The violence of our age isn’t just in wars or laws, but in how we have learned to live with them, how we scroll past them on our phones before bed. The internet has made everything visible, but it has also made everything hollow. We see genocide, femicide, labour strikes, police brutality, and still we go to work the next morning. That’s part of the design: this constant overwhelm that makes us feel small and replaceable, unable to grasp the enormity of what is being done in our name.
Big Tech, the powerful corporations that shape how we work, shop, and connect online, has perfected the art of invisibility. It hides violence in the fine print of its terms and conditions, and in the quiet hum of its data centres, while the planet heats up. At Amazon, warehouse workers have reported fainting in facilities without air-conditioning or adequate breaks for water or rest. Meanwhile, delivery drivers and other gig workers brave storms and floods to bring comfort to our doorsteps, and social media moderators sift through horrific content so the rest of us can scroll in peace.
We are in the #16DaysOfActivism, and the same multinational tech corporations that visibly back feminist campaigns at such times are often tied to state and military contracts, including enhancing digital surveillance exports to African governments. Reports show Big Tech’s partnerships with militaries and intelligence agencies continue to expand their capital, reach, and political influence, even as these companies publicly align themselves with social justice causes. Meanwhile, grassroots feminist and queer movements remain underfunded. It is all connected; imperial power now wears a hoodie, talks like a tech bro, and calls its harm progress.
Empire, but make it digital
Silicon Valley isn’t just a place; it is a worldview. It is the belief that every social problem can be solved with an app and that every new crisis just needs another update. But the cloud that stores all that data isn’t some weightless dream; it is land, water, cables, and labour. It gulps electricity, drains rivers to cool its endless servers, and leaves nearby communities dealing with droughts and power cuts. The same cloud that feels invisible to us sits on servers in Arizona, in vast data centres in South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria. It travels through undersea cables laid by exhausted workers from the Global South. It depends on the same fragile grids, cheap labour, and extractive systems that built every empire before it. The cloud has borders, and those borders protect profit. A handful of corporations own the data, and with it, the power to decide who gets seen and who disappears.
All of this runs on extraction. From cobalt mines in Congo to lithium lakes in Chile, from moderation hubs in Nairobi to data centres in Accra, the digital economy eats land, water, and bodies. The same companies building AI tools are lobbying to weaken climate laws. They call it progress while the planet burns. Tech billionaires talk about Mars like it’s a backup drive, while floods drown the poor and droughts kill crops here on Earth. Across the Global South, the costs pile up: cyclones tearing through Mozambique and Malawi, wildfires and heatwaves scorching North Africa, rising waters swallowing homes in Ghana, Sierra Leone, and The Gambia. In South Africa and Zambia, power cuts and water shortages make ordinary life impossible; in the Horn, famine creeps closer every year.
None of this is ‘natural’. These disasters are symptoms of the same global system that fuels Big Tech. Data centres gulp electricity while nearby villages go dark. Cobalt and lithium mines in Congo, Namibia, and Zimbabwe power the so-called green tech revolution, leaving behind poisoned soil and ghost towns. Carbon markets have become the new frontier of extraction, corporations buying and selling the right to pollute, pushing pastoral communities like the Maasai off their ancestral lands in the name of conservation. Same violence, greener branding. Meanwhile, the tech bros throw themselves parties. Jeff Bezos hosts an extravagant wedding in a sinking Venice. Mark Zuckerberg buys up land in Hawaii, fences off beaches, and calls it privacy, while the islands burn. Digital capitalism depends on destruction, then sells us wellness apps to manage the anxiety it creates. The jokes write themselves, really.
The empire is ever-expanding. Israel’s spyware industry supplies authoritarian regimes, exporting repression under the guise of “security”. China exports facial-recognition systems to African governments, embedding digital policing into the fabric of daily life. Russia floods social media with propaganda that fuels the far right globally and drives disinformation wars in Central and West Africa. And the European Union, while preaching human rights, fortifies its borders with biometric databases, drones, and AI-powered surveillance systems that push migrants into deserts and detention camps, exporting its border regime to Africa in the name of migration management. Each claims to bring ‘stability’, but what they secure is control over our minds, our movements, our data, and our labour.
The empire’s reach now extends to the people we follow every day.
Influence itself has become part of its machinery. Governments and corporations know that power isn’t only enforced through armies or algorithms; it is shaped by culture and visibility. They pay influencers to make the empire look aspirational, to dress up inequality as success and surveillance as safety. What seems like culture or creativity often hides soft power, paid partnerships, and quiet propaganda. In Africa, influencer economies are growing fast, and with them, new ways of shaping how people see power, beauty, and belonging. Algorithms reward those who make power look aesthetically trendy and injustice invisible, turning our timelines into new sites of control.
Gender, Power, and the New Normal
Across the world, and across Africa, a wave of populism and anti-rights politics feeds on resentment, patriarchy, and fear. It thrives in the same digital spaces that profit from misogyny. Platforms that thrive on gender-based hate, amplifying men who build power through the humiliation of women, queer and trans people, and anyone who refuses to be erased, are the same ones that claim to care about safety. Algorithms don’t just recognise anger; they weaponise it, mining resentment for clicks and refining it into profit.
This violence is both ideological and material. Women form a vast part of the invisible workforce that keeps the digital economy running, often from the Global South, where they face the daily brutality of exploitation. From Ghana to Ethiopia to Uganda, women moderate violent content for multinational tech firms; they assemble and recycle electronic devices in unsafe factories; they power call centres and data-labelling farms that feed artificial intelligence systems. They absorb the exhaustion, trauma, and silence that keep the internet alive. Gender-based violence here takes many forms: harassment, overwork, wage theft, surveillance, and the denial of dignity. It is all part of the same logic that devalues care, empathy, and collective life.
But African ways of knowing remind us that the body carries wisdom, that rhythm, rest, and relation are forms of intelligence.Our ancestors understood that life must move with the sun, the soil, and the breath of others.
You cannot digitise the ease of shared laughter, the warmth of food passed from one pot, or the peace of sitting together in silence. Yet today, we measure our worth in output and our time in notifications, letting devices dictate our rhythms.
The body becomes data to be tracked and optimised, its wisdom ignored until it breaks. This disconnection is not personal failure; it is design. The same economy that thrives on overwork online erodes the spaces where people could once simply exist offline. Public parks, libraries, and forests are fenced, sold, or neglected, leaving fewer places to gather, breathe, or rest. So we stay indoors, glowing blue in the light of machines that quietly make us ill. Eyes burning, backs aching, minds heavy, watching a world we are too tired to join.
And when we burn out, we are told to “log off.” But for many, disconnection is not an option. To work, to be seen, to earn, all require being online in a LinkedIn generation. Trend forecasters now call “being offline” the next luxury, the new minimalism of the privileged. The irony is unbearable: the ability to step away from the internet has become a class privilege. “De-Googling your life,” switching to privacy tools or self-hosted servers, takes time, money, and technical literacy that most people do not have. Freedom itself has become a subscription model.
Refusal, repair, and resistance
And still, people are finding ways to say no. Across the world, workers, organisers, and communities are calling out the tech industry’s complicity in state violence. Employees at major companies have walked out over military contracts. Feminists and queer activists are building independent digital spaces, encrypted networks, and archives of care. Communities are reviving the idea of digital sovereignty, of technology as a commons, not a weapon.
To decolonise tech is not just to change code, it is to change what we think technology is for.
But can we really decolonise tech? Maybe not in the way we imagine. Maybe it is less about reforming Big Tech and more about remembering that technology once meant knowledge, craft, care, things made to sustain life, not control it. Perhaps it is about building small and building differently: community Wi-Fi instead of monopolies, co-ops instead of platforms, tools rooted in care instead of endless extraction.
The #16DaysOfActivism reminds us that violence is not inevitable. It is designed, and anything designed can be redesigned. The systems that exploit us were built by people, which means they can be unbuilt too. There is power in small resistance; in muting the algorithm, in walking outside, in caring for one another offline. There is power in remembering that the world existed before Big Tech, and will exist after it too. My friend Sunshine Komusana always says we need to find the big red switch, the one that turns it all off. Maybe that’s the start of imagining something new: not the endless hum of machines, but silence, breath, and the sound of people finding each other again.
Maybe the next revolution will not be livestreamed. Maybe it is already happening quietly, in gardens, in markets, in shared kitchens, in the small acts of restoration that teach us how to live again. Maybe activism now means learning again how to feel, how to rest, how to imagine. To build a world beyond digital empire is not just to resist it; it is to remember what it means to be human.
Najjuko Joanita (Joey) is a Pan-African feminist activist and organiser devoted to reimagining just and liberated futures for African women and minoritised communities. Through her work, she challenges global systems of power and colonial legacies, drawing on African feminist traditions of critique, imagination, and collective care. Her activism weaves inquiry with community building, joy, and creativity, emphasising that liberation is achieved not only through resistance but also through nurturing life and solidarity in everyday acts.