These two features of technology revolutions—their promise to deliver progress and their tendency instead to reverse it for people out of power, especially the most vulnerable—are perhaps truer than ever for the moment we now find ourselves in with artificial intelligence. Since its conception, the development and use of AI has been propelled by tantalizing dreams of modernity and shaped by a narrow elite with the money and influence to bring forth their conception of the technology. That conception is what has led to the exploding social, labor, and environmental costs that are playing out around the world today, particularly, as we’ll see, in many Global South countries, for which the consequences of their dispossession by historical empires still linger in delayed economic development and weaker political institutions. And yet, just like the South Carolina congressman, Silicon Valley has painted the experiences of those being exploited and harmed by the technology as 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.

Today Chile produces roughly a third of the world’s lithium, second only to Australia. The material is primarily extracted out of the Salar de Atacama, the largest salt flat in the country, by pumping its brine out into shimmering pools of turquoise and waiting for the sun to evaporate and crystallize the solution into lithium and other by-products. The salares were once home to flocks of pink flamingos, which the Atacameños consider their spiritual siblings. Now the flamingos are gone; the young daughter of one Indigenous leader in the Peine community has only her ancestors’ stories and a flamingo plushie by which to remember them.

The situation— and this was the case not just in Kenya but throughout postcolonial Africa— is that described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, wherein the global vision that guided the anticolonial struggle gradually shrinks to the level of the continent, then the national territory, then down to the regional and ethnic level. The symbols of the nation left standing are the flag, the anthem, the nationalized colonial army and police force, and of course the Leader.