Cathy Smith

The digital era has made the Western techno-companies and international organizations regard technology as the ultimate solution for the Third World, from Africa, Asia, to Latin America. This perception of 'progress' reinforces the current status quo of global power dynamics and erodes cultural sovereignty and further entrenches inequality. The techno-colonialism, if it might be described, is a digital takeover of the Global South, not something over the horizon but already upon us.

This is not an abstract debate; it is real in the lives of villagers and city dwellers of the Global South. There are very deep impacts felt here, ranging from the digital divide, enforced dominance of Western tech platforms, to eroding local cultural practices. An example in coastal villages of Kenya indicates how patterns of communication and tradition have taken a downward shift as they gradually embrace more aspects of the West. This pattern is reflected equally in highland Guatemala with a changed face for the economy and social systems of the community. This is a development name given to the people, being exposed to such a nature of 'prosperity' at the cost of the autonomy and identities

The Digital Divide: Whom Does it Leave Behind?

The digital divide is predictably sharp in most of the Global South, though the contrast would vary from place to place—from 22 percent internet penetration in sub-Saharan Africa to 87 percent in Europe, for example. What it truly translates to, however, is significant retardation in economic growth, access to healthcare and education, and civic-political participation—all strong reasons why this gap has to be bridged urgently.

It really matters to consider this divide: this is not about ownership of the digital space, but infrastructure or technological access to whom it happens. When you look at the figures, much of what people use in the Global South to access the Internet is defined by the interests of Western companies. For instance, most users in Africa access the Internet using Facebook and WhatsApp. In Bangladesh, for example, nearly 90 percent of smartphones operate on Google's Android operating system. Even as the numbers coming online grow, they do so on a small handful of Western-controlled tools.

When Facebook introduced its "Free Basics" initiative in Kenya, giving users free access to select websites, the motive was not about equal access—it was to provide a captive audience to the Facebook ecosystem. People could access Facebook, check for messages, and get some education but if they want more, they must pay. And the result is that Facebook holds such a stranglehold on the Internet that no room is left to homegrown technology companies or internet services. Google and Amazon spread their wings into places where connectivity is desired, but the choices are minimal.

Forcible Adoption of Western Tech Platforms: Facebook in Africa, Google in Asia

One of the most insidious elements of techno-colonialism is the adoption of Western digital platforms. However, this adoption is also aided and abetted by local governments and institutions. What this may look like—for example, more than 10 million people use Facebook in Kenya alone—is at the same time a story of erosion in culture and rise in economic dependence, as shall later be shown in the paper. To many people, Facebook is not a communication medium; it is the Internet. Here's a typical encounter with the digital world. In rural Kenya, with choice limited and access to what little there is, slim at best, one usually only finds the digital world in the 'walled garden' of Facebook.

This E-Gilded-Cage has significant consequences. In countries as diverse as Uganda and Tanzania, where Luganda, Swahili, and other local languages are the lingua franca, Facebook domination is equivalent to a barrier of English—an elixir for most. The digital economy marginalizes the non-English-proficient. Even worse is the fact that the platform algorithm continues to favor sensationalism and content for profit over local news, thereby further marginalizing the local voice. In most of the people in those countries, the problem of which platform to use is, in actual sense, a compulsion that does not hold economically and/or socially.

Consider just India, the world's second-most populated nation, for Android: A staggering 97 percent of all mobiles in the country were running on the Android operating system, said a report in 2020. A digitization achievement-sounding accomplishment translating into how dominance now hovers over Indian mobile land courtesy of Google, with the latter still being an exclusive market and its way of distributing the applications, all bound by those policies and that hefty commission for Indian developers and users. Although no longer prohibitively expensive, the design of smartphones remains fundamentally to launch people into the vastness of Google's cosmos: Google search, Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, and the Android operating system.

It means to most Indians that even with a very high rate of smartphone adoptions, a great deal of digital activity gets funneled into no other space than that of Western-controlled platforms, leaving one little freedom to cause exploration and discovery of anything local. The idea of this one-size-fits-all Western solution flattened the vast cultural diversity of India—its myriad languages, customs, and regional digital needs. The benefit has gone to the Tech Titans; there is no trickling down of benefit, it has not happened—the cultural empowerment that the arrival of "smartphones" was supposed to bring about—but instead, a reorganization of daily life through global platforms often at the expense of local innovations and traditions.

