Digital Attunement: Relation Against Extraction

The ‘Global Majority’ is a term that describes shared political conditions shaped by ongoing histories of colonialism and racial capitalism. Educator and activist Rosemary M. Campbell-Stephens coined the term as way to reorient racialised populations historically labeled as ‘minorities’ within Western nation-states from a position of subordination towards a space of transformative empowerment, where agency is amplified through practices of remembering, disrupting, imagining, and sharing.1 In this response to the 011 question, I want extend this emphasis on agency through Indigenous feminist perspectives that draw on pre-colonial forms of attunement, relation, and kinship, reconnecting the Global Majority with ways of being and knowing suppressed under Western colonialism. 

As AI-driven surveillance and digital technologies radically transform the collective circumstances of the Global Majority, it becomes especially urgent to ask how these systems of power unevenly affect bodies and communities situated across the globe. The Global Majority becomes a shared category when there is a need for collective resistance and solidarity. I am not convinced that solidarity is something a Global Majority can ever reach. In contrast to solidarity, collectivity does not require a unified position but can emerge through the forging of relations across difference. This essay considers how AI-driven surveillance and digital technologies dis/possess the Global Majority, as well as how communities across cultures and borders might find ways of collectively resisting such dis/possession. Going back to Campbell-Stephens, I want to ask whether Indigenous feminist practices of attunement can generate forms of collectivity able to resist such systems? Here, Indigenous feminist practices are relational ways of being and knowing specifically oriented through Indigeneity, where community, ceremony, and cosmology are taken points of departure, 

AI technologies are increasingly being put to use globally for purposes of surveillance. Flock cameras are flooding Turtle Island, infiltrating communities, families, and their vulnerable moments and movements that are cherished as private and intimate, and now, in Berlin, there is a new ‘AI surveillance system’ at Kottbusser Tor, one of the city’s most beloved and busy areas. These kinds of technological onslaughts produce different kinds of dis/possession, where bodies and communities lose agency over the conditions under which they live, observed and rendered as data. If, as I discuss below, attunement describes an embodied process of continuously registering and responding to one’s environment, including our technological conditions, these systems of dis/possession affect not only the ability for certain communities to exist in and move through space but also in their nervous systems. By this, I mean that the nervous system continually registers and responds to the conditions of its environment, including those shaped by surveillance and digital technologies.

However, these systems of dis/possession do not affect all communities in the same way, and viewing the disparate experiences of communities belonging to the Global Majority through the latter framework should not flatten these differences. What this framework does illuminate, however, is the way that technological systems of surveillance increasingly organise, classify, extract, and act upon differently situated bodies. In such a context, collective resistance does not require sameness because it can emerge through recognising different experiences as relationally implicated in overlapping technological structures of power. 

These operations of dis/possession are not only integrated into public surveillance systems but are also embedded within our digital devices. When scrolling through social-media platforms, puppies appear beside violence, stories of homicide beside influencers sharing their daily spending, families reuniting on vacation beside images of genocide. And this dissonance is not accidental. Algorithmic systems organise what the body and the nervous system encounters through data accumulated about the user. The nervous system continues to attune, but within a relational field that is/was not collectively established. 

The body isn’t simply dis/possessed by such technologies but unconsciously participates in the relational process. This relational process is part of the nervous system attuning. Through this participation, the body produces data while retaining limited agency over how its resulting digital representation is assembled, interpreted, and circulated.

This produces a need for collectivity, where relation and kinship are at the centre, and practices of reciprocity, responsibility, and agency can move towards resistance and anti-coloniality positioning. This positioning is a kind of gathering that precedes colonialism and attunes not only the individual but the collective nervous system. It pulls the individual towards collective forms of ceremony, towards practices that underpin relation and kinship. For example, collective storytelling brings bodies together through listening and witnessing – where what is shared is held across the collective rather than alone. 

