The construction of the brand new AI world is being designed and constructed at this time but giant elements of the worldwide south should not amongst its architects. Together with the remainder of the International South, Southeast Asia finds itself positioned within the world AI financial system as a shopper, a reservoir of pure assets and low cost labor, and the first provider of the info powering the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Past current, progressive information regulation efforts, the crafting of nationwide AI methods, ministerial declarations, and native “unicorns” constructed on international cloud infrastructure, lies a foundational query: are these digital devices of technological sovereignty and financial productiveness, or reasonably signs of intensifying dependency, democratic erosion, and foreclosures of the area’s techno-scientific future?
Like Dante’s descent into successive circles of hell, this text strikes by layers of accelerating structural depth, every darker and extra unsparing than the final. Guided by historical past and political financial system, I journey downward from the floor layer of coverage, compliance frameworks, and AI adoption, by AI’s bodily infrastructure, and the deep tectonic plates of the stratified and unequal world-system.
This epistemic motion reveals a historic sample. From the colonial plantation to the info heart, from the steam engine to the GPU cluster, each industrial revolution returns to an unresolved techno-societal puzzle: how does expertise form the relation between society, labor, productiveness and surplus, and the way does surplus form the social physique and its establishments?
For Southeast Asia’s 700 million inhabitants, the dilemma caused by this AI wave is the most recent iteration of the perennial query that has haunted humanity because the first industrial revolution within the 18th century.
AI’s Transformative Potential?
The sociotechnical infrastructure of Southeast Asia is more and more anchored to a quickly increasing ensemble of digital and AI applied sciences. Massive language fashions (LLMs), pc imaginative and prescient methods, facial recognition instruments, and embedded predictive suggestion engines, and so forth at the moment are deployed at scale. These applied sciences are more and more employed and operationalized throughout e-commerce platforms, public service supply, monetary methods, border management, training, policing, and surveillance networks. Their cumulative impact is a elementary reorganization of the state equipment, social relations, city infrastructure, and the economics of the area.
The dominant interpretation of this transformation is one in every of techno-progressivism and “charting paths right into a courageous new world.” Techno-optimists have been fast to announce that Southeast Asia shall be “a burgeoning hub for AI innovation” one which has already attracted $30 billion in AI infrastructure and $50 billion funding in AI. The ASEAN ministerial assembly on Science, Expertise and Innovation (AMMSTI) launched an announcement in June 2024 declaring that AI has “important transformative potential,” and is a “key driver of technological development and innovation.” The assembly famous that AI could probably consequence “in a ten to 18% GDP uplift, valued at roughly USD1 trillion by the yr 2030.” The market seems to share this worldview, with a report in The Enterprise Occasions in March 2026 asserting that “81 per cent of South-east Asian corporations [are] already piloting and scaling AI-powered tasks.”
But the image is extra difficult. Students and AI specialists warn that this wave of “automation is outpacing moral checks and balances” and can solely intensify structural “fault strains,” the “democratic deficit” and financial inequalities. These critics argue that the orthodox narrative reproduces, nearly with out deviation, the worldview, metrics, classes and growth blueprint of Silicon Valley. The United Nations’ Human Growth Report (2025) argues that AI dangers implementing a “future dominated by inequality and eroded freedoms,” with Southeast Asia most uncovered. The report signifies that the lower-income international locations within the area lack the infrastructure, human capital, and technical know-how for any significant positive factors from the expertise.
Coverage responses have adopted however on no account have solved these contradictions. At finest reactive and piecemeal, particular person states and regional our bodies have just lately tried to counter these dynamics by reskilling packages, nationwide AI ethics tips, and regional cooperation mechanisms, every falling in need of the tempo and scale of the transformation they search to manipulate. Extra concretely, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and others have every tried to claim territorial sovereignty over their digital assets by information localization legal guidelines, digital governance frameworks, Private Information Safety Acts, and nationwide AI methods, pushed by the popularity captured by the U.S. Division of State’s Pax Silica Declaration (2025): “If the twentieth century ran on oil and metal, the twenty first century runs on compute and the minerals that feed it.”
On the regional degree, the ASEAN Framework on Private Information Safety (2016), the Framework on Digital Information Governance (2018), and the “Information on AI Governance and Ethics” (2024) “replicate the rising efforts to standardize privateness compliance.” But as Hpone Htoo writes, “iterations of the information stay non-binding and solely spotlight finest practices and proposals with no enforcement mechanisms. Adoption stays voluntary and doesn’t supersede any nationwide laws.” The contradictions run deeper than any of those devices can attain. For Amazon Internet Providers, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and OVHcloud, it’s enterprise as normal and at full pace. The cloud platforms, foundational fashions, and information architectures restructuring the area’s financial system, social life and nature proceed totally undisturbed.
The query is what that digitalization is constructed on, by whom, and for what goal.
Technological Sovereignty Simulacrum
Sociologist and media research specialists, Couldry and Mejias (2019), sought to make sense of this datafication of life, social relations and financial system by putting it within the wider historical past of expertise, financial system, and geopolitics. For them, this “large-scale social, financial and authorized transformation” which reifies and compresses concrete actuality by datafying it, is an element of a bigger structural shift they name “information colonialism.” This isn’t a metaphor however a techno-societal situation of extraction and appropriation that enforces itself through new financial, authorized, and regulatory orders. A variegated community of multinational firms spanning machine producers, platform builders, information brokers, and digital infrastructure suppliers operates as what they name the “social quantification sector.” This capitalist assemblage turns each day actions, interactions, behaviors and institutional operations into information factors which can be collected, aggregated, repackaged, monetized, and fed again into the circuits of capital accumulation as for-fee providers.
