Paper short abstract:

The paper examines links between Silicon Valley elites, big data/AI, and cash transfers. Firms extract profits via financial technologies that claim to reduce poverty. Legitimized under the discourse of Effective Altruism, these elite interests are advanced under the guise of scientific objectivity.

Paper long abstract:

Critical scholars question the hype surrounding digital technologies and 'big data', critiquing, e.g., the commodified 'data phantoms' assembled from individual medical histories (Ebeling 2016), the rise of 'surveillance capitalism' (Zuboff 2015), and the epistemological implications of big data's overt positivism (Kitchin 2014). However, scholars have failed to fully appreciate the close links between powerful actors in Silicon Valley, big data and AI/machine-learning, financial technologies ('fintech'), and digital technologies for development. This paper addresses this oversight by advancing two arguments. First, it argues that surveillance capitalism is transferred into the sphere of development practice in sub-Saharan Africa through two main channels. On one hand, for-profit ventures develop fintech platforms, which are sold to non-profit cash transfer programs to help them verify identities, track payments and make disbursements. On the other hand, these same fintech products can also be used in for-profit lending ventures, for example, by trawling users' mobile phone data to establish creditworthiness. In both cases, surveillance capitalism is mobilized to extract data and profits from activities that claim to reduce poverty. The mechanisms by which these activities are legitimized form the paper's second argument, namely that Silicon Valley elites have appropriated the Effective Altruism (EA) movement as a technolibertarian moral philosophy that advances global capitalism while asserting scientific objectivity. By funding think tanks, university institutes, and donor-advisory organizations that adhere to EA's narrow definition of 'effectiveness', Silicon Valley elites are able to promote their own interests under the guise of scientifically-proven, common-sense solutions to poverty.