Our Bodies, Their Data: Platform Capitalism and Exclusion of the Global South (countercurrents.org)

This piece is a critical essay arguing that everyday life — our bodies, movements, preferences and labour — is being continuously “datafied” and monetized by a handful of global platforms, producing a form of digital colonialism that disproportionately extracts value from the Global South. Using vivid examples (a Google travel-summary email, YouTube’s early non‑monetization of Indian creators, tracked routines of Swiggy delivery workers, and the “buy or bury” acquisition playbook) the author shows how platforms reduce people to streams of metrics: pulse, location, clicks, ratings and deliveries become inputs for algorithms that predict behaviour, optimize profits and discipline labour. The result is concentrated power, limited local platform emergence, and precarious gig work monitored through opaque algorithms. For the AI/ML community this matters technically and ethically. Centralized, cross‑border data harvesting shapes training datasets, encodes geographic and socio‑economic biases, and cements monopolies over model inputs, evaluation and deployment. Algorithmic systems increasingly mediate labour (task routing, performance scoring) and market access (ranking, visibility) — amplifying surveillance and economic asymmetries. The essay underscores the need for data sovereignty, transparent instrumentation of models, accountable reward mechanisms for creators/workers, and alternative platform architectures to prevent entrenched extraction. Practitioners and policymakers must reckon with how data provenance, governance and ownership influence model fairness, global capability building, and who benefits from AI.