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Digital Sovereignty: Power, Algorithms, and Justice in the Global Media Ecosystem The term ""digital sovereignty"" dominates policy discourse, yet remains conceptually incoherent. Is it data localization? Domestic chip fabrication? Digital autarky? This book argues that all three miss the point: sovereignty itself is being reconstituted through digital infrastructure, not merely defended against it. We are living through an infrastructural inversion. When algorithms curate public discourse, when platforms become the default infrastructure for commerce and communication, and when payment protocols mediate social life, we confront governance systems that wield power exceeding many states-yet lack democratic legitimacy. This is not a technical shift. It is a political transformation. This book intervenes in three prevailing orthodoxies: Against Digital Universalism. Algorithmic governance is never placeless. By contrasting platform labor in Jakarta with its counterparts in Silicon Valley and Shenzhen, we demonstrate how law, infrastructure, and culture produce divergent sovereignties within the same global platforms. The local always bites back. Against Techno-Determinism. Code is politics sedimented into infrastructure. The Digital Sovereignty Comprehensive Stack (DSCS) Framework renders visible the political choices embedded in cables, data regimes, and algorithmic design-choices often misrecognized as neutral ""technical necessities."" Against Policy Fatalism. Sovereignty can be measured and negotiated. The Digital Sovereignty Index (DSI) operationalizes sovereignty as a gradient across six layers-Infrastructure, Data, Algorithms, Economy, Governance, and Subject Formation-giving policymakers empirical tools beyond rhetoric. Why Indonesia? Between 2020 and 2026, Indonesia transformed from a platform periphery into a global laboratory of digital statecraft. From the TikTok Shop ban to the nationwide rollout of QRIS and SatuData, Jakarta's experiments reveal the central thesis: digital sovereignty is not about withdrawal from global networks, but about negotiating position within the stack. What this book offers: For policymakers, researchers, and industry leaders, this is both a map and a toolkit. We examine: the ontological stakes of a digitized society; an ethics for technologies operating at population scale; the political economy of the shift from U.S. hegemony to multipolar digital contestation; and the operationalization of the DSCS Framework across Indonesia's payment, commerce, and social media stacks. The question is no longer whether digital sovereignty is emerging, but what form it will take: democratic, just, and accountable-or extractive, opaque, and feudal. This book is an essential guide to choosing the former.

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