Why the global South remains optimistic about tech, while pessimism grips the rest of the world

In her latest book, Payal Arora tackles a pressing paradox: why the Global South remains optimistic about digital technology amidst rising global pessimism. Her insights highlight how hope can reshape tech futures and offer lessons for fostering global inclusivity. Interview.

Hello Payal Arora, why did you write this book now?

Payal Arora: This book is a response to the growing pessimism-optimism divide we are witnessing over these last year’s, where the West is increasingly in despair about all things digital, and their future at large. On the other hand, the rest of the world is far more optimistic as captured in poll after poll in the last decade. This book makes sense of what appears like a pessimism paradox. How can the Global South, with all their issues with poverty, war, and population growth be hopeful? This book turns the question on its head, and argues that because the Global South are disproportionately impacted by these issues due to limited resources, and opportunities, they have become rational optimists. They are embracing every new tool at their disposal, including AI, to counter challenges.
Just look at the media headlines for instance. AI promises to destroy our democracy, our mental health, our social lives, and may even create an existential crisis. Doomsday prophets have instilled in us fear and even impotence towards AI which they largely see as a sexist, racist, colonial tool out to oppress us. No wonder we see us against the machine and not as partners for change. To crack the code on the increasing pessimism-optimism divide among countries globally, we must consider demographics, culture, and growth mindsets.
For instance, 90 percent of the world’s young populations live in the Global South. Anyone who has ventured outside the West will feel the contagious optimism from young people’s extraordinary hunger for being digital. They are teens after all. These youths are full of enthusiasm and passion for life despite the tremendous sociopolitical challenges they face. This is survival in its fullest sense. They are intrinsically optimistic as their future lies ahead of them in contrast to Europe’s aging population, which leans towards a nostalgic mindset. While Europe and the US are driven by fear of the unknown and channel their energies toward containing AI, many countries in the Global South are embracing AI as a path to economic growth and skills development to fit their young citizen’s unmet aspirations. The fact is that while legitimate concerns drive fears around tech innovations, we need to account equally for young people’s digital aspirations and futures to ensure we do not inadvertently destroy that which they value the most—rare spaces for self-actualization.
In short, the premise of the book is that the West is suffering from pessimism paralysis—a negative bias toward all things digital—that can derail the drive to change the status quo. Negativity does not inspire change. Pessimism is for those who are privileged and can afford to live with despair. Imagine if Martin Luther King, Jr., started his speech by saying, “I have no dream.” It is not naive to be optimistic about our digital future. It is our moral imperative to design with hope.

An extract from your book that best represents yourself?

Payal Arora: From the Introduction
Pessimism is rewarding in the media-saturated world. Bad news is good news for clickbait. More books are sold, talks watched, and grants awarded with doomsday messages. Depressing headlines pull in readers. Experiments conducted on people’s responses to negative news find that people react quicker to words like cancer, bomb, and war than to words like baby, smile, and fun.
Devrupa Rakshit, associate editor of The Swaddle, a health, gender, and culture news site, asks how people have come to “associate negativity and hopelessness with a higher degree of intellectual aptitude.” Rakshit surmises that pessimism is looked at as a call to action, while the opposite translates to happiness with the status quo. Cynicism is a measure of maturity and being critical, a sign of objectivity. British science writer Matt Ridley notes that if you say the world is getting better, you may be in danger of being called naive, insensitive, or out of touch. On the other hand, Ridley remarks wryly, if you say that “catastrophe is imminent,” you may expect a MacArthur “genius grant” or even the Nobel Peace Prize.
It is even harder to speak with nuance about the Global South; ideological straightjackets confine us. Some of my Chinese academic peers have gotten increasingly frustrated as they cannot address the everyday social lives of their people without pegging it to Chinese authoritarianism. It’s akin to asking scholars in the United States to always address gun violence, abortions, and Trumpism when sharing insights on quotidian life in the United States. When I gave a talk on data governance to Silicon Valley folk, I remarked on how many Global South tech entrepreneurs admire Chinese innovators. Despite limited resources, China has been able to become a legitimate competitor to Silicon Valley. Chinese state support for e-commerce, mobile money, and internet penetration over the last decade has resulted in unprecedented poverty reduction, becoming a model for other Global South countries to follow. After the talk, I was asked if I would like to edit my part on China prior to the video release for the sake of my reputation.
A positive note on Chinese innovation does not translate to an endorsement of human rights violations. Intellectual honesty demands breaking out of binary cults. The nature of culture is contradiction. All communities straddle different generations, ideas, beliefs, and experiences that make for a rich and diverse social history. Sensational declarations need to give way to sensitization to stories. Courage is often mistaken for naivete. Is it foolish for young women to take to the streets to defy the ayatollahs in Iran against the mandatory Islamic dress, sometimes at the cost of their lives? Were Ukrainians irrational to take on Russian forces when they invaded? Should we consider young people ignorant as they take to social media to express themselves online despite knowing that they are being watched, heard, monetized, and regulated? Hope comes when aspirational forces overthrow oppressive regimes, causing perhaps the right dose of algorithmic anarchy for social change.

