Technologies of the Global South: Exploring the Alternatives to Neoliberal Colonization

• In Event: Educating Techno-Skeptics: Critical Approaches to Educational Technology in a Dystopian World

Abstract

The global south is not a geographic area but a term that encompasses human suffering caused by global colonialism and capitalism in the past six centuries (Glaveanu & Sierra, 2015). In the 21st century more than ever, the ontologies of the global south are tied with the force of global neoliberal capitalism (George, 2017). With the promise of free market and autonomous individuals free to choose, neoliberalism has reached global scales in recent history. Framing the global south as economically underdeveloped, neoliberalism framework has succeeded in offering technology as a great equalizer, enticing new consumers from the rich and evolving “third world” into the digital technology market. Techno-neoliberalism has become a dominant force in shaping ontologies across the globe, but its impact in the global south continues the work of colonization.

In the global neoliberal market, education is a sector with potential for massive profits for the technocapitalists. Technologies that mediate educational communication and relationships globally are designed and implemented by tech business giants such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter that, collectively, cover most of the educational technology market (Kwet, 2019). Kwet warns that “Education offers the ultimate breeding ground for Big tech imperialism; product placement in schools can be used to capture emerging markets and tighten the stranglehold of Big tech products, brands, models and ideology in the Global South” (p. 17). Here, while the youth are prepared to be consumers of the product, they are also shaped to become future laborers for the tech ecosystems.

With the involvement of technocapitalist giants in the global south educational sectors, neoliberal value system is embraced as the central ontic logic that values a calculative intelligibility over humanity. George (2017) argued that capitalism is ontologically dependent on the calculative intelligility which allows the system to turn humans and non-humans into commodities or merchandizes that can be measured, assessed, and valued before traded for in the market for higher profit. We follow George’s (2017) Heideggerean reimagining of technology as an understanding of Being, and consider it as the appearance of reality manifested by human/non-human agentic relationships.
In this segment of the symposium, we utilize de Souza Santos (2012)’s framing of the need for centering epistemologies of the south and apply it to imagine new technologies that counter global neoliberal capitalism. Using Glaveanu and Sierra’s (2015) structure to recenter perspectives from the global south, we ask: (1) what technologies exist in the Global South that have been made invisible in the techocapitalist reality; (2) what technologies offer alternatives to the present reality; (3) what technologies support epistemologies of the south and in what ways, and (4) how can these technologies demonstrate a promotion of mutual intelligibility between experiences of the world that are available and possible?
Finally, following de Sousa Santos’s framing, we present examples of community-based approaches to creating alternative realities of, with, and through technologies that allow for onto-epistemologies of the south to thrive in a suppressive technocapitalist imperialism of the Global North, especially the U.S.

Authors

• Ted Hall, Martin University

• Rohit Mehta, California State University - Fresno