AI is ushering in a new era of colonialism

TEXT START: As AI changes the way the world gathers information, some critics say that it is perpetuating stereotypes and erasing cultural nuances for Indigenous groups and people of color.

The Dissection

This article identifies a genuine mechanism—data extraction, cultural homogenization, epistemic extraction—but frames it through a 20th-century lens that fundamentally mischaracterizes what's occurring. Calling this "new colonialism" is like diagnosing a nuclear strike as "aggressive property annexation." The category error is not incidental; it is disabling.

The Core Fallacy

The framing assumes the damage is cultural representation—that the harm is Indigenous voices being erased from training data, Western values dominating outputs, cultural nuances flattened for algorithmic efficiency.

This is real. But it is a side effect of a terminal process, not the process itself.

The Discontinuity Thesis reveals the actual structure: AI is not extracting cultural data to perpetuate cultural dominance. It is automating the cognitive labor that makes human cultural participation economically relevant. The colonial metaphor works for the data layer but collapses entirely when you ask: toward what end?

Colonialism extracted resources to fuel a system that still required human labor—human bodies, human hands, human management. The empire needed the colonized alive and working.

AI extraction serves a system that increasingly does not need human participation at all.

Hidden Assumptions

1. Cultural representation is the operative axis of harm. The article assumes that if AI were trained on diverse, culturally-nuanced data, the damage would be mitigated. Wrong. The economic displacement operates regardless of what data trains the model.

2. AI perpetuates bias as a bug. The piece implies the problem is that models "mimic" Western values—that better data would produce better outcomes. DT says the replacement of human cognitive labor is the feature, not the bug. The cultural flattening isn't a failure of engineering; it's an artifact of a system optimizing for performance across human-generated content as a transitional substrate, not as a permanent input.

3. The affected groups have meaningful recourse through cultural advocacy. Even if every Indigenous language, knowledge system, and cultural nuance were perfectly represented in training data, the structural displacement—mass unemployment, sovereign/servitor bifurcation, productive participation collapse—remains fully intact. You cannot UBI your way out of cultural erasure when the consumption circuit that sustains cultural reproduction is severed.

Social Function

Prestige-class cultural grievance signaling. It performs intellectual legitimacy in progressive-adjacent tech media while addressing neither the structural mechanism nor the actual survival question for the populations being discussed. It is the discourse version of renaming a hospice wing.

The Verdict

The article correctly identifies a real extraction mechanism and assigns it a name—colonialism—that has cultural resonance. But it is diagnosing a symptom of terminal structural displacement as a cultural representation problem that has cultural solutions. This is the precise intellectual configuration that will leave the people being discussed most vulnerable: deeply aware of the harm, completely unprepared for the collapse.

The colonial apparatus is not the data extraction. The colonial apparatus is the ownership structure of the AI capital itself. Whoever controls the inference layer extracts value from every culture's contribution without compensation, without participation, without dependency. That is not a new form of the old empire. That is something the old empire could not have imagined, because it still needed the colonized.