoid exposure to the pathogen. (trutherfr, Urban Dictionary)

The iPad Kid is seen as a contagious disease rather than a human. It is something that should be avoided and, in more extreme cases, annihilated. This aspect of contagion, the possibility of spreading and taking over our lives and societies as we know them, seems to be a key aspect of understanding why the iPad Kid is not met with pity or empathetic concern, but with disgust and anger instead.

This response is at odds with ongoing policy debates that claim to prioritize children’s safety and well-being by banning dangerous and addictive technologies through social media or smartphone bans. But the impacts and effectiveness of such legislation remain controversial.

Public discourse frames technology as an evil that children must be protected from. On the other hand, the iPad Kid meme implies that it is not technology that is dangerous, but the kids themselves. It is the kids (and sometimes their families) who choose a life of dirty screens, long screen time, ElsaGate, and loud Cocomelon marathons. They infuse, otherwise fairly neutral and harmless devices, with chaos.

Technology offers them choices: they can choose from a wide array of complex quality games, yet they flock to Roblox; they can watch all the educational content published on YouTube, yet get sucked into rabbit holes of stupid cartoons; they can act like grown-ups in these spaces, yet they choose to be… childish? The argument which lurks deep beneath the surface, therefore, is that technology and platforms are not the dangerous or contagious ones – it is the people who can’t handle them appropriately.

Although these discourses may seem like polar opposites, one placing children as victims and the other as villains, they ultimately lead us to the same place. Despite making technology the villain, pragmatically, governments still fail to tame its owners and designers, and instead focus on an easier target: holding the kids/users accountable. They are made to carry a burden, being excluded from online spaces and opportunities, of a problem they did not cause or create.

Beyond ineffective, as experts have repeatedly pointed out, bans are a ‘lazy fix’ and, ultimately, an admission of defeat in the face of tech giants who ‘refuse’ to be regulated. The turn to individual accountability puts all of our abilities to self-regulate and self-optimize in check, which, in turn, makes the possibility of catching the ‘iPad Kid disease’ even scarier. Beware, if you do succumb to this illness, you will have no one to blame but yourself.

Fearing What We Can’t Control

How to navigate this complex debate? Do we just pick sides based on whether or not we enjoy sharing the (online) public space with kids, and shoot memes at each other to get our points across?

Our Know Your Meme deep dive showed that some memers have already chosen this path, either by ridiculing the imagined haters of iPad Kids or by foregrounding that we were all once children with questionable media preferences.

“iPad Kid – People who flood this sub with “iPad Kid” starterpacks starterpack | /r/starterpacks”. Uploaded in 2022 by Reddit Moments. From: Know Your Meme

Another option would be to engage with this debate in a nuanced way — not discarding or vilifying digital youth cultures, but also not pretending it’s ok that tech giants are feeding all of us slop, ads, and user-unfriendly design.

This is the harder path, as platforms and digital technology continue to evolve at a pace that most users simply struggle to comprehend and subsequently act on. It seems the promises and hopes of a democratic and participatory internet are long gone. Instead, they were replaced by fears that digital media will lead to deep sociopolitical polarization, tearing our society apart for profit. How these platforms and devices function is subject to constant, highly non-transparent change, and our established institutions seem unable to counter or control what will happen next.

This is why the iPad Kid figure is so appealing. It allows us to identify a folk devil that embodies all that is wrong with the (digital) world. It gives us a ‘bad guy’ that is more constant, concrete, and easier to grasp. If you think about it, this may actually be quite a logical strategy when one attempts to navigate the overwhelming feeling of powerlessness against the current digital reality.

“iPad Kid – We’ve all clocked some intense Mall Madness games”. Uploaded in 2021 by Y F. From: Know Your Meme.

By casting iPad Kids as folk devils — embodying our moral panic — we distance ourselves from these struggles. Along this piece, we have called iPad Kids many things: a disease, disgusting, stinky, obsessive, ill-mannered, children of divorce, stupid, and contagious. But let us add one more to that list: iPad Kids are scapegoats. They are our coping mechanism.

They are profane and morally corrupted. Not us, surely! By centering this persona, we avoid relevant discussion around the moralization of technology. It’s the fault of lazy kids, careless parents. They deserve to be mocked; show them no pity! Put them in their place; they are deviant, they are not like us. We have nothing to do with it. Not us, not our tech, not our society.

