CONCEPT
Epistemic Decolonization
The project of displacing the colonial hierarchy of knowledge that the training corpora of large language models have inherited and made operational.
Epistemic decolonization is the project of dismantling the hierarchies of knowledge that colonial modernity established — the arrangement by which Western, male, Anglophone, written, institutionally-certified knowledge has been treated as universal while other forms have been treated as local, partial, or merely cultural. The project long predates AI; it runs through Frantz Fanon, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Sylvia Wynter, the Rhodes Must Fall movement, and the broader decolonial turn in higher education. What the AI era adds is urgency: the large language model trained on the current corpus is the single most powerful mechanism ever built for inscribing a particular epistemic hierarchy into the infrastructure of future knowledge production.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The training corpus of a frontier model is, in effect, the curriculum of a universal university. What is in the corpus is taught; what is absent is not. The current corpora are dominated by English-language, Western-authored, digitized text — a specific archive that represents perhaps 15 percent of the world's languages and a tiny fraction of its living