Big Tech’s Empire of Extraction

Silicon Valley says it’s building the future, but its methods look a lot like the past. Extraction, exploitation and empire, all dressed up as 'progress and innovation'.

The latest insult coming out of Silicon Valley is “NeoAmish.” It’s a smug little slur used to dismiss those who dare to question the ethics of artificial intelligence. To them, if you’re not cheering on the latest wave of unregulated AI development, you must be a Luddite in a wooden shack, terrified of electricity and churning butter in candlelight.

But we already had language for this. There’s a long-standing debate about de-digitisation, digital sovereignty and ethical design. These are serious concepts. What’s really going on is not about nostalgia or fear of the future. It’s about calling out a global land grab, one hiding behind free apps and cashed up lobbyists.

Photo by Alex Boyd on Unsplash

What we’re witnessing isn’t new. The logic driving today’s AI boom is the same logic that drove colonial expansion across the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The Dutch in Indonesia. The French in West Africa. The Belgians in the Congo. The British everywhere else. Powerful players carving up the world, extracting resources and culture without consent or compensation, and justifying it all in the name of progress.

Swap out spices and cotton for content and code, ships for servers, and you don’t have to look hard to see the historical parallels.

The biggest con in tech right now is the idea that AI is clean and immaterial, a purity of development unseen before. The platforms just float above the real world, powered by innovation and cleverness alone. That it isn’t built on the backs of human input.

As Kate Crawford says in Atlas of AI, these systems rely on extraction. Real people feed the machines. Real cultural and creative labour gives them their intelligence. Everything from books and songs to images, voices, language and code has been taken through industrial scale copying to feed large language models and generative tools.

It’s not just a metaphor to call this colonial. It’s the same structure. Companies behaving like empires, treating the digital world as unclaimed territory, free to plunder. No permission, no license, no payment. Just the assumption that anything online is theirs for the taking.

The colonisation of Australia in 1788 was justified by declaring the land terra nullius. Empty, unowned, a free-for-all. It was a legal fiction that ignored 60,000 years of cultural connection and custodianship by hundreds of different Indigenous language groups and communities. Tech has its own version of this. It’s called fair use. Or rather, what they claim is ‘fair use’, a US legal principle they think can apply to rest of the world.

The truth is, AI and US ‘fair use’ has yet to be truly tested in a US court. There’s no ruling, no precedent, no legal foundation. It’s just a colonial-style assumption that if something is available, it must be theirs to take. They invoke US fair use the way colonisers invoked divine right, as if legality is just a detail that will sort itself out later. Territory nullius becomes digital nullius. The takeover happens first, and the legal justification is papered on afterwards, if it comes at all.

When OpenAI trains on copyrighted novels without asking, or Google scrapes Australian artists' work to train image generators without credit, they’re not disrupting anything. They’re looting.

The empires of the 21st century don’t need the Dutch East Company, or soldiers, or muskets, or smallpox. They operate through code, unfair contracts and VC prospectus. Where European powers once laid claim to land, labour and resources, AI companies now lay claim to language, culture and memory.

The strategy hasn’t changed. Find a resource, declare it unregulated, extract it, and centralise the profits. The only difference is scale. These are the richest companies in history, and the resources they’re taking aren’t minerals or timber, but human creativity itself. Culture is being stripped down, processed, and sold back to us in automated, synthetic form.

The justification hasn’t changed either. Colonialism promised civilisation. AI promises innovation. In both cases, the benefits are wildly exaggerated and the costs passed on to the people who never got a seat at the table.

Those now being dismissed as ‘NeoAmish’ aren’t clinging to the past. We are all confronting a system that exploits both culture and labour. Writers, musicians, First Nations communities, visual artists, journalists are all pushing back against an industry that treats their work as raw material.

It’s not just about stolen songs and scraped books. The weight of AI is also being carried by an invisible global workforce. When workers then demand answers, they’re handed redacted payslips and silence. The system is built to keep them in the dark and keep the platforms clean.

It’s exploitation by design. A modern colonial infrastructure that extracts knowledge and culture, repackages it, with all traces of origin erased. And they call that ‘fair use’. There are too many LOLs if it wasn’t so serious.

And perhaps the most honest image of this new empire and the one that will outlive the billion-dollar valuations and the marketing spin is the photograph of Silicon Valley’s most powerful men lining up behind Donald Trump at his January inauguration. The self-proclaimed futurists of the world, standing shoulder to shoulder with a man who represented its unraveling. The millions they poured into that spectacle. The certainty in their faces.

That photo will appear in textbooks. It will resurface in essays and exhibitions with a single caption: How far were they prepared to go?

That’s the question now. About culture. About labour. About power. And about the assumptions being made. That creativity can be taken. That exploitation can be outsourced, and that progress is theirs to define.

We’re not NeoAmish. We just know an imperial invasion when we see one.

Sources:

Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI (2021); Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism (2019); Rest of World, “How Big Tech’s AI labor supply chain relies on hidden African workers” (2025); E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963); Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine (2023); Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture (2004); Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (2011).