This paper examines why data sovereignty policies in Southeast Asia fail to deliver technological autonomy despite mandating domestic data storage. Drawing from science and technology studies (STS), political economy, and world-systems theory, we move beyond surface-level digital analysis to examine the deeper material foundations of technological dependency.
We introduce the concept ‘sovereignty simulacrum’ to describe how countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, and Malaysia achieve only the appearance of technological independence while remaining structurally dependent on foreign-controlled AI infrastructure—specialized GPUs, cloud architectures, and data centers. Data localization addresses the phenomenological surface of dependency while leaving intact the material chokepoints of computational power.
Our transdisciplinary analysis reveals how AI reproduces historical core-periphery dynamics through extractive mechanisms: exploitation of assembly line workers and data annotators at below-subsistence wages; extraction of rare earth materials for AI hardware manufacturing; and appropriation of user-generated data to train large language models sold back as commercial services.
We conclude that the concentration of AI computing resources in core economies creates technological dependencies that transcend data sovereignty policies, as the ‘intelligence’ in artificial intelligence remains foreign-controlled even when raw data stays local.
Read More ➜