Trump is killing civic participation in global tech governance

AllAfrica

3 days ago

Not long ago US foreign assistance, alongside European and multilateral donors, helped sustain a global ecosystem of civil society efforts to safeguard democratic oversight of public policy – and, more recently, frontier technologies.
I know this work well: I served with USAID for more than a dozen years, advancing democratic governance and building civil society as essential counterweights to unchecked private and abusive public power.
Now, civil society's financial lifeline is being severed and that ecosystem is being dismantled — deliberately and in plain sight.
The new American regime's decision to gut USAID, freeze funding for the National Endowment for Democracy, dismantle the US Institute of Peace, quit international organizations such as WHO and withdraw funding from other multilateral institutions including UN Agencies and (reportedly) NATO, is not a scattershot retrenchment.
It is a coordinated retreat from the very idea that civic voices have a role in shaping global policy — particularly around the governance of frontier technologies like AI, surveillance systems and biotech.
And that's precisely the point. Civil society is not collateral damage in this regime. It's the target.
For years, civil society organizations and academic institutions around the world — many supported and financed by USAID and its ecosystem of partners — have helped build the infrastructure for the field of democratic tech governance. They've trained civic actors in digital rights and policy engagement, funded citizen labs that assess individual and societal risks of emerging technologies and provided indispensable funding for civil society to be able to show up at key moments where voices to hold tech firms accountable to public interest standards are most needed.
They've ensured governments have access to technical support, independent research and multistakeholder processes to shape digital policy with democratic values at the center.
But that is now being unraveled. By design. After all, if you don't have money, you can't travel, can't participate, can't be heard. Can't hold power to account.
The Donald regime has already rescinded President Joe Biden's AI Safety Executive Order, replacing it with what amounts to sweet subsidies and deregulation for his tech billionaire buddies. At the same time, USAID's digital governance programs have been shut down. The agency's public-facing digital archives have disappeared from the web. Entire ecosystems of civic engagement — global conferences, advisory panels, technical assistance platforms — have been hobbled.
You don't need to burn libraries to erase memory. In the digital age, you just take down the websites.
This collapse is not limited to far-flung democracies. The same playbook is now being deployed domestically. Universities, research centers and civic infrastructure inside the US — many of which play crucial roles in public-interest tech policy — are already under attack. With the international scaffolding removed, the regime is turning inward.
And the timing couldn't be worse. At the very moment the world needs stronger, more inclusive digital governance, the space for democratic participation is shrinking. Who fills that void? The answer is clear: authoritarians, opportunists and tech oligarchs.
Donald and Elon may present themselves as disruptors, but they are really architects of a new oligarchic order. Their vision for global tech governance is one in which civil society is absent, democratic guardrails are gone and the rulemaking is done in private boardrooms, not public forums, by hyper-masculine white dudes.
It is no accident that USAID — an agency unknown to many Americans and politically vulnerable — was first on the chopping block. It was the proof of concept. With little domestic constituency to defend it, few noticed when decades of work supporting civic participation, especially in the Global South, vanished overnight. And with it, the very notion that technology should serve people, not just profit.
Unless others step up — the Global Majority with financial support from Europe, the EU, civic coalitions around the world — we risk ceding the entire digital governance agenda to those who view democracy and diverse lived experiences as an obstacle.
Digital democracy won't defend itself. It must be deliberately built, protected, and expanded. That means investing in civic infrastructure, funding public-interest tech efforts, and ensuring that democratic participation — globally and domestically — is not a luxury, but a prerequisite.
Because when civil society is no longer allowed to help shape the rules, it won't just be tech that is unaccountable. It will become power itself.
Michael L. Bąk is a Thailand-based expert on civic participation and democratic governance of frontier technology and a non-resident senior fellow (cyber policy) at NYU Center for Global Affairs; co-founder of Sprint Public Interest, a research agency; and an advisor at the Centre for AI Leadership in Singapore. He served with USAID in Southeast and East Asia and was head of public policy at Facebook. He works with civil society, governments and academia as countervailing forces to big tech's accumulating, private power. He has lived most of his life in Southeast Asia.