Pursuing digital sovereignty in technological peripheries: The case of Chile

Technologically, peripheral countries can exhibit high digital engagement while lacking meaningful control over the infrastructures, standards and platforms that mediate everyday life. This article argues that in such contexts, digital sovereignty – conventionally understood as State-level control – must be reconceptualized as distributed collective agency enabled by population-level digital self-determination. Using Chile as an illustrative case of what we term the ‘advanced digital consumption trap’ – where developed-country connectivity coexists with peripheral production and innovation capacities – we map vulnerabilities across four channels: economic extraction, cybersecurity dependence, information integrity and well-being. We develop a micro–macro mechanism specifying four pathways through which individual digital self-determination aggregates into bounded collective resilience: reducing population-level exploitability, strengthening regulatory compliance capacity, generating political demand for accountability and expanding the human capital pipeline. We propose comprehensive digital awareness as an integrative competency bundle derived from these peripheral constraints and evaluate it against alternative strategies. Education is defended not as a terminal solution but as the most feasible near-term lever for achieving incremental gains in digital policy autonomy.