Data Society

The image shows a visual architecture that blends urban, industrial, and cartographic elements, highlighting a landscape of inequalities and exploitation. The lower part presents an urban scene in Nairobi, where workers from a tech giant's Data Center have built makeshift slums to live near their workplace. In the background, a map of a mining site in South Africa can be seen. This image evokes the connection between digital capitalism and extractivist colonialism, emphasizing how global data centers, which power digital infrastructures, rely on deeply rooted socio-environmental exploitation models. In the Global South, the construction and maintenance of data centers involve precarious working conditions, low wages, and little regard for workers' well-being. This reality intersects with the dynamics of the extractive industry, which provides essential raw materials (such as copper, lithium, and nickel) needed for the production of advanced technologies. The boundaries drawn in the upper part seem to outline a control map, suggesting that socio-economic inequalities are driven by a system that prioritizes the profits of big tech companies over workers' rights and environmental protection. This presents a narrative completely different from the clean and soft image of the positivist West. This visual intertwining tells the story of the ongoing dependence of digital economies on extractive colonial practices, perpetuating a system of inequalities that pushes environmental and social costs to the margins of the Global South.