TIME magazine, an American bi-weekly, recently celebrated the global movers and shakers of artificial intelligence: mostly Northern, mostly white, overwhelmingly male. And very positive. Yet many experience a world that looks incredibly different, one fractured and reshaped by polarising ideologies supported by the realities of technocolonialism.
In Gaza, AI-enabled surveillance and targeting systems have become part of Israel’s genocide machinery — and the United States shields it from accountability with an imperial shield, wielding its UN veto as a blunt weapon.
In Palestine, until this week, Microsoft provided cloud services on which Israel’s intelligence Unit 8200 processed data for mass surveillance of Palestinians. It wasn’t the UNESCO Recommendations on Ethics of AI nor the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights that forced Microsoft’s hand, it was acts of resistance through investigative journalism (by The Guardian, Israeli-Palestinian publication +972, and Hebrew news outlet Local Call) and the subsequent “PR fire” it stoked that forced the company to break ties.
In Kenya and the Philippines, “gig workers” serve as data labelers for American firms. They are invisible laborers in digital sweatshops, Big Tech’s hidden backbone, without whom they cannot scale, cannot extract, cannot survive.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, 40,000 children work in cobalt mines, with 80% of production controlled by Chinese interests while western tech giants capture most profits. All to power our AI future.
In Thailand, the American tech firm Tools for Humanity – OpenAI’s Sam Altman is a co-founder – extracts biometric data from scanning the irises of largely poor Thai people in exchange for money.
In Malaysia, foreign data centers siphon off natural resources and extract local data to feed the centre. The arteries of empire now pulse with electricity and information.
This is the digital world we inhabit: a new colonial order and infrastructure hiding (and extracting) in plain sight.
As John Green reminds us in his book Everything is Tuberculosis – itself an account of how decisions humans make at the centre create inequality and injustice at the periphery – “colonial infrastructure was not built to strengthen communities, it was meant to deplete them.”
Looking Back: Soekarno’s Indonesia
In 1955, a mere decade into independence and amidst decolonisation around the world, Indonesia’s founding president, Soekarno, created a global platform with a grand vision. Charismatic and defiant, he sought a path beyond the suffocating binaries of the Cold War.
Soekarno had already pulled off an improbable unification at home. He forged a nation from thousands of islands, various religions, hundreds of ethnic groups, and countless languages — exploited for nearly 350 years by the Dutch. He promoted Bahasa Indonesia as a shared language, not to impose dominance (as his own native Javanese most certainly would have) but to prevent a new hierarchy from replacing the Dutch one. His philosophy — drawn from Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (“unity in diversity”) and Pancasila (five guiding principles**) — was neither Soviet communism nor American capitalism.
It was a middle way: rooted in justice, equity, and sovereignty.
Washington saw it differently. Very differently. For the new post-war geopolitical masters in America, neutrality itself was dangerous. Unless a country aligned with the America, it was suspect, vulnerable to too much communist empathy and likely to become one of the “falling dominoes” that the American mind had invented and repeatedly convinced itself was real. Deadly CIA covert operations followed wherever countries fell out of Washington’s line. Washington cast a very long shadow.
In the Jakarta of Soekarno’s day, the U.S. government actively worked to destablise his young democracy because they could not fathom anti-colonial, leftist nationalism without confusing it with Marxist-Leninist communism, much as they had done in Guatemala, Iran, Brazil, Việt Nam, Congo, and many other places in the “third world”.
Where the empire saw American profits and ideology in peril, mass killings and coups would do the job, just nicely. For example, the 1954 CIA-backed coup in Guatemala was undertaken to benefit the American United Fruit Company – poised to lose out financially due to President Jacobo Árbenz agrarian reforms – while conjuring an impending communist take-over as rationale.
For years before the 1965 coup in Indonesia, the U.S. worked to undermine Soekarno — from CIA air bombings in Ambon to arming and training the Indonesian military at Fort Leavenworth. When the Indonesian army staged its coup, it borrowed America’s anti-communist playbook, blaming a fictitious “demonic” conspiracy by the Indonesian Communist Party — a broad, anti-colonial movement, hardly Soviet or Chinese in character, but popular across Indonesia. As the mass killings began, Washington signaled support to army brass, on the condition that Indonesia stop attacking U.S. policy and end harassment of American energy companies. Within weeks, Freeport was prospecting for gold in Papua; today its Ertsberg site is the world’s largest gold mine.
America’s neocolonial coups sometimes even led to sharing kill lists of people to be executed, as the U.S. Embassy would do in both Guatemala and Indonesia, among other places. (To put this in context, up to 1 million innocent Indonesians were slaughtered in 1965 in a supposedly anti-communist cleansing that the U.S. fully backed and supported. Millions more were scarred for life.)
