DiPLab co-director Antonio Casilli is featured in the culture pages of the Italian magazine L’Espresso, where he discusses the process that led to the release of his award-winning documentary In the Belly of AI, which he will present at the Festival del Pensare Contemporaneo in Piacenza, Italy on September 13, 2025. The 75-minute documentary, co-written with Julien Goetz and directed by Henri Poulain, exposes the hidden human costs behind artificial intelligence systems—from data centers consuming massive environmental resources to underpaid “data workers” in the Global South who process disturbing content to train algorithms, often developing psychological trauma in the process. Casilli’s appearance at this international philosophy festival, themed “Vite Svelate” (Unveiled Lives), aligns perfectly with his documentary’s mission to unveil the invisible labor powering AI systems. The film has earned critical recognition including the Outstanding Excellence at the Documentaries Without Borders festival the documentary has been shortlisting for the Melbourne documentary Film Festival. Find here the pdf version in Italian and the html version in English of Casilli’s article. EspressoDownload Last June, when Meta announced the appointment of Alexandr Wang to head its new artificial superintelligence program, the trade press hailed yet another enfant prodige of Silicon Valley. At only 28 years old, he has become one of the most influential faces in the race toward General Artificial Intelligence. A textbook American parable: brilliant MIT student, billion-dollar deals, rise to the top of the tech industry. Behind this glossy narrative, the reality is another: Wang is first and foremost a cofounder of Scale AI, and his entry into Meta coincided with the nearly $15 billion investment Zuckerberg’s behemoth made in his company. Founded only a few years ago, the startup that turned him into a star in the industry relies on a business that is anything but glamorous: employing millions of data workers who for paltry sums enter information, tag images, transcribe text, and filter sensitive content. These are the riders of artificial intelligence: precarious, underpaid jobs that fuel the technology of the future. While investors and the public are being dazzled by the rhetoric of superintelligence, behind the scenes is this industrial army that continues to work for Scale AI and hundreds of other such companies. The truth is that artificial intelligence, no matter how sophisticated it may appear, is still massively dependent on the most precarious human labor on the planet. An untold number of digital workers, estimated by the World Bank to be well over one hundred million globally. For years, the media have documented the working conditions of these “click proletarians.” In January 2023, two months after the launch of ChatGPT, a Time magazine investigation brought to light the existence of real digital sweatshops in Africa, where workers were paid as little as a dollar and a half an hour to “train” OpenAI’s artificial intelligence. Also supporting Time’s reporting was the research of academics like myself, who had been engaged in field investigations for years to document this reality. At that time I was already working with director Henri Poulain on what would later become our new documentary, In the Belly of Artificial Intelligence (In the Belly of AI, Federation Studios, 2025). My research activity has long been intertwined with the production of television investigations on the relationship between technology and work. This time we decided to shine a spotlight on a burgeoning phenomenon: the use, to make artificial intelligence work, of the most vulnerable people. From the victims of armed conflicts, to the millions of unemployed in the poorest continents, to low-income workers even in rich countries. These are not just companies like Scale AI, but international chains of exploitation in the digital economy. Uma Rani, an economist at the International Labor Organization in Geneva, explains this with disarming clarity during one of the first interviews in our documentary. Every time ChatGPT answers a question, a Tesla car avoids an obstacle, or Instagram recognizes a face in a photo, there is a stream of human labor running across the planet behind that automation. It’s not just code and algorithms: it’s sweat, toil and exploitation in countries where a few cents can make the difference between surviving and not making ends meet. But this interview was just the beginning. During months of filming we met dozens of people: inmates in Finnish prisons who for two euros a day train specialized intelligences, Ukrainian refugees reduced to tagging digital images to support their children, Indian migrants tagging images for a few cents an hour. But it was especially the slum workers in Nairobi, Kenya, who struck us the most. Not only because of the extremely exploitative conditions, but because of the devastating psychological consequences of their work. Many of them train the artificial intelligence of large multinational corporations not to generate illicit content: rape, torture, murder, abuse. This kind of activity, also called “moderation,” represents the darker side of artificial intelligence