The Loss of Cultural Sovereignty: The Case of the Zapatistas and Beyond

Wherever technology spreads, it brings a subtle form of erasing culture. But today, around the world, in areas where people lived in some semblance of isolation, those same Western technology platforms are disrupting how local cultures express themselves and create community. The southern mountains of Mexico have long been home to the Zapatista resistance movement against global capitalism's dominance, extending to its digital avatar. The Zapatistas—majorly indigenous Mayans—fought for the autonomy of their people to manage their resources, language, and education.

Despite all efforts to stem the relentless incursion of the companies of the Western technology world into their turf, it has just not succeeded. Lately, the Zapatistas have had to fight the entry of Facebook and Twitter into the circle of its influence, which is now opening the world to its cause. This is because, for a prize, they earn worldwide coverage. Still, the consequence is that the words fall under the exact mechanisms of digital algorithm that helps to amplify western propaganda. As the message reaches all the farthest corners, now even the words themselves have co-opted the political agenda for those platforms to mold their way into telling the story.

That is cultural sovereignty, not for the language itself, but for who will own the narration. The expanding platforms in Brazil bring to the fore online presence by Brazilian content—for instance, with the appearance of YouTube—but the more that digital space opens up, the more the content—music, videos, blogs—is Westernized through algorithms and monetization schemes. And yet, for every million views that a Brazilian music video might rack up, how many stories or songs slip into the chasm of the search engine?

It has further provided the means for Indigenous groups across Papua New Guinea and Bolivia to call for representation as this dominance of the Western platform goes hand in hand with the spread of Western apps and services that will silence the local voice. For example, it is cultural why web content about Aymara and Quechua is not much. Those living in rural Bolivia live in a virtual world only portrayed in Spanish, English, or Portuguese; therefore, they lose a beautiful tradition they would pass along in their first language.

Involvement of Western Governments and NGOs: Development as a Facade for Exploitation

But this time, it is Western governments and international NGOs playing the lead role—more often than not masquerading as "development." Think, for instance, of USAID funding digital literacy initiatives in Haiti or Ethiopia. Typically backed by corporate giants such as Google or Microsoft, such initiatives promise the magic of empowerment through technology. They are often, however, structured in such a way as to provide most benefits for the companies instead of the communities they serve. For example, Google has been a crucial partner for developing countries in delivering digital literacy education. While this is a public service, it creates dependency on its tools to continue dominating such markets.

This has witnessed companies like M-Pesa take the lead in the trend of extending access to mobile banking in Kenya, where over 70% of the population resides in rural areas. Though M-Pesa has transformed mobile payments, the strong relationship with Western financial institutions and technology companies has compelled these players further into Kenya's economic tissue. The products conceived and driven by local entrepreneurs cannot match the coverage and infrastructure that the foreign-supported services can boast of.

Most of that so-called "development" they are clamoring for is actually a rather short-term affair in the forms of dependencies on West's technologies. They have to be digitally high, which cannot be made feasible without depending upon the designs that Silicon Valley conceived and where just a handful of global players sit as proprietors. Essentially, digital development constitutes more or less a smoke-screen for deep-level economic exploitation.

Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty: A Road to Autonomy

Meanwhile, against this tide, the opposition to techno-colonialism is also crystallizing on many fronts across the Global South—from community-led tech projects deep in rural Kenya to Indigenous people-led movements on the continent of South America. This would include guerrilla girls working in Brazil and taking the genders and races under equity of the digital, digital Green of India, which empowers the farmers here using open-source technology; the solution for the cyberspace primarily lies at the localization level by finding the needs.

This is the future of the digital empowerment for the Global South and could only have come about as a result of not taking on board any of the adopted Western technologies as a silver bullet. Or, they would have to fight for their digital sovereignty—that is, local, homegrown platforms, cultures, and languages that could speak to the needs of the locality. A decentralized, diverse, and inclusive digital ecosystem is more important than one universal Internet at the head of the West, which gives greater importance to local autonomy and cultural identity.

It is the right of the Global South to write their own digital future without erasing the cultural, economic, and political dimensions that characterized past forms of colonialism, but not just a resistance to Western tech corporations.

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Techno-Colonialism: The New Digital Conquest of the South
https://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2025/01/23/techno-colonialism-the-new-digital