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Four hundred years ago, they asked us for spices. Today, they ask us to click “I Agree.”
If you traveled back to 1602 and told a Dutch merchant from the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) that in the year 2026 a handful of foreign corporations would extract immense economic value from the Indonesian archipelago without firing a single cannon, he would probably ask what you were smoking and whether it could be taxed.
Yet here we are.
History rarely repeats itself in exact form, but it has a remarkable talent for recycling incentives. Four centuries ago, empires crossed oceans in search of nutmeg, cloves, and pepper. Today, the world’s most valuable resource is increasingly information: our habits, preferences, languages, behaviors, and digital traces.
Four centuries ago, extraction required ships, forts, monopolies, and military force. Today, extraction increasingly arrives through platforms, interfaces, cloud infrastructure, and terms-of-service agreements. The methods differ. The asymmetry feels familiar.
This does not mean that modern technology companies are literal colonial powers. No technology firm commands warships or governs territory in the way European empires once did. The comparison is structural rather than historical. Both systems derive influence from controlling critical infrastructure. Both benefit from asymmetric dependencies. Both transform resources generated locally into wealth concentrated elsewhere.
The commodity has changed. The logic has not.
Recent developments have made this tension difficult to ignore.
In Rome, Pope Leo XIV issued his first major encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, warning against the concentration of technological power and the temptation to reduce human beings to measurable data points. His concern was not merely technical. It was civilizational. The document warns that societies increasingly risk treating human beings as inputs to be optimized rather than persons possessing inherent dignity.
Meanwhile, in Jakarta, Indonesia is accelerating its ambitious GovTech agenda. The promise is understandable: a more efficient state, fewer bureaucratic bottlenecks, integrated public services, and better access for citizens. Yet the speed of implementation raises difficult questions about accountability, oversight, and technological dependency.
The issue is not whether Indonesia should adopt artificial intelligence. That debate is already over.
The issue is whether Indonesia will merely consume cognitive infrastructure designed elsewhere, or whether it will participate in building it.
Because when a nation increasingly relies upon systems trained, governed, and owned beyond its borders, sovereignty becomes more complicated than the control of physical territory. It becomes a question of who shapes the architecture through which knowledge is produced, decisions are made, and reality itself is interpreted.
The old spice trade moved commodities across oceans.
The new one moves information across servers.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it loves a good remix. Four centuries ago, the commodity of empires was nutmeg, harvested from the Banda Islands to flavor the bland stews of European aristocrats. Today, the commodity is your digital footprint, your localized slang, and your grandmother’s biometric data, harvested by Silicon Valley to train artificial intelligence models that will eventually sell you back your own cultural identity at a premium subscription rate.
We used to call this colonialism. Today, we call it the “user experience.”
The Danger of the Unregulated Experiment
Meanwhile, back in Jakarta, the Indonesian government is busy running the exact opposite experiment.
With all the caution of a teenager playing with firecrackers, the state has rolled out its massive “GovTech” initiative. It is a sprawling, hyper-ambitious network integrating AI across public sectors, launched into a regulatory landscape that remains fragmented, incomplete, and still struggling to catch up with the speed of deployment. We are told this is “modernization.” But when you plug a society of 270 million people into foundational AI models that are structurally starved of Indonesian, Javanese, or Sundanese nuance, you aren’t modernizing. You are participating in a massive act of voluntary digital submission.
Welcome to the new spice trade. The ships are digital, the ports are in the cloud, and once again, the Global South is providing the raw materials for someone else’s empire.
The Linguistic Tower of Babel
To understand how a server farm in Virginia can influence a conversation in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, we must first understand what modern AI systems consume. They do not consume ideas in the abstract. They consume data.
And the global data ecosystem remains profoundly unequal.
English dominates the internet. A substantial share of publicly available digital content originates from English-speaking institutions, corporations, universities, media organizations, and online communities. Indonesian has a growing presence online, but local languages such as Javanese and Sundanese remain comparatively underrepresented in the digital corpora used to train many advanced AI systems.
