2026 Seminar
Tech Juggernauts: AI, Freedom of Expression, and Shifting Geopolitical Alliances
The 2026 Seminar
Seminar Dates: April 13 - 15, 2026
Generative AI is propagating seismic shifts in information environments globally. While AI enables easier and faster access to tailored media content, through search engines, personalization and translation, these same AI-powered curation tools are imbued with the algorithmic bias of their corporate creators who serve as gate keepers with outsized power over public debate and knowledge. AI-generated disinformation and deepfakes chill democratic participation and the health of the public sphere. Microtargeting and personalization narrows exposure and creates information silos and feedback loops, imperiling citizens, journalists, and public figures alike.
As the oligarchizing of media and tech platforms continues unfettered, how we define and operationalize the right to freedom of expression is increasingly contested. Powerful entities increasingly use threats, violence, legal pressure, troll farms, and political intimidation over media institutions to silence critics and control the narrative. Many of these efforts to manipulate public opinion now take place under the guise of freedom of expression. Over the last year, we have seen: the United States sanction anti-hate speech and anti-misinformation organizations in Europe, teachers lose jobs for opining on free speech crusader Charlie Kirk’s death, universities lose funding for not policing student speech, and allies spar over digital sovereignty issues. More and more, global information policy seems schizophrenic, corrupted, and distorted, absent of internal logic and the plaything of ideological maneuverings. This year’s Milton Wolf Seminar hopes to diagnose and disentangle some of the threads in this complicated nexus.
Seminar Agenda
Monday, April 13, 2026
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM — Welcome Reception and Registration (Diplomatic Academy)
Tuesday, April 14, 2026
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM — Welcome Tea & Introduction
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM — Panel 1: Information Sovereignty and Information Rights in an AI-Driven Economy
Panelists will set the stage for two days of debate and discussion, looking at the physical and philosophical changes shaping the media and communications landscape for media and diplomacy. AI trade details and shifting geopolitical alliances, such as US security policy with respect to the EU and the UK’s Online Safety Act, are complicating historical friend/foe relationships. Concerns over big tech’s complicity in the rise of authoritarianism, state capture through unfettered growth, and the metabolization of competitors are beginning to seep into public consciousness and legislative agendas. Big tech firms increasingly write their own rules and with tentacles in every industry. Panelists will discuss the implications of these trends for media and diplomacy. How are states responding to structural changes in the media and information system? What are the implications for freedom of expression? How has the debate over information sovereignty shifted, and to what effect?
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM — Lunch
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM — Panel 2: The Geopolitics of Communications in the Age of AI
Large-scale AI models train on datasets hoovered without consent, from copyrighted media to personal images. Data centers consume as much energy and water resources as entire nations’ power grids. For example, between 2022-23, Google, Microsoft, and Meta exceeded the combined consumption of Jordan, Iceland, and Ghana. Rare earth mining for AI hardware devastates ecosystems and Indigenous communities. Behind “autonomous” or “self-learning” AI lies an obscured workforce, including data annotators, content moderators, and gig workers who are often in the Global South, facing precarious conditions under what critics term “AI colonialism.” This concern grows as AI deployment leads to widespread job loss and displacement. This panel considers the lived and environmental effects of the AI explosion.
3:00 PM - 3:15 PM — Tea Break
3:15 PM - 5:00 PM — Panel 3: Techno-feudalism, Media, and Diplomacy
Techno-feudalism is an economic theory, primarily advanced by economist Yanis Varoufakis, which posits that traditional capitalism has been supplanted by a new system dominated by "cloud capital" and rent-extraction. Unlike traditional capital (machinery or land), this consists of networked software, AI algorithms, and digital infrastructure (e.g., server farms) designed to modify human behavior and extract value. Major platforms like Amazon, Google, and the Apple App Store now act as digital lords or fiefs. Not subject to state or national-level checks and balances, power is centralized in transnational corporations, leading to a new form of corporate hegemony. As the vassal of techno-feudalism, AI economies are determining political alliances, trade networks and supply chains, and policy agendas, with consequences for everything from basic communication to our imaginaries, from the built environment to resource distribution, energy consumption, warfare, and information production and consumption.
6:30 PM - 9:00 PM — Tour of Freud Museum and Dinner
Wednesday, April 15, 2026
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM — Coffee and Conversation with the Emerging Scholars
Supporting junior scholars is a key part of the Milton Wolf Seminar. Please join us for morning coffee and a lively roundtable discussion with our 2026 Emerging Scholar Fellows, who will present their research and explain how it relates to the 2026 Seminar theme.
10:00 AM - 10:15 AM — Tea Break
10:15 AM - 12:00 PM — Panel 4: Media and Sovereignty Revisited
In the early 1980s, countries across the developing world rallied against the dominance of news agencies like the Associated Press and Reuters, citing western media hegemony. More than 30 years later, information sovereignty is even more fundamental to diplomatic engagements but has become increasingly complicated. Information hegemony is now not simply about controlling media delivery platforms but the entire tech stack, from shovels in the ground to the cloud. Countries around the world are instituting new policies and forming new alliances designed to reassert information sovereignty domestically and protect the freedom of expression of their citizens and corporations abroad. From Saudi Arabia’s proposed “digital embassies,” which would host data centers operating under the data owner’s laws, to the controversial trade deal allowing China to purchase Nvidia chips, the realignment of allegiances to accommodate the proliferation of AI is problematizing an already unsettled and in flux global order. Case studies in this session will unpack examples on a more granular level.
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM — Lunch
1:15 PM - 3:00 PM — Panel 5: Dystopian Visions: What is Freedom of Expression in 2026?
Over the last decade, authoritarian and democratic regimes alike have moved from digital strategies like censorship, internet shutdowns, and online propaganda and toward more covert, preventive, and targeted forms of digital repression. This “Authoritarian Informationalism” transforms traditional authoritarian strategies along three dimensions: (1) Actors; from state to private, from organizations to individuals, (2) precision; from reaction to prevention, from blunt to fine-grained control, and (3) scope; from local to global and across regime types (Garb and Maertz, 2025). From “collaborative authoritarianism” in Saudi Arabia facilitated by nationalist journalists and influencers who rely on Western tech platforms to the export of “authoritarian-friendly” digital tech from one repressive regime to another, to democratic states surveilling social media, accessing personal data, and disseminating misinformation that increasingly imperils civil liberties and accountability—In this paradigm, who has freedom of expression? Who wants it? How do we get it? How have traditional Freedom of Expression tenets been co-opted by the rise of far-right, populist ideologies and figureheads and how does big tech aid and abet authoritarian survival?
3:00 PM - 3:15 PM — Tea Break
3:15 PM - 5:00 PM — Panel 6: Davids and Goliaths: Challenges to Tech Oligarchy Across the Political Spectrum
Across the globe, different stakeholders have sought to counter and control big tech’s dominance in both the physical and digital world. From citizens protesting data centers in their communities to political hearings about AI-fueled rising energy costs and lobbying for more expansive social safeguards to protect children, social awareness of the economic and environmental impacts on everyday life is on the rise. Beyond the material lies the philosophical: what is the appropriate balance between the right to design and market information technology and the right to control and regulate that same technology? How should we think about freedom of expression in 2026? Where are innovative attempts to ameliorate the harms introduced by AI while maximizing the technological promise?