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Whilst some hail the new digital economic era as an opportunity for people in the Global South to ride the wave of innovation to prosperity, others argue that what we see is a new era of digital colonialism. There are countless committed digitalisation fans who are happy to adopt any AI, smart or data-driven technology without a second thought and believe that digitalisation is the way out of poverty for millions in the Global South. The reality seems to show us something else. Rather than finding success, the Global South once again is in a position of permanent dependency, where the dominant large tech firms, Big Tech, use their ownership of digital infrastructure, knowledge and control of the means of computation to entrench the unequal division of labour (Kwet, 2021). Women in the Global South are disproportionately affected by this digital change as they more often find themselves in low-paid, unprotected jobs.
Digital colonialism and the platform economy
A few firms such as Meta, Google and Alibaba have created a market monopoly by accumulating masses of data through their services in the social media and cloud applications that they use to optimize algorithms, which in turn enables more intensified data extraction. This feedback effect shows clear parallels to classic colonialism; those who have more, and better data can create the best applications that attracts the most users, which in turn gives them even more data to improve their artificial intelligence services. Data has become the new raw material that propels wealth and domination in the global north (Kwet, 2021). As a result, Big Tech are in control of entire economic “ecosystems” (Gurumurthy & Chami, 2020) and local start-ups are struggling to compete.
Particularly the platform economic model is a way for Big Tech to increase their market monopoly. A platform provides a framework for interactions in the marketplace, connecting its many actors – consumers, advertisers, service providers, suppliers and even objects – that compromise the platform ecosystem (Gurumurthy & Chami, 2020). The platform extracts rents from each transaction and set the key rules that govern how these different actors interact with each other (Graham, Hjorth & Lehdonvirta, 2019, p 288). By constantly harvesting data from its users, platform owners can optimise interactions between actors and thus maximise profit and secure local monopoly. The platform economy is growing; it is estimated that by 2025, over 30% of global economic activity will be mediated by platform companies (Gurumurthy & Chami, 2020). In every sector, from agriculture to retail commerce and care work, the platform will become the main infrastructure for exchanges.
Eroding worker’s rights
What is problematic is how platforms attempt to minimise any form outside regulation particularly in terms of worker’s rights, and national labour law rarely apply to these platforms (Graham, Hjorth & Lehdonvirta, 2019, p 217). The on-demand and micro-work on which platforms are built often leads to perpetual competition among workers, making it difficult to organise for their rights. Moreover, when platforms move into a new market, the local business models based on detailed knowledge of their markets and consumers are displaced by a data-driven intermediation of the marketplace and its transactions (Gurumurthy & Chami, 2020). For example, the Big Tech firm Alibaba’s ET Agricultural Brain aims to create real time monitoring and remote controlling of farm-based activities, as well as controlling the farm-to-fork cross-border supply chain, not only enfeebles traditional livelihoods but could also edge out local agricultural economies in Asia (Gurumurthy & Chami, 2020). Once again, people in the Global South find themselves on the lower end of the value chain, doing low-paid precarious work with little opportunity to unionise.
Gender gap in the new digital era
In this current platformisation of the economy, the role of women both in society and in the workforce are rarely taken into consideration. The digital world is heavily male-dominated, and technologies are often designed to men’s interests and needs. There is a clear gender gap in the power to contribute, create and control content and services, whether it be the platform itself or the services offered (O’Donnell, A & Sweetman, 2018, pp. 218, 221). Even in the world of ICT4D, women are portrayed as either consumers of ICT and the solution lies in giving more women access to technology, or as potential entrepreneurs who just need to be equipped with the right technology. As we have seen, this approach completely ignores the broader structural and cultural factors influencing women’s success in the new digital economy (McCarrick & Kleine, 2019, p 110). Rather than just focusing on aspects such as access, affordability and awareness, feminists need to address the old age questions of power and inequality, this time in terms of digitalism and datafication.
Women are especially affected by this restructuring of global and local value chains as platform companies is a direct competition to women’s traditional livelihoods in agriculture and micro-retail. Whether it be online food delivery platforms which undercut women’s home-based catering work, to AI-driven, platformised supply-chains disrupting women-led agricultural enterprises, potentially having a negative impact on food security in households (Gurumurthy & Chami, 2021, p 4). Another factor is that women often find themselves employed in sectors that are increasingly taken over by platforms, whether it be care work or the service sector. The work platform “Book my Bai” (Book my Domestic Help) is perhaps the most known platform for domestic workers in India. A couple of years ago, the platform ran an ad campaign “Diamonds are useless! Gift your wife a maid”. The ad reflected the deep-seated patriarchal norms surrounding women’s work, particularly care work. It also reinforced the idea that labour done at home is not real work the women employed are not considered real workers with rights. It is unlikely that a platform endorsing this idea would incorporate any tools or rights for its workers to empower themselves. Indeed, the platform rather did the opposite, offering to send text messages to the father and / or husband of the employed domestic workers so that they could keep track of their whereabouts. Book my Bai also offers prospective employers to enter preferences on religion preference actively promoting discrimination against religious and ethnic minorities (Hiriyur, S, 2018).
The way forward
As we have witnessed, Big Tech and other digital companies have taken advantage of the current lack of a global data governance regime. These firms are pushing the dogma of “free cross-border flows” to a whole new level, taking advantage of the legal vacuum in many countries in the Global South to harvest data for their advantage. In this new age of digital colonialism, developing countries are prevented from evolving their own digital industry and adhering policies (Gurumurthy & Chami, 2021, p 5). What we need is a global data constitutionalism that can form a new social contract in the digital age, governing data as an economic resource which is grounded in the protection and promotion of human rights, not at least women’s rights ((Gurumurthy & Chami, 20201, p 6).
A framework for cooperation
On all levels, from global to local we need innovative and legally binding institutions to share data and intelligence in a protected and regulated manner. These data institutions should incorporate data commons, data trusts and fair data markets, working within a public interest framework, where data collected should be used to benefit people rather than exploit them (Just Net Coalition, 2019, pp. 9, 16). A global governance framework could promote and strengthen national legislation, which currently has very large loopholes which Big Tech takes advantage of. Without sovereign control of data resources, countries in the Global South particularly will find it almost impossible to safeguard the privacy and claims of its population from for example corporate data theft (Gurumurthy & Chami, 2021, p 5).
With the platform economy, competition becomes skewed as these companies strive for absolute domination of the market, squeezing out local enterprises, many which are run by women. Therefore, a framework is needed to ensure that the data collected is available for local digital businesses to take advantage of, on fair and regulated terms (Just Net Coalition, 2019 p 16). States have to ensure that dominant digital companies do not gain unbridled access for their platform companies in order to protect local businesses such as farmers, traders and micro-entrepreneurs (Gurumurthy & Chami, 2021, p 6).
Global trade unions can also play a role in protecting workers selling their services on platforms as well as those with local businesses competing with platform companies. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) can push for recommendations for a universal labour guarantee for platform workers and can pave the way for changes in the national labour law, which guarantees platform labourers fundamental workers’ rights including adequate living wage, limits on hours of work as well as safe and healthy workplaces (Gurumurthy & Chami, 2020, p 7).
A new cooperative platform economy
Another suggestion would be to create alternative platforms that are run as a cooperative by consumers or local workers, just as cooperative building societies and cooperative supermarkets have been an alternative to privately held banks and shops. These platforms would have the public’s interests as their main motivation, some running critical platform infrastructures as public utilities (Graham, Hjorth & Lehdonvirta, 2019, p 288). Moreover, a public cloud infrastructure could enable local enterprises to benefit from data analytics. For example, a national tech-accelerator policy could bring together a women farmer’s group and a women-led tech start up to launch a new smart farming initiative (Gurumurthy & Chami, 2021, p 7).
Finally, one way to ensure a more equal and fair digital economy could be to introduce a new digital taxation regime for Big Tech and other digital firms. This would be a progressive tax measure for countries in the Global South to fund essential public services and protect worker’s rights (Gurumurthy & Chami, 2021, p 6).
Conclusion – why feminists should be clued up on the digital world
The title of this article was why feminist should be concerned with the digital economy and datafication. Of course, the negative impacts of the new digital economy in general, and the platform ecosystem in particular, affects a broad range of workers negatively. Likewise, the suggested policies to protect and enable people in the Global South to take advantage of the new digital technologies of course incorporate women as well. Nevertheless, women are hit the hardest by economic shocks and are predicted to lose out again as we enter a new digital era. Together with the gender-gap in technology, a sector which mostly employs men and realises men’s ideas, women’s needs are again seen as secondary. Therefore, it is important to have a specific focus on opportunities for women when designing new global, national and local framework and policy. All these recommendations should be viewed from a feminist perspective, focusing on human rights in general and especially women’s rights. Whether it be using tax revenue to fund social protection programmes for women’s participation in the digital economy, to ensure women farmers and local entrepreneurs are protected from the increased platformisation of the economy, or to create public-funded platforms that aim at promoting women’s work and their rights, women play an important role in the economy and their contribution should be duly recognized.
Civil society have already taken steps to protect worker’s rights in the new digital era. Trade justice activists in Asia and Africa are highlighting the problematic reliance on digital trade liberalization as a path out of the current recession, and there have been civil action from workers in the platform and digital sectors ranging from strikes led by Amazon employees in the US and Europe, strikes by on-demand delivery workers in Latin America to civil lawsuits by content moderators at Facebook/Meta in the US and Kenya
There is still a lot of work to be done to prepare for a digital world. The idea of “mining” people for data has a very colonial ring to it and handing over complex moral questions to the corporate world regarding individual privacy and worker’s rights is highly problematic (Birhane, 2019). However, once we have recognized data as a key economic resource that cannot be harvested without permission or consent and built necessary global and national framework to govern data in the interest of the people rather than Big Tech companies.
Reflection:
Writing articles and building this blog has been an interesting and fun experience, but also proved to be a steep learning curve as I had very little knowledge of the world of digitalization and datafication before starting this course. Sure, I’ve worked with websites before but personally I am someone who always tried to stay clear of social media and sharing on the internet, and largely keeping one eye shut to the prospect of a ton of personal information floating around the internet, not to mention all the EULAs and cookies I’ve agreed to just to get on with whatever I was doing. Nevertheless, a few articles on the joint reading list caught my interest and I decided to sign up for the theme of datafication. Then I found that I could combine my two main topics of interest – gender justice and global social justice with digitalization and my blog posts are the result of this. I also really enjoyed working with my peers and to see our blog coming into existence and enjoyed writing in a less academic style. Although a fun exercise, I don’t see myself starting my own blog soon (juggling a job and two small kids is work enough) and within the communication team and my workplace, we seek to use other communication methods. However, I did enjoy the more practical element of this course, doing real-world communication with a group of peers.
References:
Birhane, A. (2019, July 18). The Algorithmic Colonization of Africa. Real Life Mag. Accessed September 13, 2022 https://reallifemag.com/the-algorithmic-colonization-of-africa/
Graham, M. Hjorth, I and Lehdonvirta, L. (2019). Digital Labor and Development: Impacts of Global Digital Labor Platforms and the Gig Economy on Worker Livelihoods in Mark Graham (ed.) Digital Economies at Global Margins (pp 269-295). MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Gurumurthy, A and Chami, N (2021). The Deal We Always Wanted – A Feminist Action Framework for the Digital Economy. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Berlin.
Gurumurthy A & Chami N. (2020 Jan 16). The Intelligent Corporation – Data and the Digital Economy, Transnational Institute, accessed. September 13, 2022 https://longreads.tni.org/stateofpower/the-intelligent-corporation-data-and-the-digital-economy
Hiriyur, S. (2018, Aug. 6) Are Service Apps for Domestic Workers Reproducing Old Systems of Power. Feminism in India. Accessed October 15. https://feminisminindia.com/2018/08/06/service-apps-domestic-workers/
Just Net Coalition (2019) Digital Justice Manifesto: A call to Our Own Digital Future, accessed October 20, 2022. https://justnetcoalition.org/digital-justice-manifesto
Kwet, M. (2021, March 3). Digital Colonialism: the Evolution of American Empire. ROAR. Accessed September 20, 2022, https://roarmag.org/essays/digital-colonialism-the-evolution-of-american-empire/
McCarrick, H. & Kleine, D. (2019). Digital Inclusion, Female Entrepreneurship, and the Production of Neoliberal Subjects—Views from Chile and Tanzania in Mark Graham (ed.) Digital Economies at Global Margins (pp 103-129). MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts.
O’Donnell, A & Sweetman, C. (2018). Introduction: Gender, development and ICTs. Gender & Development, 26(2), 217-229.