training. Even those who moderate content on Facebook are actually teaching automated systems to block violent or offensive photos and text. Those who perform these tasks often develop post-traumatic stress disorder after spending months viewing and cataloging gruesome content. In the face of these testimonies, we bumped into the wall of silence from Big Tech. What is the response of AI development companies in the face of all this? Virtually nothing. Apart from a few timid attempts to give themselves codes of ethics that have no legal standing, their main job seems to be to silence critical voices. The realization of In the Belly of Artificial Intelligence, more than in our other projects, has been a minefield: interviews with experts and witnesses canceled at the last minute, lack of approvals from institutions and government departments, intimidation by lawyers linked to large corporations and law enforcement. The most surreal episode happened in Nairobi, where we were interviewing some artificial intelligence trainers. While we were filming, a group of police officers raided the venue and pressured the crew to turn off the cameras. Kenya is in a particularly delicate position in dealing with tech giants. The country has become a crucial hub for these kinds of digital services, hosting untold numbers of data workers who work for global AI giants. This economic dependence makes the Kenyan government particularly receptive to pressure from multinational corporations. A few months after the police raid during our shooting, President William Ruto himself publicly intervened in lawsuits against companies that exploit workers at starvation wages. He announced an amendment to prevent future lawsuits against these companies: ‘We changed the law so no one can take you to court anymore.’” What we have realized during these years of work is that this army of data workers is not “invisible labor,” as it is often called. It is actively hidden by tech companies that use intimidation, legal hurdles and media manipulation to construct a storytelling that makes people like Alexander Wang the sole heroes of the digital revolution. But the real heroes are others. Ordinary people, without fame or recognition: the women and men who today are finally organizing in unions and associations to demand decent working conditions. It is they who, thanks in part to documentaries like ours, can now hope that their voices will finally be heard. Because behind every intelligent algorithm there is always human intelligence. And that intelligence deserves respect, dignity and justice.

Last May, the French government launched a working group aimed at legalizing real-time facial recognition. Far from being a surprise, this announcement is part of a series of proposals put forward by state officials, along with industrial and scientific players. We publish this op-ed by Félix Tréguer, adapted from a text originally published on AOC, where he argues that facial recognition is incompatible with democratic forms of life. In May 2025, Gérald Darmanin was getting restless. Overtaken on the right by his successor at the Ministry of Interior, Bruno Retailleau, the new Minister of Justice apparently found it difficult to hang up his apron as “France’s top cop.” So he pulled out of his hat a seemingly novel proposal: the legalization of real-time facial recognition. The ink on the War on Drugs law, with its array of new police surveillance measures, was not yet dry— the Constitutional Council would rule on it a few days later—but the minister was already on to his next move. After his announcement, his office would confirm to AFP that a working group was about to be launched to “create a legal framework” so as to “introduce this measure into our legislation.” According to the minister, who in 2022 said he opposed facial recognition, “using technology and facial recognition are the solutions to drastically combat insecurity.” A few days later, his rival Retailleau would follow suit, calling for “highly regulated” use of real-time facial recognition in the context of criminal investigations. A POLITICAL PROJECT The context of heightened political competition on the right could lead one to believe that this is yet another trial balloon with no future. In fact, facial recognition is a political project that has long been embraced by Emmanuel Macron’s governments, but has been repeatedly postponed for fear of provoking an outcry among the population. When my colleagues at La Quadrature du Net and other collectives across the country launched the Technopolice campaign in 2019 to document new police surveillance technologies and unite local resistance, facial recognition was already on everyone’s lips. At the time, the Parliamentary Office for Scientific and Technological Assessment, then spearheaded by a Macronist parliamentarian, was already calling for an experimental law to authorize its use in real time. A few weeks later, Secretary of State for Digital Affairs Cédric O gave an interview to Le Monde newspaper on the subject. In this very first government statement on the topic, O considered it necessary “to experiment with facial recognition so that our manufacturers can make progress.” The economic stakes were then expressed