Standards In Turbulent Times: Geopolitics, Labour, and Capture from 5G to AI

Standardisation has become a central terrain of geopolitical and economic struggle in turbulent times, and acutely so where standards become data-driven. In artificial intelligence and platform systems the standard is no longer a settled technical artefact but a process continually rebuilt from data. This session reads AI and data standards across two terrains, the high politics of the state and the international committee, and the ordinary work of users, inspectors, and annotators, and it asks where authority and value are captured along each.

The first terrain is high politics. The power to set, certify, and control AI and data standards shapes market access, supply-chain position, and technological sovereignty, and it has become an instrument of statecraft. Capture works here at the gate, the committee secretariat, the patent declaration, the conformity assessment that converts a written standard into a condition of market entry, and standardisation reterritorialises transnational production along lines of sovereignty and security.

The second terrain is the ordinary. Data-driven standards are made from the mundane activity of those positioned as implementers, the users whose interactions are logged, the inspectors who certify, and the annotators who label, correct, and supply the difference from which the next version is built. Implementation becomes a moment of making. The standard is captured in the recursive folding of ordinary labour into the benchmark, constituting a primary site of contemporary value extraction from unpaid or undercompensated labour. We ask how this recursive folding transforms the economic governance of digital supply chains.