In today’s global conversation about frontier technologies, which includes artificial intelligence, one thing has become just too hard to ignore: the majority of globally recognised “influential” voices, events, institutions, and policymaking leaders continue to be shaped by and of the Global North.
To be recognised is to be legitimised — and legitimisation is power.
It ensures that their work, their ideas, their anxieties, their histories, and their political and economic frameworks define the global narrative.
Look closer, and it narrows even further: the conversation is dominated by the United States, its elite universities, its think tanks, and its policy networks. Meanwhile, Brussels and Beijing try to stake their ground.
Honestly, this is the white elephant in the room. But few are seriously willing to call it out.
From AI ethics summits to high-level policy convenings, the pattern repeats: agenda-setting flows from the center. The Global South — including Southeast Asia in particular, where I’ve made my home — becomes the reluctant periphery: the “adopters,” the “reactors,” the case studies. Rarely are we recognised as intellectual leaders in shaping policy or defining the technological future.
This isn’t just an oversight. I believe it is a structural problem, supported in large part by the composts of colonialism.
So allow me to offer a perspective from the so-called margins — from Southeast Asia looking outward.
Barriers to a Southeast Asian Tech Thought Ecosystem
For some time now, I’ve been preoccupied with a question: where do we find the knowledge we need to guide us through this global voyage of technological innovation?
I’ve lived through the tech revolution myself — from the screeches of the dial-up handshake to the internet to my first SMS message, from wireless ISPs to iPhones, from the early days of social media to the rise of AI. And I’ve watched it all unfold not from Palo Alto or Cambridge, but from the periphery — here in Southeast Asia.
And yet… and yet… every figure hailed as a leader, innovator, or thinker in this revolution seems to arrive here only through translation. Their books, their TED talks, their frameworks — all imported and mediated by the Center.
Why does this leadership, by default, have to be American? Why Silicon Valley? And why is the burden always on the rest of the world to translate their ideas into our languages?
So I started asking myself what’s missing here in Asia — more specifically in Southeast Asia, my home. Why haven’t we built a knowledge ecosystem on technology, AI, and frontier innovation that has the same visibility and influence as the North? With the same ability to influence global narratives and policymaking.
I don’t have all the answers. But I do see some patterns. And perhaps this is a place to start — an invitation for others to add, challenge, and deepen.
So….
Linguistic Imperialism
Since the end of World War II when America's hidden empire became increasingly visible and the world’s new shining city on the hill began to shape the world's economics and politics in its image, American English has become the de facto language of global knowledge production. While it creates shared access, it also imposes asymmetrical burdens.
In Southeast Asia, with its hundreds of languages and dialects, expressing complex technical ideas in English often comes at the cost of an expert’s nuance and clarity. They must work twice as hard just to be heard and understood by an audience (in the North) who doesn't translate well.
Meanwhile, colonial architectures that remain pervasive throughout knowledge infrastructures provide little incentive in the Global North to translate work coming from these linguistic margins.
The default expectation is that the South must translate itself into English.
But what if the North took on the labor of translation – not for niche research projects, but for mainstream, policy-relevant work? What if the Global North shouldered the burden?
Fragmented Financial and Institutional Infrastructure
Unlike the United States or the United Kingdom, there is little philanthropic culture in Southeast Asia for endowing research institutions or policy think tanks. Few incentives for endowing academic institutions. Government funding is often limited, politically constrained, or tied to donor agendas. ASEAN, unlike the EU, lacks a coordinated research policy or funding architecture. As a result, national and regional thought leadership remains scattered and under-resourced.
Worse, competition over limited foreign donor funding often pits local institutions against each other, eroding incentives for genuine collaboration.
Academic and Political Constraints
In many Southeast Asian countries, academic freedom is curtailed. Sensitive topics — like monarchy in Thailand, the military in Myanmar, or corruption in Cambodia — are often off-limits. These restrictions stifle open discourse, which is essential for any thriving knowledge ecosystem.
Digital Colonialism
The colonial logic persists in new forms.
Today, Northern tech companies dictate not just the tools but also the narratives around tech adoption, safety, regulation and evening defining what “innovation” should mean. They invest heavily in research that fuel their public policy campaigns. While the research is positioned as “objective” and “independent”, it's not difficult to see the same academics paraded out on panels and workshops who have produced the research paid for by corporate money.
In other words, when Western corporates provide sponsorship for research it's either (a) specifically tailored to what they want through funding academic thoughts that align with their preconceived policy positions, or (b) insufficient funding levels for the really robust and deep research necessary to address the complexities we face (you’ve heard of them, micro-grants to stimulate inquiry).
They determine what topics are important and what outputs matter. They celebrate what they like; they bury what they don’t.
The Global South may be allowed to contribute data, but rarely to define the discourse as knowledge leaders.
