Linking knowledge and natural resources is not only a poetic choice. In 1974, the UN General Assembly passed a declaration on the New International Economic Order (NIEO) proposed by the G77 coalition of developing nations, approving an ambitious set of demands for global redistribution, increased aid, stabilization of commodity prices, and permanent sovereignty over natural resources. The G77 made demands for collective management and ownership of the seabed, the moon, and Antarctica alongside those for central management of the world’s information. Third World demands for rents for the airspace used by Western satellites circling overhead was only one of the ways that the materiality of information infrastructure met the spaces of the so-called natural world.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 196