ICTworks

The current involvement of the private sector in the technopolitics of development, and specifically Big Tech, differs substantially from the role that it took during the 1980s.

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Back then, the privatization of public assets was part of a larger package of policies to curb local government regulation and social spending, remove government subsidies and price control, liberalize trade and devaluate local currencies.

Big Tech Actions Today

Today, the state is the primary interlocutor and client of tech companies building the material infrastructure through which data are constituted as a resource for governance and development. Within this emerging digital development paradigm, tech firms are accruing power in the form of state overreliance on their services, or ‘institutional source of business power.’

Besides redefining state technopolitics through the design, management and maintenance of data infrastructures, tech firms are also building their own legitimacy by influencing the state’s regulatory approach to data collection and usage across multiple fields of application.

Through industry associations like the GSMA, international organizations such as UNCDF, or think tanks like CGAP, tech firms and philanthro-capitalist actors are advancing narratives of digital development and advising policymakers and regulators on how to shape regulatory frameworks, officially for maximizing the inclusive potential of digital technologies but, in fact, for carving new spaces of value extraction for private companies.

Big Tech & Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence has been, since the birth of the concept in the 1950s, ‘animated by, and has in turn refuelled, the imperial and capitalist projects of its patrons’.

The popularity of AI has coincided with the increasing influence of the tech industry over AI research and ethics agenda through massive hiring of AI scientists, computing power, and large datasets. Big Tech in particular has positioned itself as the main force shaping the research trajectory and the policy and popular conversation around AI by lever- aging not only technical and financial resources, but also its geopolitical clout.

By actively advancing, the AI4SG and 4IR discourses to place AI and datafication at the center of the development agenda, tech corporations seek to create new opportunities for rent extraction.

To achieve this, they attempt to locate themselves in the space between the state, the citizens, humanitarian organizations, and the recipients of aid as hard-to-displace partners.

By black-boxing decision-making processes, the firms behind the design, management and maintenance of digital platforms aspire to control the construction of data as an object of power and knowledge. Despite their highly political and ideological agendas, AI4SG and 4IR attempt to be a form of ‘depoliticization through datafication’ in which politics is removed from scrutiny.

Government Pushback on Big Tech

Against the quickly shifting backdrop of digital development, initiatives by policymakers and civil society organizations are trying to wrestle the control of data infrastructures from foreign tech firms or make them more accountable.

For instance, in recent years, countries including Nigeria, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Senegal have put the issue of digital sovereignty on the political agenda, not only passing data localization laws that require firms and international agencies to process and store locally all or some types of data collected inside the country, but setting up publicly funded AI research centers and tightening the control over local data infrastructures, including data centers.

At the same time, calls for decolonizing AI are being actively advanced in the field by organizations such as South Africa-based Masakhane (which features Microsoft and Mozilla, financially supported by Alphabet/Google).

A lightly edited synopsis of AI for social good and the corporate capture of global development by Gianluca Iazzolino and Nicole Stremlau