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by Dr. Mathew Maavak
August 08, 2025
from
RT Website
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Dr. Mathew Maavak,
researches systems science,
global risks, geopolitics, strategic foresight, governance and
Artificial Intelligence
drmathewmaavak.substack.com
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© Getty Images/gremlin
Yesterday's empire
was built
on spice, slaves, and silver.
Today's
empire runs on metadata
Mathew Maavak
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 A.I.
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 "A.I. 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 A.I. Equalizer
A.I. is marketed as a miracle
equalizer that will help developing nations leapfrog into the
future.
We were told A.I. 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
A.I. 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, A.I.-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 A.I. 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 A.I. 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 the new 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
-
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,
...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.
The Digital 'Kangani' System
India, once hailed as a rising digital superpower, now serves
as a showpiece for A.I. 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 A.I...
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.
Resistance and Reclamation
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 A.I. 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 Global North and the Global South
Wikipedia
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,
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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