🚨 The Hidden Empire: How Big Tech is Colonizing the Global South 🚨
This video exposes the new form of colonialism sweeping across Africa, Asia, and Latin America - but this time, the colonizers are tech giants like Google, Facebook, Meta, and Microsoft. From data mining in Kenya to surveillance testing in South Africa, from exploitative labor in the Congo to the systematic extraction of digital resources, Silicon Valley has created a new empire built on algorithms and data.
What You'll Discover:
How Mark Zuckerberg's "Free Basics" operates like the East India Company
Why Meta charged $100 million to users promised "free" internet
How AI systems are trained on Global South data but serve Northern interests
The shocking reality of cobalt mining that powers your smartphone
How India's tech workers became "digital coolies" in the new plantation system
Why content moderators earn $2.20/hour to clean traumatic content for Facebook
How surveillance technology is tested on African communities first
The resistance movements fighting back across the Global South
This isn't just about technology - it's about power, empire, and the struggle for digital liberation. From the activists who defeated Facebook in India to the artists imagining decolonized internets, discover the movements building technological sovereignty.
🔥 Share this video to expose Big Tech's colonial agenda and support the Global South's fight for technological sovereignty!
#digitalcolonialism #bigtech #TechColonialism #digitalempire #SiliconValleyColonialism #antiimperialism #usempire #TechImperialism #DigitalImperialism #TechHegemony #globalsouth #decolonization #DigitalDecolonization #TechResistance #digitalsovereignty #meta #facebook #google #microsoft #apple #amazon #openai #techgiants #BigTechExposed #techcritique #surveillancecapitalism #DataColonialism #digitalrights #DataJustice #TechJustice #socialjustice #HumanRights #laborrights #DigitalEquality #TechActivism #CyberColonialism #africa #asia #latinamerica #india #kenya #congo #nigeria #brazil #GlobalSouthSolidarity #africantech #indiantech #TechExploitation #DigitalLabor #ContentModerators #CobaltMining #TechSupplyChain #digitaleconomy #TechCapitalism #PlatformCapitalism #ai #artificialintelligence #algorithm #machinelearning #FacialRecognition #surveillance #biometrics #datamining #TechSurveillance #technews #digitalfuture #TechPolicy #internetfreedom #netneutrality #privacyrights #opensource #techethics
This video exposes the new form of colonialism sweeping across Africa, Asia, and Latin America - but this time, the colonizers are tech giants like Google, Facebook, Meta, and Microsoft. From data mining in Kenya to surveillance testing in South Africa, from exploitative labor in the Congo to the systematic extraction of digital resources, Silicon Valley has created a new empire built on algorithms and data.
What You'll Discover:
How Mark Zuckerberg's "Free Basics" operates like the East India Company
Why Meta charged $100 million to users promised "free" internet
How AI systems are trained on Global South data but serve Northern interests
The shocking reality of cobalt mining that powers your smartphone
How India's tech workers became "digital coolies" in the new plantation system
Why content moderators earn $2.20/hour to clean traumatic content for Facebook
How surveillance technology is tested on African communities first
The resistance movements fighting back across the Global South
This isn't just about technology - it's about power, empire, and the struggle for digital liberation. From the activists who defeated Facebook in India to the artists imagining decolonized internets, discover the movements building technological sovereignty.
🔥 Share this video to expose Big Tech's colonial agenda and support the Global South's fight for technological sovereignty!
#digitalcolonialism #bigtech #TechColonialism #digitalempire #SiliconValleyColonialism #antiimperialism #usempire #TechImperialism #DigitalImperialism #TechHegemony #globalsouth #decolonization #DigitalDecolonization #TechResistance #digitalsovereignty #meta #facebook #google #microsoft #apple #amazon #openai #techgiants #BigTechExposed #techcritique #surveillancecapitalism #DataColonialism #digitalrights #DataJustice #TechJustice #socialjustice #HumanRights #laborrights #DigitalEquality #TechActivism #CyberColonialism #africa #asia #latinamerica #india #kenya #congo #nigeria #brazil #GlobalSouthSolidarity #africantech #indiantech #TechExploitation #DigitalLabor #ContentModerators #CobaltMining #TechSupplyChain #digitaleconomy #TechCapitalism #PlatformCapitalism #ai #artificialintelligence #algorithm #machinelearning #FacialRecognition #surveillance #biometrics #datamining #TechSurveillance #technews #digitalfuture #TechPolicy #internetfreedom #netneutrality #privacyrights #opensource #techethics
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📚
LearningTranscript
00:00The new colonial frontier isn't restricted to mineral-rich Congo or oil-drenched Venezuela.
00:05It's digital, invisible, and everywhere.
00:08From the shantytowns of Nairobi to the barrios of Manila,
00:12smartphones hum with the raw material of the 21st century.
00:16Data.
00:17And just like spices and slaves once sailed westward in imperial galleons,
00:22metadata now travels quietly to the cloud servers of Palo Alto and Shenzhen.
00:27This isn't development.
00:28This is digital extraction.
00:31Welcome to the age of digital colonialism.
00:34The architecture of this new empire is built on three pillars.
00:37Software, hardware, and network infrastructure.
00:40But unlike the colonial powers of old who needed armies and gunboats,
00:44today's digital colonizers need only code and connectivity.
00:48They've turned the entire global south into a massive open pit mine for behavioral data.
00:54All under the pretense of development and connectivity for all.
00:57AI is marketed as a miracle equalizer.
01:00That will help developing nations leapfrog into the future.
01:05We were told AI would bring precision agriculture, predictive healthcare, and smart urbanism to even the most under-resourced regions.
01:11These Davos fantasies have been regurgitated for nearly two decades.
01:16But where is the proof?
01:18Where are the showcase projects that demonstrate even a fraction of these promises were delivered?
01:23The only real revolution happening is the outflow of data that were supposed to power these breakthroughs.
01:29Voice samples collected in Ghana become training fodder for Western voice assistants.
01:35Facial data gathered in Nigerian policing trials end up fine-tuning surveillance software in San Francisco.
01:42Where Western models have had persistent problems identifying and tracking darker-skinned individuals,
01:47agricultural data scraped from Filipino farmers,
01:51power predictive analytics for agribusiness conglomerates that will never benefit the Philippines.
01:56Big tech servers abroad now function like the colonial warehouses and banks of old.
02:01Models, patents, ideas, and profits quietly migrate north.
02:06While the global south is left with nothing but pilot programs and PowerPoint presentations,
02:10consider this irony.
02:13The African continent is home to around 2,000 languages,
02:16approximately one-third of the world's languages.
02:19Yet as of 2024, Apple's Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon's Alexa collectively service zero African languages.
02:28Zero.
02:29This is not a partnership.
02:30This is colonial pillage dressed in TED Talk lingo.
02:33Silicon Valley has become the global epicenter of the new East India companies.
02:37These entities wield quasi-sovereign power,
02:41backed by vast capital reserves,
02:43lobbying muscle,
02:44and a veneer of corporate benevolence.
02:46Where the original East India company extracted tea and textiles,
02:50today's digital extractors siphon location metadata,
02:54online behavior,
02:55biometric identifiers,
02:57and social graph mappings.
02:59Consider Meta's Free Basics initiative,
03:01which offered zero-rated internet access
03:03in dozens of developing countries.
03:05What seemed like a humanitarian gesture was,
03:09in reality,
03:10an attempt to create a captive ecosystem,
03:13one where Facebook was the internet.
03:15It was blocked in India in 2016 after massive resistance,
03:18but continues in other countries,
03:21quietly conditioning the digital habits of hundreds of millions of users.
03:25An expanded meta-connectivity program is now used by an estimated 300 million people across countries,
03:31including Indonesia, Pakistan, and the Philippines.
03:35Critics warned these platforms could be exploited for surveillance.
03:39Intellectual property harvesting.
03:41Geopolitical intelligence.
03:43Often without the knowledge or consent of local populations.
03:46And here's the kicker.
03:48These services aren't even truly free.
03:49Pakistani users of Meta's supposed tech philanthropy
03:53were allegedly charged $1.9 million per month.
03:58In 2021 alone,
03:59users who had been promised free data access by Facebook and the global south
04:03paid nearly $100 million.
04:06No plans have been announced to repay them.
04:09The parallels to historical colonialism are unmistakable.
04:11The East India Company also promised mutual benefit in civilization.
04:18While systematically extracting wealth and imposing dependency,
04:22today's tech giants use the same playbook.
04:25Promise development.
04:27Extract value.
04:28Create dependency.
04:30And maintain control through technological infrastructure.
04:33The extractive nature of digital colonialism operates on multiple levels.
04:38First, there's the physical extraction that makes digital extraction possible
04:41in the first place.
04:42The Democratic Republic of Congo supplies over 70% of the world's cobalt.
04:46It's essential for batteries and smartphones and computers.
04:50Local workers face appalling conditions while thousands of children work in mines.
04:54Almost none of the industry's profits return to the local population.
04:58But the data extraction is where the real colonial parallel becomes clear.
05:02Just as colonial powers once established trading posts
05:04to funnel raw materials back to the metropole for processing into finished goods.
05:08Big tech corporations established digital infrastructure
05:12to funnel raw data back to Silicon Valley for processing into AI services
05:16and targeted advertising.
05:18In Kenya, facial recognition technology was introduced as a policing tool
05:22under the guise of modernization.
05:24In practice, it has disproportionately targeted political activists.
05:28The same activists are now using AI tools to level the political battlefield.
05:33But who ultimately benefits from this internecine clash?
05:37Isn't this the latest incarnation of the old imperial divide-and-conquer strategy?
05:41In India, AI-driven fraud detection systems have misclassified thousands of rural poor,
05:47unjustly cutting them off from vital government benefits,
05:50imported algorithmic governance,
05:52often designed without regard for local context or cultural nuance,
05:57compounds the problem.
05:59Ironically, while these systems penalize the most vulnerable,
06:03India has emerged as a global hub for sophisticated online scams.
06:08The biometric gold rush exemplifies this perfectly.
06:11Tech firms, often partnering with NGOs or financial institutions,
06:16are racing to digitize identities across the global south.
06:19Fingerprint scans, iris recognition, voiceprint registration,
06:24all justified as ways to include the unbanked or streamlined public services.
06:29But these efforts rarely include meaningful consent or data protection frameworks.
06:34Take WorldCoin, a cryptocurrency project offering small payments for biometric iris scans.
06:40Its largest user base?
06:42Young people in low-income African nations who serve as a convenient population to experiment on,
06:47far from the regulatory spotlights of Brussels or Washington.
06:51Note that WorldCoin was co-founded by Sam Altman, who also founded OpenEye.
06:56India presents perhaps the clearest example of digital colonialism in action.
07:01Once hailed as a rising digital superpower,
07:04India now serves as a showcase for AI neocolonialism.
07:09Its vast IT industry, once brimming with promise,
07:12is today little more than an outsourced arm of Western conglomerates.
07:17Here's a reality check.
07:18How many people outside India have even one Indian-made app on their phones?
07:22There was a brief window when Indian tech seemed poised to lead.
07:26In the late 1990s,
07:27a major U.S. tech firm allegedly commissioned two parallel teams,
07:32one in Silicon Valley,
07:34the other in an Indian city,
07:35to build a next-generation operating system to challenge Microsoft.
07:39The Indian team delivered.
07:42The U.S. team could not.
07:44Around the same time,
07:46Indian innovators like Sabier Basha gave us hotmail.
07:49For a moment, the digital future seemed multipolar.
07:53But rather than reward innovation,
07:55big tech consolidated.
07:57Competition was replaced with shareholder-sanctioned coordination
08:00led by investment giants like BlackRock.
08:02From that point on,
08:05Indian IT firms were reduced from potential innovators
08:08to mere subcontractors.
08:10Digital coolies in the new plantation system.
08:13And who better to manage this global digital plantation
08:16than a new class of compliant Indian C-suite executives?
08:21These are not disruptors.
08:22They are the taskmasters of digital kanganis,
08:25running the same extractive labor models
08:27once perfected by the East India Company.
08:28The dream of an Asian century,
08:31powered by Indian software and Chinese.
08:34Hardware has curdled into a reality of Chinese software,
08:38Chinese hardware,
08:39and Chinese AI.
08:41Indian tech talent has been reduced to glorified middleware at best.
08:45For all the online chest-thumping
08:47about Indian origin CEOs in the U.S.,
08:49where is India's Jensen Huang?
08:52Where is the Indian-founded equivalent of NVIDIA,
08:54OpenEye,
08:55or even Palantor?
08:56There isn't one.
08:57India produces engineers by the millions,
09:01but owns almost none of the trillion-dollar platforms.
09:05The colony codes and the empire profits.
09:07The colonial project is accelerating.
09:10In 2025,
09:12Mark Zuckerberg announced the formation
09:14of Meta Superintelligence Labs,
09:16a new division dedicated to building AI systems
09:19that surpass human capabilities.
09:21The initiative brings together Meta's core AI.
09:24Research and product teams with the stated goal of delivering personal superintelligence for everyone.
09:30But who is this everyone?
09:32And who controls this superintelligence?
09:34Leading the new lab is Alexander Wong, founder of Scale AI.
09:39Following, Meta's reported $14 billion investment in his data labeling firm.
09:43The team includes former executives from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic,
09:49a brain drain from other AI companies to serve Meta's colonial ambitions.
09:54Meanwhile, OpenEye is in talks with investors for a stock sale that could value it at $500 billion.
09:59Potentially making it the world's most valuable private tech firm,
10:03ChatGPT's maker has grown its annual subscription revenue
10:06to $12 billion since launching in late 2022.
10:10This is the monetization of intelligence,
10:13self-the-privatization of human cognition.
10:15President Trump's $500 billion Stargate initiative promises to secure
10:20U.S. leadership in superintelligent AI through incentives for private research,
10:26export controls on advanced chips,
10:28and direct collaboration between tech firms and defense agencies.
10:31Trump's allies describe AI as the Manhattan Project of our generation,
10:36insisting that the future of human civilization must be led by the United States.
10:41This isn't just economic competition.
10:43It's a race to control the fundamental infrastructure of thought and decision-making in the 21st century.
10:48The Global South isn't just being excluded from this race.
10:52It's being positioned as the testing ground and data source for systems designed to maintain northern dominance.
10:58Digital colonialism operates through six interconnected mechanisms
11:02that mirror and extend historical colonial practices.
11:07First, unequal concentration of power.
11:10A handful of primarily U.S.-based tech companies control the essential infrastructure of the digital economy.
11:17Microsoft dominates operating systems.
11:21Google controls search and mobile platforms.
11:23Amazon rules cloud computing.
11:26And Meta dominates social networking.
11:28This isn't market competition.
11:30It's digital feudalism.
11:32Second, violent and harmful extraction.
11:35The violence operates at multiple levels.
11:38The physical violence of cobalt mining in Congo.
11:40The psychological violence inflicted on content moderators earning $2.20 per hour to review traumatic content.
11:48And the systemic violence of algorithmic systems that exclude and discriminate against the Global South's populations.
11:55Third, resource and data extraction.
11:58Just as colonial powers extracted raw materials for processing in the Metropole.
12:03Tech giants extract raw data for processing in Silicon Valley.
12:07The AI systems trained on Global South data are sold back as finished products,
12:12creating the same unequal exchange that characterized historical colonialism.
12:16Fourth, dependency creation.
12:19By aggressively promoting their platforms and creating ecosystems that lock users in,
12:24tech giants establish technological dependencies.
12:27Countries become reliant on foreign-controlled infrastructure for basic digital services, education, and governance.
12:33Fifth, cultural imperialism.