If only that were true. At the very least, we have to admit that hating iPad Kids does indeed tell us a lot about ourselves. Why do we laugh at them? Why are random people online so disgusted by them? Why do we use them as an insult? We frame the iPad Kids figure as “a sign of the times,” a mere symptom of a ‘sick society’ that perceives itself as going downhill from here.

When we speak of abstract ‘kids’ with such anger and disgust, we are externalizing something much more complex. We are scared our brains might be rotten, that we are condemning the next generations, that AI slop will come to rule the internet and the world. Much like other moral panics, the iPad Kids figure seem to hold a distorted mirror up to us. They are what we fear we might become: dirty, unhealthy, stupid, antisocial – and enslaved to technology, which we are unable to fully control.

References

Hanna Ziady, ‘We will protect them from the digital Wild West.’ Another country will ban social media for under-16s, CNN Business, 3 February 2026, https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/03/tech/spain-under-16-social-media-ban-intl

Josh Butler, ‘Children to be banned from having YouTube accounts as Albanese government backflips on exemption’, The Guardian, 29 July 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jul/29/children-to-be-banned-from-having-youtube-accounts-as-albanese-government-backflips-on-exemption

Justine Humphry, Catherine Page Jeffery and Jonathon Hutchinson, ‘The anxiety of age: Moral panics over children’s social media use as a tool to regulate’, Convergence, 19 May 2026, https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565261451511.

Know Your Meme, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ipad-kid

Sawdah Bhaimiya, ‘Countries around the world are considering teen social media bans – why experts warn it’s a ‘lazy’ fix’, CNBC, 8 April 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/08/teen-social-media-ban-countries-tech-experts-warning.html.

Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, New York: Routledge, 2002.

Urban Dictionary, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=iPad+Kid

Bios

Ana Kubrusly is a PhD candidate in Communication Sciences at NOVA University of Lisbon, funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). Her research focuses on children’s and adolescents’ relationships with digital environments, their literacy, skills, well-being, and digital cultures. Ana is also a research fellow at the Institute for Research on Digital Literacies (York University, Canada) and a member of the Futures + Literacies + Methods Lab.

Martina Paulenová is a PhD candidate at Masaryk University’s Department of Media Studies and Journalism in Brno, Czech Republic. In her research, she focuses on political communication on social media, with a special emphasis on memes and their impact on audiences. She investigates how different types of memes shape political perception, drive engagement, and contribute to broader shifts in public opinion.

Interview with Ezequiel McGovern.

The introduction of Digital Tribulations, a series of intellectual interviews on the developments of digital sovereignty in Latin America, can be read here. 

I met Ezequiel at the first meeting of IT workers in Argentina, held in Buenos Aires in March 2026. Esteban—a friend from the Argentine IT workers’ union, whose interview will be published next—pointed him out to me as someone especially worth speaking to. Ezequiel was wearing an ARSAT T-shirt, which, as I soon learned, referred to the Empresa Argentina de Soluciones Satelitales Sociedad Anónima, Argentina’s state-owned telecommunications company.

Founded in 2006, ARSAT was created at a moment when Argentina risked losing control over key orbital positions assigned to it for satellite communications. From that starting point, it grew into a central actor in the country’s technological infrastructure: developing and operating geostationary satellites, expanding the federal fiber-optic network, supporting digital television, and building domestic data-center capacity. As such, it has become one of the clearest institutional expressions of Argentina’s attempts to build a measure of technological and digital sovereignty.

Ezequiel is an engineer who has been working on these issues since long before “digital sovereignty” became a fashionable term in policy circles. My impression was that he has seen many of these debates come and go, and that he has a particularly clear sense of what should—and should not—be done if Argentina is to achieve technological autonomy under its specific conditions. 

The interview took place online. In it, we discuss the history and role of ARSAT; the relationship between public infrastructure, digital sovereignty, and national development; the material constraints behind data centers and AI infrastructure; the strategic importance of satellites, fiber optics, and cloud systems; finally, Latin America’s dependence on foreign hardware and software and the possibilities and obstacles for regional technological cooperation.

***

What do you do, and how did you get involved with the issue of digital sovereignty?

