Dr Lize Barclay is the Stream Head for PGDip Futures Studies in Managing New Technologies at Stellenbosch Business School.
Dr Lize Barclay
Although the month of August commemorates women who resisted a system that determined how their bodies, labour and movement are governed, 69 years later, a new system built on algorithms, data and artificial intelligence capabilities increasingly shapes women’s opportunities, employment, daily lives, and futures.
It is overwhelmingly designed, financed and governed by men who, through their legacy-based control of digital infrastructure, increasingly resemble feudal lords more than founders, and women are predominantly missing from this technology-infused reality. Technology is not neutral – it is embedded in power structures and, through them, colonises the future.
This emerging order is increasingly described as “techno-feudalism”, where a small number of firms control the digital infrastructure society is compelled to rent access to, while it extracts value from our data and attention similar to a medieval lord extracting rent from land and the people working it. Instead of medieval armour, these tech rulers wear casual hoodies while controlling the servers and platforms everyone depends on. This new order is also gendered, because the people setting the terms of the AI age are overwhelmingly male. The people absorbing its costs are disproportionately female, especially girls and women in the global south.
