Jeff, very solid piece. "Knowledge Unbound" puts into sharp focus something that urgently needed to be said.

The core argument is precise and necessary: a critique of data extractivism that ignores the actual existence of open source as a global phenomenon is not merely an empirical oversight — it is a form of theoretical paralysis with concrete political consequences for the Global South.

The observation about Das and Borhan's bibliography frozen at 2020 deserves even stronger emphasis: when it comes to AI, temporal bias is not a minor methodological flaw — it is a disqualifying one. No serious analysis of artificial intelligence can be built on a knowledge base that predates the very transformations it claims to explain. A bibliography that stops before DeepSeek, before the EU AI Act, before the Chinese open-source ecosystem reached thirty percent of global usage, is not simply incomplete — it is analyzing a world that no longer exists. And in the Global South, where the window of opportunity is narrow and the cost of missing it is measured in decades, outdated analysis is not just academically weak. It is politically dangerous.

This connects directly with Yuk Hui's call for technodiversity: there is no single technological path, and assuming that all AI equals privatization amounts to denying the very possibility that the Global South can build its own tools on its own terms. Das and Borhan's framework forecloses precisely what it should be demanding — alternative technological futures rooted in different political and epistemic conditions.