How Technology Preserves the Legacy of Colonialism Across Africa

Silicon Valley is globally acclaimed for its pivotal role in shaping the fourth industrial revolution. However, its gleaming innovations obscure the troubling reality that the Valley is a thriving habitat for the racist, sexist, white nationalist and hyper-capitalist culture that has long shaped human history. Thanks to the influence of globalization, technologies midwifed in Silicon Valley become global exports that diffuse their ideological baggage globally.

As writer and critic, Amiri Baraka posited decades ago in his seminal work, Technology and Ethos, machines, ‘are an extension of their inventor-creators.’ They are infused with and project their inventors' values, ethics, mores and worldviews. Technology, in other words, is never neutral. Even the choice of what problems to solve or which features to build is value-laden. As the ideological alignment of the creator becomes the default that everyone else uses.

For instance, the absence of non-white human characters and lack of skin-colour diversity in early emoji sets subtly communicated a default human that erased non-white identities and privileged whiteness. Since most tech-company employees and executives are white and non-disabled, it’s no surprise that technology products and services default to a white, able-bodied perspective.

THE FALLACY OF TECH NEUTRALITY

The default whiteness of internet technologies became painfully apparent at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. During this period, many darker-skinned students who transitioned to remote learning struggled to write exams because online-proctoring face detection tools, trained primarily on white faces, either failed to recognize their faces or erratically flagged them as cheaters when these tools did not recognize them. The racist undertones of these systems were impossible to ignore when a Google engineer had to tender a public apology after the Google Photos app mislabeled two black people as gorillas. Most recently, in 2024, Google was enmeshed in yet another bias scandal when its generative AI tool, Gemini, churned out stereotypical and ahistorical pictorial depictions of people of colour. The system was temporarily suspended because it was over-sexualizing its depictions of black women and generating ahistorical images like Asian Vikings, black female popes and black Nazi soldiers.