candidly. It is true that since the early 2010s, facial recognition and other techniques combining artificial intelligence and video surveillance—a spectrum of applications grouped under the term algorithmic video surveillance (AVS)— have been the subject huge public spending. Through public research policies led by the European Commission or the French National Research Agency, but also via tax mechanisms such as the Research Tax Credit, startups and large multinationals such as Idemia and Thales have a significant portion of their R&D financed by taxpayers. Bpifrance (the French public investment bank) and the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations have also taken action to help French industry structure itself to gain a foothold in these promising markets: last year, the global facial recognition market grew by 16% per year and is expected to reach $12 billion in 2028; while the market for other applications of AVS was $5.6 billion in 2023 and could reach $16.3 billion in 2028. In 2019, Cédric O therefore proposed legalizing facial recognition on an experimental basis for the 2024 Olympic Games. But on the eve of the 2022 French presidential election, before retiring from politics to become the chief lobbyist for the tech industry, he publicly acknowledged that the political conditions for using this technology were not ripe: “Priority has been given to other issues […] given the context and the sensitivity of the subject,” he explained at the time, while also denouncing the “libertarian NGOs” that, in his view, had fueled a climate of “psychosis.” The government then fell back on VSA applications deemed less sensitive. They were legalized on an experimental and temporary basis under the 2023 Olympic Games Act and implemented in recent months: These include detecting people or vehicles driving in the wrong direction, falls to the ground, crowd movements, fires, etc. The experiment had inconclusive results, and yet the government is now seeking to extend it as part of the next law relating to the 2030 Olympic Games. But at the end of 2022, during parliamentary debates, Gérald Darmanin, then Minister of the Interior, and his colleague in charge of sports, Amélie Oudéa-Castera, were pretty clear: facial recognition was a no-go: “The system does not in any way provide for […] the creation of a biometric identification system,” the minister of sports stated in the chamber: “The government does not want anything like that, either now or in the future.” IN THE AI ACT, EXEMPTIONS FOR THE POLICE But these reassurances were part of a double game. At the same moment, in Brussels, the French government was leading the negotiations on the AI Act. As demonstrated by an investigation by the media outlet Disclose published this winter, even though the European Commission’s political marketing around this text was based in part on the promise of a ban on “real-time biometric surveillance in real time,” France was actually putting all its weight behind pressuring other European Union member states to spare law enforcement agencies from overly restrictive regulations. This strategy paid off. In the version of the “AI Act” that was ultimately adopted, the principle of banning real-time facial recognition was immediately undermined by a number of exemptions. For example, it is authorized to prevent “a genuine and foreseeable threat of a terrorist attack,” but also in the context of criminal investigations to find suspects for a range of offenses punishable by more than four years’ imprisonment, including sabotage. Activist activities, particularly those associated with the environmental movement, could easily be impacted. Another concession obtained by France —a particularly chilling one—, allows police forces to use algorithmic video surveillance systems that “deduce or infer [people’s] race, political opinions, trade union membership, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life or sexual orientation.” This means not only the detection of insignia or clothing denoting political orientation, but also the resurgence of naturalizing theories and pseudosciences purporting to reveal “race” or sexual orientation based on morphological characteristics or facial features, now incorporated into powerful automated systems designed to enact state violence. Gérald Darmanin’s announcement of the launch of a “working group” to legalize facial recognition was therefore no surprise. It was a logical follow-up of many steps taken at the highest levels of government, in conjunction with industrial and scientific actors, to prepare the French population and minimize as much as possible the political cost of legalizing real-time facial recognition. The Minister of Justice has claimed that facial recognition is essential to ensure the safety of the population, while trying to minimize the issues at stake: “People say that at [the main Paris airport] Roissy, it takes 1.5 hours to get through; in Dubai it takes 10 minutes; yes, but in Dubai, they have facial recognition,” he explained May, touting the added convenience that people would be entitled to expect from the widespread use of this technology. One might be tempted to remind the minister: “Yes, but in Dubai, human rights