Popular digital sovereignty and digital real utopias: Lessons from the Homeless Workers’ Movement in Brazil

This article traces the ongoing construction of “popular digital sovereignty” within Brazil’s Homeless Workers’ Movement (MTST), through its Tech Sector, arguing that the concept itself operates as a digital real utopia: an aspirational horizon made workable through imperfect and situated practice. Rather than treating digital sovereignty as a state-centric policy project, the movement frames popular digital sovereignty as a from-below definition forged through epistemic sovereignty, the collective control over how knowledge is produced, debated, and circulated inside and beyond the movement. Drawing on a workers’ inquiry approach conducted since 2021, including interviews, observations, workshops, and co-produced materials, the article analyzes how the MTST’s Tech Sector develops this concept through learning in struggle: iterative trial-and-error, learning by doing, and continuous revision in response to the material constraints of organizing. We show how popular digital sovereignty is assembled through territorial and class-based priorities, and how its meaning shifts as the movement grapples with the role of the state, infrastructural dependency, and the need to “meet workers where they are.” The article contributes to digital sovereignty studies and utopian media studies by conceptualizing popular digital sovereignty as an epistemic practice and a prefigurative, unfinished project, an effort to build tech otherwise from below under conditions of constraint.