This “quantification” displays a predetermined political financial system. Throughout AI provide chains, mass mineral extraction from peripheries, semiconductor fabrication vegetation, ever-increasing information mining at scale, information heart proliferation, and the undersea fiber optic cables carrying the info throughout continents, your entire bodily equipment is privately owned by BigTech and weaponized at will by the US. Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and OVHcloud monopolize and centralize this techno-societal grid.
The implications are seen within the Southeast Asian area’s personal panorama. Toothless AI and information governance insurance policies, token native executives main BigTech, unequal bilateral investments, native “unicorns” constructed on international cloud infrastructure, and the proliferation of principally foreign-owned 631 information facilities throughout Southeast Asia have produced what can solely be referred to as a “technological sovereignty simulacrum.” In Baudrillardian sense, it’s a simulacrum not as a result of sovereignty was tried and failed, however as a result of the structural situations for its existence have been pre-emptively suspended. What stays is a self-referential picture: information facilities with out possession, AI methods with out productive or governance capability, digital governance with out infrastructure. It doesn’t level to any sovereign actuality. It replaces it, and the state administers the picture and its penalties solely. BigTech shouldn’t be solely promoting the info facilities, the AI methods, digital platforms, and the techno-utopian imaginative and prescient. They’re additionally promoting the expertise of technological sovereignty to states for whom the actual factor has been made structurally not possible.
The Machine and the World System Drawback
Southeast Asia’s technological predicament is much from new or distinctive. David Ricardo, in “On The Precept of Political Economic system and Taxation” (1817), retracts his earlier views on influence of expertise on society. Ricardo had beforehand argued that equipment advantages each capitalist and laborer alike, the previous “by making nice earnings,” the latter by gaining “the means of shopping for extra commodities with the identical cash wages.” The logic was classically liberal in its optimism: a positive-sum ontology during which the enlargement of productive capability generates a rising tide, lifting all alike. Later, in his chapter “On Equipment,” Ricardo confesses “I’m satisfied, that the substitution of equipment for human labor, is usually very injurious to the pursuits of the category of laborer.” He traces this epiphany to Adam Smith’s remark that whereas the employee’s urge for food is bounded by the biophysiological limitation of the abdomen, the machine proprietor’s starvation for wealth and property “appears to haven’t any restrict or sure boundary.”
Channeling Smith’s pin-factory instance the place productiveness rises however the employee turns into de-skilled and intellectually diminished, Ricardo attracts two conclusions: first, that the machine will increase the web income of householders of the technique of manufacturing and makes employees redundant; second, that if capital can not extract most web income domestically then the machine “shall be carried overseas, and this should be a way more critical discouragement to the demand for labor…by exporting it to a different nation, the demand shall be wholly annihilated.”
Charles Babbage, the technologist and “father of the pc,” in his “Economic system of Equipment and Manufactures” (1832), demonstrated that equipment doesn’t enhance common welfare however decomposes the labor course of into its easiest parts, concentrating surplus within the fingers of those that personal the machines. Marx, drawing on Babbage in “Capital” (1867), goes additional: equipment underneath capitalism shouldn’t be a impartial instrument of manufacturing however a weapon destroying the collective energy of the employees. He concedes that expertise, underneath totally different social relations, relieves arduous labor, allows self-actualization, and opens new domains of artistic work. Below capitalism, nevertheless, what Ricardo handled as a subjective immoral choice (the attainable export of machines overseas to not pay labor), Marx reveals as structural necessity. Capital doesn’t select to go overseas; it’s compelled to.
Constructing on this custom, the Dependency and World System theorists like Amin, Marini and Wallerstein confirmed that the worldwide state-market system is stratified and arranged round a set of iron legal guidelines of which monopoly of expertise was central. These legal guidelines embrace the unequal trade between core economies that personal and function machine manufacturing and the peripheral circuits that export uncooked minerals and agricultural commodities; the switch of surplus worth is such that the periphery is structurally unable to personal, create, and produce its personal techno-scientific infrastructure.
What does this political financial detour educate us about Southeast Asia’s AI and expertise dilemma?
First, Southeast Asia’s structural and technological place shouldn’t be a developmental lag. The iron legal guidelines of unequal trade, peripheral de-industrialization, surplus switch, and super-exploitation of labor make sure that the area stays a shopper and supplier whereas the techno-scientific methods and its materials surplus accumulate within the industrialized world.
Second, the “technological sovereignty simulacrum,” with its AI and digital governance instruments, is an ideological obfuscating mechanism that presents the phantasm of management over AI and digital platforms which can be materially owned by BigTech. The failure is assured; that is the structural final result of the primary level.
Third, Southeast Asia’s query concerning AI and expertise is a novel articulation of the identical historic query that political economists and technologists posed throughout each industrial revolution: who owns the machine, who works it, who extracts the excess, and who bears the associated fee. From the steam engine to Ford’s meeting line, from the nuclear reactor to the GPU cluster, this techno-societal puzzle stays unresolved.
AI and digital platforms are accelerating and deepening the disaster, and Southeast Asia’s 700 million inhabitants are, at this time, on its receiving finish. But traditionally, particular buildings of accumulation and dispossession are neither everlasting nor immutable. The unipolar Silicon Valley-centered order is now fracturing. China’s emergence as a full-spectrum techno-scientific energy, controlling mineral processing, deploying its personal semiconductor structure, and increasing state-directed digital infrastructure throughout the area, introduces a real problem to Western technological hegemony. China’s personal developmental trajectory opens totally different prospects for the International South.
The situations for different human-centered techno-scientific tasks should be a topic of pressing scholarly and policymaking inquiry.