This does not mean that an AI model literally translates Indonesian into English before generating a response. Modern language models are more sophisticated than that. The concern is subtler.
When training data is disproportionately drawn from particular linguistic and cultural environments, the assumptions embedded within those environments can become disproportionately influential. As a result, an AI system may speak fluent Indonesian while still reflecting patterns of reasoning, priorities, and categories that emerged elsewhere.
AI systems often struggle to capture the full social and historical weight of concepts like gotong royong or musyawarah. Faced with culturally specific ideas that have no perfect equivalent in English, models frequently approximate them using familiar concepts such as collaboration, teamwork, or consensus. Something important can be lost in that translation.
Language is not merely vocabulary. It is a way of organizing reality.
When concepts such as gotong royong or musyawarah are interpreted through systems primarily shaped by foreign cultural assumptions, something important risks being lost. Not because the machine is malicious, but because every model inevitably reflects the data from which it learned.
The danger is not that AI refuses to speak Indonesian.
The danger is that it speaks Indonesian while gradually teaching Indonesians to think within frameworks they did not consciously choose.
From the VOC to Silicon Valley
If you want to understand the future of tech, you have to read the history of the 17th century. The mechanics of exploitation rarely change; they just get a software update.
In 1602, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) realized that conquering territory through a traditional state military was expensive and inefficient. Instead, they invented the world’s first mega-corporation, complete with its own private army, its own currency, and a legal mandate to wage war. They didn’t just want to buy spices; they wanted to control the infrastructure of trade.
Today’s tech giants operate with the exact same corporate sovereignty. When OpenAI, Microsoft, or Google negotiate with global leaders, they don’t behave like companies seeking a permit, they behave like nation-states signing treaties.
The historical parallels between the VOC and Silicon Valley are not metaphorical; they are structural.
1. The Monoculture of the Mind
The VOC’s first order of business in the Banda Islands was to enforce a strict agricultural monoculture. They systematically eradicated native nutmeg trees outside their control, famously executing local populations to secure a total monopoly. They turned a biologically diverse archipelago into a single-crop factory for European profit.
Big Tech does the exact same thing to our cognitive landscape. By training foundational AI models almost exclusively on Western data, they enforce an epistemic monoculture. They clip the wings of local languages and cultural nuances, forcing the diverse, chaotic polyphony of Indonesian thought into a single, standardized corporate framework. It is the digital equivalent of burning down a forest to plant a corporate crop.
2. The Puppet Regimes (The Corporate Bupati)
The VOC rarely ruled directly. They realized it was much easier to co-opt local leaders - the Bupati (regents) - by giving them titles, weapons, and a cut of the profits in exchange for enforcing Dutch quotas on their own people.
Today, we see the rise of the Digital Bupati. These are the technocrats and local politicians who eagerly sign massive procurement contracts with foreign cloud providers and AI cartels. They proudly announce “partnerships” with Silicon Valley giants to digitize Indonesian public services, completely blind to the fact that they are outsourcing the nation’s cognitive infrastructure. They get the political clout of appearing “modern,” while the foreign tech giants get access to the behavioral data of 275 million citizens.
3. The Myth of the “Civilizing Mission”
The Dutch justified their brutality through the Ethical Policy (Ethische Politiek) and the myth of the “civilizing mission”, the idea that the backward natives needed European enlightenment, infrastructure, and governance.
Today, Big Tech wraps itself in the language of democratization. We are told that AI will “democratize education,” “streamline healthcare,” and “leapfrog development” in the Global South. But just like the VOC’s roads and ports, this digital infrastructure is not a gift. It is an extraction pipeline. We are given the shiny front-end interface, while the backend wealth, the intellectual property, the algorithmic patents, the compute power, remains locked away in the corporate metropole.
We congratulate ourselves on our high internet penetration rates and our tech-savvy population. But from an economic history perspective, we are celebrating the fact that we have built the digital roads for the company trucks to haul our resources away more quickly. The ships are digital, the ports are virtual, but the ledger still balances in favor of the empire.
The Indonesian government’s massive GovTech initiative.