This contributes nothing to building the infrastructure for an ecosystem of knowledge creation and knowledge leadership.
The Margins Speak, But the Center Doesn’t Listen
A useful example of this epistemic asymmetry is KemenkeuGPT.
You never heard of it, right?
Researchers investigated the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to overcome the complexity and dynamic nature of governmental financial data and regulations in order to provide better public service. They used datasets from the Indonesian Ministry of Finance. This study undertook “an iterative process to develop KemenkeuGPT using the LangChain with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), prompt engineering and fine-tuning.”
This, in the world’s fourth most populous country. Not a banana republic by any means.
The results were sobering: high error rates, hallucinations in legal/regulatory interpretation, and clear limitations in domain-specific reasoning. In short, it was a warning. The study concluded that off-the-shelf LLMs were not ready for unsupervised use in complex governance tasks.
Let me repeat that: off-the-shelf LLMs were not ready for unsupervised use in complex governance tasks.
And yet, barely a year later, the United States government accepted OpenAI and Anthropic models across the entire federal workforce of millions of bureaucrats, for one dollar. Shockingly, with minimal guardrails and no reference to the concerns raised by this Southern precedent which demonstrated the risk of off-the-shelf models.
Here was a case where the "margins" produced rigorous, early evidence that could have informed "center" decisions. But the knowledge hierarchy held firm: the South could observe and learn, but not instruct.
The Global South may be allowed to contribute data, but rarely to define the discourse as knowledge leaders. (I mean, just look at TIME100 AI Influencers list.)
This is how historical colonialism breeds digital colonialism, in our time, strengthening:
The assumption that knowledge from the “margins” is not generalisable;
The unidirectional flow of legitimacy (in other words, validation must come from Northern Centers, not Southern peripheries); and
The exclusion of “Southern experience” from setting norms or red flags in global discourse.
The assumption that the center must always lead, and the periphery must always follow, ensures that even when the margins speak with clarity and foresight, they are often ignored.
Towards a Southeast Asian Knowledge Ecosystem
So what would it take to build a genuinely sovereign, influential tech thought ecosystem in our part of the world, here in Southeast Asia?
I propose at least these five starting points.
1/ Nurture Regional Philanthropy for Knowledge
We need homegrown, long-term investments in universities, think tanks, and research consortia. This means cultivating regional philanthropic networks to support indigenous knowledge creation.
Southern research should no longer be used exclusively to legitimate Northern research-as-global. Southern-driven thinkers, leaders and researchers must have the support and power to build their own research agenda that aligns with and informs the economic, social, cultural, political and regulatory needs that they determine must be better understood.
Their work needs to be recognised as robust and worthy to influence global discourse and governance deliberations.
The monopoly of setting the research agenda in Washington, Silicon Valley, London, Brussels or Paris must end.
2/ Public Sector and Political Commitment
When thinking about the challenges to “knowledge translation” in the Global South (in other words, uptake by policymakers and so forth), Indonesian academic Fajri Siregar recently identified these key challenges in our region:
weaker and less established institutions (such as scientific communities, scientific advisory systems, the civil service, the media, political parties, civil society, etc.)
limited, if not unavailable, (public) domestic funding for research and communication
political contexts dominated by patronage, informality and vested interests
limited government capacity to use evidence.
Governments must treat research and knowledge infrastructure as essential to sovereignty in the digital age.
Funding must be stable, strategic, and free from donor agendas.
3/ Tax Tech to Fund Southern Thought
Here’s to being radical and revolutionary:
They’ve extracted enough from us already. Multinational tech companies operating in the region should contribute financially to independent public research as a condition of market access. A knowledge tax on tech profits could directly fund regional AI ethics bodies, regulatory frameworks, and R&D – helping to address Fajri Siregar’s identified weaknesses, with Global South leadership stewarding it all.
Thailand has a sin tax on tobacco and alcohol that funds Thai Health, a major thought leader. Can’t we do the same with (foreign) Tech?!
Just imagine a government in Thailand or Vietnam taxing the billions of dollars extracted annually from their countries by digital colonisers from Silicon Valley. Just 1% of $1 billion is 10 million dollars. And they are extracting much more than that from our countries.
Think about that.
4/ Flip the Switch on Translation
It’s time the North began translating our work.
Institutions in the North should invest in multilingual access to Southern research. This is not charity. It is necessary for the health of global discourse. Research produced in Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Mandarin, Khmer or the myriad other languages from the region should, as an SOP, be sought after and translated for broader use.
This may slowly change the colonial mindset of the periphery following Northern leads. And it will contribute to strengthening Southern knowledge as generalisable globally.
5/ ASEAN Integration for Knowledge Sovereignty
ASEAN must move beyond trade coordination and treat knowledge sovereignty as a regional imperative.