It would come as no surprise, therefore, that even before becoming a victim himself, Soekarno viewed America’s foreign policy as “neocolonialism” – imperial control without formal rule. In fact, he created an acronym to identify the enemy newly independent countries like his own confronted: NEKOLIM, or neocolonialism, colonialism, and imperialism.
And he believed the decolonising world was in this together. And he would be the one to steward the solidarity they needed in order to exercise their agency in this new world.
The Asian-African Conference (a.k.a. the Bandung Conference)
So, when Soekarno invited 29 newly independent nations of Asia and Africa to the Indonesian mountain town of Bandung from 18-24 April 1955, it was revolutionary.
Leaders of India, Burma, Ghana, Egypt, and more came together. They were neither Soviet stooges nor American pawns. They saw themselves as architects of a new world in which they could breathe freely and act independently.
Ever the orator, Soekarno opened the gathering with these words:
“[W]e are united, for instance, by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears… How is it possible to be disinterested about colonialism? For us, colonialism is not something far and distant. We have known it in all its ruthlessness… Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation. It is a skillful and determined enemy, and it appears in many guises. It does not give up its loot easily. Wherever, whenever, and however it appears, colonialism is an evil thing, and one which must be eradicated from the earth.”
Bandung created space for sovereignty, development, and solidarity on the terms established by those who had lived for generations under the yoke of abusive, extractive colonialism. Independence brought nominal freedom, but the road ahead would be long.
The conference was also more than just rejecting prevailing ideology. It was an act of refusing Western narratives: we will not be defined by your Cold War. Bandung was a declaration that the world’s newly freed peoples could speak for themselves, act for themselves, and define their own future.
To use modern day vernacular: not only did they bring their own damn chairs to the table, they brought their own table, too!
Six years later, out of Bandung would grow the Non-Aligned Movement, officially established in Belgrade, Serbia (then Yugoslavia). In the middle of the Cold War.
Today’s New Cold War
Fast forward to today, we see that the language of that Cold War has resurfaced following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Commentators describe a new bipolar world: the U.S. and its allies on one side, Russia and China on the other. As the world fractures further still, this new Cold War is unfolding with greater clarity — as a digital one.
The Digital Cold War’s battlegrounds are chips, compute, attention and AI.
Its superpowers are mostly America and China — to a lesser degree, the European Union (EU).
Each offers its own ideology:
The United States frames AI as essential for national security and global AI domination. (see NOTE^)
China casts AI as industrial modernization, the backbone of a “shared future.”
The EU presents itself as the conscience: people-centered, planet-centered, rights-first.
(NOTE^) Don’t believe me? America’s AI Action Plan, published in July this year, is pretty explicit: “The United States is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence (AI). Whoever has the largest ecosystem will set global AI standards and reap broad economic and military benefits. Just like we won the space race, it is imperative that the United States and its allies win this race.”
For much of the Global Majority, binary choices dominated by digital colonialists only leave dependency in its wake. Adopt the American stack and risk obedience to Silicon Valley’s extractive model. Choose the Chinese ecosystem and risk authoritarian overreach. Even the third choice, Europe’s rights-based framework, is rooted in Northern interests and their own geopolitics and histories.
Once again, the South is pressured to choose sides — only this time, the contest is fought with algorithms rather than tanks. The choice isn’t over capitalist vs communist ideologies, but rather over an infrastructure, tech, and governance stack deeply steeped in opposing political ideologies – this time neoliberal-libertarian versus authoritarian.
The New Cold War’s Technocolonialism
The New Cold War is geopolitics and ideologies at play in the global arena — and beneath that lies empire building by another name.
Once, America’s expanding hidden empire was fueled by guano — bird droppings rich in nitrogen that fertilized its industrial agriculture. Today, its empire is built on data, chips, and extraction. America’s tech sector enjoys the full support of the U.S. government, much as United Fruit and America’s oil and extractive industries did during the old Cold War. This is the context in which to understand the American president’s recent threats against countries that attempt to stifle the operations of American tech giants:
China, for its part, advances empire through the Belt and Road Initiative. What began as ports, roads, and railways has expanded into the Digital Silk Road: undersea cables, 5G networks, surveillance systems, and cloud data centers exported across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. What looks like development assistance often leaves behind debt, technological lock-in, and compromised digital sovereignty.
Trump’s America First policies are aggressive, loud and uncompromising. China employs soft terms like “building a shared future” and “promoting AI technologies to benefit humanity.”
But don’t be fooled; both are technocolonial.
“Colonial infrastructure was not built to strengthen communities, it was meant to deplete them.” - John Green, in “Everything is Tuberculosis”
These empires and their tech giants compete to control information pipelines — the physical infrastructure as well as the intangible data and insights scraped and extracted from the new digital colonies. Some examples:
Tech giants exploit cheap Southern labor for data annotation, the invisible sweatshops of AI.
Big Tech’s data centers consume vast energy and water resources, leaving little in terms of economic value to local communities, all while sending value northward.