I’ve been working in this field for 15 years. My specialty has always been industrial and high-availability IT. From there, I worked for Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF), Argentina’s main energy company, for many years, overseeing its automated lubricant warehouse. I also worked for Telefónica, always on large-scale projects where there were problems to solve or particularly complex systems that had to be integrated.

That’s how I started working with data centers, initially from within the public sector. I first worked for the City of Buenos Aires, then for the National Office of Information Technologies (ONTI). As I saw the challenges we were facing, I began advocating for the idea of having a national-level data center with world-class capabilities. We couldn’t continue relying on many small data centers that lacked proper budgets and qualified personnel and eventually ended up underfunded and plagued by problems.

I brought that vision to ARSAT during a meeting where the board invited me to explain the project: what a new data center would be useful for, what business opportunities it could enter, and what possibilities it offered. I gave a presentation of roughly half an hour to the board. They were interested in the range of potential businesses that could emerge, at a moment when cloud computing was just beginning. Amazon had only recently started investing heavily in the cloud, but the idea of building something similar was already taking shape.

After that meeting, the company’s president at the time, Pablo Tognetti, said to me: “Well, when are you going to start working with us to make this project happen?” So, I began with a part-time contract for six months, and then I joined full-time. We built the data center. I was responsible for the infrastructure design: everything related to servers, connectivity, and all the procedures—together with the networking team—to become an internet service provider, obtain IP address allocations from the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry (LACNIC), create the autonomous system, start announcing our addresses on the internet, and, in general, develop the entire project needed to create our own cloud platform, which is what we ultimately achieved.

When was ARSAT founded, and what does it do?

ARSAT was founded on May 20, 2006, in response to a need Argentina had at the time. There was a geostationary satellite operated by Nahuelsat, whose use had been outsourced and privatized. The company was required to launch another satellite to preserve Argentina’s orbital slot, but it failed to fulfill the contract and announced that it was leaving the country.

To avoid losing those orbital positions, the national government submitted a proposal to the ITU to continue the process through a national company. That was how ARSAT was created. From there came the ARSAT-1 and ARSAT-2 projects, the geostationary satellites that are currently in orbit. That was the original reason for its creation. But there was also recognition of the need for communications infrastructure in a country as large as Argentina—which I believe is the eighth-largest country in the world by area—where connectivity is extremely challenging and had been severely underinvested. To give you an idea, at that time there were fewer than 8,000 kilometers of fiber-optic cable in the entire country, counting all providers combined. Private companies were unwilling to make the necessary investments to deploy high-quality fiber-optic infrastructure across the territory.

That concern led the government to act, and ARSAT took responsibility. The Federal Fiber Optic Network was created, which today consists of 35,000 kilometers of fiber operating throughout the country. Alongside the Federal Fiber Optic Network, it became clear that we also needed a data center, which was exactly what I had been advocating for. That’s why they called me: to take advantage of those services and build an internationally competitive data center inside Argentina, with the data remaining in Argentina.

So the process began with nationwide telecommunications and the satellite segment. Then came the Federal Fiber Optic Network and the data center. Alongside that, there was also the rollout of Digital Terrestrial Television, which was tied to telecommunications because spectrum had to be freed up: frequencies used for analog television had to be reassigned to mobile networks and other technologies. That’s how the project to transition all television broadcasting to digital began. ARSAT also took on that task, and digital terrestrial television coverage eventually reached almost 85% of the country, with the remainder covered through satellites.

I think it’s great that a public company plays such an important role in developing technology. But it also seems that the government has changed significantly. President Milei has recently declared that Argentina will become an artificial intelligence hub. What would be the role of digital sovereignty, or of an actor like ARSAT, in relation to this shift?

The key issue that governments always forget when they make these kinds of announcements is that these are extremely large investments. These are highly complex systems, and they also require enormous amounts of energy to operate. Today, all of those conditions—combined with ongoing wars and disruptions to global supply chains—are wreaking havoc on the data center market.

In fact, I was reading that many of the data centers planned for this year in the United States will not be built because the necessary transformers cannot be manufactured. Electrical infrastructure doesn’t expand overnight; it’s not like software. Building infrastructure is extremely complex. And given the current geopolitical situation and supply-chain disruptions, for example, copper is hard to obtain, there is a shortage of specialized steel for transformers, and trade routes are being disrupted.

