Sudhir Tiku is a Technical Philosopher and an Automation expert based in Singapore. He has extensive work experience in the Automation space across the globe, and is a regular at TEDx circles in the Asia-Pacific region on topics of AI Ethics and its impact on humanity. He has an Engineering degree in Electronics and a Master’s in subjects such as Finance and Ethics.
Sudhir Tiku
The term “Global South” represents a fundamental reorientation of global discourse, moving away from outdated, hierarchical classifications like “First World,” “Second World,” and “Third World.” It’s not a geographical designation but a socio-political and economic concept that groups together countries that share a common history and a position of relative disadvantage in the global system. This includes nations in Africa, Latin America, and much of Asia, which were historically subjected to colonization, economic exploitation and political subjugation by a small group of Western powers.
The Global South is no longer a passive recipient of global power dynamics; it is an increasingly influential force actively shaping the 21st century. Its growing importance is multifaceted, driven by both demographic and economic shifts. Home to a majority of the world’s population, its young and growing workforce is the engine of future global economic growth.
The Global South’s importance is also evident in its role as a key player in solving some of the world’s most pressing problems. Its nations are at the forefront of the climate crisis, despite having contributed the least to global emissions. The unique knowledge systems and biodiversity of the Global South are also essential for finding solutions to a wide range of global challenges, from food security to sustainable development.
International trade agreements, financial institutions and geopolitical power structures often favour the interests of developed nations. This creates a systemic disadvantage that makes it difficult for Global South nations to industrialize and develop on their own terms. The contemporary phenomenon of “data colonialism,” where data from the Global South is extracted and exploited by tech corporations in the Global North, represents a new form of neo-imperialism that perpetuates these power imbalances.
Data Colonialism: Hard Numbers
Data colonialism is not a metaphor of protest; it is a system that can be measured and verified. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Digital Economy Report, hints that over 90% of global data centre capacity is located in developed economies.* Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for less than 2% of global data centre capacity. The US and China account for more than 90% of the market value of the top digital platforms. More than 75% of cloud infrastructure is controlled by a handful of Western firms. It is also ironic that while Compute infrastructure is monopolised by North, the Global internet traffic has grown 25x in the last decade, with major growth coming from the Global South. Yet most data routing, storage, and analytics layers remain offshore. The global South is a centre for generating and labelling data, while foundational model building and platform distribution are concentrated in the Western world, thereby enabling control over the flow of value. The implications are profound. The Global South generates vast streams of data through its populations, markets and digital adoption. Yet the infrastructure required to store, process and monetize that data is largely located elsewhere. This asymmetry mirrors earlier patterns of economic extraction. Just as raw materials were historically exported from the South and refined in the North, data today is extracted in its raw form—unprocessed, continuous and largely uncompensated—and transformed into high-value outputs elsewhere.
* United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Digital Economy Report 2021: Cross-border Data Flows and Development (Geneva: United Nations, 2021).
The scale of this extraction becomes clearer when we examine labour. Millions of workers across Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia are engaged in data annotation, content moderation and other forms of digital labour essential to artificial intelligence systems. These workers often earn between one and three dollars per hour. Their task is to label images, filter content, and structure datasets so that machines can learn. This labour is not peripheral; it is foundational. Artificial intelligence systems depend on vast quantities of labelled data to function effectively. Yet the workers who produce this data remain largely invisible. They do not share in the ownership of the systems they help create. They are not recognized as contributors to the intelligence they enable.
Data extraction is further intensified by the nature of consent in the digital economy. Much of the data used to train artificial intelligence systems is scraped from publicly available sources or collected through complex user agreements that few fully understand. This creates a situation in which entire populations in the Global South contribute data without clear knowledge of how it is used or who benefits from it. Communities become sources of raw material, not stakeholders in value creation.
