Killing Us Softly

America Defunded Civic Participation in Tech Governance — Rebuilding Starts Now

I’ve just published a piece in Asia Times titled “Trump is Killing Civic Participation in Global Tech Governance.” [1] It sounds extreme. But it’s not. Moves to dismantle the infrastructure that has enabled civic leaders — especially in the Global Majority — to shape digital policy is happening deliberately and in plain sight.

This dispatch offers a few more reflections — grounded in personal experience, and focused on what’s now at risk.

Nearly 30 years ago in Indonesia, I started working with peacebuilders and religious leaders following the fall of Suharto’s authoritarian New Order regime. Entire communities were consumed by violence. Millions were displaced. During Suharto’s rule, open discussion of SARA — suku (ethnicity), agama (religion), ras (race), and antargolongan (intergroup relations) — was suppressed. Civil society was weak by design.

And that weakness came at a cost.

Without strong civil leadership and inclusive dialogue, the country lacked the infrastructure — political, legal, cultural — to manage its diversity. That vacuum enabled catastrophe.

I’m reminded of that history now.

Today, we are witnessing another kind of dismantling — this time, in the global ecosystem that supported civil society participation in digital governance. The battleground is tech. The stakes are enormous.

With implicit consent of Congressional republicans, the Trump regime’s moves to eliminate USAID and defund democratic participation are not just an attack on Global Majority actors. They are part of a broader strategy to silence independent academic institutions and dismantle the infrastructure that checks concentrated power — especially private, corporate power.

For decades, U.S. foreign assistance (largely through USAID) — alongside other upper income donor countries and multilateral funders — played a transformational role in strengthening civil society. In recent years, I’ve written and spoken about the need for equitable, substantive, and sustained participation in tech governance. Here’s what that looks like:

• Equitable: Civil society is treated as a full partner — not junior to government or industry. Their expertise, lived experience, and advocacy must be valued on par with corporate actors.

• Substantive: Civil society isn’t symbolic. It must have the skills, knowledge, tools and platforms to meaningfully shape agendas, influence priorities, and hold power to account. It has a meaningful role in shaping public policy and regulation.

• Sustained: Participation can’t be one-off. Civic actors must have an enduring presence at the tables where policy is made and implemented.

USAID and its partner ecosystem helped to increasingly make this possible — imperfectly, yes, but it was critically important. From health [2] and HIV/AIDS [3] [4] to independent journalism [5] [6] and support to human rights defenders (including safe houses) [7], LGBTQ+ rights [8] to climate [9], the impact of civil society leadership has been far-reaching. And now, that scaffolding is being stripped away.

Today’s frontier technologies — especially AI — intersect all of these global issues … and more. Leaders and organisations from civil society must be able to exercise agency in democratic governance of these advanced technologies. Without strong civic participation, decisions about tech’s role in areas including inter alia surveillance, warfare, genocide, safety, bias and digital rights will be made by a small, elite few — not the communities most affected.

USAID helped train rights-based actors in policy engagement and made it financially possible for them to participate in multi-stakeholder processes shaping digital policy. Now, that scaffolding is being taken down — deliberately and in plain sight.

This is not policy drift. It is strategy. When civic participation is erased, power consolidates. Big Tech can afford to stay in the room. Civil society cannot. The result is a world where decisions are made about people — without people.

This extends beyond development circles. Across the globe, academic institutions, DEI programs, and research centers focused on justice are under coordinated attack by US government agencies. New visa restrictions are being framed as security measures [10], but functionally suppress speech, scholarship, and transnational solidarity. To win contracts from the State Department overseas, municipalities and companies are extorted to remove DEI policies and tow the American regime’s new line. [11] [12] [13]

They are destroying both the human and knowledge infrastructure. As I also wrote in the Asia Times piece:

You don’t need to burn libraries to erase memory. In the digital age, you just take down the websites.

And you defund the people who would have remembered.

I think back to Indonesia — to what happens when civil society is deliberately weakened, dialogue is suppressed, and power operates without accountability. The violence that followed wasn’t inevitable; it was the result of a vacuum where civic infrastructure should have been.

Today’s dismantling of civic participation in global tech governance risks creating similar vacuums — not of ethnicity or religion this time, but of access, rights, and digital agency. The consequences may not look the same, but the roots are familiar: concentrated power, silenced voices, and the exclusion of those most affected.

What Can Be Done — Now

If we are serious about strengthening civic power in tech governance, we must act on three urgent fronts: