Every server. Every algorithm. Every line of code is built on the territories, the labor, and the knowledge of the communities who have always tended life.
There is no Cloud.
Only Earth.
And those who fight every day to keep it thriving.
Support, amplify, and collaborate with the movements resisting extractive technologies:
ZAAB
AfriTAP
ETC Group
SIRGE
IT for Change
Green Screen Coalition
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Ahead of RightsCon 2026 in Lusaka, we, social movements rooted in territories and diverse cosmovisions including environmental justice, food sovereignty, Indigenous and community rights, digital rights, workers’ rights, and decolonial feminism — are coming together for an indaba, to develop a shared political analysis of the harms of AI and digitalization, and explore collective strategies to defend our narratives, territories, and ways of life.
The infrastructures of these technologies map directly onto the old geographies of colonial extraction. Minerals that build servers and computers are dug off of lands stolen from peasant and Indigenous communities in former colonies. The energy that powers these machines is drawn from landscapes where communities have been displaced by dams, mines, and vast development projects in service of feeding extractive economies. Even the cables carrying data follow paths shaped by centuries of imperial trade, conquest, and resource extraction.
Across Africa in particular, territories once stripped for gold, diamonds, and oil are again being targeted; this time for the copper, cobalt, lithium, and other minerals needed to build and operate the AI Empires.
Zambia, alongside the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, sits at the heart of the AI Empires’ expansion. In Zambia there is a push to triple copper output for AI chips and license mega-mines funded by Gates and Bezos, even as communities reel from mine spills and AI-driven farming schemes. Worldwide, several trillion dollars are being spent to build data centers, satellites, and cables, fueled by minerals, fossil and nuclear energy, and water. Africa, the Global South, and territories of marginalized communities everywhere, are treated as sacrificial extraction zones.
Today, tech oligarchs, backed by imperial states, are working to erase these ways of knowing and replace them with another story. In boardrooms, climate summits, technology expos, and policy corridors around the world, they are advancing the narrative that humanity’s only chance of survival lies in surrendering our futures to an industrial strategy they call “Artificial Intelligence”. To get there they are ramping up the most expensive infra-structure buildout since the railways - data centers, cables, copper mines, and digital sweatshops. Empire frames this as a digital “Cloud”. A distant, intangible realm removed from our lands, our lives, and our realities. But this framing is a lie.
Long before supercomputers, “Cloud” servers, and data centers, carved open the Earth to fuel the Empire's latest frontier of Artificial Intelligence, the planet was already alive with its own Intelligence.
Mycelial systems stretch beneath forests and fields, threading life in vast webs that share information and resources, far more intricate than any fiber-optic grid.
Rivers carry memory through mountains, valleys, and plains, shaping and sustaining life through cycles of flow, flood, and renewal in ways that no machine could ever learn, model, or compute.
Millions of seeds contain entire worlds of inter-generational knowledge and adaptive intelligence within cells so small they can rest in the palm of a hand, carrying complexity that no data center could ever contain.
For millennia, cultures and cosmologies emerged from listening to land, water, forests, and fields. Across generations, these learnings have been kept in continuity by peasants and fisherfolk, Indigenous and pastoral communities, workers, women, and countless others who carried this knowledge through stories and rituals, in art and song, in fishing and farming practices, in the saving and sharing of seeds, and in systems of collective care that have allowed communities to endure through centuries of change, crisis, and colonisation.
on AI, Digitization, Ecology, Sovereignty and Justice.