Paola Ricaurte Quijano, Fernanda Rodrigues, Angela Chukunzira, and Kauna Love Malgwi make it clear that colonial powers have never gone away. The people and technology powering them have just changed, and one of them is AI…

More Like This: REAL Resistance: Against Automated Governments

This is REAL Resistance, a collection of conversations produced in collaboration with Real ML, featuring the experts and advocates who make up Real ML’s global network.

In this conversation, four guests from the network discuss how the business of AI continues legacies of colonialism in Brazil, Mexico, and Kenya:

• AI companies are taking land in Querétaro for data center expansion, and they’re doing it without asking first. Paola Ricaurte Quijano explains that these are the mechanisms of dispossession at play — and it’s nothing new.
• The government in Brazil are adopting a risk-based approach for AI regulation; Fernanda Rodrigues demonstrates the problems with this approach, and how they disproportionately harm Black people.
• African data workers suffer the worst mental health harms when compared to other localities. Angela Chukunzira and Kauna Love Malgwi have worked to build a resistance movement for oppressed workers, and a framework for decolonising mental health.

Further reading & resources:

• A Mental Health Intervention for Data Workers — Kauna Ibrahim Malgwi
• "It's not drought, it's plunder" Querétaro, the valley of data centers — By Paola Ricaurte Quijano and Teresa Roldán Soria, July 2025
• Facial recognition surveillance in São Paulo could worsen racism — Al Jazeera, 2023
• The Feminist AI Research Network
• More about the African Content Moderators Union
• Iris — The Institute for Research on Internet and Society
• Siasa Place — a youth organisation that helped tech workers who had been dismissed

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Computer Says Maybe is produced by Georgia Iacovou, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Sarah Myles, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout