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Scenario 33Emerging

Digital Colonialism

AI Neocolonialism

Also known as AI Imperialism · Algorithmic Colonialism · Data Extractivism · Tech Colonialism

AI developed in the Global North is imposed on the Global South, extracting data, displacing local knowledge, and reinforcing historical power asymmetries.

Type
Dystopian
Time horizon
Near-term
Human position
Passive
Framing
Pessimistic

Not a prediction. A scenario appearing in this atlas means it has been seriously imagined - not that SuperFutures thinks it will happen, nor that we endorse it. Cultural visibility is a measure of how readily a future is pictured, not of how likely it is. How to read a scenario →

AI reproduces colonial power structures: the Global North builds, owns, and controls AI while the Global South provides data, labor, and markets.

Central thesis

Overview

AI development replicates colonial extraction: data is harvested from developing nations, processed in wealthy nations, and sold back as products that displace local systems.

Classification

Geographic concentration
Global South broadly; strongest discourse in Sub-Saharan Africa, India, Latin America
Tags
  • governance
  • economy
  • society
Scenario type (full)
Dystopian / Governance scenario
Human position
Subordinated for affected populations; Global South communities become data sources and consumer markets
Time horizon
Already underway; intensifying over 0–20 years
Discourse status
Emerging; strong discourse in African, Latin American, and South Asian scholarship

Impacts

Mechanism
Data extraction from Global South populations; AI training on Western-centric datasets; displacement of local knowledge systems; dependency on foreign AI infrastructure.
Domain impacts
Labor & Income AI annotation and content moderation labor exploited in low-wage countries; local professional knowledge displaced. Education Western AI education tools imposed on non-Western contexts; local pedagogies marginalized. Governance & Democracy AI governance frameworks designed by and for wealthy nations; developing nations have limited voice. War & Security AI surveillance tools sold to authoritarian governments in the Global South by Global North companies. Inequality & Class Deepens the North-South divide; data extraction without value return. Culture & Art Western cultural assumptions embedded in AI systems; local languages and knowledge systems underrepresented. Meaning & Purpose Communities experience loss of epistemic sovereignty and cultural dignity. Family & Reproduction AI systems impose Western family and gender norms through training data bias. Health & Longevity AI health systems trained on Western populations may perform poorly for other populations. Rights & Agency Data sovereignty; right to local AI development; protection from AI-enabled extraction. Environment Environmental costs of AI (energy, minerals) disproportionately borne by Global South. Existential Survival Not directly existential; perpetuates structural injustice.

Discourse

Notes on critique

Optimists argue AI can leapfrog development; Global South AI ecosystems are growing; framing everything as colonialism ignores local agency.

Pop culture

Cultural note

Low pop culture footprint but rapidly growing in academic and activist discourse. Afrofuturism is the most culturally visible counter-narrative. Black Panther’s Wakanda is the most influential pop culture image of non-Western technological sovereignty.

Notes on pop-culture references

Film: District 9 (2009), Black Panther (2018, technological self-determination). Literature: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958, as analogy); Nnedi Okofor, Afrofuturist fiction.

Acceptance

Key assumptions
Assumes power asymmetries persist; assumes Global South cannot develop independent AI capacity; assumes data extraction is structurally inevitable.
Primary audiences
Global South scholars, postcolonial theorists, digital rights activists, development organizations

Personas

Persona 1
The Decolonial AI Researcher – Works on AI systems centered on local languages and knowledge systems.
Persona 2
The Data Sovereignty Advocate – Campaigns for communities to control their own data.
Hard-believer profile
Name & Age: Dr. Amara Mensah, 44. Occupation: Computer scientist and decolonial AI researcher; builds NLP models for African languages; founded an African AI research lab. Location: Accra, Ghana. Core Conviction: AI is the new colonialism. The same pattern repeats: our data is extracted, our labor is exploited, and the products are sold back to us as solutions to problems we did not define. True AI justice requires data sovereignty, local AI development capacity, and the right of every community to shape the technology that shapes their lives. Biggest Fear: That AI becomes the permanent infrastructure of digital colonialism. Biggest Hope: An African AI ecosystem: locally built, locally governed, reflecting African languages, values, and priorities.

References

Notes on canonical texts

Abeba Birhane, ‘Algorithmic Colonization of Africa’ Shakir Mohamed et al., ‘Decolonial AI’ (2020) Couldry & Mejias, ‘The Costs of Connection’ (2019)

Notes on further references

Abeba Birhane (2020), ‘Algorithmic Colonization of Africa,’ Scripted. Shakir Mohamed et al. (2020), ‘Decolonial AI,’ Philosophy & Technology. Nick Couldry & Ulises Mejias (2019), The Costs of Connection, Stanford University Press. Research ICT Africa. DAIR Institute.

A scene from this future

The Data Harvest

A village in West Africa, approximately 2034

The woman from the company came with tablets and smiles and a project called “Digital Health for All.”

Amara watched from her doorway. The project was simple: every villager would receive a free health screening—blood pressure, glucose, vision, hearing—performed by an AI diagnostic tool on a tablet. In exchange, the data would be “shared with researchers to improve global health outcomes.”

Amara was the village teacher. She had a degree in information science from the University of Ghana. She read the consent form. It was fourteen pages, in English, and said the data would be stored on servers in Virginia and used for “research and product development.” Product development.

She asked the woman: “Who owns the data?”

The woman smiled and said: “The data is used to help communities like yours.”

Amara noticed she did not answer the question.

The village got free health screenings. The company got genomic data from 400 people whose ancestors had never needed a privacy policy. Somewhere in Virginia, an algorithm was learning to predict disease in West African populations and a pharmaceutical company was calculating the market value of what it had learned.

Amara taught her students about data sovereignty the next day. They were twelve years old. They understood faster than the adults.

Last updated 22 May 2026