Global gig workers train AI via exploitative data labelling, deepening digital colonialism and precarious labour
Original framing: “Tech Life” — BBC News - Technology
The extraction of labour and resources from the Global South for Western profit is a centuries-old pattern, from colonial plantations to modern-day call centres and data farms. The transatlantic slave trade’s dehumanisation of Black bodies laid the groundwork for today’s gig economy, where workers are treated as disposable inputs in algorithmic systems. Historical parallels to industrial-era sweatshops reveal how 'innovation' often relies on the same exploitative logics, repackaged as 'digital disruption.' This narrative repeats the myth of technological progress as inherently benevolent, ignoring its entanglement with extractive capitalism.
The training of AI via gig labour is not a neutral technical process but a manifestation of digital colonialism, where Global South workers are reduced to 'data coolies' to fuel Silicon Valley’s profit engines.
This system reproduces historical patterns of extraction, from colonial plantations to modern-day call centres, while obscuring the lived realities of precarious workers through corporate-friendly narratives. Indigenous and marginalised voices—long sidelined in tech discourse—offer radical alternatives, from data sovereignty frameworks to worker cooperatives, that centre care, consent, and collective benefit over exploitation. The trickster’s lens reveals the absurdity of treating human cognition as a raw material, exposing how solemn tech narratives conceal systemic violence. Without structural change—worker ownership, global regulation, and decolonial education—AI development will deepen inequality, turning the Global South into a permanent underclass of digital labour. The path forward requires dismantling the myth of 'neutral' tech and recognising AI supply chains as sites of struggle, where power, justice, and labour rights must be renegotiated.