Once upon a time, colonial powers roamed the earth, planting flags, enslaving populations, and extracting natural resources to fuel their insatiable greed. The British had tea and orchestrated famine; the Belgians had rubber and mutilation; the Spanish had gold and genocide. Fast-forward a century, and the colonial game remains unchanged — only this time, the plunder happens at the speed of light, through fiber-optic cables, cloud servers, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) models trained on the labor of the world’s poorest.
This is digital colonialism, led by Silicon Valley’s titans — Alphabet (Google), Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, and more. Let’s be clear: Big Tech’s dominance isn’t about innovation or the mythical ‘free market’. It’s about power — economic, political, and infrastructural — accumulated through the systematic exploitation of developing nations. Behind every algorithm, search, and prompt pumped into ChatGPT, is a hidden workforce — underpaid, overworked and exposed to trauma, all to keep Silicon Valley’s hands clean. This is the new face of colonialism, binding the Global South in a system of exploitation while touting itself as progress. This is the raw deal: digital sweatshops powering the AI revolution, moderating the darkest corners of the internet, harvesting the data that fuels the global economy, and maintaining the infrastructure that keeps the world connected — as the wealth flows back to the Silicones.
Take Facebook’s Free Basics, a program supposedly designed to provide free internet access to low-income users in India, Nigeria, and dozens of other countries. It sounds generous, except that Free Basics wasn’t the internet — it was a Meta-controlled walled garden, where users could only access Facebook-approved websites, ensuring that every interaction, every click, every piece of digital behavior was meticulously harvested for profit. India, in a rare moment of regulatory backbone, banned the program in 2016 for violating net neutrality.
Meanwhile, Google reigns as the world’s de facto information overlord, controlling 90.14% of the global search market. If you live in the Global South, chances are your digital life is conducted through an Android phone — an operating system that not only preloads Google services but locks users into an ecosystem designed to siphon as much data as possible. All this data, produced by users in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, is monetised in Silicon Valley, with zero revenue-sharing, no reinvestment, and no ownership for the very people generating it. Sound familiar? It should. This is how colonial economies were structured — raw materials extracted from the periphery to be refined and monetised in the metropole.
Maybe all of this doesn’t sound too bad — it’s just data. Silicon Valley loves to sell AI as an autonomous, magical force — a self-improving, godlike intelligence. But here’s a dirty little (not so) secret: AI runs on human exploitation. It runs on the underpaid, invisible labor of thousands of workers in Kenya, the Philippines, India, Venezuela, and beyond. When OpenAI’s ChatGPT was in development, it needed content moderators to clean up its datasets — to scan through the most horrific, violent, traumatising material imaginable so that the final product wouldn’t parrot genocidal rhetoric back at users, which it still did anyways (ChatGPT gives great advice on how to carry out a terrorist attack).
Who did all this work? Kenyan contractors, paid as little as $1.32 an hour, forced to read graphic depictions of murder, torture, sexual violence, and pedophilia without psychological support. Some workers developed PTSD. OpenAI, now a multibillion-dollar company, shrugged and moved on. Wait, no, they did increase the wages of Indian moderators from $1400 to $3500 per year. How lovely. The AI economy thrives on the same logic as the old colonial regimes of the 1800s — cheap, disposable labor in the periphery, unimaginable wealth at the center.
But what about your iPhones and Macs? Congo supplies 70% of the world’s cobalt, an essential mineral for making the batteries sitting inside our indispensable devices. Fourteen families in the Democractic Republic of Congo are now suing Apple, Tesla, Alphabet, Dell, and Microsoft for benefitting from child labour in mining for this precious blue mineral.
And lithium? Here are the stats for wages in the top 3 lithium reserves in the world: in Chile, miners earn about $1430-$3000 a month. In Argentina, it’s between $300 and $1800 a month. Australian miners earn around $9000 a month, and can reach $200,000 a year. How surprising.
The Global South doesn’t just suffer from data and labor exploitation; it’s also locked into a cycle of infrastructural dependence. In the 19th century, colonial powers implemented and controlled the railroads and shipping routes; today, Silicon Valley controls the cloud.
Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud are the backbone of digital economies worldwide, hosting the data of businesses, governments, and entire nations. In Africa, most major institutions rely on foreign cloud storage — meaning that their most sensitive data is ultimately at the mercy of U.S. tech giants. When Google unilaterally decided to withdraw free cloud storage for universities in Latin America, entire academic systems were thrown into disarray. The message was clear: if you depend on Silicon Valley’s infrastructure, you play by their rules — or you scramble to find an alternative that doesn’t exist.
Meanwhile, Western governments ensure that no viable alternatives emerge. When Huawei, a Chinese technology company, attempted to build 5G networks across Africa, offering a rare chance for infrastructural autonomy, the U.S. waged a full-blown diplomatic war to crush it, citing “national security concerns.” Translation: only American firms are allowed to dominate digital infrastructure.
