Critics warn that these platforms could be exploited for surveillance, IP harvesting, and geopolitical intelligence – often without the knowledge or consent of local populations. No one really knows what is happening. Besides, these services are not entirely free either. Pakistani users of Meta’s tech philanthropy were allegedly charged $1.9 million per month.
Rather than reward innovation, Big Tech consolidated. Rival platforms that didn’t serve the globalist surveillance machine were quietly buried. Competition was replaced with shareholder-sanctioned «coordination», led by the likes of BlackRock and its predecessors. From that point on, Indian IT firms would be reduced from potential innovators to mere subcontractors.
And who better to manage this global digital plantation than a new class of compliant Indian C-Suite executives? These are not the disruptors. They are the taskmasters of digital «kanganis», running the same extractive labor models once perfected by the East India Company.
The dream of an «Asian Century» powered by Indian software and Chinese hardware has curdled into a reality of Chinese software, Chinese hardware, and Chinese AI. Indian tech talent has been reduced to glorified middleware, at best.
For all the online chest-thumping about Indian-origin CEOs in the US, where is India’s own Jensen Huang? Where is the Indian-founded equivalent of NVIDIA, OpenAI, or even Palantir? There isn’t one. India produces engineers by the millions but owns almost none of the gilt-edged platforms. It trains the talent, but not the trillion-dollar tech. The colony codes and the empire profits. A similar theme is being played out in the US Ivy League system.
The article concludes that the Global South needs a coordinated pushback against Silicon Valley’s digital hegemony. This would involve not just resisting predatory data practices but investment in alternative infrastructures such as sovereign cloud storage, ethical AI standards, community-owned data cooperatives, and open-source platforms. This is how a new digital non-alignment paradigm can be achieved.