The extent to which the emerging global economic system was being fed by developments in the southern hemisphere was strikingly evident even before 1914. In 1890, the par value of capital invested in the low-grade Witwatersrand mines stood at £22 million, by 1899 it was up to £75 million, and by 1914 it was £125 million. In 1886, the infant Rand industry produced less than 1 per cent of the world’s gold, by 1898 the figure had sprinted to 27 per cent, and by 1914 a whopping 40 per cent of the world’s supply of the precious metal derived from this astounding, still developing new source.

Intermission

Meanwhile, in Chile

The great misconception about the Chilean experiment is that it was an attempt to apply computer technology to the task of organizing a command economy. This is a handy myth for those who want to use it as an example for whatever argument they’re trying to make. Neoliberals and apologists for Pinochet and Friedman can pretend that it was a quixotic project with no more hope of working than the Soviet system; socialists and other apologists can pretend that it nearly worked. Neither is the case, and by now it ought to be obvious why — management cybernetics demonstrates quite clearly why a centrally planned economy doesn’t respect the law of requisite variety and can’t get the information it needs to function.

Where MTurk’s workforce primarily came from the US and India, Scale went hunting first in Kenya and the Philippines, English-speaking former colonies with a long history of servicing American companies through call centers and digital work. The startup’s worker-scouting teams searched for the areas in each country that struck the very same balance of factors that would converge in Venezuela: a high density of people with good education and good internet yet who were poor and thus willing to work hard for very little money. The thesis was guided not only by the company’s cutthroat business practices but also a compelling story they told themselves: that these were the people who could benefit most from the economic opportunity and be happier because of it.

As Naomi Klein details in her 2007 international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, the Chile Project was not education but indoctrination. At the University of Chicago, Chilean students—and later students from other countries in Latin America—were explicitly taught to critique their country’s economic policies and the fatal flaws of Latin American developmentalism.

Under Pinochet’s rule, Chile privatized nearly everything—education, health care, the pension system, even water. The strategy produced economic growth; it also fueled stunning inequality. Chile is among the most unequal countries in the world today, with nearly a quarter of the country’s income concentrated among a few powerful families in the 1 percent. Having never meaningfully industrialized, it also remains tethered to the extraction economy that makes it relevant to higher geopolitical powers.

And so, as the AI boom arrived, Chile would become ground zero for a new scale of extractivism, as the supplier of the industry’s insatiable appetite for raw resources, not just its copper and lithium in the north but also its land, water, and energy resources for a growing crop of data centers in the Santiago metropolitan region. In May 2024, the government proudly announced that the country would welcome twenty-eight new data centers, on top of its existing twenty-two, over the coming years, bringing in $2.6 billion of foreign investment.