CONCEPT
Colonial Genealogy of the Digital
The argument that the digital infrastructure of the AI age is not a break from colonial history but a continuation of it, reproducing in new forms the extractive and hierarchical structures of earlier empires.
The standard Silicon Valley self-description presents AI as a radical novelty — a break from everything that came before, ungoverned by the patterns of earlier technologies, accountable only to its own disruptive logic. The colonial-genealogy framework, developed by Mbembe and others including Sylvia Wynter, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Syed Mustafa Ali, rejects this self-description. The patterns by which AI is being built and deployed — the geographic distribution of labor, the concentration of capital in metropolitan centers, the extraction of resources from the periphery, the imposition of governance frameworks written without peripheral input — are not novel patterns. They are the patterns of five centuries of colonial modernity, updated for digital conditions.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The argument operates on multiple levels simultaneously. At the material level, the physical infrastructure of AI — the cobalt in the batteries, the lithium in the data centers, the rare earths in the chips — is extracted from the same geographic zones
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