The Subaltern Who Codes

The subaltern, in Gramsci’s analysis, is not merely the poor but the structurally excluded: the person whose experience of the social order is systematically different from the experience the dominant narrative describes, and whose difference is rendered invisible not by suppression but by the narrative’s claim to universality. The AI transition has produced a global geography of subalternity that the dominant discourse consistently maps as a geography of opportunity. The developer in Lagos who uses a large language model to build software is real; her expanded capability is real; the access she has gained to tools previously reserved for engineers at elite corporations is real. What the rhetoric of democratization conceals is the structural position that access does not alter: she did not choose the training data, does not know whether the model learned from her own previous work extracted from the internet without