Socio-Spatial Studies

Socio-Spatial Studies

Training Locally, Thinking Globally: The Political Economy of Community AI in Television and Satellite Broadcasting and the Structural Limits of Computational Decentralization

Document Type : Original Article

Author
Haider Falah Zaeid
College of Media, University of Thi Qar, Thi Qar, Iraq
10.22034/soc.2026.256632
Abstract
Across the Global South, and within Indigenous and minority-language communities worldwide, a proposal has gained currency: if our languages, our knowledge, and our everyday expression are being harvested to train artificial intelligence systems owned and operated elsewhere, then we should train such systems ourselves. This article examines the political economy of that proposal, and argues that broadcasting is the field in which it is best understood. The argument has two parts. First, broadcasting supplies the historical precedent: the demand for a New World Information and Communication Order, and the satellite sovereignty controversies of the 1970s and 1980s, posed the same structure of claim, and the outcome was named by Straubhaar as asymmetrical interdependence — genuine local production capacity coexisting with persistent structural subordination. Second, broadcasting supplies the material substrate: for many low-resourced languages the largest existing body of recorded speech is held not on the open web but in the archives of radio and television stations, which makes broadcasters the effective gatekeepers of the corpora on which community AI depends. Drawing on the literature on data colonialism, the documented “compute divide,” recent feasibility modelling of sovereign-scale training, and community-led initiatives including the Masakhane network and the Māori broadcaster Te Hiku Media, the article contends that the binding constraints are less about where computation physically happens than about who governs four resources: data, compute and infrastructure, frameworks and base models, and the distribution of resulting value. It specifies four conditions under which local training would constitute genuine rather than nominal sovereignty, argues that each is political and economic rather than technical, and identifies public service and community broadcasters as institutional actors whose archives, mandates and governance structures make them overlooked candidates for the role.
Keywords
artificial intelligence
satellite broadcasting
NWICO
data colonialism
data sovereignty
compute divide
broadcast archives
low-resourced languages
political economy of technology
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Socio-Spatial Studies
Volume 10, Issue 4
Autumn 2026
Pages 15-34