Data colonialism

Data colonialism is the Latin American civil-society framing of AI-and-data extraction as a continuation of historical colonial patterns of resource appropriation from the Global South for accumulation in the Global North. It operates simultaneously as an academic-substantive thesis (originating in Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias's 2019 The Costs of Connection) and as the working public-discourse register of two anchor Latin American digital-rights organisations: Derechos Digitales, whose Co-Executive Directors Jamila Venturini and J. Carlos Lara name the organisation's leadership "in our analyses of the impacts of artificial intelligence and data colonialism", and Coding Rights, whose Not My A.I. project under Joana Varon and Paz Peña reads Latin American AI deployment as "another expression of colonial extractivism". The framing's substantive demand is for a Latin-American-epistemic-position regional civil-society reading of AI governance that names the asymmetry between Global-North-headquartered AI industry and Global-South publics most affected by AI deployment as a structural pattern requiring regional protective frameworks — not as a translation problem to be solved by importing US or European AI-ethics vocabularies into Spanish and Portuguese.

Origin

The framing's academic crystallisation runs through Couldry and Mejias's 2019 The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism, the work the public record credits with the term's settled academic formulation. The book's substantive argument — that "the data economy reorganizes human life into a continuous source of raw material for capitalist accumulation," and that control over data flows confers political, economic, and cultural power asymmetries that recapitulate the structural shape of historical colonial appropriation — is the analytical claim the framing carries. The book is the genealogical antecedent the corpus records on the framing's source roster, but its in-corpus anchor sits one step downstream, in the working public life the framing has acquired in Latin American civil-society organising over the same six-year window. The Couldry and Mejias framing entered the public record from outside the Latin American region; its working civil-society life in the region runs as a grassroots-anchored register through organisations whose programme work is itself anchored on Latin American experience and Latin American epistemic positions.

The framing's longer intellectual genealogy — Latin American dependency theory in the 1960s and 1970s, Aníbal Quijano and Ramón Grosfoguel's coloniality-of-power tradition, Boaventura de Sousa Santos's epistemologies of the South, and Latin American feminist-decolonial writing — supplies the wider register inside which the data-colonialism framing's regional uptake makes sense. The corpus records the academic genealogy as a source pointer rather than as the framing's working anchor: the public-discourse work the framing performs in this corpus is done by the regional civil-society organisations carrying it, not by the academic citations they draw on.

Travel into Latin American civil-society organising

The framing's most consequential downstream venue is the Latin American regional digital-rights field. Derechos Digitales, the Santiago-headquartered Latin American digital-rights non-profit founded in 2005, has installed the data-colonialism register as the substantive interpretive layer of its regional AI-and-inclusion programme. The framing operates across three interlocking programme threads: the four-country comparative empirical study Decisiones automatizadas en la función pública en América Latina (covering social-intervention systems in Chile, justice administration in Colombia, job-allocation systems in Brazil, and public-health management in Uruguay); the feminist-AI line developed with the A+ Alliance's Latin America and Caribbean Hub; and the regional advocacy that runs into the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, UNESCO, and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. The 2025 Association for Progressive Communications 20th-anniversary feature is the framing's clearest single public artefact in the organisation's named-leadership register: Co-Executive Directors Jamila Venturini and J. Carlos Lara are jointly credited with the framing that Latin America is "at the forefront of the assessment of impacts caused by artificial intelligence and data colonialism", and the article reproduces their statement that the organisation's leadership runs "in our analyses of the impacts of artificial intelligence and data colonialism, among other key issues".

Coding Rights, the Rio de Janeiro-headquartered Brazilian feminist digital-rights organisation founded in 2015 by Joana Varon, carries the framing into the project register of its Not My A.I. Latin American feminist-and-decolonial AI-accountability programme. Not My A.I., launched in 2021 and co-led by Varon and the Chile-based researcher Paz Peña, is framed as a "feminist toolkit to question A.I. systems" and operates as the working LatAm-civil-society vehicle through which the data-colonialism register interprets concrete AI deployments. The project's Plataforma Tecnológica de Intervención Social case study — a May 2021 analysis by Peña and Varon of the Microsoft-backed adolescent-pregnancy-prediction AI system deployed in Salta Province, Argentina (subsequently expanded to La Rioja, Chaco, Tierra del Fuego) and Brazil (as Projeto Horus) — reads the deployment in the verbatim register that "this is another expression of colonial extractivism", with the analytical claim that the system was designed to "automate, predict, identify, surveil, detect, target and punish the poor". The case study and Not My A.I.'s wider analytical framework ("Oppressive A.I.: Feminist Categories to Understand its Political Effects") sit alongside the academic data-colonialism vocabulary as a Latin-American-feminist-and-decolonial extension of the same critical register: where Couldry and Mejias write from a Global Britain–US academic position, Not My A.I. writes from inside the Latin American case material the framing names as the substantive ground.