Technological extraction intensifies the need for collectivity and collective attunement, because bodies and nervous systems are already attuning, most often subconsciously, to everything around them: from people and environments to digital technologies. Since digital technologies are part of this process, our bodies are already participating in relation to technology and its extractive conditions. Within these extractive technological relations, the body and the nervous system have limited agency over the conditions of their participation. In this sense, surveillance technologies occupy the nervous system by shaping the conditions to which they must continuously attune. However, when attunement becomes intentional and/or conscious, the conditions of that relation can become more perceptible, creating possibilities for collective intervention and resistance. 

These uneven conditions of technological dis/possession also complicate what it might mean for collective forms of resistance to take part in producing a Global Majority. A collective cannot depend on converting different experiences into equivalence without risking reproducing another form of extraction. Relation becomes important here as a practice of witnessing. Indigenous feminist practices of reciprocity, responsibility, and witnessing offer ways of thinking about how culture, language, knowledge, and stories can be shared and carried through relation without being muddied into equivalence. Rather than a unified account of Indigenous experience, these practices present relational methodologies for thinking about and practising collective attunement. Collective attunement here entails not only producing collective resistance but also asking how the collective is itself being constituted.

Digital attunement is not the absence of relation. It is a kind of relation in practice. As the nervous system attunes to digital technologies, the body simultaneously produces data: traces of what the body watched, read, searched, shared, and returned to are ever-present. Over time, digital technology receives and organises this data into an archive, producing a representation of the body through data collected over time, which becomes a ‘data body’ and a ‘data-story’. This representation is not the body itself, but a story of the body produced through its ongoing interaction with digital technology. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun writes that discriminatory data complicates this representation by exemplifying that data-driven systems do not simply recognise what is already there, but organise users through correlation, prediction, and categories of similarity.2 The data-story generated out of body’s interaction with such systems is therefore not a neutral memory of the body but an algorithmically determined version of it, one that is shaped by the logics through which data becomes recognisable and predictable.

This data-story does not remain static. It returns to the body by shaping the digital environments presented to it. The body encounters an environment informed by its previous encounters, produces further data, and continues to attune. This relation moves in both directions, meaning the body attunes to technological environments while those systems simultaneously respond to accumulated data about the body. It is important to note that relation here does not signify balance or reciprocity. This means that digital attunement is a kind of relational practice where neither the body nor the algorithm are entirely separate from one another. 

And relation is not exclusive to Indigenous practices. However, it can be experienced through ceremonial forms such as storytelling, where knowledge and memory are held and carried individually and collectively through the body and into the individual and collective nervous system. Kinship emerges through these relational practices; through gathering, listening, remembering, which are extended into responsibilities held between bodies, generations, ancestors, and land. Yet under contemporary technological systems of power and surveillance, these relations are vastly asymmetrical and extractive. The body participates in producing its digital representation while possessing limited agency over how that representation is assembled, interpreted, and returned to it.

Dis/possession is a relation where the body’s agency over the conditions of attunement is increasingly displaced. This distinction matters because the task is not simply to create relation where none exists – relation is always already taking place, whether asymmetrically or reciprocally. Rather, we must ask what kinds of relations digital technologies are producing, what responsibilities accompany them, and how those relations might be reoriented.

An anti-colonial or non-dis/possessive relational technological practice would therefore begin with agency. Campbell-Stephens’s framing of the Global Majority is useful here because it positions agency as central to a decolonial shift away from minoritisation and subordination. The nervous system is always attuning, but when held in community rather than dis/possessed through extraction that attunement can become nourishing rather than dysregulating. Agency might begin with consent but extends beyond it: it entails having a say not only in the presence but also the purpose of technology. In ceremonial practices such as storytelling, agency is relational: one can listen, receive knowledge, carry a story or share one. What is critical in such practices is not simply the act of sharing and receiving, but the conditions of reciprocity, responsibility, and agency through which knowledge is carried. 

What might these ceremonial practices teach us about how extractive digital environments could instead be structured through relation, kinship, and collective responsibility? 

