Yesterday’s empire was built on spice, slaves, and silver. Today’s empire runs on metadata
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 US, 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.
The myth of the AI equalizer
AI is marketed as a miracle equalizer that will help developing nations leapfrog into the future. We were told AI would bring precision agriculture, predictive healthcare, and smart urbanism, among numerous other utopian transformations, to even the most under-resourced regions. These Davos fantasies were regurgitated for nearly two decades. But where is the proof, the showcase project or evidence that even a fraction of those promises was delivered?
The only real revolution happening is the outflow of data that were supposed to power these breakthroughs. Big Tech servers abroad now function like the colonial warehouses and banks of yore. Nor are intellectual properties of individuals and SMEs in the Developing World safe from this new brand of predation. Models, patents, ideas, and profits quietly migrate north while the Global South is left with nothing but pilot programs and PowerPoint decks.
Worse still, these tools are increasingly used against the very populations providing the raw material, or should I say, raw data. In Kenya, facial recognition technology was introduced as a policing tool under the guise of modernization. In practice, it has disproportionately targeted political activists who, in turn, are also resorting to AI to level the political battlefield. Who ultimately benefits from this internecine clash? Isn’t this the latest incarnation of the old imperial “divide and conquer” dictum?
In India, AI-driven fraud detection systems have misclassified thousands of rural poor, unjustly cutting them off from vital government benefits. Imported algorithmic governance – often designed without regard for local context or cultural nuance – compounds the problem. Ironically, while these systems penalize the most vulnerable, India has emerged as a global hub for sophisticated online scams. It is a digital paradox where the poor are relentlessly surveilled, while the real fraudsters flourish with impunity.
The biometric gold rush
Nothing exemplifies AI colonialism better than the biometric boom. Tech firms, often in partnership with NGOs or global financial institutions, are racing to digitize identities across the Global South. Fingerprint scans, iris recognition, voiceprint registration have all been justified as ways to “include the unbanked” or “streamline public services.”
But these efforts rarely include meaningful consent or data protection frameworks. In many cases, biometric systems have been imposed without community consultation or independent oversight.
One of the most egregious examples is Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency project that offered small payments in exchange for biometric iris scans. Its largest user base? Young people in low-income African nations like Kenya who served as a convenient population to experiment on, far from the regulatory spotlights of Brussels or Washington. (Note; Worldcoin was co-founded by Sam Altman, who is also the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT).
Once collected, this data becomes part of opaque and often proprietary AI systems whose inner workings are unknowable to the very people they affect. Local regulators are usually outgunned, underfunded or more likely, politically compromised. As a result, entire populations are subjected to surveillance and scoring regimes that they neither understand nor control.
The worst culprits in this saga are not Big Tech but local politicians and “technocrats” who sell out their nations at bargain basement prices, couched under the double-speak of “best practices” and UN institutional recommendations.
The new East India Companies
Silicon Valley is the global epicenter of thenew East India Companies. These entities are vested with quasi-sovereign power and backed by vast capital reserves, lobbying muscle, and a veneer of corporate benevolence. Where the original East India Company extracted tea and textiles, today’s digital extractors siphon up location metadata, online behavior, biometric identifiers, and social graph mappings.
Consider Meta’s “Free Basics” initiative, which offered zero-rated internet access in dozens of developing countries. What seemed like a humanitarian gesture was, in reality, an attempt to create a captive ecosystem – one where Facebook was the internet. It was banned in India in 2016 but continues in other countries, quietly conditioning the digital habits of hundreds of millions of users. An expanded Meta Connectivity is now used by an estimated 300 million people across many countries, including Indonesia, Pakistan, and the Philippines.
Critics warn that these platforms could be exploited for surveillance, IP harvesting, and geopolitical intelligence – often without the knowledge or consent of local populations. No one really knows what is happening. Besides, these services are not entirely free either. Pakistani users of Meta’s tech philanthropy were allegedly charged $1.9 million per month.
India, once hailed as a rising digital superpower, now serves as a showpiece for AI neo-colonialism. Its vast IT industry, once brimming with promise, is today little more than an outsourced arm of Western conglomerates. Here is a reality check: how many individuals outside India have even one Indian-made app on their phones?
There was a brief window when Indian tech seemed poised to lead. In the late ’90s, a major US tech firm allegedly commissioned two parallel teams – one in Silicon Valley, the other in an Indian city – to build a next-generation operating system to challenge Microsoft. The Indian team delivered. The US team could not. Around the same time, Indian innovators like Sabeer Bhatia gave us Hotmail, which arguably accelerated the decline of the traditional postal system. For a brief moment, the digital future seemed multipolar. That was until Big Capital arrived.
Rather than reward innovation, Big Tech consolidated. Rival platforms that didn’t serve the globalist surveillance machine were quietly buried. Competition was replaced with shareholder-sanctioned “coordination,” led by the likes of BlackRock and its predecessors. From that point on, Indian IT firms would be reduced from potential innovators to mere subcontractors.
And who better to manage this global digital plantation than a new class of compliant Indian C-Suite executives? These are not the disruptors. They are the taskmasters of digital “kanganis,” running the same extractive labor models once perfected by the East India Company.
The dream of an “Asian Century” powered by Indian software and Chinese hardware has curdled into a reality of Chinese software, Chinese hardware, and Chinese AI. Indian tech talent has been reduced to glorified middleware, at best.
For all the online chest-thumping about Indian-origin CEOs in the US, where is India’s own Jensen Huang? Where is the Indian-founded equivalent of NVIDIA, OpenAI, or even Palantir? There isn’t one. India produces engineers by the millions but owns almost none of the gilt-edged platforms. It trains the talent, but not the trillion-dollar tech. The colony codes and the empire profits. A similar theme is being played out in the US Ivy League system.
But is the tide turning? Nigeria has applied brakes on foreign-backed digital ID programs. Kenya has suspended iris-scanning initiatives after massive backlash. A growing chorus of activists, lawyers, and technologists are calling for data sovereignty: the idea that countries should have the same rights over their data that they claim over oil, water, and land.
A few pioneering efforts have emerged. In Brazil, the General Data Protection Law has begun to shape public discourse. In South Africa, local AI research groups are working on open, transparent models rooted in African languages and cultural norms. The African Union has even begun early-stage deliberations on a continental data governance framework.
But it is an uphill fight.
Western governments, in tandem with corporate lobbyists, continue to push for “data liberalization” which is nothing but a euphemism for open access-mediated exploitation.
Aid packages, development grants, and tech investments are increasingly tied to these demands. It echoes the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s, where loans came with strings that hollowed out national control. Only now, the strings are coded in algorithms.
The need for a new digital non-alignment
The Global South needs a coordinated pushback against Silicon Valley’s digital hegemony. This would involve not just resisting predatory data practices but investment in alternative infrastructures such as sovereign cloud storage, ethical AI standards, community-owned data cooperatives, and open-source platforms. This is how a new digital non-alignment paradigm can be achieved.
The Global South has been colonized before. But data, unlike oil or sugar, is invisible, infinitely replicable, and easily stolen. That makes the fight harder but also more urgent. In this new age of algorithmic empires, control over information isn’t just about profit, it is about power, freedom, and the right to define your own future.
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