Colonial Infrastructure, Digital Infrastructure

Anderson argued, alongside other postcolonial theorists, that colonial infrastructure was never neutral. The roads built to extract cotton from India structured Indian economic geography for centuries after independence. The railways that moved British troops continued to move Indian goods along routes designed for imperial convenience. The administrative languages, the legal codes, the educational systems — all inherited their shape from the purposes of extraction rather than from the needs of the populations that came to depend on them. The AI infrastructure inherits this non-neutrality. Models trained on predominantly English data, optimized for Western workflows, hosted on servers controlled by American corporations — this is not a neutral substrate for global building. It is a specific configuration with specific distributional consequences.