defenders are imprisoned, the regime resorts to torture and is effectively a dictatorship. Is this really a model to follow?” Darmanin conveniently forgets that facial recognition is already a reality in some French airports and train stations. It helps him better defend his fool’s bargain: privacy and freedoms in exchange for greater convenience for those who move around in the world of flows. The minister sees this as a good deal, one that will convince “the average person” to put aside their reservations and what he sees as a widespread “paranoia about technology, civil liberties, and the issue of databases.” PERMANENT, GENERAL, AND INVISIBLE IDENTITY CHECKS In high places, however, the paradigm shift brought about by real-time facial recognition is well understood. In 2019, when a colleague from La Quadrature and I were invited to give our opinion on the “social acceptability of facial recognition” before an assembly of police officials, prefects, scientists, and industrialists at the General Directorate of the National Gendarmerie, a colonel in the Gendarmerie came to present a memo he had just published on the subject. In this document, he offered a rather lucid analysis of the place of facial recognition in the history of state identification techniques: “The advantage of this technology is that it systematically and automatically performs the basic tasks of law enforcement, which are to identify, track, and search for individuals, making this control invisible. Subject to unbiased algorithms, it could put an end to years of controversy over racial profiling, since identity checks would be permanent and universal. Provided the algorithms are unbiased, it could put an end to years of controversy over racial profiling, as identity checks would be permanent and universal [emphasis added].” “Invisible, permanent, and universal” identity checks? Michel Foucault was undoubtedly right when, in Discipline and Punish (1975), he alluded to the fantasy of a police force that had become “the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making everything visible, but on the condition that it makes itself invisible.” If a law were to be passed to authorize real-time facial recognition, things could move very quickly: Even if, for the time being, in France, its use by the police is only legally possible after the fact, in the context of judicial investigations and only for the “Criminal Record Processing” database (the TAJ, which contains nearly 10 million photographs of faces), the technical infrastructure enabling real-time use is already in place. First, the sensors: around 90,000 video surveillance cameras placed on public streets and roads across the country, forming as many geolocated points dedicated to the collection of facial images. Next, centralized databases of ID photos linked to civil status data: in addition to the TAJ database, most immigration-related files now include photographs of faces that can be processed by algorithms. This is also the case for the ” Secure Electronic Documents ” (TES) file created in 2016 by the Ministry of the Interior, which collects facial prints from all holders of identity cards and passports. And finally, the last piece of the puzzle: facial recognition algorithms that compare images to files, provided by private service providers such as the multinational company Idemia, whose reliability rate has greatly improved in recent years. REFUSING FACIAL RECOGNITION With facial recognition, our faces become index terms in police files, which means that our personal data can be automatically revealed (surname, first name, place of birth, place of residence, etc.). If its use in real time were authorized, going out in public with your face uncovered would be like harboring a forgery-proof ID card that could be read by the government at any time. Anonymity would be made virtually impossible. And, in the course of this process, our faces—which reflect our emotions, attitudes, and ways of being—would be reduced to being mere faces: eyes, a nose, a mouth, ears, and other anatomical features whose measurements, shapes, or colors could be automatically classified. As showcases of our subjectivity, they would become new objects of power, through which the state could control us. Facial recognition is also one of the means by which fascism could take hold and endure. On that day in September 2019 at the General Directorate of the National Gendarmerie, we reminded all its promoters present in the audience why we believed it is unacceptable. Thinking that we could strike a chord with some in the audience, we told them of our conviction that if our grandmothers and grandfathers had had to live in the early 1940s in a world saturated with these technologies, they would not have been able to survive for long in hiding, and therefore organize resistance networks capable of standing up to the Nazi regime. This counterfactual hypothesis illustrates why facial recognition is simply incompatible with the defense of democratic ways of life. In this day and age, it is not to be taken lightly. Félix Tréguer is a researcher, member of La Quadrature du Net and author of Technopolice, la surveillance policière à l’ère de l’intelligence artificielle (Divergences, 2024).