Imported “smart city” technologies in African capitals replicate spatial injustice, exporting Western models that do not fit local realities.
This is digital colonisation. Technocolonialism. It has a name. Let’s use it.
Pakistani researcher M. Shahzaib Hassan reminds us, “both the US and China are forging digital alliances: the US promotes “Clean Network” programs restricting Huawei, while China negotiates bilateral internet pacts under its Belt and Road Initiative. In each case, smaller states must choose camps or carve out neutral space, often with little real autonomy.”
In each case, states are pressured to pick a camp. Space for different paths is shrinking fast. And the Global Majority may be left with little wiggle room to define their own way forward with technology that, first and foremost, serves their citizens.
BUT — perhaps the past really is prologue.
Learning from the Spirit of Bandung
Soekarno’s generation faced a similar dilemma. Capitalism or communism. Washington or Moscow. Both “choices” were inadequate. Bandung declared a third way.
Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and we see that colonialism never really died. It just re-invented itself. The North composted its colonialism, created international financial and development institutions to “guide” countries on the proper pathway to development. And coerced choices.
The Americans called this Modernization Theory, the ethnocentrically biased “theory” that all societies transitioned in a similar, linear fashion from “traditional” to “modern” states. And of course “modern” was a genuine reflection of American rationalism, “free” market capitalism, and democracy. And if a little bit of authoritarian muscle supported by a well-armed, CIA-backed military machine was needed to speed things up and get things on that linear track, so be it.
Which, in a sense, brings us full circle. We stand at a parallel moment in history.
Technocolonialism rests on the composted remains of centuries of colonisation. Financial institutions, development banks, modernization theories, “the Washington Consensus” — all crafted to keep the South “on track” toward someone else’s version of progress — now increasingly have their equivalents in digital infrastructures, technological “innovation” and dominance of the governance of AI and frontier technologies. Modernization Theory is replaced by effective accelerationism.
And yet, another way is not only possible; it is already emerging. Across the Global South, governments and communities are forging South-South cooperation to discuss shared experiences and expectations for a just AI-enabled future. Within ASEAN, within the African Union. With national South-South cooperation agencies. These may not yet rival Silicon Valley or Washington or Beijing, but they are strong foundations — proof that sovereignty can be built collectively.
When Soekarno convened leaders in the Bandung of 1955, there were no South-South cooperation units. Civil society was barely a concept and straight men dominated the discourse. Indeed, there was no internet, communications were tough, and imperial eyes were everywhere.
Today, Indonesians can collaborate in real-time with Brazilians, South Africans with Thais, and Ghanaians with Malaysians – with no regard for the distances that separate them. Women lead civil society groups that provide much-needed lived experience, analysis, and advocacy. Intersectional communities have voice.
And without America or China able to mediate their interactions.
Bandung 2.ai — A Non-Aligned AI Movement
Imagine a Non-Aligned AI movement — Bandung 2.ai — fit for purpose for the 21st Century’s struggle against technocolonialism in the new Digital Cold War. This time not just governments, but a big tent movement.
Governments. Researchers. Civil society. Indigenous knowledge keepers. Indigenous knowledge creators. Activists.
Together, they declare independence from both America’s libertarian-fueled surveillance capitalism and Chinese techno-authoritarianism.
Imagine a non-aligned movement that rejects the hyper-scaling and narrowly focussed profit maximisation motives dominating our AI discourse today.
Imagine instead a movement inspired by pro-social AI that seeks innovation that supports and nurtures both humanity and planet. As the leading thinker of pro-social AI (and my friend), Cornelia Walther, explained it recently to mark Malaysia’s independence day from colonialism:
“Traditional AI development optimizes for singular objectives: maximize engagement, minimize cost, increase speed, reduce error. Prosocial AI systems, by contrast, are designed to balance multiple objectives simultaneously. They must be economically viable (pro-profit), socially beneficial (pro-people), ecologically regenerative (pro-planet) and developmentally enhancing (pro-potential). This constraint forces a different kind of innovation — one that mirrors the complex trade-offs that characterize all biological systems.”
Imagine this movement committing to knowledge ecosystems driven by research and ethics rooted in Ubuntu, gotong-royong, and other indigenous traditions. And an overarching centering of human rights, dignity and agency.
They refuse extractive AI.
They refuse surveillance.
They build technologies that bend toward justice and equity.
They refuse to choose between two extremes. Instead, they choose to fuse a collective, inclusive future for frontier technology.
A non-aligned AI movement would mean freedom to experiment, to set priorities, to craft technologies that nourish rather than exploit. To guide AI’s development with leadership from the periphery. To make the centre take notice and bend toward the influence of the historically marginalised.
Time for a Reunion — to Bandung 2.ai
Seventy years ago, Soekarno welcomed what he called the “coloured peoples” of the world to Bandung. They came together in solidarity to express their sovereignty and dignity.