On paper, GovTech is a technocrat’s wet dream. It promises to take a notoriously bloated, chaotic bureaucracy and consolidate everything - from health records and social welfare to identity registries - into a sleek, AI-driven super-app network. The marketing brochures promise “efficiency,” “modernization,” and an end to the endless physical paperwork that has plagued Indonesian citizens since the days of the Dutch civil service.
But there is a glaring, terrifying catch: as The Jakarta Post recently pointed out, this massive rollout is operating in a profound accountability and regulatory vacuum.
With all the foresight of a teenager throwing firecrackers into a dry field, the state has integrated automated AI systems across vital ministries before establishing a clear legal mandate, operational authority, or independent safety metrics. We are building a digital panopticon without installing any brakes.
This is exactly what Pope Leo XIV was screaming about in Magnifica humanitas. The Pope didn’t just warn that AI would make people lazy; he warned that unchecked automation inevitably “reduces victims and citizens to mere data points”. When a state automates its social safety nets using biased, opaque, foreign-trained algorithms, bureaucratic cruelty stops being an accident. It becomes an unarguable, automated law.
Imagine a machine, trained on the data of Western suburbs, deciding whether a family in a rural kampung ( village ) qualifies for government assistance. If the algorithm glitches and denies them food subsidies, who do they complain to? The local government official will simply shrug, point to the screen, and say, “Maaf, sistemnya begitu” (Sorry, that’s just how the system is).
This is the ultimate evolution of the Digital Bupati. Our leaders are eager to look modern, so they have handed over the keys of state governance to black-box algorithms they themselves do not understand.
To make matters worse, this entire GovTech experiment is hurtling forward ahead of the strict October 2026 enforcement deadline for the Personal Data Protection Law (UU PDP). We are collecting and feeding the most intimate biometric and financial data of 275 million people into a centralized network before we even have the legal teeth to protect them from leaks, corporate poaching, or state surveillance.
We aren’t modernizing our state. We are building the ultimate extraction pipeline, cutting the ribbon, and inviting foreign tech cartels to come and drink their fill.
Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty
Decolonization in the 21st century is no longer about lowering a foreign flag from a physical flagpole. It is about unplugging our minds from a foreign server.
If Indonesia continues on its current trajectory, we will achieve a bizarre historical milestone: a nation that successfully threw off the shackles of physical imperialism, only to voluntarily sign a digital lease with Silicon Valley. We will become a country governed by algorithms we didn’t write, using data we don’t own, to satisfy a corporate ledger we will never see.
Dutch colonial rule justified itself through several narratives across different periods. During the late colonial era, the Ethical Policy presented Dutch governance as a civilizing mission intended to uplift indigenous populations. Whatever its stated intentions, the policy also helped legitimize a system in which political and economic power remained concentrated in colonial hands.
We must heed the warning of Pope Leo XIV, who correctly identified that the ultimate threat of unchecked AI is not terminator robots, but the automated erasure of human dignity and cultural memory. If we let foreign-trained models dictate the boundaries of our language, our history, and our public policies, we are letting them dictate the boundaries of our future.
True sovereignty in the algorithmic age requires epistemic resistance.
Indonesia does not need to blindly import the hyper-individualistic, extractive tech frameworks of the West. We have our own deep, historical philosophies of community, consensus, and ethics to draw from. It is time to stop acting like the raw material providers for a new digital empire. It is time to start building an infrastructure of the mind that actually belongs to us.
Sovereignty in the twenty-first century is not only territorial. It is linguistic. It is epistemic. It is computational. A nation that cannot shape the systems through which knowledge is produced will eventually find itself governed by assumptions it never consciously chose.
The real ships are gone, they are digital now. The forts have crumbled but the ports live in the cloud. The spice warehouses are museums but the item is data rather than nutmeg.
History has a habit of changing costumes while keeping the same ambition. And once again, the question facing Indonesia is deceptively simple:
Are we building the infrastructure of our future, or merely supplying the raw materials for someone else’s?
Empires once arrived with charters, cannons, and monopolies. Today they arrive with cloud contracts, APIs, and user agreements. The paperwork has changed. The question of sovereignty remains.