Today sees the start of the plenary debate of the draft law on the simplification of economic life at the French National Assembly. A seemingly technical law, with obscure issues, it marks a new show of force in the service of industry, and to the detriment of human rights and the environment. Article 15 of the bill, in line with the promises made by Emmanuel Macron to investors at the AI summit last February, aims to accelerate the construction of huge data centers by allowing the government to impose them onto local authorities and the population. Against this power grab aimed at building these infrastructures for the benefit of the tech giants and at the cost of a monopolization of land, electricity and water resources, a broad segment of civil society organizations is calling for the deletion of this article and the establishment of a moratorium on the construction of large data centers. SIMPLIFICATION, THE TROJAN HORSE OF DEREGULATION The examination of the “simplification” bill begins today in the National Assembly, amid a certain indifference. However, the stakes are high. As France Nature Environnement points out in its recently published report, which takes stock of 20 years of “simplification” laws, the latter are in fact to be ” a Trojan horse of deregulation, an insidious and dishonest process that weakens the rule of law and environmental justice, jeopardizing the protection of ecosystems and the construction of a livable world”. Article 15 of the bill, relating to data centers, fits perfectly into this dark history: it authorizes the government to grant a status derived from the 2023 law on green industry to fast-track the construction of large data centers, which have an extremely high environmental impact: label “major national interest project” (PINM). According to the government, this status could be granted to data centers with a surface area of between 30 and 50 hectares (the equivalent of up to 71 football fields)! With this PINM status, the tech multinationals and the investment funds that support them with tens of billions of euros would be provided by the government to impose data centers on municipalities: the national government would then take over the powers of local authorities relating to urban planning and regional planning, by itself rewriting local urban plans in order to adapt them to a given data center project. Public consultation procedures would be further weakened. Finally, the government could grant exemptions from environmental regulations, particularly those relating to protected species. In other words, the state could bypass existing rules in the name of “simplification” and “innovation” so as to impose the construction of resource-intensive and polluting data centers on local communities. MORATORIUM! For several weeks, the collective Le Nuage was under our feet, which organized itself in Marseille to resist the Hiatus coalition (launched in February to ‘resist AI and its world’), are calling for two things: on the one hand, the repeal of Article 15, and on the other hand the adoption of a moratorium on the construction of large server warehouses. Several amendments, resulting from contacts established at the political level, were aimed specifically at relaying these demands. Amendments to delete Article 15 were thus tabled by the Socialist Party, the La France insoumise. This is our urgent and minimum demand: to defend it, contact your representatives to convince them to adopt these amendments, go to this page where you will find arguments in support of these positions. But other amendments, based on , had been tabled with a view to a more ambitious objective: to introduce a moratorium on the construction of large data centers, until a citizens’ convention can lay the foundations for a debate on the appropriate framework for the development of digital infrastructures. Sadly, although these moratorium amendments has been tabled and examined in committee in March without any problem, this time for the debate in plenary session, the services of the National Assembly deemed them inadmissible because they contravened Article 40 of the Constitution. Apparently, such a moratorium or the organization of a citizens’ convention would contribute to “worsening a [fiscal] burden” or “reducing public resources.” REALITY CHECK This is all the more concerning that the principle of a moratorium — a way of laying the foundations for democratic control of data centers, and of countering the government’s desire to accelerate ever further in defiance of rights and democracy — is supported by a wide range of actors. A broad front of civil society, including researchers, activists and political representatives, is thus calling, in a Op-Ed in Libération, for the introduction of such a moratorium. In Marseille, the public investigator in charge of investigating the SEGRO logistics warehouse and data center case has also just called, in his recommendations addressed to the regional authorities, to “take a break so as to bring the players around the table, imposing a moratorium”. Similarly in Ireland, where data centers today account for de facto moratorium until at least 2028. In short, this policy option is not only possible, but also realistic and necessary to begin putting digital technology back in its place, at a time when the rise of AI is leading to a speculative boom in the development of these infrastructures. So let’s keep pushing! Visit our campaign page to urge MPs to vote to remove Article 15 of the “simplification” law, and to demand that the government introduce a moratorium on large-scale data centers! You can also support us in this fight by making a donation to La Quadrature!

