The contemporary digital landscape is undergoing a seismic shift.
Unnecessary features like automatic reel translation, AI-generated personal message summaries, and predictive texts that finish our sentences are becoming woven into the fabric of our daily lives.
This aggressive push for technology is not new. This integration of AI reflects historical patterns of economic expansion and cultural erasure.
This creates a central dilemma: Is this progress or a new era of digital colonialism?
The push for AI is a replica of the induced demand strategy of the mid-20th century.
In economics, this happens when a producer increases the supply of a product to the point of altering consumer behavior, creating a “need” where none existed before.
An example of this is the introduction of a smart refrigerator.
The main function of a refrigerator is to keep cold. Adding Wi-Fi-connected touch screens to track egg due dates is not a pressing need. It is rather a solution that seeks a problem.
Manufacturers deliberately made dumb appliances harder to find or deliberately left out features to create a technological lock-in. Consumers don’t buy them because they need smart devices, but because the entire system was designed to require that central hub.
By marketing smart appliances as symbols of modern sophistication, they created a need.
Today, AI giants (mainly based in the Global North) are following the same plan. By forcefully integrating AI into an everyday platform, they ensure that every interaction becomes a data point.
Having saturated the market with hardware and cloud storage, they must now justify the astronomical valuations of generative AI.
By introducing AI into social media interfaces, they ensure that every user interaction becomes a data point, feeding the very engines they seek to monetize.
This aggressive integration of AI transcends mere market strategy. It highlights a structural shift towards algorithmic extractivism, where technological dependency becomes a tool for geopolitical dominance.
Scholars and critics argue that this phenomenon replicates older patterns of economic dependence, raising concerns about data mining, cultural dominance, and the erosion of digital sovereignty in the Global South.
The debate arises from dependency theory, a framework that suggests how resources historically flow from poorer “peripheral” nations to richer “core” states, underpinning global inequality.
This suggests that advanced economies are once again benefiting disproportionately, but this time from data, jobs and care.
An obvious example is the artificial intelligence giant OpenAI. While the West interacts with a magically clean ChatGPT interface, the work that makes it secure is outsourced to the Global South.
As reported by the guardianOpenAI used workers in Kenya (through the company Sama) to label thousands of passages of graphic and traumatic content for less than $2 an hour.
This creates a huge value gap, that is, intellectual property remains in Silicon Valley, while physical and psychological labor is offloaded to developing nations.
History shows that technological gifts often come with strings attached. For example, during the colonial era, the British built extensive railway networks across the subcontinent.
While it was framed as a civilizing era, the primary goal was the efficient extraction of raw materials and the rapid movement of troops to suppress local dissent.
Similarly, the free AI tools offered today are the digital railways of the 21st century. They facilitate the extraction of our most valuable raw material, that is, human attention and data.
Most LLMs are trained with English-centric data. When Meta applies its moderation algorithms around the world, they often fail spectacularly.
According to a discussion paper published by the CARR Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, Meta-owned Facebook’s AI appeared to have incorrectly labeled “terrorist content” in non-violent Arabic content.
The researchers also found that Google’s Perspective API applied American standards to local slang.
For example, while the term “dawg” is informal in the United States, it is very disrespectful in Swahili. Similarly, the term “fatness,” which means wealth, beauty and fertility in Africa, was flagged by AI as toxic body shaming.
This forces the Global South to adopt a Western semantic logic simply to exist on these platforms.
Therefore, the aggressive integration of AI is not simply a natural evolution, but a calculated economic maneuver. This creates a closed loop: dependency is induced, authenticity is degraded, and solutions are monetized.