To be held in relation is also to be acknowledged and witnessed. Within community, acknowledgement may take the form of an echo – such as ‘I hear you, I see you’ – but it can also mean remaining quiet, listening without interruption, and holding what has been shared with grace. Relation therefore extends beyond the moment of receiving. Drawing from Jo-ann Archibald’s principles of responsibility and reciprocity within Indigenous Storywork, I understand this as extending beyond immediate encounter(s).3 Within digital attunement, I think of this extension as a form of aftercare: returning, checking in, and remaining responsible to what has been witnessed. The echo here is not extractive, it is reciprocal. What matters is how it is held, circulated, and returned, and whether those participating retain agency within that relation.

Here, ceremonial practices of gathering and storytelling offer another way of thinking about relationality. In ceremony, bodies also receive and hold knowledge because memory is also produced collectively. Margaret Kovach’s writing on conversational method helps locate listening within this relational process, where the exchange of knowledge carries responsibilities between those participating.4 I understand listening here as a particular form of witnessing, as an active practice of relation rather than something that is passive. Through listening, responding, and carrying what has been shared, relation can deepen into kinship. Indigenous feminist methodologies teach us to understand such relationality through kinship, reciprocity, and responsibility. The storyteller gives something to the gathering and listeners receive with their whole bodies: the knowledge passes between these bodies, across generations, including between present and future ancestors. Rather than remaining static, relation is intentionally practised and sustained. 

The question, then, is not whether digital technologies can be relational – they already are – but what might happen if digital attunement is approached through practices of relation that resist extraction and bolster anti-coloniality? Instead of retreating from the current technological relation, we might ask how reciprocity, responsibility, and collectivity can reorient its terms. This does mean reproducing or appropriating Indigenous ceremony or storytelling within digital spaces; rather, it means attending to the relational commitment of reciprocity, responsibility, and collective accountability that is integral to these practices. More specifically, it means exploring what ceremonial and relational practices can teach us about being responsible to the relations we are already producing with and through digital technologies.

The Global Majority cannot become another overarching category in which bodies and cultures are flattened into equivalence. Leaning into collective attunement, it allows us to practise being intentional with our bodies: how we move through the world; how we are in relation with others. It also invites us to become more conscious of the nervous system and of the systems (platforms and infrastructures) to which it is already attuning. Practising this kind of intentional attunement collectively makes resistance possible.

Rather than approaching solidarity or decolonisation as completed states, I understand them as ongoing processes that move the collective towards the ante- and anti-colonial, as mechanisms that require a kind of ongoing presence. Indigenous feminist practices of witnessing, encounter, reciprocity, and responsibility offer ways of thinking about this process of relating without positioning Indigenous ceremony as something to be reproduced or appropriated. Practising relation through these ways of being becomes a form of collective attunement that moves us towards solidarity without requiring it to become a completed state of being.

Digital attunement therefore is not about escaping technological relations. It begins from the recognition that AI and digital technologies have colonised the conditions through which our nervous systems encounter and attune to the world, while also asking us to imagine relational approaches to technology as a way of producing alternative imaginaries and futures. What remains unresolved is not whether relation exists, but what we choose to do within it, how intentionally we encounter it, and what forms of collectivity might become possible through that participation.

* The objects and images accompanying this essay are intended to create a visual relation to practices of attunement that extend beyond contemporary digital technologies. They move across Indigenous material culture, land, water, borderlands, and technological forms of seeing, rather than functioning as direct illustrations of the essay’s argument. The inclusion of an object from the Purhépecha region situates this relation partly within my ancestral lineage, while the satellite and borderland images bring these questions into contemporary regimes of technological observation. I have deliberately chosen not to reproduce images of ceremony, ritual, or identifiable Indigenous people. Instead, the selected images offer traces of relations between bodies, land, material, memory, ancestral knowledge, and technological vision without turning ceremonial or embodied Indigenous practices into objects of visual consumption. Their relationship to the text is therefore intentionally associative. They offer another way of encountering and attuning to the relations the essay describes.