First in a series of interviews, conducted by the Italian researcher Gianmarco Cristofari (affiliated with INC in Amsterdam) during his travels in Latin-America: https://networkcultures.org/blog/2025/12/04/digital-tribulations-2/ I met Oscar D’Alva, a researcher at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), at a bar in Botafogo during the pre-conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) that took place in Rio de Janeiro in mid-October 2025. Oscar’s PhD thesis, entitled “Estatísticas oficiais e capitalismo de plataforma: a transição para um regime de dataficação no Brasil” has received multiple major social sciences awards in the region, including a prize from CAPES, Brazil’s federal agency for graduate education and research, ANPOCS, the national association of advanced studies in social sciences, and AoIR. When Oscar realized that the conference was (modestly) funded by Microsoft – as it has been for the past twenty years – he decided to turn down the latter prize, sparking a debate inside a conference held for the first time on the Global South and whose main topic was anticolonialist perspective on digital sovereignty. The interview took place at a dim, wood-lined bar behind Praia do Flamengo in Rio.