The National Assembly has begun examining the bill on the simplification of economic life. Through its Article 15, this “simplification” bill (or PLS) aims to speed up the construction of huge data centers in France, by allowing the government to impose them on the territories concerned and by increasing exemptions to municipal planning regulations, environmental laws, and to the principle of public participation. Against this new denial of democracy imposed to serve the interest of the tech industry, La Quadrature du Net and the collective “Le Nuage était sous nos pieds”, together with the other members of the“Hiatus” coalition, are calling for the deletion of Article 15 and a two-year moratorium on the construction of large data centers, so as to provide the time to establish the conditions for the democratic control of these digital infrastructures. In early February, at the Paris summit on AI, Emmanuel Macron once again donned his suit as the great leader of the Startup Nation. The result was announcements of funding from all sides: while the French Parliament had just adopted the most austerity-driven budget of the 21st century, billions were pouring in, particularly to finance a boom in “data centers” in France. Data centers are industrial production plants, huge warehouses where thousands of servers owned or used by tech multinationals are piled up. In the age of AI, we are witnessing a real boom in the construction of these data computing and storage infrastructures. This boom is amplifying the misdeeds of computing, not only from an ecological point of view, but also in terms of surveillance, exploitation of labor, and the destruction of public services, as denounced by the Hiatus coalition in its founding manifesto. Because France has nuclear energy that can lower the “carbon footprints” of tech multinationals, and because it is ideally placed on the international map of submarine cables, Macron the salesman presents it as a promised land for investors. To attract them, the French president has made a promise: simplifying and deregulating to avoid protests and ensure the swift construction of these resource-intensive infrastructures. The law on the simplification of the economy, already passed by the French Senate and currently being examined by the National Assembly, aims to translate this promise into action. WHAT THE SIMPLIFICATION BILL (PLS) SAYS In its article 15, the “simplification” bill – in fact a deregulation bill – authorizes the government to grant construction projects for very large data centers a label derived from the 2023 law on “green industry”: the label “project of major national interest” (PINM). According to the government, this label is intended to be reserved for data centers with a surface area of at least 40 hectares, or more than 50 football fields! With this status of “project of major national interest”, tech industrialists would see the government work with them to impose data centers on municipalities: the government would then take control of the powers of local authorities relating to town planning and regional development, by taking over the rewriting of local urban plans so as to adapt them to these data center projects. The public consultation procedures will be further streamlined, and the government will also be able to decide that these infrastructures can infringe on environmental regulations, particularly those relating to protected species or the non-artificialization of soil. Finally, in its article 15 bis, the simplification bill enshrines into law the 50% reduction enjoyed by data centers that consume more than 1 gigawatt in a year – a provision that is currently set out in a joint decree of the Minister for Energy and the Minister for Industry. Thus, by encouraging the explosion of ever more gigantic and resource-hungry data centers, the “simplification” law accelerates the ecocidal impact of the tech industry, all to enable France and Europe to remain in an illusory “AI race”. WHY THIS DEREGULATION OF DATA CENTERS IS UNACCEPTABLE This attempt to “accelerate” is all the more unwelcome as the proliferation of data centers in France is already the subject of citizen protests across the country due to the conflicts of use they generate. As documented by the collective “Le Nuage était sous nos pieds”, in which La Quadrature participates, their establishment in the port area of Marseille has, for example, led to the monopolization of waterfront land. It has led to the postponement of the electrification of the quays where cruise ships dock, as evidenced by documents from RTE. The latter thus continue to spew their toxic fumes into the Saint-Antoine district, causing various illnesses among the inhabitants. Finally, to cool the servers that are running at full capacity, data centers also require huge amounts of water, monopolizing a resource that is essential for ecosystems and the maintenance of agriculture. Added to this is the regular release of fluorinated gases with a high