What are the trends that are just emerging, and which do you believe in the most?

Payal Arora: I notice a trend of European and even American companies becoming inward-looking again, after a decade of pivoting their digital products and services toward the Global South. They are afraid of the downturn in the economy and the unknown in these precarious and volatile geopolitical times. We witnessed this sentiment play out through the tech layoffs in early 2023, with projects around the Global South impacted the most. This is a move in the wrong direction. Far from the “rest of world” being a high-risk venture, organizations should view engagement with these regions as the only viable option to build innovative and sustainable technologies.
Around when my prior book ‘The Next Billion Users’ was released in end 2019, I headed to Stockholm to engage with Spotify’s Next Billion User (NBU) lab, launched to study users outside the West. Google grew their NBU team exponentially in 2020 from a few dozen members to hundreds, in search for their next “blockbuster product.” Meta’s emerging markets group got rebranded as the next product experimentation team. Launched in 2019, this team intended to test the new hypothesis, “that the next big idea may come from a market outside the U.S.”
Tech companies’ interest in the Global South in the last decade is no surprise. In 2017, The Economist published a story that asserted “the world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data.” Various market analysis reports suggest that the “next big trend” in digital won’t emerge from a Western market. Companies have witnessed how millions of users, primarily from the Global South, are coming online for the first time due to access to affordable mobile phones and data plans. India and China alone are home to most users today, and neither market is anywhere close to saturation.
Despite these global opportunities, fear has set in due to the current state of geopolitics and uncertain user markets. This is part of a broader global market reserve and retreat, triggered by institutions like Wall Street warning global investors of the end of globalization. Fortress gates are up again among European companies and their governments, where EU-based policies like the Green Deal double down on “European values” instead of universal values for future digital innovations. Some companies dip their toes into this “rest of world” adventure, only to retreat them quickly, seeing no clear business model. Going “local” is back in fashion, viewed as a pathway to resilience. Instead, it is the pathway of least resistance to status quo.
Times have changed. The Global South is no longer what it used to be. Today, these regions contribute 80 percent to global growth. They are not a mere demographic advantage or a source of data harvesting for AI hungry tools as one might assume. These countries have become vital spaces for innovation. These next billion users are deeply aspirational users, highly driven to shape tech spaces, not just as consumers but as creators of the future digital economy. They are eager to leave the past behind. Weak legacy infrastructures and systems inherited from their colonial aftermath has propelled the Global South to leapfrog across sectors, fuelling the reinventing of their nations and societies. It is time for organizations to take note.
I believe in the youth in the world today, majority of whom live in the Global South. We need to invest in them in every possible way as they are full of energy, determination, and optimism, much of what we lack as we contain ourselves in our bubbles. These youth have come to terms with the idea that their future lies in their hands. Their aspirations are not aligned with what their governments have in store for them when it comes to future work opportunities, and they are determined to not reproduce their families’ pasts. These youngsters will not be farmers, maids, or street sellers in a traditional sense. Digital media is often their way out of their confined contexts. They reinvent the game in line with their dreams, dedicating themselves to cracking the code and hacking creativity online. They face oppressive laws, patriarchal cultural norms, and restrictive social rules, and they are not naive about the political and social harms that come with being digital. Relative to their confining conditions and lived realities, digital media appears more dynamic and forgiving as it allows for more experimentation despite the risks. The algorithm, despite the risks, is still their friend.

If you had to give one piece of advice to a reader of this article, what would it be?