Algorithms today are not passive tools; they are active agents in structuring the world. They determine what information individuals encounter, how risks are assessed and how opportunities are distributed. In doing so, they influence behaviour, perception and decision-making at scale. In law enforcement systems, predictive models use historical data to anticipate future events. Yet when historical data reflects bias or unequal enforcement, the algorithm reproduces these patterns. Communities of Colour or Underprivileged Communities that have been over-policed in the past are more likely to be flagged in the future. The past becomes encoded into the system, shaping outcomes in a self-reinforcing cycle.
In financial systems, algorithmic assessments determine access to credit, insurance and employment. Individuals whose lives do not fit neatly into structured datasets, often those in informal or rural economies, are frequently excluded. The algorithm becomes a gatekeeper, defining who is recognized as economically viable and who remains invisible.
Control extends beyond infrastructure into governance. International standards for artificial intelligence are often developed within institutions and regulatory frameworks based in the Global North. While these frameworks aim to address important concerns such as safety, transparency, and accountability, they are often designed without fully considering the diverse contexts in which they will be applied. As a result, countries in the Global South often adopt standards that do not fully align with their economic structures, cultural norms, or development priorities. Participation in global governance exists, but influence remains uneven.
The combined effect of these dynamics is a system in which the Global North defines the architecture of the digital world. It controls the infrastructure, sets the standards, directs the flow of capital, and shapes the trajectory of innovation. The Global South, meanwhile, is integrated into this system as a contributor of data and labour but with limited control over its outcomes.
The Global South stands at a critical moment within this unfolding transformation. It can continue to participate in systems designed elsewhere, or it can assert a more active role in shaping them. The difference between these paths is not merely economic or technological. It is existential, and a new Manifesto is needed.
THE GLOBAL SOUTH MANIFESTO
Every manifesto begins with a memory. The Global South remembers more than most. It remembers the spice routes, when nutmeg was worth more than gold and cloves could draw the sails of empires across oceans. It remembers the bodies carried in chains, the languages erased in schools designed to produce clerks, the soil tilled for export crops while hunger stalked the villages. It remembers that progress in the North was often paved with the extraction of resources from the South.
Today, the galleons are gone. No cannons guard the harbors. And yet, the inheritance of chains persists, though now they are made not of iron but of code, data, and dependency. What was once taken in silver and spices is now taken in metadata and server time. Once, colonial maps redrew boundaries. Today, algorithms redraw realities. And once again, the South finds itself the silent scaffolding of another revolution.
Consider the ghost workers of Nairobi and Manila, paid a few dollars a day to label millions of images so that AI can recognize cats, traffic lights, or faces. Consider the content moderators in Lagos or Caracas, whose job is to sift through humanity’s darkest digital detritus: hate speech, violence, pornography, so that the feeds of the North appear “clean.” This is not innovation.
AI is often described as “disruptive.” For the South, it is not just disruptive; it is recursive. It repeats, with eerie fidelity, the old scripts of dependency. The resource is different: data instead of diamonds, labour clicks instead of sugar cane, but the pattern is hauntingly familiar: value flows outward, while risk and trauma remain behind.
This is the Inheritance of Chains. But unlike the chains of the past, which were enforced by the brute force of empire, today’s chains are enforced by the seductions of inevitability. “This is progress,” we are told. “This is the future.” As though the future were a product to be imported, not a canvas to be painted. As though the South were destined only to consume, never to create.
But the South is not merely a victim of this inheritance. It is also its crucible of contradiction. For while it bears the burdens of asymmetry, it also carries the ingenuity of adaptation. The South invented mobile money before Silicon Valley thought of fintech. The South turned patchy grids into laboratories for renewable energy. The South built informal networks of care and cooperation when state systems collapsed. Out of scarcity grew resilience. Out of exclusion grew creativity.
That is why the South cannot afford to remain silent in the age of AI. To inherit chains is one thing. To pass them on is another. The South Manifesto begins with a refusal: a refusal to let the next century be written in the same ink as the last.
The North tells the story of AI as if it is destiny: more data, more compute, more capital, more models. Bigger is better. Faster is inevitable. The South must challenge this myth. The South must say: AI is not destiny, it is design. And design can be redirected.
