Artificial intelligence, monopoly and control of knowledge

This article critically analyzes the role of technological revolutions in the digital age and the place that the State occupies, or has ceased to occupy, in the face of the advance of surveillance capitalism. It argues that the concentration of knowledge and technological infrastructure in the hands of private capital has limited the development of critical thinking and has deepened inequalities between the countries that control information and those that remain mere spectators. From a critical and decolonial perspective, the text questions the supposed neutrality of knowledge produced by those who hold power, particularly the countries of the Global North. The decolonial lens makes it possible to examine the development and use of artificial intelligence as part of an extractive, appropriative and exclusionary logic of knowledge, in which data, technologies and algorithmic decisions are concentrated in corporate elites. In response, other epistemologies are vindicated, especially those formulated from the Global South, as forms of resistance against hegemonic models. Thinkers such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Enrique Dussel, Hugo Zemelman and Arturo Escobar have proposed theoretical and political paths to reconfigure knowledge from other rationalities, in dialogue with local, community and ancestral knowledge. In this framework, it is affirmed that recovering the leading role of the State is essential to democratize access to information, reduce global gaps and counter the new forms of domination imposed by large technology corporations in the era of surveillance capitalism, understood as an economic model that bases its profits on the massive collection of personal data, its algorithmic analysis and its use to predict and modify human behavior for commercial or control purposes. Only a plural articulation among the State, social movements, scientific communities and territorial knowledge will make it possible to move toward a digital epistemic disobedience that democratizes knowledge and opens the way to a new ecology of knowledges.