Travel into multilateral advocacy: the 22 April 2025 IACHR 192nd-session hearing

The framing's most consequential multilateral-record artefact in the period 2024–2025 is the 22 April 2025 Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 192nd-session hearing on artificial intelligence and human rights, for which Derechos Digitales led the drafting of a joint Latin American civil-society contribution involving seventeen regional organisations. The contribution operates as a regional civil-society reading of AI deployment under the framing's asymmetry-of-accumulation logic — that AI systems are designed in jurisdictions other than the ones where their disproportionate impacts land, and that the absence of regional protective frameworks is itself a structural feature of the same Global-North / Global-South asymmetry the framing names. The IACHR hearing register is the framing's clearest single artefact of public-policy operationalisation across the Inter-American human-rights system, alongside the organisation's UNESCO Civil Society Organizations and Academic Network on AI Ethics and Policy participation and its UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights submissions on the use of AI by Latin American states.

The Al Sur regional consortium — the eleven-organisation Latin American and Caribbean civil-society infrastructure of which Derechos Digitales and Coding Rights are core members alongside ADC (Argentina), CELE (Argentina), Karisma (Colombia), Hiperderecho (Peru), IDEC (Brazil), IPANDETEC (Panama), InternetLab (Brazil), R3D (Mexico), and TEDIC (Paraguay) — is the regional convening shape across which the framing carries beyond either anchor organisation's own materials. The LAVITS (Latin American Network of Surveillance, Technology and Society Studies) regional academic-research network is the parallel academic-research convening shape inside which the framing's intellectual life runs alongside the civil-society public-discourse life: Venturini's own LAVITS membership sits at this intersection, and the LAVITS biennial conferences are the corpus's working record of the framing's adoption into Latin American academic surveillance studies.

Spanish- and Portuguese-language register

The framing operates in three working language registers across the Latin American civil-society field. The English-language register is the one Derechos Digitales' co-executive directors carry into international fora ("data colonialism" verbatim in the APC 20th-anniversary feature). The Spanish-language register operates in the Latin American regional working materials under the formulations "colonialismo de datos" and "extractivismo de datos" — the latter the formulation Coding Rights and Not My A.I. carry into Brazilian Portuguese-language work as "extrativismo de dados" alongside the verbatim "colonial extractivism" framing the Peña and Varon case study deploys. The English-Spanish-Portuguese trilingualism is itself a structural feature of how the framing carries: the corpus's working register on AI-civil-society organising in Latin America runs across the three languages of the region simultaneously, and the framing's grammatical portability across them is part of why it has settled into the regional working vocabulary.

Why it has carried

Three features have made the framing durable in Latin American civil-society organising over the 2019–2025 window.

First, the framing names a structural pattern rather than a discrete harm. Where the corpus's adjacent algorithmic-accountability framings (such as coded gaze) name specific decision-system harms and the corpus's AI-safety framings (such as pause giant AI experiments) name specific frontier-model development risks, data colonialism names the asymmetry of accumulation between jurisdictions in which AI is built and jurisdictions in which its disproportionate impacts land. The structural register has let the framing carry across substantively distinct case material — the Chilean Sistema Alerta Niñez predictive-risk algorithm; the Argentine Salta Plataforma Tecnológica de Intervención Social deployment; the Brazilian and Uruguayan ADM cases the regional comparative study covers — as the same underlying pattern under different national surface shapes.

Second, the framing supplies a Latin-American-epistemic-position interpretive layer that refuses the assumption that AI-and-human-rights critique flows from the Global North to the Global South. The Derechos Digitales framing that the region is "at the forefront of the assessment of impacts caused by artificial intelligence and data colonialism" is the working public statement of the substantive epistemic claim. The Coding Rights decolonial-feminist self-framing operates from the same position: the framing's working public life refuses to treat Latin American AI-and-human-rights work as a translation of US or European AI-ethics vocabularies into Spanish and Portuguese, and treats the regional civil-society reading as itself a leading contribution to global AI governance.

Third, the framing pairs an academic-substantive thesis with a concrete operational programme. The Derechos Digitales four-country comparative regional study and the Not My A.I. case-study series supply the framing with empirical case material that the public-discourse vocabulary can reach for; the IACHR 192nd-session hearing and the UNESCO and UN-OHCHR submissions supply the multilateral-record artefacts the framing operationalises into. The combined shape — substantive thesis plus regional empirical research plus multilateral advocacy plus feminist-decolonial methodological frame — is what has converted the framing from a 2019 academic intervention into the working public-facing interpretive register through which Latin American AI-civil-society organising now operates.

The framing's limit, visible across the same record, is that the academic-substantive register and the public-discourse register sit somewhat awkwardly against each other in the corpus's grassroots-organising frame. The data-colonialism framing has not generated a public-rallying hashtag, a campaign-and-coalition slogan, or a protest-line register of the shape that adjacent framings such as #BanTheScan, #KeepItOn, or Ban biometric mass surveillance carry on the corpus's adjacent biometric-surveillance pole. The framing's working life is the academic-substantive-and-civil-society-policy register rather than the protest-line register, and the corpus's interest in the framing turns on its function as the regional civil-society interpretive layer through which Latin American organisations carry the substance of the same AI-and-human-rights critique that other regions carry under different vocabularies and convening shapes.