In that context, having your own data center and technological sovereignty means having something smaller and better suited to the country’s needs, rather than depending on investments that we know are unlikely to arrive—especially in the current international environment. That’s why we always envisioned relatively small data centers of around two megawatts, nothing extravagant. If there were a need for artificial intelligence or intensive computing, then we could consider building a larger facility. But the investment required is enormous. To give you an idea, a single AI server costs millions of dollars and consumes around 30 kilowatts. To build something reasonably capable, you need to think in terms of 35 megawatts. That means well over one billion dollars in investment between equipment and construction.

Those are figures that are far beyond the current model of the Argentine economy. And globally, I don’t think that investment is going to come to Argentina under these circumstances. If even in the United States the number of data centers planned for construction this year has already been cut in half, all of this is going to be delayed. That is also encouraging companies to make better use of the infrastructure they already have. Google and other companies have managed to run models four to six times larger using the same amount of memory. So they no longer need to expand as rapidly as they originally planned. That affects the entire production chain. On top of that, we now face external constraints that nobody anticipated. No one expected a war with Iran this year. And that directly affects one of the most important variables in the economy: the cost of energy.

In that regard, Chile developed a system to assess the environmental impact of data centers. What do you think about that? Can it help determine where data centers should be built?

We have always envisioned locating data centers within industrial hubs that already have environmental conditions clearly defined. Places where water management has already been addressed, where any water used can be recycled, where electricity supply is guaranteed, and where the facilities are located away from urban centers.

In fact, one of our earliest plans was to build a facility in the Bariloche technology park. We had a World Bank loan of 200 million dollars approved for that purpose. But after a change of government, the loan was redirected elsewhere and was not used for the data center. Even so, the project remains active. We are still in discussions with the World Bank, and when the political context changes, the idea is to move forward with construction. But we have always approached it this way: locating data centers in places already designed to host businesses or industries with high energy and water consumption.

Fortunately, in Argentina we do not have a shortage of space. We have many possible locations for building data centers, unlike Chile, which faces much greater geographic constraints as well as limitations in energy availability.

So what Milei said about building data centers in Patagonia would be more difficult to implement?

Yes, at the moment it is much more difficult. We also have a connectivity problem in the south. We would need more submarine cables landing there, as well as a connection through the Pacific. We had planned a trans-Pacific fiber-optic link together with Chile, but the current government halted the project. That would have given us direct internet access, through dark fiber, to Asian markets via Australia and the broader Asia-Pacific region. It would have allowed services to be provided to those markets from southern Argentina. Today, by contrast, all traffic has to pass through Miami, which adds nearly 300 milliseconds of latency. And latency is another factor that companies examine very carefully.

But the biggest issue with the investment figures being discussed—the 25 billion dollars often mentioned—is that, globally, that level of investment is no longer expected to go into AI servers. OpenAI, for example, failed to follow through on its most recent memory-chip purchases from Samsung and SK Hynix. So the growth projections they had previously announced have already weakened. They had claimed they would consume nearly 60% of global memory-chip production for three years. This month, however, they bought nothing. As a result, those projections are now considered unreliable, and people are waiting to see how purchasing trends evolve. Because if companies continue buying memory, that means they are still buying servers and still building new data centers. If those purchases stop, it suggests that the projected number of data centers will not materialize as expected.

And given the infrastructure limitations we have in southern Argentina, the challenge looks even greater. To give you an idea, today ARSAT is the only company with fiber-optic infrastructure along Route 40. Along Route 3, we are building what would become the Atlantic coast segment. The Andean region already has fiber, but a data center without connectivity is useless, especially for this type of service.

As for energy for data centers in the south, there are several projects that use gas turbines capable of generating enormous amounts of power. Mining companies are already using this approach. So energy could be available through on-site turbines powered by flare gas. In fact, that is much more environmentally friendly than simply burning the fuel, because if that gas is not used for electricity generation, it still has to be burned or vented into the atmosphere. But these are very remote and inhospitable locations. Where you place the facility matters a great deal. There is also very limited water availability, which means those data centers could not rely on water cooling. They would have to use direct-expansion cooling systems, which completely changes the design.