12:35English becomes the default language of code and platforms.
12:40Silicon Valley's particular vision of social interaction, privacy, and human relationships becomes universalized.
12:48Local ways of knowing and being are crowded out by algorithmic logic and data-driven decision-making.
12:54Sixth, benevolent discourse.
12:56Perhaps most insidiously, this entire system is wrapped in the language of progress, development, and human rights.
13:05Connecting the world, democratizing access to information.
13:09AI for good.
13:11These phrases mask a fundamentally extractive and exploitative system.
13:15The Global South serves as a testing ground for surveillance and control technologies that will eventually be deployed globally.
13:22In Johannesburg, the company Vumicom has built a CCTV network of over 5,000 cameras.
13:30Private security companies use AI analytics to identify threats.
13:34Often through facial recognition technology that exhibits racial bias.
13:38Microsoft's little-known public safety and justice.
13:42Division has built extensive partnerships with law enforcement surveillance vendors worldwide.
13:48Their tech runs on Microsoft cloud infrastructure, including a citywide surveillance platform called Microsoft Aware, purchased by police in Brazil and Singapore.
13:56And police vehicle solutions with facial recognition cameras rolled out in Cape Town and Durban.
14:02Microsoft is also deeply involved with the prison industry, offering software solutions covering the entire correctional pipeline.
14:09In Africa, they partnered with Notopia Solutions to offer a prison management software, platform that includes escape management and prisoner analytics.
14:18For centuries, imperial powers tested technologies to police and control their citizens on foreign populations first.
14:27From fingerprinting applied in British India to America's biometric surveillance apparatus developed in the Philippines, the pattern remains consistent.
14:37Africans continue to serve as a laboratory for carceral experimentation.
14:42The data collected through these systems doesn't just serve local law enforcement.
14:45It feeds into global surveillance networks.
14:50Edward Snowden revealed that Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Apple all shared information with the NSA through the PRISM program.
14:57Countries across the Global South have been targets of this surveillance from the Middle East to Africa and Latin America.
15:03But resistance is emerging.
15:05Nigeria has applied breaks on foreign-backed digital ID programs.
15:09Kenya has suspended iris scanning initiatives after massive backlash.
15:13Brazil's general data protection law has begun reshaping public discourse about data rights.
15:19The fight against Facebook's Internet.org in India offers a powerful example.
15:23Digital rights activists, developers, and tech policy experts launched the Save the Internet campaign to oppose Facebook's project.
15:31They routinely compared Facebook to the East India Company, drawing explicit parallels to historical colonialism.
15:36When Facebook board member Mark Andreessen responded to their victory by tweeting,
15:42Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for India for decades.
15:47Why stop now?
15:48He inadvertently revealed the colonial mindset underlying Silicon Valley's global expansion.
15:53Artists like Tabita Razer have been creating powerful works examining digital colonialism.
15:58Her piece, Deep Down Title, explores how undersea Internet cables follow the same routes as both telegraph lines and slave trade routes,
16:06connecting the ocean as a site of both connectivity and colonial power.
16:11In Latin America, digital rights activists like Renata Avila have been developing frameworks for digital sovereignty.
16:17Projects like Whose Knowledge? work to center the histories and knowledge of the global majority that is underrepresented on the Internet.
16:24The African Union has begun early-stage deliberations on a continental data governance framework.
16:30South Africa, local AI research groups are working on open, transparent models rooted in African languages and cultural norms.
16:38The path forward requires more than resistance.
16:41It demands the construction of alternative digital infrastructures based on principles of sovereignty, cooperation, and genuine development.
16:49This means investing in sovereign cloud storage, ethical AI standards, community-owned data cooperatives, and open-source platforms.
16:58It means building digital public infrastructure controlled by and accountable to local communities rather than foreign corporations.
17:07The Global South needs a coordinated pushback against Silicon Valley's digital hegemony.
17:12This isn't just about resisting predatory data practices.
17:15It's about building the technological foundation for genuine self-determination in the digital age.
