how tech giants smuggle colonial norms into ai systems

norm smuggling isn’t just a metaphor—it’s the quiet colonization of ai systems. companies outsource data labeling and model training to the global south, then impose their own ethical frameworks, erasing local contexts. who decides what’s “fair” in an algorithm trained on anglo-centric data? this isn’t innovation; it’s digital extraction. the real question: how do we dismantle these smuggled-in hierarchies before they become the new standard? cyber-borders and data sovereignty are band-aids if the code itself is a pipeline for imperial logic. katie ebner-landy’s work exposes the rot—we need to burn it down, not patch it.