The manifesto, therefore, begins not with policy prescriptions but with a call to consciousness. Before one can plant, one must first clear the weeds. The weeds here are the myths:
● The myth that technology is neutral. It is not. It encodes values, and those values are rarely ours.
● The myth that innovation trickles down. It doesn’t. It accumulates upwards, leaving scarcity below.
● The myth that scale equals success. It does not. Sometimes the smallest, most local solution is the most transformative.
To inherit chains is not to be condemned by them. It is to learn the art of breaking them, link by link, pattern by pattern. The South has done this before. It resisted colonialism, overturned dictatorships, birthed independence movements. It can do so again. But this time the fight is not for flags or borders. It is for something less visible, more pervasive: the fight for algorithmic sovereignty.
Because the real danger is not just that the South will be exploited again. The real danger is that the South will stop imagining. That it will accept, without question, the rules written elsewhere. That it will confuse adoption with agency, consumption with authorship. Chains are not forged only from steel or silicon. They are forged in the imagination.
The Inheritance of Chains, then, is not just history but psychology. It whispers that “this is the natural order,” that Silicon Valley is the brain and the South is the muscle. It tempts policymakers to settle for pilot projects and charity cloud credits rather than demand sovereignty. It tempts entrepreneurs to imitate rather than innovate.
But memory can be weaponized. Memory can also liberate. To inherit chains is also to inherit the wisdom of those who broke them. The manifesto insists: the South will not be the testing ground of someone else’s tomorrow.
The Right to Imagine
Chains do more than bind bodies; they restrict imagination. That is their most devastating effect. For centuries, the Global South has been told not just what to produce but also what to dream. Plant this crop, build that railway, teach this curriculum, follow this model of development. Imagination, outsourced. Futures, imported.
Artificial intelligence risks becoming the latest delivery of prefabricated futures. A California start-up decides what “healthcare AI” should look like in Lagos. A government in Europe writes rules that later dictate how farmers in Andhra Pradesh may use data.
A corporation in San Francisco designs surveillance algorithms that end up in African cities. The South becomes a theatre where scripts written elsewhere are performed. The most radical act today is not coding an algorithm but claiming the right to imagine outside the defaults. Not asking: “How can we adapt to this new technology?” but instead: “How should intelligence itself be defined, and to what ends should it serve?”
Imagination as Resistance
The Right to Imagine is not indulgence; it is resistance. Because when imagination collapses, dependency follows. If the South accepts its role as mere adopter, then sovereignty ends before the first line of code is written. But if the South insists on imagination; on asking its own questions, shaping its own metaphors, then even limited resources can birth worlds unseen.
Take the Caribbean thinker Édouard Glissant, who spoke of the right to opacity, the right not to be fully legible to outside systems. In the AI age, this means refusing to be reduced to data points, to be flattened into rows and columns. To imagine opacity as dignity is a challenge to every surveillance model that claims to “know” us.
Or consider the Andean myth of the condor and the eagle. The eagle flies high, sharp, fast; the condor soars slower, broader, connected to earth and sky. Both must fly together for harmony to exist. What AI today celebrates is the eagle’s logic: efficiency, scale and precision. What the South must imagine is the condor’s counterpoint: slowness, depth and entanglement.
The Imagination Deficit of AI
AI, as currently built, suffers from an imagination deficit. It knows how to predict but not how to wonder. It can generate text but not meaning. It can optimize flows of traffic but not flows of justice. That is not a bug, but it is a reflection of the imagination that created it, which was narrow, profit-driven and impatient.
The South’s challenge is not to catch up to that imagination but to replace it with broader ones. Imagine an AI trained not only on market data but on oral epics, songs, and rituals, so it learns rhythms of continuity, not only disruption. Imagine models whose benchmarks are not quarterly profits but lives improved, forests preserved, conflicts avoided. Imagine design guided not by acceleration but by endurance.
