Digital Labor Platforms as Infrastructure of Extractivism

Abstract

This chapter examines how digital platforms, as infrastructures of extractivism in contemporary artificial intelligence, enable corporations to appropriate data and labour while concentrating value in core regions such as Silicon Valley. It proposes platform extractivism as a framework linking commodification, epistemic dominance, and reproduction through territory. Drawing on digital labour studies, Latin American critical thought, and mixed-methods research with Venezuelan and Colombian data workers, the chapter discusses how AI depends on precarious platform labour to produce, clean, annotate, and maintain data. It further shows how annotation systems normalize culturally specific categories, especially US norms, as universal knowledge, reproducing colonial hierarchies. Finally, it highlights how data work is sustained by unpaid reproductive labour, community networks, and material conditions that make workers available for platform labour. Platform extractivism thus reveals AI as a labour-intensive and territorially embedded political-economic system under capitalism that perpetuates legacies of coloniality.