Payal Arora: We need to shed the imitator label that has been tagged onto much of the Global South. We cannot afford to be paternalistic about the majority world, especially when we have much work to do together to solve some of the most confounding problems we face today as a humanity – the climate crisis, socio-economic inequality, and the need for peace.
If we go back almost a decade ago, the former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina described China as an imitator nation in her interview with TIME. She said that “the Chinese can take a test, but what they can’t do is innovate…they are not terribly imaginative.” Fast forward to 2023, where even Fiorina would not agree with her former self. China has earned the reputation as a global hub of innovation in tech and renewables among other vital sectors. In 2018, China entered the global innovation index rankings as one of the top twenty most innovative countries in the world. They have pioneered the world’s first quantum-enabled satellite, the world’s fastest supercomputer, the world’s largest and fastest radio telescope, the world’s first solar-powered expressway, the world’s largest floating solar power plant, and the world’s thinnest keyboard. It should give us pause when Elon Musk, still perceived by many as the epitome of Western innovation, sees the future of X to be the next WeChat- China’s “everything app” or super-app, which was released a decade ago.
Innovations in the Global South are not confined to China. India has gone ahead and set up their “tech stack,” the largest open source, interoperable, and public digital infrastructure in the world. This is enabling entrepreneurs to build their various products and services away from the Apple and Google duopoly that constrains competition and choice. This may get the market to start working again. India has gone ahead and done what Europe has been trying to do for decades, albeit with a fraction of Europe’s deep wealth. Another example is what’s going on in Abu Dhabi which has become a global hub for music-streaming apps. By 2028, 70 percent of global subscriber growth for music-streaming services is estimated to take place in the Middle East, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and Africa. If you want to assess the future of crypto, you need to look at India, Nigeria, Vietnam. The Central & Southern Asia and Oceania region dominates the top of the 2023 Global Crypto Adoption Index, with six of the top ten countries located in this region. This should not be a surprise. The volatility of many Global South currencies, and few recourses to protect your savings, as well as the youth’s appetite to embrace innovation has led to quick adoption of these financial alternatives.
Despite the Global South demonstrating their innovative prowess across sectors, the imitator label remains a sticky factor. This perception often translates to Western companies treating these countries as beneficiaries and not as partners and leaders in global innovation. This cognitive dissonance leads companies to view their own international teams as disposable, have little patience for a business model to emerge in these contexts, and under-utilize their regional teams for thinking out-of-the-box. Many multinationals I have engaged with over these years continue to treat the Global South as back offices for cheap labor and rote tasks instead of being part of ideation and execution in their own contexts. Venture capitalists give far shorter timelines for Southern entrepreneurs to yield profits compared to their Northern counterparts. Templates of innovation are imposed upon these entrepreneurs, demanding they innovate within conventional constraints. This only guarantees more of the same.
It is time we stop underestimating the Global South. Instead, companies should channel their energies by looking at how different business cultures, contexts, and consumers can help to rethink opportunity, safeguards, and creative futures with the world’s majority. Inclusion is not an altruistic act. It is an essential element in the revival of a genuinely free and global market to generate solutions for the wicked problems we face today as a humanity.

In a nutshell, what are the next topics you will be passionate about?

Payal Arora: My next book is about how we can build new data to train AI to help us see the world differently, and more inclusively. I am delving deeper into how to leverage on generative media to build new kinds of creative representation, expression, and voice to foster new narratives for the majority world. My team and I at the Inclusive AI Lab are working with creative communities on the ground in India, Kenya, and Ecuador to build a kind of a ‘Diverse Data Commons.’ This will serve as a public data repository for entrepreneurs and other such entities to use to build their applications in ways that reflect the ways in which the majority world want to be seen and heard.
The rise of the next billion users from the Global South promises to radically diversify our digital cultures. While tech corporations struggle to move beyond the commodification mindset, and the state and aid agencies work to shift away from their need for totalizing control, users are at work shaping the nature of global datasets and algorithmic cultures. Content creators from rural areas in Zambia and Brazil churn out multimedia content daily, playing with stereotypical scripts of poverty porn, victimhood, and racialized and sexualized selves, often through satire, humor, or just mundane snippets of everyday dignified living. AI is a numbers game and the numbers work in their favor. Diversity by default can be the aspirational rule of the day.
There is much work to do to curate multicultural datasets. When we go online to search for images of people, things, and cultures outside of the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) context, we often face data absences or stereotypical images. For instance, most Indigenous communities in Latin America are not mapped, captured, or visualized. An image search for ‘women at work in India’ returns a stark lack of women doing household work. This situation is further exacerbated by the limited types of visuals in stock images and under Creative Commons licenses. This case can be made for audio diversity as well. It is understood today that the quality of trained datasets influences what we experience when online; what we hear, see, and feel are shaped by the biases in these systems. These limited options influence how the West imagines and approaches the rest of the world. Going by the principle of garbage in is garbage out, when it comes to algorithmic models being only as good as the quality of the training data, these myopic framings will amplify stereotypical views of the majority world.
A multicultural dataset can enable AI algorithms to learn from a wide range of voices, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the human condition. With diverse datasets, algorithms maybe less likely to perpetuate stereotypes or discriminatory patterns, as they will have been exposed to a variety of perspectives and cultural nuances. As a result, AI systems can make more informed and empathetic decisions, leading to greater fairness and social justice in areas like hiring, loan approvals and criminal justice, among others. A multicultural approach to building datasets serves as a powerful catalyst in our journey towards a more compassionate society.

Thank you, Payal Arora

Thank you, Bertrand Jouvenot

The book: From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech, Payal Arora, The MIT Press, 2024.