Digital Development Dilemma: From Progress to Control

While the move towards digital futures seems to be inevitable, there are concerning reports about discrimination, exclusion, injustice, repression, and bias backed up by the newest technologies. Many of these problems are portrayed as unintended outcomes, digital harm, political repression, or planning and design mistakes. This chapter takes a brief historical look at the conceptualisation of technology in the decades of development work and the faith in technological fixes for socio-political problems. It argues that without situating ICT4D programmes in their colonial, political, socio-cultural, and economic contexts, their complexities and their “outcomes” cannot be analysed. This chapter introduces the digital development dilemma as a concept describing the inherent dilemma carried in the core of digital development programmes: increasing efficiency, inclusion, and participation on the one hand and paving the way for digital repression, consolidation of exclusion, establishment of new forms of technological dependency, and complicating digital self-determination, on the other. The chapter also includes recent examples of state control and surveillance, the increasing engagement of Big Tech companies in digital development, and new colonial models of platform-based work. In doing so, it aims to scrutinise the neutrality and idealism of ICT4D programmes by highlighting the dilemma between efficiency, control, and dependency at the heart of such initiatives.