Despite the cold climate, you cannot rely on the weather itself, because it is also an arid environment with a great deal of dust. And you cannot have a data center exposed to dust. You can install multiple layers of filtration, but then those filters have to be maintained, and that introduces additional costs that work against you.

When we talk about governance of the technology stack, satellites seem to be something that receives relatively little attention, even though they are extremely important. What are the advantages of having your own satellites rather than relying entirely on private companies?

The most important advantage, in a country like Argentina that struggles with balance-of-payments constraints and foreign currency shortages, is that with two national satellites you can provide communications across the entire country while paying in local currency. Argentina spends roughly between 60 and 80 million dollars a year on satellite communications. Of that amount, around 60 million is absorbed by ARSAT. Without ARSAT, those dollars would flow abroad. So from a balance-of-payments perspective, it is enormously beneficial. ARSAT is a profitable company. You can pay for its services in pesos and continue receiving them; otherwise, you need hard currency available to pay foreign providers.

That is the economic side. From the perspective of sovereignty, you are also developing an industry that improves the quality of production at every level: electronics, engineering, metalworking, propulsion systems, systems integration. It allows you to create a network of SMEs that INVAP can contract, and those companies begin to gain international recognition for other satellite projects because they have developed expertise and high-quality processes.

In the satellite industry, quality has to be guaranteed from beginning to end. It is not like other products. There are insurance requirements, verification procedures, and extremely demanding standards. All of that helps create new industries and higher levels of quality. And in a country as large as Argentina, satellites are essential. There are many remote areas—the foothills, the Andes, the northern regions with ravines and valleys—where installing fiber-optic infrastructure is extraordinarily expensive or simply impossible. Sometimes you can build it, but then a flood destroys it and cuts the entire line. So you cannot rely solely on fiber. You absolutely need satellite capacity.

Satellites are also critical for strategic purposes: border control, communications for the Armed Forces, the fishing fleet, and Antarctica. All of these functions require satellites if you want to exercise sovereignty. Moreover, satellites also shape symbolic and territorial sovereignty. With ARSAT-1 and ARSAT-2, we provide coverage over the Malvinas/Falkland Islands and Antarctica, territories over which we claim sovereignty. Providing communications through those satellites is another way of reaffirming the country’s rights, by saying: we made the investment, we are providing coverage, and we are guaranteeing services throughout Argentine territory and for all its inhabitants. And the costs are competitive as well. It is not as though we are losing money to achieve that. The company is profitable.

Of course, we do not have the most advanced communications technology today, because these satellites have been in orbit for more than ten years. When they were launched, having five megabits of internet bandwidth was considered very good. The challenge is that geostationary satellites last between 15 and 18 years, while technology evolves very quickly. We will need to consider how to improve services, perhaps by launching ARSAT-SG, which is designed to help close the digital divide and provide high-quality coverage across the Andes, the foothills, and northern Argentina. That would allow us to offer bandwidths of around 50 megabits per second.

It makes me think a bit about the postal system: the advantage is not only that it works and connects everyone, but that it also functions better when it is public. In that sense, what do you think about interpreting infrastructure lack in Latin America as a form of digital dependency?

Yes, absolutely. That is one of the things we try to avoid whenever possible. For example, in choosing the cloud management platform software we use, we selected Apache CloudStack, which belongs to the Apache Foundation. That gives us access to the source code and ensures that no company can suddenly change the licensing model or prevent us from using it.

We have already seen that happen with VMware. VMware, which was widely used for virtualization services, changed ownership, dramatically increased prices worldwide, and forced many European SMEs to migrate to open-source solutions. Excessive cost increases push the market toward concentration, where only the major cloud providers can survive while smaller companies can no longer offer the same services. Fortunately, on the open-source side we have KVM, which provides essentially the same capabilities for virtual machines and cloud services and remains available.

Where Latin America truly remains dependent is in computing hardware. We depend on technologies developed by American, Asian, or European companies. We do not have chip fabrication plants, and we do not manufacture memory. We do have the human talent needed to design these technologies, but building a world-class semiconductor fabrication plant requires billions of dollars in investment and an industrial ecosystem that simply does not exist here. That is why those facilities are in Taiwan, and why the issue is so sensitive.

