Alagados: Notes on Technique and the Periphery

Abstract

This essay analyzes Artificial Intelligence (AI) not merely as a technical miracle, but as a new chapter in the long-standing issue of development for peripheral countries. It argues that simple access to technology does not guarantee emancipation and can, instead, consolidate an "algorithmic colony" where the periphery provides raw data, energy, and cheap labor while importing decision-making and command systems. The dispute over AI is presented as a struggle for language and the power to name the real, challenging foreign semantic patterns that treat local diversity as noise. The text denounces the hidden materiality of digital technology, which relies on mineral extraction, intensive energy use, and precarious, invisible labor. It critiques local elites who profit from the intermediation of dependency, using AI to intensify social discipline and the management of scarcity through automated scoring and surveillance. As an alternative, a sovereign strategy is proposed through an "anthropophagic" approach: devouring and reorganizing foreign technical artifacts to serve local historical bodies and priorities. This requires mobilizing state capacity, sovereign currency, and public procurement directed by social missions. Finally, the essay defends a Latin American scale of cooperation as essential for building the cognitive density and autonomy necessary to face global monopolies.