Of course, Big Tech isn’t just an economic force — it’s a political one. These corporations have more lobbying power than most sovereign states, shaping global regulations to protect their monopolies. Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft collectively spent over $50 million on lobbying in 2024, ensuring that data privacy laws, AI ethics debates, and digital sovereignty discussions always skew in their favor. I don’t think we even need to go over Zuckerberg and Musk’s comments and policies on Meta and X (Twitter was always a better name).
Silicon Valley doesn’t just protect its own interests, it actively collaborates with Western governments to maintain digital and political hegemony. The Snowden leaks revealed that Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Apple all provided backdoor access to U.S. intelligence agencies, facilitating mass surveillance of the world. Governments in the Global South remain powerless to stop this data extraction, their citizens treated as nothing more than surveillance fodder for the US National Security Agency’s ever-expanding databases.
Colonialism was never just about land — it was about control. Today, that control is digital, and the consequences are devastating. Silicon Valley’s empire extracts wealth, labor, and infrastructure from the Global South while ensuring that no meaningful alternatives arise. And just like the colonial regimes of old, it disguises exploitation as progress, subjugation as connectivity, and economic plunder as innovation — and they get away with it. In touting technological progress and now, perfecting convenience, we live in true monopoly. So, willingly or not, we are complicit. All of this is the cost of our convenience: real people, real economies, real countries, real families, and real children.
It is only natural to find oneself grappling with this reality with disdain, pain, and perhaps even a sense of urgency for change. In writing this article, I read through personal stories and sensationalised ones, I read articles that turned these lives into statistics and academic conclusions, and I did my best to put them forth into this piece of writing. My anger towards a system that I myself find inescapable makes me feel powerless, and any solution I find seems radical and superfluous in the face of something so much larger than any of us.
To write about companies that individually are worth more than entire GDPs of countries, that hold more political influence than most nations recognized by the UN… it imparts a feeling of hopelessness. I struggle, typing away at the very MacBook that is a result of this pain, not being able to throw it away because a Dell or Alien laptop or an Android phone isn’t any better, and because I need this laptop to complete my degree. So what is the decision that I am making? Am I putting my future, my parents’ investment, before the lives of children forced into labor to create the tools of my education? Is this a conscious, deliberate choice? Is throwing away a laptop and a phone, vowing not to buy another, enough? Would it be entirely symbolic? Is it futile? Is it just a statement? What can we do? If this won’t be enough (and I believe it would be arrogant to say it will), then what will? What devastation must collectively occur before the world turns its attention to this issue?
The ongoing genocide in Palestine at the hands of Israel has revealed some of our collective humanity, yet even that has been branded as controversial in professional, political and even academic spaces. No amount of International Court of Justice calls for arrest or United Nations sanctions and votes seems to topple this. The irony of living in the age of information is that its accessibility is controlled simply because of its accessibility. One would think that this incomparable access to unlimited knowledge would lead to a profound understanding of coexistence, but how can world powers expect to have power unless the power of knowledge rests in their palms? We have seen the media strain itself, stretching thin and wide to cover up truths, magnifying their own narrative based on their sponsors. We often would like to think we have the critical thinking required to distinguish falsehoods from truth, and I believe many of us do. But we also neglect how much slips away from under our noses after its 15 minutes in the limelight.
This article is one such example; perhaps after reading it, you will store it in your mind, and at some point, you will move on. I will move on too, perhaps. Because the pain we feel for the darker truths of the world can only be carried for a certain period of time until the world is telling you to get up, move on, finish your assignments, call your parents, get your degree, get to work. The very system we have built collectively — or abide by — is both our escape and our prison. But there is no ‘breaking free’, there are only conscious choices and kindness in a world in which revolution is simply not a realistic possibility, at least for now (again, I would feel arrogant to speak only in absolutes).
It is indeed our responsibility to hold ourselves accountable. Accountable to our decisions regarding our beliefs and values, yes — but also our decisions in the workplace, in consumption, in voting, in friendships and what we choose to communicate, what we choose to advocate. Perhaps we alone cannot revolutionise Silicon Valley, but we can and must draw awareness to their practices.
The intended effect of this article isn’t to bring about guilt of living the way we do, but to raise the flags of thought. Have conversations about this, post about it, be aware; let not these sufferings of others fall silent because it is ‘uncomfortable’ — normalise these discussions, because you can.
Quite simply, it is a privilege to be able to read about these issues while being wholly unaffected by it (albeit whatever guilt or sorrow one may feel). The privilege must not be entirely cited as problematic, because that only results in the designation of these issues being labeled as ‘uncomfortable’. Rather, this privilege is what it simply is: power, ability and capability. You have the ability to engage in this discourse with no repercussions. Ask yourself what the true cost is in you speaking up, going to protests, not using ChatGPT?
Whatever you choose to do with the knowledge you have acquired, or been reminded of from this article, is up to you. In truth, our lives are the longest things we have, no matter if you think it’s too short. In this very big thing that is existing, there are some infallible truths and injustices that make us wring our hands, or force us to turn a blind eye to cope. We are, at the end of the day, at the mercy of our own volition and ethics. But I will say, do not let discomfort sway you from hope, discourse, effort, and change. Just because the road is unclear does not mean a path does not exist; it will just take us all a bit of time and hard work to find it.