greenhouse effect, and an almost constant noise pollution. In view of these problems, the current legal and democratic vacum surrounding data centers is particularly shocking. Local elected representatives and citizens’ groups agree on the need to rethink the regulatory framework around data centers. As for the National Commission for Public Debate (CNDP), it has asked to be consulted during the construction of these warehouses, but has come up against the will of the government to exclude the body from a growing number of industrial projects, through a recent draft decree. The situation is therefore highly problematic at the moment. But with the “simplification” law, the government is proposing to deregulate even further, aggravating the denial of democracy. The aim is to roll out the red carpet for tech speculators, to enable them to turn France into a kind of “digital colony” stamped “low carbon”. FOR A MORATORIUM ON THE CONSTRUCTION OF NEW DATA CENTERS We refuse to allow our towns, villages and neighborhoods to be taken over by the tech giants in this way. We refuse to see our territories and natural resources sold to the highest bidders, undermining the few mechanisms of regulation and collective control that exist today. We do not want to “accelerate” the ecocidal headlong rush of tech as Emmanuel Macron invites us to do. We want to put a stop to it! That is why we call on members of Parliament to reject Article 15 of the “simplification” bill and to support a two-year moratorium on the construction of large data centers in France, until a public debate can be held on how to regulate them. The two-year moratorium would apply to data centers larger than 2,000 m2 or with an installed power of 2 megawatts. According to the typology established by Cécile Diguet and Fanny Lopez in their research report for ADEME, a moratorium on facilities larger than 2,000m2 preserves the possibility of medium-sized data centers and does not hinder any projects that the State or local authorities may wish to undertake for public use. The public debate to which we are calling could take the form of a citizens’ convention. It should address both the democratic control of digital infrastructures such as data centers and the artificial intelligence systems now deployed in all sectors of society. It should address the question of the uses of digital services, trying to break the dependence on the toxic models of the major multinationals in the sector. Against the industrial deregulation granted to tech, against the concentration of power and the amplification of social injustice that artificial intelligence reinforces, it is urgent to put digital technology back in its place and to think of a model for the development of its infrastructures that is compatible with ecological limits as well as human and social rights. NEXT STEPS The members of the special committee responsible for examining the text have already tabled amendments to it on Thursday 20 March. Several of them aim to delete Article 15. An amendment to call for a moratorium has also been tabled by Green MPs Hendrik Davi and Lisa Belluco. These amendments will be examined by the special committee from Monday 24 to Thursday 27 March. The examination in public session will then take place from April 8 to 11, 2024. We will soon be launching a campaign page to make it easier for everyone to participate! In the meantime, spread the word and get ready for the battle against this umpteenth piece of shitty legislation! <3

For years, we’ve been bombarded with the idea that artificial intelligence is the answer to all our problems. A revolution, they say—a future marked by progress. But behind the hype lies a troubling reality that tech moguls are eager to hide: AI isn’t as artificial as we’re led to believe. It relies on the invisible labor of workers from the Global South—“click workers” in places like Kenya and Colombia—who spend their days labeling, annotating, and moderating data. Without them, AI wouldn’t function. In an interview with French media Blast, DiPLab’s Antonio Casilli discusses how platform capitalism, at the heart of the Big Tech empire, revives the darkest aspects of our past—colonialism, racism, and authoritarianism. It’s techno-fascism in action: on one side, promises of a better future through technology; on the other, mass exploitation and displacement. Thousands are caught in the middle, grinding away as the invisible labor force of AI, while the cycle of oppression continues.

In this Twitch livestream, L’Humanité journalists Pierric Marissal and Mathilde Gros interview DiPLab’s Thomas Le Bonniec about a 2025 complaint against Apple by the French League for Human Rights. Le Bonniec, whose whistleblowing sparked the case, previously worked for Apple’s subcontractor in Ireland where he transcribed Siri recordings collected without user consent. Now pursuing a sociology PhD at Institut Polytechnique de Paris, he studies how European data authorities recognize AI workers.