Yesterday’s empire was built on spice, slaves, and silver. Today’s empire runs on metadata. Africa is the new frontier
The new colonial frontier isn’t restricted to mineral-rich Congo or oil-drenched Venezuela. It’s digital, invisible, and everywhere. From the shantytowns of Nairobi to the barrios of Manila, smartphones hum with the raw material of the 21st century: data, all sorts of data. And just like spices and slaves once sailed westward in imperial galleons, metadata now travels quietly to the cloud servers of Palo Alto and Shenzhen. This isn’t development, it is digital extraction. Welcome to the age of AI colonialism.
Big Tech firms from the U.S, and to a lesser extent China, have turned the Global South into a massive open-pit mine for behavioral data. Under the pretense of "AI for Development," they build infrastructure, donate connectivity, and sponsor pilot programs but the returns flow in only one direction. Voice samples collected in Ghana become training fodder for Western voice assistants. Facial data gathered in Nigerian policing trials end up fine-tuning surveillance software in San Francisco where western models have had protracted problems in identifying and tracking darker-skinned individuals. Agricultural data scraped from Filipino farmers help power predictive analytics for agribusiness conglomerates that will hardly benefit the Philippines.
This is not a partnership. This is colonial pillage dressed in TED Talk lingo. (more...)
AI Neo-Colonialism: How Big Tech Is Strip-Mining the Global South for Data
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