17:21Consider the success of free and open-source software movements that created digital commons free of corporate control.
17:27When Microsoft scorned Peru for trying to shift to open-source software and attempted to prevent African governments from using new Linux,
17:35they revealed their colonial intentions.
17:37The response must be to strengthen these commons-based alternatives.
17:42But technology alone isn't enough.
17:45Digital decolonization requires confronting the political and economic structures that enable digital colonialism.
17:51It means challenging the World Trade Organization's intellectual property regimes,
17:58the structural adjustment programs that force countries to accept digital colonization,
18:02and the global financial system that extracts wealth from South to North.
18:06The critique of digital colonialism opens up space for imagining radically different technological futures.
18:12What if AI development was driven by community needs rather than profit maximization?
18:19What if data was treated as a commons rather than private property?
18:23What if digital infrastructure was designed for cooperation rather than competition?
18:27These aren't utopian fantasies.
18:30They're practical alternatives being built by communities worldwide.
18:34From community mesh networks providing internet access independent of corporate control,
18:38to blockchain-based systems for protecting indigenous data sovereignty,
18:42to platform cooperatives owned and governed by their users.
18:45The movement for digital decolonization is part of broader struggles for climate justice,
18:51economic equality, and true decolonization.
18:54The ecological crisis created by capitalism intersects directly with digital colonialism.
18:59From the environmental destruction of mineral extraction,
19:02to the massive energy consumption of data centers and cryptocurrency mining,
19:07solutions must address root causes and major actors,
19:10connecting with grassroots movements willing to confront capitalism, authoritarianism,
19:16and American empire.
19:18This means building coalitions between tech workers organizing within Silicon Valley,
19:23communities resisting extractive industries,
19:26and movements for digital rights worldwide.
19:29We stand at a crossroads.
19:31Down one path lies the continuation and intensification of digital colonialism,
19:36a world where a handful of corporations control not just our data,
19:41but our very capacity to think, communicate, and organize.
19:46A world where the global south remains permanently relegated to the role of data supplier
19:51and surveillance testing ground for technologies designed to maintain northern dominance.
19:56Down the other path lies the possibility of genuine digital liberation,
20:01technologies designed by and for communities.
20:04Digital infrastructures that serve human needs rather than capital accumulation.
20:10AI systems trained on the knowledge and priorities of the global majority
20:13rather than Silicon Valley elites.
20:16The choice is ours, but the window for action is closing.
20:20As AI systems become more powerful and pervasive,
20:23as surveillance technologies become more sophisticated,
20:26as dependency on corporate platforms deepens,
20:29the task of building alternatives becomes more difficult.
20:32The global south has been colonized before,
20:35but data, unlike oil or sugar, is invisible,
20:39infinitely replicable, and is lead stolen.
20:42That makes the fight harder but also more urgent.
20:45In this new age of algorithmic empires,
20:48control over information isn't just about profit.
20:51It's about power, freedom, and the right to define our own future.
20:55The movements emerging across Africa, Asia, and Latin America
21:00to resist digital colonialism and build technological sovereignty
21:03represent the seeds of a different future.
21:06From the activists who defeated Facebook's Internet.org in India
21:10to the artists imagining decolonized Internets,
21:13from the communities building mesh networks
21:15to the cooperatives creating platform alternatives,
21:18These are the forces that will determine
21:20whether technology serves liberation or domination.
21:24Digital colonialism thrives in darkness,
21:27hidden behind the complexity of algorithms
21:29and the promise of technological progress.
21:32But knowledge is the first step toward resistance.
21:36Support organizations fighting for digital rights worldwide.
21:40Advocate for data sovereignty in your communities.
21:43Choose open source alternatives where possible.
21:45And remember, every time you use technology,
21:48you're participating in political and economic systems.
21:51Make those choices consciously.
21:53The future of human freedom in the digital age
21:56depends on the choices we make today.
21:58Colonizers are counting on our passivity.
22:00Let's prove them wrong.
22:02And don't forget like the video and subscribe the channel
22:04to keep thinking the world how it really is.
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