In fact, on April 18 we will be giving a talk in Avellaneda about the need to think seriously about rebuilding a microchip and microcontroller industry in Latin America. Not with the goal of competing at the cutting edge with three-nanometer technology, but by starting with 90- or 45-nanometer processes. For example, you should not have to wait for a chip for a washing machine to arrive from China. Nor should a military drone depend entirely on foreign suppliers. These are not highly complex technologies, and they could be produced with those manufacturing capabilities. We are talking about much smaller investments—less than one billion dollars—compared to the 60 billion dollars that a cutting-edge fabrication plant can cost.

For regional needs, that would be extremely important. Brazil is already far ahead in this area. Brazil clearly understands that the world is organized around strategic resources and acts accordingly. Unfortunately, Argentina at the moment is, I would say, functioning like an occupation government. It is a government focused on dismantling the country’s technological and developmental capacities. If you look at the sectors they have targeted, they are precisely the ones that allow a country to differentiate itself, grow, and integrate. This government will clearly attack all of those areas. We have always looked to Brazil. Brazil has long had an imperial vision of itself as a global actor and behaves accordingly, even at the level of its elites. In Argentina, when I studied our elites, I found that they have largely been rent-seeking and extractive elites. They see themselves as the owners of Argentina, while the rest of us are merely tenants. And that is how they treat us, both politically and economically.

Brazil is an interesting case. Digital sovereignty is discussed there quite extensively, both among the public and within the state. For example, the development of payment infrastructure such as Pix has transformed people’s lives, especially those of poorer citizens. But at the same time, despite all that discourse, American companies are still contracted for certain services. That can also become a trap, because state-led innovation can end up being captured and put at the service of foreign corporations.

Yes, absolutely. Here in the Province of Buenos Aires we have Cuenta DNI, which aims to become something like an Argentine version of Pix. It is a locally developed system, and that is very important. The Province of Buenos Aires also has its own data center and its own development teams. In many cases, these solutions emerge because of budget constraints. There simply is not enough money to hire Accenture or some international consulting firm. That necessity forces you to develop capabilities locally.

In ARSAT’s case, for example, we developed Cine.Ar Play, which allows people across the country to watch Argentine films from the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA) free of charge. We also developed local content delivery network solutions. For example, that is the infrastructure used by the Official Gazette to publish government documents. So solutions already exist that address specific needs and that, if they did not exist, would make us dependent on companies elsewhere in the world. And they can be built using open-source technologies—good, effective, and affordable, as we like to say—precisely because we do not have the budget for anything else.

Do you think there is something to learn from a more popular Latin American tradition when thinking about digital sovereignty? 

I think there is. We have a fairly good understanding of where we can add value and which costs would not be justified. That is why we focus on software development and infrastructure solutions based on our own engineering capabilities, without relying on third-party engineering, while trying to make everything as maintainable as possible.

For example, when we built the data centers, we did not buy a turnkey solution. We became deeply involved in the project itself. We tried to ensure that each component had the lowest possible level of complexity so that maintenance would be easier. I always say that one of the main enemies in engineering is complexity. Sometimes it is unavoidable, but in many cases it leads to larger problems when unexpected behavior appears—which it always does.

Black-box solutions are attractive because they provide something that is already solved. But when a problem arises, you no longer have visibility into what is happening inside. We try to avoid that. Even if it is not always the most efficient approach, we prefer to keep everything separated, understand the system as a whole, reuse components, and know exactly which part is causing which problem. And if there are things that cannot be avoided, then so be it—but at least we want them clearly identified.

We do not think in terms of building the entire technological stack in Latin America or manufacturing everything locally. But we do believe in developing the areas where we can differentiate ourselves, where we can add value, and where foreign companies would charge enormous sums to adapt solutions to our needs. Because otherwise you become dependent on their development roadmap.

A clear example is Oracle databases, which are still used extensively throughout Latin America. We have always advocated moving toward PostgreSQL, which is open source and offers virtually the same performance for normal use cases. But fashions and managerial fears carry a lot of weight: “I don’t want to move away from this because it already works.” The problem is that these technologies are extremely expensive, and they can also leave you vulnerable to situations where a company suddenly says: “We are no longer selling licenses to Argentina.” Then, overnight, you lose access to updates. That happened to Russia, it happened to Cuba, and it is happening to Iran right now. In the long term, the risks are much greater if you depend on those technologies.