The Right to Silence
There is also the right to refuse certain imaginations. Not everything must be digitized. Not every tradition must be extracted into a dataset. A forest may hold more wisdom standing than mapped by satellites. A story may hold more truth when told face-to-face than when tokenized into a database. Here, the Right to Imagine includes the right to keep certain knowledge sovereign, sacred and opaque.
To tell the North: Some things are not yours to code.
Work, Dignity and Creation
The imagination crisis is most visible in work. For the North, work is imagined as a commodity: tasks, outputs, productivity. For the South, work has always carried the weight of dignity for the farmers, artisans, teachers and healers. Yet AI threatens to strip this dignity, recasting workers as invisible micro-workers feeding into someone else’s model.
The manifesto responds: the South has the right to imagine work as creation rather than depletion. To imagine economies where data is not only extracted but co-owned. Where workers are not hidden annotators but acknowledged co-creators of intelligence. Where the gig economy is replaced by commons economies rooted in reciprocity.
From Consumption to Authorship
The future will not be written by those who consume, but by those who author. Consumption is dependency disguised as participation. Authorship is sovereignty disguised as creation. The right to Imagine is, therefore, the right to Author.
It asks uncomfortable questions:
● Why should machine translation erase dialects when it could expand them?
● Why should predictive policing target poor neighborhoods instead of predicting corruption in boardrooms?
● Why should AI design fast-fashion supply chains instead of designing durable, regenerative economies?
These are not technical questions. They are imaginative ones. And the South must insist on its right to ask them.
Imagination as Photosynthesis
Think of imagination as photosynthesis. Light falls everywhere; satellites beam, cloud servers hum and machine learning frameworks spill across borders. But whether this light becomes nourishment depends on the soil it touches. In Silicon Valley, the light feeds profit. In the South, it could feed survival, resilience and rebirth. The manifesto declares that we will not remain passive soil. We will cultivate imagination as a form of photosynthesis, converting the global light into local nourishment.
A Declaration of Rights
To crystallize, the Right to Imagine includes:
● The Right to Define Intelligence
● The Right to Refuse Digitization
● The Right to Author Futures
● The Right to Be Opaque
These are not utopian claims. They are survival strategies. Because without them, the South remains trapped in the shadow of extraction. With them, the South becomes a source of new metaphors, new ethics, new horizons.
The Unwritten Future
The greatest lie is that the future is already written and that AI is destiny. But the future is unwritten, and the South holds pens of many colors. The task is not to copy the West’s script, but to draft new ones, written in voices the machine has never heard. The South Manifesto therefore insists that imagination is not luxury. It is sovereignty.
The Blueprint of Sovereignty
Manifestos must not stop at poetry. They must blueprint. To name injustice is necessary; to imagine alternatives is vital; but to chart a path toward sovereignty is indispensable. Without a blueprint, imagination dissolves into aspiration. With a blueprint, it becomes a direction.
The Global South has long been told it is “catching up.” Catching up in industrialization, in education, in infrastructure and in innovation. The very phrase is a trap as it frames the North as the natural destination and the South as a perpetual laggard. Sovereignty requires rejecting the logic of “catching up” and instead defining a different trajectory altogether.
What might that trajectory look like in the age of AI?
The blueprint can be built on five pillars.
1. Sovereign Compute and Infrastructure
Every empire has its factories. In the age of AI, the factory is the data centre. Compute is capital. Without it, imagination is hostage to whoever owns the machines. Today, those machines sit overwhelmingly in the North: clusters of GPUs in California, Frankfurt, Beijing, Seoul.
The blueprint demands:
● Regional Compute Alliances: Shared supercomputers built and governed by Southern blocs: African Union clusters, ASEAN AI grids, Latin American compute commons. Pooling resources prevents dependency on foreign cloud monopolies.
● Open Hardware Revolutions: Adoption of open architectures like RISC-V to avoid lock-in from Northern chipmakers. Sovereignty requires chips we can design, adapt, and audit.
● Renewable Compute: the South holds sunlight, rivers, geothermal heat. Data centres must be powered by local renewables, so sovereignty does not become another form of ecological dependency.
This is not fantasy. The South has done it before leapfrogging from no telephones to mobile networks, from no banks to mobile money. It can leap again.
2. Data Dignity
If the South is the soil on which AI grows, then its data is the nutrient. Today, this nutrient is stolen and scraped from local voices, exported without consent and monetized elsewhere.
The blueprint declares:
● Data Commons: local communities must co-own the data they generate and share in the value it creates.
● Consent as Collective: not just individuals, but villages, tribes, cooperatives must have rights over how their data is used.
● Right to Refusal: just as a nation may refuse mining on its land, so it may refuse digital extraction of its citizens.
Data dignity is not a side note. It is the line between sovereignty and recolonization.
3. Labor Recognition
Invisible labor is not inevitable. The hidden armies of annotators, moderators, and taskers must no longer remain ghosts.
The blueprint calls for:
● Fair Wage Standards for Digital Labor: A global floor, not charity handouts.
● Recognition in Ownership: Ghost workers are not just service providers; they are co-trainers of intelligence. They must be listed as co-authors in the story of AI.
● Cooperative Platforms: Digital labor platforms owned by workers themselves, turning ghost work into dignified work.
Without recognition, the South remains the factory floor of intelligence and with recognition, it becomes a co-architect.
4. Governance and Non-Aligned Technology
The Cold War had the Non-Aligned Movement. The algorithmic century needs a Non-Aligned Tech Movement.
The blueprint demands:
● South–South Treaties on AI: Shared regulation to prevent undercutting and exploitation.
● A Seat at the Table: Southern governments must not be token participants in global AI negotiations; they must co-write the rules.
● Neutrality as Power: Avoid dependency on either American or Chinese AI blocs. Non-alignment today means diversified partnerships and sovereign standards.
5. Cultural Sovereignty
The most subtle form of colonization is cultural. Languages erased, stories flattened, art commodified into datasets. Sovereignty requires cultural firewalls.
The blueprint proclaims:
● Cultural Data Trusts: Communities as guardians of heritage, deciding how and if their cultural artefacts enter digital systems.
● Narrative Sovereignty: AI must not only speak Southern languages but also think through Southern metaphors.
● The Right to Opacity: Not all knowledge must be digitized. Protecting opacity is protecting dignity.
A Manifesto of Rights
From these pillars, we declare the Five Rights of the South in the Age of AI:
● The Right to Compute: Access to infrastructure that is not rented but owned.
● The Right to Data Dignity: Control, consent and value-sharing.
● The Right to Labor Recognition: Ghost workers brought into the light.
● The Right to Non-Aligned Technology: No dependency on empires of code.
● The Right to Cultural Sovereignty: Preservation of voice, story and opacity.
These rights are not negotiable. They are the foundation of tomorrow’s sovereignty.
Beyond Trickle-Down Technology
For decades, the South has been sold the myth of “trickle-down technology.” Buy enough devices, import enough platforms, and progress will follow. But trickle-down is nothing more than dependency repackaged as inevitability.
The blueprint insists that Technology must not trickle down, it must grow upward from the soil of the South itself. Seeds planted locally, cultivated collectively and harvested equitably. Sovereignty is not a gift to be granted by the North but it is to be claimed by the South. The South Manifesto therefore shifts the grammar: No longer passive voice (“technology arrives”), but active voice: We build, We author, We decide.
A Declaration of Tomorrow
The South Manifesto ends with declaration, not plea:
● We declare that intelligence is not the monopoly of algorithms; it is the shared inheritance of humanity.
● We declare that the South will not be the silent scaffolding of Northern empires but the author of its own architectures.
● We declare that the future is not pre-written in Silicon Valley product roadmaps; it is unwritten, and we hold the pens.
● We declare that our soil, our languages, our labour, our cultures will not be extracted as raw material alone but cultivated as sources of flourishing.
● We declare that sovereignty is not isolation but entanglement on our own terms.
Closing Image
In the end, a garden must be tended; weeded of bias, watered with dignity and harvested with justice. The future of the world is not only with a factory, but with such a Garden.