I’ve spoken with people across Latin America, and everyone tells me the same thing: yes, we need more cooperation at the Latin American level, but it’s very difficult. What can be done to strengthen cooperation among countries?

The most important thing is creating spaces for people to meet. Those spaces do not exist, deliberately so. There are no regional technology forums, even though there easily could be. Brazil, for example, could host them. Europe has many more of these spaces: user groups, regional conferences, and so on. We have often been invited to conferences organized by the KVM Foundation and to regional technical conferences in Europe. Obviously, we participate mostly online because we are not allowed to travel, but we still contribute in our own way. And everything we develop ends up being used around the world.

I think that is the direction we should pursue. But there are always what I call “agents of chaos,” people who actively undermine opportunities for communication. That happens even within Argentine universities, where research groups working on exactly the same topics often do not even know each other exists. Right now I am very focused on energy issues, and I keep finding universities carrying out similar analyses without realizing that other groups are doing the same work. So I often end up acting as a kind of matchmaker between research teams: “Look, this faculty is working on this topic—go talk to that other group,” and I put researchers in touch with one another. That is when synergies begin to emerge. But we have built a model of isolated islands. And those islands are a major obstacle to scientific and technological development. We need to start breaking them down and creating larger collaborative communities. There is also a very Latin American problem, which is the “me first” mentality: “I do it better, everyone else does it worse.” These ego-driven competitions also work against us. Egos can sometimes be useful for driving projects forward, but when we need to pursue a common cause, they become a major obstacle. And many projects ultimately fail because of that. There is also a cultural element, if you like: we are more expressive, and disagreements can become irreconcilable very quickly. And that happens not only across Latin America but also within individual countries.

And what about Uruguay? What do you think of ANTEL, which seems to have a somewhat more public-oriented approach?

We have had two meetings with ANTEL because we have many things in common. They do not have satellites or satellite capacity, but they do have fiber coverage throughout Uruguay and they operate data centers. Their situation is somewhat mixed, though: they have data centers with their own equipment, but they also purchase capacity from Amazon and other major providers. It is a hybrid model.

That said, Uruguay has a major advantage: it is a very small country. That means the cost of building and maintaining high-quality infrastructure is much lower. Our challenge is that Argentina is a very large country and infrastructure costs are astronomical. Uruguay has a system that works very well. What they lack is professionals, because Uruguay loses many highly skilled workers. A great many people end up moving to Argentina or to other countries due to economic conditions and quality-of-life considerations. If those conditions improved, they could retain that talent and advance much further, because their infrastructure and expansion costs are significantly lower.

Brazil, by contrast, has strong integration between industry and universities and has always maintained an industrial focus. Petrobras is also a giant company that drives much of the country’s scientific computing, data center development, and communications infrastructure. They have a very clear understanding that these capabilities are necessary if they want to continue developing and growing.

What is to be done when authoritarianism is not simply a blast from the past, but mutates through AI slop, fossil infrastructures, culture wars, and flexible realities? What happens when time collapses and fascists wage war on truth itself? What is the role of artists and postartists facing this conundrum? Should they become more operational, or rather radically inoperative? And do we need clear answers, or must we learn how to pose the right questions?

In this episode, we map postartistic antifascism around the world with Gregory Sholette, Hito Steyerl, and Kuba Depczyński. Expect no comforting answers, but sharp discussions about the radical unpresent, retro-vanguards, derivative fascisms, fractal colonialism, democratic interregnums, phantom archives, and the fragile afterlives of initiatives such as the Antifascist Year. Please join us in this exchange of diagnosis and strategies — because by braiding both we get a bit closer to knowing what needs to be done.

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About

Duckrabbits Talk Back is a podcast about postartistic antifascism, hosted by Aria Spinelli, Kuba Szreder, and Sepp Eckenhaussen. The series is inspired by the comic treatise Duckrabbits Unveiled: A Sneak Peek at the Postartistic Theory and Practice (2025).

Production: Anielek Niemyjski
Cover art: Kacper Greń
Jingle: Olka Dąbrowska

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, 2026